“I don’t want him...too close. And I don’t want them—” she smoothed her hand through Liliana’s curls “—to be disappointed when he’s not around.”
“You sure they’re the ones gonna be disappointed?”
She narrowed her eyes at him over Liliana’s head.
He chuckled. “You can shoot me all the dirty-diaper glares you want. I’ve seen the way you look at him.”
She’d seen the looks, too, in the daily media roundups Namrita continued to send: her glance when he was working, her smile when he was entertaining the group with a story. They’d caught her staring at Aish in silhouette with a broom in his hand, and she’d looked like a ballet aficionado watching Misty Copeland.
Her eyes were lingering too long on Aish Salinger.
“Parra,” she said quietly, asking him to stop. “Why do you keep going on about this? It’s an act. I’m supposed to...”
“Sweetie, you’re not that good of an actress,” he drawled over her words. “And I noticed the looks because there was a time I was hoping to get ’em.”
Shocked, Sofia met his blue-sky eyes. It was the first time she’d seen insecurity on this man built for big burly joy and bravado.
“I’ve been over it for a while, so don’t worry. But when you said that kiss didn’t work, it didn’t work for you.”
He tsk’d a laugh and then pushed his finger against her chin to snap her mouth closed.
“Henry, I’m sorry I...”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Don’t do that. That’ll just make it weird. I’m only telling you to get you to pay attention. I don’t know what happened in the past, but in the present, he’s stickin’. He’s staying and fighting and that’s the last thing I expected from him. And you’re... I don’t know...stronger and warmer when he’s around. And that’s the last thing I expected from you.”
Sofia didn’t want to think of the implications of her looks or Aish’s fight or the awareness from someone she deeply admired that she was changed when her ex was around. Of course she was. That was why she’d obliterated the thought of him for a decade.
So she just wove her arm around Henry’s massive bicep and leaned her head against it. With her eyes closed, as he squeezed her thigh, she tried to tell him without words how sorry she was she couldn’t fall in love with her best friend. It wasn’t personal. She wouldn’t fall in love with anyone.
And it was—of course—at that moment that the office door opened.
“Sorry.” She heard Aish’s discomfort over the blast of music and equipment. “I...there’s been a long lull. They asked me... I said I’d check to see when the next load is coming in.”
Sofia opened her eyes and the kids began to yell and wiggle free and Henry pinched her thigh and she tried to untangle her arm as she watched Aish take in what looked like an intimately domestic scene on her office floor.
In his knee-high muck boots, grape-stained jeans, long-sleeve T-shirt that clung to his shoulders, and wet hair shoved haphazardly back, this hardworking laborer couldn’t look any different than that heroin-chic rock ’n’ roller who’d stepped onto her cobblestones three weeks ago.
She’d forgotten how starkly the hard planes of his face showed emotion.
“Sorry, I’ll just...” He began to close the door but the kids were running toward him, gleeful shouts of “Aish, Aish” coming from their baby mouths and he was startled as they grabbed his jeans and couldn’t help it as he was pulled inside.
Sofia finally got up on her feet as Aish squatted down to take in the kids’ babble.
“Te hicimos una canción. Puedes ponerlo en tu album,” Gabriel said, tugging on Aish’s wet shirt.
“We wrote you a song,” Liliana said, translating for her brother. Her hand was on Aish’s shoulder and she was looking seriously into his eyes. “It’s for you, for your next album.”
As Sofia walked behind them to close the office door, she realized this was the first time Aish was getting to see Liliana and Gabriel without their caps and sunglasses. There, in that squat he’d kept up in the vineyard, he was looking into her niece’s hazel green eyes, seeing her wavy hair the color of Sofia’s. Gabriel, with his big brown curls, sometimes looked more like Roman than Mateo.
Many people didn’t understand that you had to get down to a child’s level to really enjoy them.
Aish glanced behind his shoulder toward Sofia, but she just took out her phone to text Carmen Louisa about the next truck of grapes.
Henry stood and went over to lean on Sofia’s desk.
“Okay,” Aish said hesitatingly. “Um...do you want to sing it for me?”
They both nodded excitedly. Too young with lives lived with too much love to know shyness, they began to sing. The song was in Spanish, a convoluted tale about the cocker spaniel they had to leave back in San Francisco where the family lived half of the year so Roxanne could be close to her headquarters. The song also mentioned their devotion to chocolate y churros.
Their voices were high and warbly, Gabriel got a pouty lip when they disagreed on the words, and what Liliana lacked in tune she made up in volume.
But there was no artifice in Aish’s room-filling shatter of applause when they were done. “So good,” he praised, still clapping. “This is definitely going on the album.”
Sofia walked around to stand in front of him, and pulled Gabriel against her legs. While Aish singing to them left her bereft but suspicious, his enthusiasm for their singing left her weak kneed.
“Que bueno,” she bent over to whisper into Gabriel’s curls before she kissed them.
Liliana leaned her whole weight on Aish’s side, so he had no choice but to put his arm
