“Since we were eighteen. You know how we men are. If we imprint on you young, you’ve got us forever. To do with us as you please.”
She smiled at Zee so sweetly that Rico braced himself for what was coming. “Or you men want us to believe that, so we can never let you go and you can use our dependence to do as you please.”
Zee looked delighted. “Are you saying men are more manipulative in relationships than women? That would go against the popular opinion, now wouldn’t it?”
Ashna mirrored his delight. “The popular opinion that men have floated through the years?”
“I know a lot of women who agree that women are more manipulative than men.”
“Just like you’ve heard women say women gossip more, or pull each other down, or only feel loved when men shower them with material gifts. Patriarchal opinions that centuries of being called ‘the weaker sex’ and being given only the domestic space and our own bodies to claim our power with have had us internalize?” Her smile wasn’t quite so sweet anymore. “Your Tanya, would you be with her all these years later if you truly believed she’d manipulated you into it? What would that say about you?”
“Fair point,” Zee said with a laugh. “It would say I’m a bloody idiot, now wouldn’t it? I’ve actually never heard it put quite that way.”
“You should have spent a day in our house growing up,” Yash said. “Our mothers pretty much fed us shredded up pieces of the patriarchy for lunch every day.”
Ashna smiled, but she had that look again, as though something had soured her stomach. A look that got particularly pronounced every time her mother came up. Another thing that hadn’t changed.
Rico looked at his watch. Since Zee had only taken a few hours off from his honeymoon in Hawaii, it was time for him to head back. “Well, time for me to save your marriage again. If you don’t take off now, you’ll miss that flight. I’m not taking you in if Tanya throws you out again.”
Zee hugged Ashna. “I’m so glad I flew in. Meeting you was totally worth leaving my honeymoon for.”
That brought Ashna’s smile back as she returned his hug. Yes, her nose crinkled again and crushed up parts of his heart filled out with emotions he hadn’t experienced in years.
As Rico walked him out, Zee had the most sanctimonious smirk on his face. “So she’s the reason.”
Rico didn’t respond, hoping to nip Zee’s filterless musings in the bud. It didn’t work.
“She’s the reason why you’re here. Everything makes sense now.”
They waited for Rico’s driver to pull the car up. “Does it? Because nothing makes sense to me,” Rico said.
“How long ago were you together?” Zee asked with uncharacteristic gravitas.
“High school. But I barely know her anymore. She doesn’t even acknowledge that she knew me, mate.”
“Why is that?”
“Hell if I know.”
George pulled the car up. “I very much doubt that. I’ve never heard you say that about anything. You do realize that your need to be a know-it-all is the most annoying thing about you, right?”
“No!”
Zee grinned. “The Rico I know would try to find out why. Because from where I was standing, it looked like she would very much like to acknowledge knowing you.”
With that half-assed wisdom, his best mate drove off to his own simple life.
Chapter Twenty
Rico didn’t care that Ash was hiding him. At seventeen, the one thing he knew for sure was that there was no connection between being hidden and being loved. His father had hidden him and his mother his entire life. Even after the car crash that killed both his pai and mãe, the press had only reported that Pablo Silva had died and that a friend had been in the car with him. They were buried separately, his pai in his family’s plots, where his wife had joined him a few years later, and his mãe by herself. Rico didn’t care. Once you were dead you were dead.
“Hindus are cremated. Thank God,” Ash had said when he’d told her that his parents were buried separately. “So no one can keep my ashes from being sprinkled over your grave.”
It was a bit crazy for teenagers to talk this way, but it had made him laugh. It was the first time anything about his parents had made him laugh since the accident.
It didn’t matter that Ash had never introduced him to her tangle of cousins—all of whom he knew she loved with the kind of intensity that made her her. Meeting her parents or her aunt and uncle was out of the question. The idea of meeting anyone’s parents made the memory of his parents in caskets come alive. He could barely stand to be in the presence of his own aunt, and he lived in her house.
He had never been to either of Ash’s homes—not the one she lived in during the week and not the one she went to over the weekend. He had never been to her father’s restaurant either.
None of that mattered.
They had been together for a year. They had met in the middle of sophomore year, and junior year had gone by in a strangely alive haze. All Rico knew was that his need for Ash was constant. She was with him even when she wasn’t with him. Sometimes it felt like everything he did was just so he could recount it for her and make her smile, or be outraged. Because her caring about things, about him, made him matter again, made him alive. Rico liked feeling alive again.
He hadn’t joined the football team, but between Ashna and the coach, they had convinced him to help with training. He assisted the coach during soccer season, mostly because he liked coaching her. Ash had convinced Coach Clarence that if he stopped badgering Rico to play, he could at least get him to help the team this way. Rico had never had to tell her that he just couldn’t play, not when his mãe and pai would never get to watch him.
His father had been a football legend, a god, they called him back in Brazil. Rico had no idea what he would have done with that legacy, after his pai’s death, had their relationship been public. When Rico was very young, he had barely seen his father. His mãe had been a single parent for the most part. Back then Rico had hated football. His mãe loved to tell the story of how Rico had been afraid of the ball—how he’d run from it when someone kicked it to him. When she’d told his pai, he had taken that as a personal insult and started to make time to play with him, and Rico had fallen in love with the sport. Football had given him his father.
“The fruit doesn’t fall too far from a tree, no?” His pai loved to say anytime Rico won his league games for his age group. It was true; everything he knew about the game he knew because of Pablo Silva.
Rico hung up his smock in the back room and left Smoothie King. His shift had been canceled because the smoothie machine was broken. His boss had given him the rest of the day off and paid for his shift. Finding reliable teenage employees in Woodside was apparently not the easiest thing. Tests, sports, musical instruments, volunteer hours, their own start-ups—all of that took priority over a job serving yogurt mixed with wheat germ and coconut milk to other teens.
Rico was possibly one of the only students at GB High who had no idea what he was going to do with his life. A sin in this part of the world if there ever was one. From the age of thirteen he’d known he was going to play league football. Now he couldn’t even imagine it. Ash wanted to go to UCLA on a soccer scholarship. Her father wanted her to go to cooking school, a laughable idea, because: Ash in a kitchen? Ha! If she wasn’t training and sweaty, she was always moving and restless, as though she were still playing in her head.