I don’t wait for Darío’s answer. Instead, I leave the room in a hurry. My footsteps sound on the tile. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t care. I just want to get to my parents’ house. Before she does something stupid, I need to talk to Teresa, a major one, because just considering marrying Dawson is absurd and a terrible decision. And to think that I thought he was the one I spent the night with for a short time.
“Tatiana! Wait!” Darío’s voice echoes throughout the place.
I finish walking down the steps and turn for a second to look at him.
“What? You’re not going to tell me that they’re free to marry whomever they want, are you? Because if that’s what it is, let me save you the breath. I’m not going to let Teresa marry your brother!”
He comes down the steps slowly. His calmness offends me and makes me want to hit him. But, when he arrives in front of me, he looks at me with a sideways smile. He never smiled in front of me, not until now.
“What’s the matter? Are you feeling okay? Are you having a stroke?” I ask him, sarcastic.
“Your squeaky voice almost did it, but no. I’m not having a stroke. Instead, I’m feeling pretty good. Even my desire to go away for a few days has waned considerably.” He takes a step closer to me. I stay in the same place, confusion preventing me from executing any movement.
I don’t know if it’s the gleam in his eyes, that gray color that is sometimes opaque like the clouds in the sky before it rains, and other times is as clear as seawater.
“You’re invading my space,” I whisper, nervous.
“I’m not going to bite you.” He smiles wider.
“What the hell is so funny?!” I burst out.
I put my hands on my hips and stamp my foot on the floor.
“You look like a fury, an angry mermaid.”
“I’m not a mermaid,” I retort.
“But you look like one.”
“Why do you do this? Why do you approach me as if your intentions are otherwise, and when you see that I’m going to give in, you walk away? Don’t you like me? Don’t you find me attractive?” I’m really starting to get fed up with this little game he’s playing. He can’t be so changeable and so explosive. He can’t look at me like I’m the most delicate treasure, then open his mouth and walk away like I have the black plague.
“Do you want to call your sister before you walk out of here like a deranged woman?”
I look at him, furious. It’s absurd that he’s constantly changing the conversation, that he’s leaving me like this, with no answers. But, somehow, I’m going to get them. I’m certainly not going to give up. I want to live with someone who is not afraid to love me, give himself, and love me without measure. I don’t want anything halfway. I don’t feel capable of being with a person who one night loves me like no other and the next day erases me from his brain.
Did he think I was a tramp? Could it be that he really doesn’t know he spent the night with me?
I couldn’t have imagined it. It is not a figment of my imagination. It’s not a story created by my brain to survive marriage to a stranger.
I touched myself, I felt myself… I felt the wetness between my legs.
Even last night, in the short time I was able to fall asleep, I had two recurring thoughts: the scene on the balcony, Darío pulling me away and that man’s hands on my body, inside me, and his kisses on my neck.
God, it still gives me goosebumps and makes my belly throb!
“Here.” He pulls out his late-model cell phone, a section with four cameras and the size of a notebook. “Call her and tell her you want to see her. If you want her to come live here to keep an eye on her somehow, do it. If someone decides to get married, even if you talk to her and pull down the sky, I don’t think you can stop her from doing it.”
“She’s my sister… my little sister. She’s only twenty years old. She doesn’t know what she wants in life,” I try to explain as I grab the cell phone. “She has too much to live for.”
“She’s almost an adult,” I hear him snap at me, “not a girl.”
“She’s not an adult. You don’t know her. She… she’s impulsive. This is just one of those urges. I just need to talk to her, get her to listen to me.”
I dial Teresa’s number. Darío tells me, as he rests his hands on mine, that I’m too nervous to call her now.
“Won’t your previous judgment about my brother be involved in your desire for her not to marry? Could it be that the problem is not that she marries, but who she plans to marry?”
“I have no judgment about your brother. Now, if you will excuse me, I must make this call.”
“As you wish, Tatiana. I’ll be in Dante’s room if you need me.”
He removes his hand from mine, and the chill settles in my fingers.
How has his warmth and presence become necessary to me?
I shake my head, annoyed by this discovery. I don’t need this, don’t want this, not now. Now I need to concentrate on talking to Teresa.
“Hello?”
“For God’s sake, Teresa!” I yell at her at once. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I love how you mention God and then the devil.” She laughs, wry.
“Shut up, you fool! I’m not in the mood, Teresa Nicole! How come you’ve decided this? I don’t understand you. What are you up to?”
I get a hush behind the line in response. I count to five. Nothing.
“Teresa.”
“I’m here.”
“Then talk to me! I swear to God I’m about to come out there and beat the shit out of you. You’re a girl! You can’t get married.”
“You don’t know him, and you don’t know who he is. So you can’t say I’m a girl. I’m not. I’m not even a virgin.”
I grab the bridge of my nose and hold the cell phone tightly against my ear. The truth is patience is not one of my greatest virtues. Yet, in some strange and twisted way, my sister manages to bring out the temper in me.
“Is this about Lucian?” The question is difficult for me to formulate, but I have no other way to put it. I always read that when a woman feels violated, she will resort to trying to take care of herself in any way possible. “Is that why you want to marry the first madman who crosses your path?”
Silence again.
It bothers me and angers me that my little sister feels that the only way out of what Lucian tried to do to her is to marry Dawson. That’s not a solution. That’s a catastrophic mistake! That man is not husbandly at all. He has no substance. You can see it from afar. You can tell he feels and thinks he’s a ladiesman, an egocentric Casanova. He is not the man for my younger sister. Dawson doesn’t deserve an innocent flower to destroy in a few months. Besides, my sister has something I didn’t have: the opportunity to choose, to say no. I didn’t have it, and it’s too late to say no. So I’m not going to say no.
I didn’t have it, and it’s too late to try to look for it, but for Teresa, it isn’t.
“Listen to me, Tere, this is not right. You can’t replace a bad experience with such an important decision. Getting married won’t erase…”
“You don’t know anything!” Then, for the first time in years, my little sister raises her voice at me.
I look everywhere as if I innocently believe someone heard her even though the call is not on speaker. Finally, I walk out of the castle and stand at the entrance. The garden is beautiful. I can appreciate the true beauty of the white roses planted in the surrounding area at this time of the morning—a garden with splendid and majestic greenery. The care and affection are almost palpable.
“Teresa…”
“No, Tatiana. Don’t tell me this is a mistake. Don’t. You know what a mistake was?” Although I’m not holding her in front of me, I know her eyes are shedding seas of tears, and her nose is red. “Mistake was thinking I could do it without you. Now that was a mistake. I can’t stay here, as things won’t work out for me. With Dawson, I have a chance to choose, to be happy in my own way, to go with who I want.”
“You don’t know him. You’ve never talked about him before,” I try to be reasonable despite wanting to lock her in a little glass box until she’s fifty and knows how to make good choices.
“Just because I didn’t talk about him with you doesn’t mean I don’t know him, Tatiana.”
Ouch.
I feel the acidity rise in my stomach and cause me to ache briefly.
This is not going well.
Has my sister been seeing that guy? Does she really know him? How come I never knew?
I’m a fucking shitty big sister. I felt like I cared for and protected my sister, that I knew her steps and her wanderings, believing myself to be an adult and knowing every step she took. I gave her the confidence to tell me everything, or so I thought. Now I see how wrong I was. I settled for the five-minute chats where I knew what her day was like and what she wanted to be in the future. I heard her say she had sex. I laughed at her morbid jokes, double and even triple engenders. I got so used to seeing her smile and be happy that I didn’t realize she was sad and devastated. I didn’t realize when or at what point she began to lose her glow and feel that she couldn’t be cheerful if I left. I thought I was taking care of her and actually put her in a dangerous position—a mental and emotional danger.
“I feel like you’re rushing.” I can’t think of anything else to object to. As much as I want to comment that he’s my brother-in-law, I know that won’t sway her decision.
She’s known him long before. She’s bonded with him like I had no idea.
“I want to leave. I want to go away and forget everything. I want to be away and not cross paths with Lucian… I just need to go away.”
And against that, I have nothing to refute since she’s the only one who knows the hell she’s going through right now.