“What are you talking about?” he asked.
He saw the slightest raise of her small, world-holding shoulders. “They’ll ‘miss’ me,” she said, putting the word in quotes. “But I’m not essential.”
He wasn’t letting go of her pocket and she wasn’t pulling away. “I was here when Mateo wasn’t,” she said in her academic away, diagramming it for him. “The villagers turned to me because they couldn’t turn to my parents.”
No wonder she hadn’t heard his music. While Aish was singing her songs and tattooing his body, Sofia was trying to keep a kingdom together.
“You would have been so young,” he said.
“When Mateo returned,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “The villagers didn’t come to me anymore.”
Oh. Baby girl. First rejected by her mom. Then Aish. Then her people.
He could imagine her reaction if he offered pity, empathy, or to let her take him down to the cellar with a bullwhip. So he said, with a light tug on her pocket that he wished would topple her into his arms, “Well, you’re essential now.” He turned back to the leaves and hid the lump in his throat. “You’re essential—” To me “—to the growers whose fruit you’re saving.”
They started working their way down the row again. “And you’re essential to the relationship I have with my uncle,” he said as he sought the little claw on the next trellis stake. “When everyone else thought I was perfect, you were the one person who expected more out of me.”
He grunted, leaning into the greenery. Dammit, he couldn’t find—there it was. He hooked the cloth. He shuffled a couple of feet to the next stake.
“This shade cloth was a good idea,” she said quietly. “It was our only good idea.”
He paused and looked up. Her voice sounded daunting.
She was very deliberate as she attached the next section. “But I don’t want to discuss the past. That part of our rules still holds true.”
The fucking ground rules. Her mentioning them was like the twang of a broken guitar string. But, for once, he swallowed his frustration.
“Anything else?” he said tightly.
She dropped her hands against her pants and looked up into the dark sky. “I’m not...threatening you. I won’t do that anymore. #Aishia is the only thing we’ve still got working for us.”
Her dark eyes were troubled when she looked down at him. “Pero...seguiremos fingiendo, Aish.” She stroked the leaves like they comforted her. “It’s all pretend. Regardless of what we... I did to you in the cellar...the only way this can work is if we both agree it’s pretend.”
But it isn’t pretend, he wanted to demand. He needed her and, at the very least, she desired him. He wasn’t blind to the way she’d looked at him that evening.
But he’d already made her miserable this month with his impatience.
“Of course,” he said, his voice steady. “It’s pretend. We won’t talk about the past.”
They worked the rest of their way down the row in silence. He promised he would listen to her, he promised he would trust her wishes. He promised himself he would take responsibility for some of the fuckups that had happened here.
That didn’t make the work-warmed smell of her, the steadiness of her breath, the weight of her imprint in the soil any easier to bear. When they reached the end of the row, he marveled at how much temptation could be packed into a hundred feet. They had many more rows to cover before dawn.
Unfortunately, the night lasted longer than the cloth did. They were still a couple hours from sunrise as Aish sat on the open tailgate of a Bodega Sofia truck, trying not to look as mentally and physically exhausted as he felt as Sofia paced in front of him, on her cell phone to discover who needed help and if anyone had extra cloth. She’d already sent one crew to another vineyard, let the other crew go home, and now, he and Sofia were alone. They’d turned the spotlights off halfway through the night and Aish’s headlamp next to him in the truck bed created a dim glow in the deep darkness of the night. The stars were gorgeous, a million pinpricks in the sky high above him. But here, on the ground, he could barely see his hand in front of his face.
Sofia slid her phone into her overalls pocket, crossed her arms around herself, and rubbed her fingers across the line between her brows. It was the first time all day she’d shrunk to her normal size.
“Any luck?” he asked.
She stood near his knee, but the glow of the lamp barely touched her. She shook her head without looking up. “Everyone is running out of cloth and heading home.”
He wasn’t going to ask the questions racing through his mind. How much of her crop got covered? What was the weather report for the morning? There was no point. They’d made their one play; only time would tell if that play worked.
But he wasn’t going to just sit there as this tired and worried princess rubbed her forehead. “This is going to work, Sofia,” Aish said, voice strong with conviction he didn’t feel. She liked going after him for his sunny American outlook, his baseless positive assertions. He’d give her a target.
But instead of smirking at him like he’d gotten used to, she kept rubbing. “Is it?” she asked. And it was the first time he heard this giant of a woman sound afraid. “I hope so.” Her breath shuddered and it fucking killed him. “I don’t know what we’ll do if it—”
No contract was going to keep him from touching her now. He grabbed her by her hand and pulled her to him.
“Hey, you’ve been going hard all day, and now that you can take a breath, you’re starting to spiral.” He settled her between his knees and briskly rubbed her arms, from shoulder to elbows. He could feel her warmth and tensile strength and trembling exhaustion. She didn’t look at him. “You’re tired, Sofia.
