I look down at her. “As am I.”
Zandor leans forward. “If you’d like to go back to your own room, we can take it from here.”
“No.”
“No?” he asks.
I close my eyes, hoping to find the word. “Prometí quedarme. Um … stay.”
When I open them, he is clearly agitated. It could be from more than my mispronunciation, like he doesn’t like the fact that I’m staying.
I carefully move, so as not to disturb Tris, and pull my phone out.
“While you have that out, let me have your number.” He holds his phone up.
I hit the translation app and read, “I mean, no disrespect. I’d prefer not to disappoint her. I promised Tris I would stay.”
“Right.” He tightens his jaw. “Phone number.”
“Zandor,” Bekah scolds him in a whisper.
I rattle off my number, first into the app in my native tongue, and then it translates to him.
“What’s this app you use to communicate and why is it you speak rather fluently sometimes and others you need the app?”
I wait for the app to translate the recording of what he just said and type back my response.
“After so many hours, it becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate. And, at times, it causes headaches. Today has been particularly long. This will get better with time, I’m positive.”
“And how much time do you plan to spend with my daughter?”
Smiling down at the screen, I type my response.
“This is not the appropriate way nor time to ask for her hand, but the answer comes from the heart: the rest of my life. And I promised Tris I would stay. I’d rather not disappoint her.”
“She’s not eighteen.”
That, I don’t have to translate.
“Si, I will wait. But it is my true intention.” I type the rest into the app and it reads it to them. “I hope that I can someday soon gain your trust, and that you will see this is very real. Sometimes painfully so.”
“Well, what—”
“He’s tired, Zander,” Bekah cuts him off, “and he seems to be staying. So let him rest, and you can interrogate him further tomorrow.”
“Mucha apreciación.”
When I wake, my neck is stiff, a warm body is curled around mine, a very dry mouth, and … several eyes are upon me.
I clear my throat. “Buenos días.”
“Buenos días,” Tris’s morning voice is very alluring and, when she looks up at me, eyes bright, undiluted, and rested, my heart swells in a figurative sense.
“Eres una visión. Descanso es desafiante en su mirada favorable, mi corazón.”
When we hear my words repeated from an app, “You are a vision. Restful is definitely in your favorable gaze, my heart,” we both smile while her mother scolds Zandor. “Let them be.”
“Is fine,” I tell them.
“We hitting brunch with everyone before they jet?” her brother, Amias, asks, and we both look at him. “Dickwad’s not coming, Tris, and the twins got in some trouble for their shit last night, so it’s all chill.”
“It wasn’t Cessca; it was—”
“Cessca’s gonna do what twat-nette tells her to,” Bris huffs. “A true twin.”
Tris laughs out. “Twat-nette?”
“Girls,” Bekah scolds.
“Seriously, Mom, they’re awful.”
“I agree, but I really hope they can get it together, you know.”
“Truth was a trip, yeah?” Amias, or My as they call him, laughs, and so do the rest of them.
I watch her smiling at her siblings and her parents as her siblings and Zandor keep the conversation going and Bekah tries yet fails to keep the conversation less risqué.
There is so much love in this room for her, so much I have seen her push away due to guilt and shame about circumstances that took her from a child to a tortured young woman. Right now, at this very moment, I see a beautiful transformation from what I bore witness to just weeks ago.
“Matteo, will you come, or do you have other things to do?”
“You eat. I make preparations for our long overdue first date.”
She squeezes my hand. “You have to eat.”
“I shall.” I kiss the back of her hand then stand.
“And you and I will have a chat before this date,” Zandor says.
I pull my phone, that is at ten percent, out of my pocket and type in for translation and read the words back.
“Of course, as many conversations as you need for assurance that she will be loved by me as she is all of you.”
“That’s so sweet.” Brisa beams.
“Yeah, sure,” Amias mumbles.
After a quick workout at the hotel’s gym, a light breakfast, taking my meds, and a shower, I realize that the order of the day should have been altered as was the prior evening. I should have eaten first, and perhaps substituted yoga in lieu of lifting weights.
Long ago, I rid myself of the need to bulk up to be the biggest man on campus, so to speak. I feel much healthier with lean muscles. My definition hasn’t lessened because I’m not carrying the extra thirty pounds, yet today, I felt driven to be bigger.
It’s preposterous to think I need that weight to protect her, yet I still feel it, and now, I ache.
A knock on the door has me throwing a shirt on, a second one has me not bothering to change from athletic pants into jeans or slacks. It could be Tris. Something could have happened.
When I open the door and see Zandor, my chest tightens. “Tell me she is all right.”
“She’s fine. I’d like to talk.” He holds up the phone. “I have the app.”
I step back, allowing his entrance.
“Tell me how this works best.”
After explaining that I can keep up, and him insisting on doing it the way in which is easiest, and also asking how to turn off the part that reads it out loud so he doesn’t get in trouble with his wife for eavesdropping, which I find amusing, we begin.
“She’s seventeen years old, she’s been through hell, and she’s healing.”
“I am aware and—”
He holds his hand up to stop me. “It’s very difficult to admit that she is doing better, because none of me wants to believe it’s all because of you. It very easily could be Marley. However, she met you first, so I have to give you some credit.”
“I believe it’s a combination and also she’s been on a rigorous schedule, yes?”
“Which has kept her occupied, distracted, and busy. She was fixated on her music and this tour. Now she’s fixating on you.”
“It’s a very healthy fixation, better than drugs, drinking, or any worry about her being mentally abused. She will be respected and loved. And she’s not alone in it. I, too, never thought I’d find someone who could love me in the way she does. It’s the kind of love that is without explanation or reason. If I may be so bold, I believe it is fate-driven.”
“That’s all the things a father would want to hear if his seventeen-year-old didn’t just throw an epic temper tantrum about coming home for a month to take part in her sister and brother’s graduation celebrations.”