A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow - Laura Taylor Namey Page 0,77

you want me to show you the time stamp from my parents’ call? ’Cause you’ll see there’s not even five minutes between me hanging up, then knocking at your door looking like shit. What does that tell you?”

He scrubs his face, shrugging. “That you’re as fucking fast on your feet as you ever were.”

“Try again. I didn’t go to Andrés with my news. Didn’t call or message or even think about him. I can’t be with a person who’s a second thought. Yeah, I loved him for a long time, but I can’t go back to him, Orion.” My words tangle in a rush of oxygen. “He should be with a person who runs to him first. I didn’t want to.”

Orion absorbs this with a pinwheel of reactions. His wide-eyed jolt morphs into a jagged smile, ending in a messy, caustic laugh. “See, I told you. No motorbike, no deal.”

I match his mess. “He hates tea with a passion.”

“Oh, well, come on, then,” he says and steps forward until he’s going either to run into me or draw me into his arms. I get the latter—home. So very much at home. “Lila Reyes of West Dade is gonna be on television. It really is cracking news.”

I fold myself into him and for a few moments, there is only me holding the star-named boy who dipped his finger into my cake batter. Weeks later, there’s no part of my life he hasn’t touched.

But time closes around us. He shifts but doesn’t let go. Like this St. Cross house, we know we’re just another home that can’t be whole. “Andrés or no, you still need to return to Miami. Be there for your family, La Paloma.”

“I am,” I say into his polo. Meaning it. “At the same time, I don’t want to leave anything here. Or anyone.” Meaning it.

He pulls back. “Day by day. All we have.” And this is all he says. You could come back. It rises, moving from his skin to mine. But would he ever voice it? Or am I just another impossible thing he’d dare not beg any God or universe for?

He thumbs underneath my eyes. “Stay and hang, okay? You can share my leftovers, but first, I can make us a cuppa? I refilled our stock here.”

“Just what I need.”

I wait on the couch, hugging my arms to my chest. Footsteps pad, then his soft gray cardigan drapes around my shoulders. Of course he has it near. I clutch the collar then say over the back of the couch, “You didn’t tell me your grandmother knitted this.”

“Not after learning you’d just lost yours.” He winds around, then hands me a warmed cup. “Then I didn’t think of it.”

I sip the fragrant tea and maybe moan.

“Quite good, huh? All those puddings you feed me made me think of this variety now. Vanilla black.”

I drink again, the flavors of two cities I love tangling on my tongue. “Orion, this one.”

“What?”

“It’s my favorite.”

27

Orion’s London is the streets and pavements and outsides of things. It’s the vintage bookstores and secret neighborhood parks, the people watching with lattes in quirky Covent Garden. Then Neal’s Yard with its cluster of brightly colored storefronts and the eclectic beat of Soho. His London is plunking our elbows onto the Embankment wall on a sun-bright Saturday, where we can get by with his short sleeves and my stretch jersey maxi dress.

The River Thames flows in front of us, winding through boroughs. Four hundred feet high, the white London Eye observation wheel twirls over South Bank, just across Westminster Bridge. Midday light glows off Elizabeth Tower at the edge of the monstrous Parliament compound. “Lots of tourists think Big Ben is the clock tower. It’s actually the bell inside the tower,” Orion says.

I stare at the blended landscape of medieval and modern so hard my eyes blur. “Never stop.” I let the river have my words.

“Never stop what?”

“Telling me things about things.”

He smiles and leads us toward Parliament and Westminster Cathedral. I link our elbows and ask him to show me Buckingham Palace.

“We should try to come back at least two more times before…” He doesn’t have to finish. “The British Museum is so cool. And the Tower of London. You’ll love the crown jewels and all the armory, the weapons. And anything you want to see the insides of, we can.”

But today the sun is high and the Mall leads us into a long thoroughfare with a fantasy palace at its foot. Union Jack banners