“It hasn’t upset me,” I tell him. “I’m just tired. I’m sure you are too. Did Dr. Costa give you your orders for the rest of the evening?”
He’s still watching me. His gaze is alive and probing, and I want nothing more than for him to drop this and let me go, to be free. Let me breathe. I never meant to confess so much to him and I feel like our relationship is now lopsided.
Then he nods. “Sí. He did.”
He cautiously gets off the table and then walks slowly across the room.
“You sure you don’t want support?” I ask him.
“Are you offering yourself or is it a crutch?” he asks, stopping by the door.
Offer yourself.
Offer yourself!
“A crutch,” I say meekly.
“Then I can manage by myself.” He pauses. “Que tengas una buena noche, Thalia.”
Chapter 8
Alejo
“Eat the flan, Alejo,” my mother says to me, her face stern but I know it’s two seconds from crumbling if I don’t in fact eat the flan.
“Mama,” I tell her. “You know I have to watch what I eat.”
“Well, you don’t have to watch now. You’re a cripple!”
This is how dinner has been every night this week.
Even though I spend a lot of time at Valdebebas, since the injury happened I’ve been at home more often than not.
To be honest, I missed my family. They are everything to me. And when you’re feeling not your best and you’re hurt and injured, you need to be around the ones you love and the ones that love you.
So I’ve been at home, having homecooked meals every night, meals I’m sure Mateo would be appalled at, full of meat and sugar and fat. My house is huge and sprawling and worth millions, located not too far from Valdebebas, so naturally I invited my mother and brother to live with me when I bought it a few years ago. They had been living in Valencia still, though I had gotten them a nice house as soon as I was able to.
But I needed them here.
When you lose a father, you realize how important the rest of your family is.
How you have to keep them near you, always in your sight.
Although you can’t be that close.
My mother lives in a guest suite with her own entrance, and my brother lives in the guest house, which is separated between the main house by a pool and a small football pitch, so we all have as much privacy as we need, which is good when I’ve brought women by in the past, or had Luciano or Rene over for the odd drink.
My mother slides the flan toward me. “Eat it.”
Armando giggles. “Yeah, eat it.”
I roll my eyes at him. “You stay out of this. You’re supposed to be on my side.”
Armando shrugs and spoons his own flan into his mouth. He’s a good kid, though he does have some troubled tendencies. He’s not been doing well at school, and my mother is trying to figure that out, which results in a lot of fighting. I think perhaps he needs to be on some sort of regulating medication for his mind but my mother is old-fashioned and doesn’t believe that men need that sort of help.
Not that she would go for that for herself either.
After my father died, things drastically changed for all of us, and we all did our best to bring ourselves out of it. I became the father figure of the house, which made things more difficult when I went off to the Real Madrid Academy. I swore to myself I would make it worth it, that I would become the best so that we could have the best life. I could make things right even without our father.
And yet, none of us have really talked about our father since his death.
I know it’s not normal.
I know it’s not healthy.
It’s just been swept under the rug, like he never existed and it never happened, and I fear for the day that the dam breaks and it all comes out, as necessary as it is.
For me, it’s already coming. Not a raging river, but in trickles. I suffer from nightmares from time to time, of seeing his body hanging there, the way his ankles looked so weak, the thin, ratty socks he was wearing.
If I think about it too long and too hard, I start to die a little inside.