Elbow deep in the work of her winery, Sofia had finally allowed herself to enjoy what she hadn’t heard in ten years: his deep, melodious voice, his smart and lusty turn of phrase, the American pop and soul rhythms now imbued with the global chords she’d introduced him to. She’d given herself sips of his talent while she was surrounded by walls her ancestors built and she’d fortified.
But she’d dismissed the lyrics like echoes, unwilling to reflect on what the recognizable words and phrases of their love affair meant in his songs. Verses might have nudged their way in, and she might have hummed them in the repetition of winery work.
She’d shaken them off every time.
It was time to shake him off now.
She took two steps back and rapped her knuckles against the glass.
Aish jerked like she’d shot him as her brother instantly turned and put his hand on the door handle.
“Fuck, oh fuck, no, Sofia, c’mon, c’mon okay...” and he was wrenching at the snaps of his dirty shirt as her brother opened the door and Aish was wrestling out the fabric and tearing it off his arms, and then getting up to his knees on the couch, still on the couch, stretching out his arms and saying, “Look, Sofia, please, please look, you don’t have to love me, but please look, know I wouldn’t do this to you, please...” and Sofia put her hand up to stop her brother in the doorway.
Aish was shirtless in front of her and what she’d denied herself in the dark—in trying to ignore his existence and then insisting he cover up—was right out in the open. He was low-slung pants and endlessly long, muscular torso and veiny, work-hardened arms and frantic energy, circling awkwardly on the couch so she could see the entire story of his full torso tattoo, covering him from wrists to collarbones to hip cuts and across his incredible back.
As he babbled, “...don’t owe me anything, I know, just please, know, why would I do all this if I wanted to hurt you, just please, believe that I only came here to help...” she saw a thin, forlorn skeleton, wreathed in a single flame, up the left side of his back, reaching across a nautical map, across tormented waves and broken guitars and an empty pizza box to a vineyard paradise on Aish’s front, fruitful and fertile in black ink, surrounding the constellation over his left breast, the constellation of la Osa Menor, the Little Dipper. The grid of nautical map and ocean covered his arms, along with a multitude of compasses whose arrows all pointed North. But the compasses were all turned so that North was directed right towards his heart.
Over his heart, at the tip of the constellation, was a brilliant, bursting North Star. It was a flame of a million colors, the only color in all the black ink of his body.
His body told the tale of a lonely burning man reaching across the ocean and sky for his estrella.
Forever. This would have taken forever. Years, a thousand hours in a chair, and a million hours of aftercare. When she’d staggered away from his body a decade ago, he hadn’t had a drop of ink on it.
“All this time, you think you’re not essential, Sofia? Look at me, look around you, look what you’ve done for your people. Even the queen, she doesn’t ignore you. She torments you for your attention. They all need you, but they can go fuck themselves because I need you more.” His mouth twisted into a grimace of desperation. “You’re essential to me, Sofia, and you have been every hour of every day since I left you.
“I never forgot, Sofia.” Still on his knees, Aish was her supplicant. “I never gave up hoping.” He turned his wrists up to her, looked willing to bleed. “You’re my first love. You’re my last love.”
His eyes were black sparkling pools. “You’re the only woman I’ll ever love.”
Sofia covered her mouth with a hand, her other arm wrapped over her stomach.
She began to laugh.
The door opened. She saw that her friends were coming up behind her wide-eyed brother.
“Get...out,” she choked out between laughter that was getting worse.
“Sofia—” Roman began.
“Get out,” she said again, and maybe she screamed it. Who could tell between all the laughing? But they were giving each other alarmed looks and Sofia continued laughing, waving them away. “Come back...come back in a few minutes...just get out...get out.”
And they did because...because she was a grown woman who’d fucked up and she didn’t need any help getting it wrong and when they left her, she was still laughing and she could turn her eyes back to Aish and he looked green, like he looked during one of his infamous, stumbling drunks and that look, that memory of how she’d believed he hadn’t fucked around with that lead singer, set her off again, leaning back against the glass and laughing as all of her emotions broke their bonds and came roaring out—anger and despair and heartbreak and, most of all, the great irony that he believed they were a story to be written in the stars, regardless of how much he’d hurt her, when he was the worst mistake of her life.
“Never,” she gasped. Stopped. Sucked in her breath while she grinned. “I would never fall in love with you again.” It was like sucking down the finest vintage, the raw anguish on his face as she smiled into it. “I never forgot, either, Aish. I never forgot how you broke up with me in a crowded bar. I never forgot how you threw me away. And I never forgot how you left me alone in that hospital bed. I will never, ever, ever forgive you.”
The anguish fell off his face. “Hospital bed?” he said.
Him echoing it back shoved her from hysteria
