“Is this a ploy for some kind of massage?”
“Always,” I told him. “But also, you seem weird. You definitely acted strangely at dinner. What’s going on?”
Absently, he picked up my hand, gently digging his thumbs into my palm. Even that felt good. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Are you still worried about your dad being upset with you? Is that why you cooked a giant dinner all by yourself, to prove something?”
César put my hand against his cheek and pressed against it. “Probably. Did it work?” He grimaced. “No, I also didn’t want to go out tonight. They’re always trying to pay for everything, and then when I do instead, they get upset about me spending so much money. I didn’t want to get into an argument.”
“I didn’t know it would stress you out so much to have them here. I thought you’d be happy.”
“I am.” He covered his eyes with my hand. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t know what was upsetting him either. “I have some ideas for tomorrow. We’re going to have a very busy day so you won’t have any time to be worried or grumpy or whatever is going on with you. We’re all going over to Woodsmen Stadium and getting a personal tour from Lyle.”
“The security guard?”
I nodded. “He’s been my friend since I was born. He’s going to show us the seamy underbelly of the stadium. That’s what he called the tour, anyway, but I bet he just means letting us into the storage rooms.”
César laughed a little. “Sounds fun to me. You have to pick up Ellie, right? After she gets here, leave some time in your plans for us all to go over to the new house. I got the keys this morning, and it’s ours.”
Ours. No, it wasn’t. “Great,” I said carefully, sounding just as brittle as he had during most of dinner.
He crawled over me and lay on the bed, head at my stomach level. “The new place has a big guesthouse. I don’t want you to get sick of my family, so we’ll stash them out there when they visit next time.”
“I like them,” I said, and I did. Oddly, I did.
César maneuvered up my t-shirt (actually, his t-shirt) to bare my stomach. “I haven’t talked to her yet today.” His dark eyes flicked up to me. “Do you understand what I’m saying now, or is your vocabulary limited to what happens on the soccer field?”
“I understand a little more,” I admitted.
He leaned and kissed my stomach, then rested his forehead against me and closed his eyes. “I’m afraid I’m doing this all wrong.”
“What?” I asked him softly. I stroked my fingers across his cheek.
“Never mind. Nothing.” He kissed my tummy. “Te quiero,” he whispered. “Te quiero tanto.” He kissed the baby again, then moved up the bed to put his arms around me. He seemed to need it, and that was how I fell asleep that night.
∞
“He sings in the locker room?” Valeria asked the security guard. “I’m sorry that you have to suffer through that. I’ve heard him sing.”
Lyle nodded. “He covers a lot of pop songs in Spanish. You can hear it echoing through the halls.”
César’s family laughed. The stadium tour was going well, and César seemed more relaxed this morning. I had opened my eyes in the middle of the night and sat straight up in bed, because he was gone. There had been a light on under his door when I crept out into the hallway to check, but now he seemed ok, rested and chattier than he had been previously.
“I like his singing in the shower,” I said. “It’s peppy. Maybe a little off-key, but it gets you going.”
“You can hear me too?” he asked me, and I nodded.
“The walls in the pink palace are thin. They spent all their budget on gold paint and large statuary instead of insulation.” I checked the time on my phone and realized I had to leave so I wouldn’t be late to pick up Ellie. Or, maybe I was already late. “Enjoy the rest of Lyle’s stories, except the parts about me getting into trouble as a kid here. Those are all lies,” I said to César’s family.
“Did you come to this stadium a lot?” Gael asked me. Clearly, César hadn’t filled them in on my backstory.
“She grew up here,” the security guard answered him. “I used to change her diapers. Her father, I should say, her uncle was the greatest Woodsmen player of all time,” Lyle continued. He nodded at me.
César and I both stared at him. “How did you know that?” I asked. Lyle usually knew just about everything, but I hadn’t ever considered that the secret about Warren Wilde was out.
“You all have the same blue eyes,” Lyle said. “The Wilde eyes. I always knew it.”
I wanted to close them, to cover up the blue that had come to me right from my father.
“And soon, we’ll be coworkers,” Lyle remarked, because of course he knew that too. César’s family wanted to talk about my new job, with César bragging that I had created it for myself.
“With your help,” I reminded him.
He checked his phone. “What time is Ellie’s flight again?” he asked me.
Oops, now I was very, very late. “I have to run to get my sister at the airport,” I announced. “Ellie is back in town,” I told Lyle. He got the significance—she wasn’t my cousin anymore.
“I’ll see you on Monday to walk you up to HR,” he answered. “Give your sister my love.”
Ellie needed more than just love when she saw me. She cried so hard when she got an eyeful of my pregnant stomach that I almost had to give her oxygen as well as a hug. She set me off, too, because it didn’t take much to make me bawl.
“Are you a little bit happy?” I gasped.
“I’m so happy to have a niece,” she told me, hugging me again. “I’m so happy, but—but—”
Exactly. The “but,” meaning
