A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow - Laura Taylor Namey Page 0,85
“Fine. I wanted to know, okay? What’s worse: Walking into your kitchen after school and finding your grandmother, your everything, on the floor in front of the sink. Already gone.”
“Christ.” His arm pulls me in. “I didn’t know you found her. Bloody hell.”
“Yes… so that, or loving a mother who’s still here but not present. Watching her lose a little more each month, preparing yourself. I hate throwing your life into your face right now. And I still have my own mother. But… Abuela—I never got to say goodbye.” I bury my head into his chest in shame. “And I don’t know what’s worse, not getting to say goodbye, or saying goodbye to a little more every year.”
“The tidal wave or the hourglass.”
“Yeah.”
He threads his fingers through my hair. “Does one have to be worse? Or can’t they both be the same amount of terrible? They change us and make us stronger, and we do our best to go on, all the same?”
“We do,” I tell him, letting his words rise and swell into cracks. “And you’re right. It’s amazing the way you handle what life hands you, how you deal. But don’t you ever want to fight back a little? Cheat the universe? Take a moment just for you and not wait for life to plan the rest of it?”
Glazed blue into my brown. “Or take it away?”
“Or that.”
“Every single day.”
“But you still… can’t?” And I can’t look at him anymore.
“Lila,” he says, his hand clamping around my forearm so quickly, I flinch. “Am I such a total dolt that you have no idea of my feelings? For you?”
Do it. Look at him. Face him. I lift up and find another kind of storm—the longing of warm drinks and warm sweaters, but the coldness of being bare. “I feel them more than anything. And I wish…” I shake my head. “Does it even matter? Do we not get to do that anymore? Wish? On stars or for moments just for us?”
He fits his hands into both of mine. “What’s your wish, then?”
“Um, no. No. Your superstitious self should know better than to ask for details. There’s already enough in the universe fighting against my wish coming true.” I straighten my spine, sniffling. “And if you don’t already know then I’m the dolt at—”
Orion knocks my words aside, stealing my space with his mouth over mine. A low-toned oath strums the back of his throat. Holy. This is new and what are we doing? We do it anyway, figuring it out as we go, a chaotic mess of flailing movement—teeth scraping, noses bumping, loose-limbed and greedy.
He rips backward, breathing like a winded runner. “I was right, then. Same as mine, you know, if I was a wishing kind of bloke.”
I make some sort of agreeable noise.
“But I can do better.”
Dios, he does. He does he does he does. My cheeks caged in his hands, Orion looks at me like I’m the finest dessert I’ve made yet. He thumbs my jawline and slides his mouth lazily over mine. Takes his time like we have it to spare.
His hands travel down, down, and lower still until they’re clasped behind me, lifting me onto his lap. He tastes of fruit and sugar. Then his smile—sweeter—before he dots his lips along my forehead and the rise of my cheekbones.
I drag him back down. Golden sparks from all the city lights we’ve seen tunnel through me, across all my avenues. I can’t stop touching him. Can’t get close enough. I push my body into his, the lean strength of his muscles and bones teeming around me.
Keep me? Another wish I can’t even trust the stars with. What language do I use to wish for continents and cultures to bend? Keep me impossibly. I wish this with my hands, my nails marking a star-named boy with half moons.
Tonight, I kiss him under a beech tree canopy and learn the pattern etched across a twilight sky doesn’t matter. Orion Maxwell is all the northern lights, the North Star—my true north—even when my legacy calls me southward.
Southward. Miami.
Clocks strike home at that, and phantom wheels touch the tarmac. We both sense the shift and ease away at the same unspoken moment. I’m still in his lap, wrapped around him like wool. My forehead tips against his with four thousand miles between us.
“When you first came here,” he starts, his voice full of gravel, “your heart belonged to another guy.” When I nod he says, “But even now, you