All I know is that I have my wife, my son, and soon I’ll have a baby. Perhaps a daughter.
Yes.
A daughter.
A name floats into my head, a name that suddenly feels more than right.
“If it’s a girl,” I tell Luisa, kissing her forehead. “We should call her Marisol.”
“Marisol,” Luisa says, smiling. “I like that.”
THE END
The Off-Season Featuring the Men of Real Madrid
Vera
“I have good news,” Mateo says as he walks in the door with Chloe Ann, throwing his keys on the side table.
“Is the good news that Chloe Ann is here?” I ask him in Spanish, smiling at my stepdaughter as she runs over to me. I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop, but I toss it aside to make way for her. She’s thirteen now, tall, skinny, gorgeous, and yet never passes up an opportunity for a hug.
“Please, enough with the Spanish,” she says, in near perfect English, as she sits down beside me and gives me a hug. “How am I supposed to become completely fluent if you keep speaking in Spanish?”
I grin at her. “Oh yeah? How am I going to become completely fluent in Spanish if you keep speaking English?”
“You speak well enough,” she says, brushing her dark bangs out of her eyes. “You’re not trying to be on television.”
“Which leads into the good news,” Mateo says, leaning back against the wall, arms casually crossed. His dark eyes glint as he stares at me, and I know whatever the good news is, he wants to tell me badly. And I love to make Mateo wait as long as I can. “Don’t you want to hear it?”
“Okay fine,” I say, giving in. “What’s the good news?”
“We’re going to Madeira,” he says. “Tomorrow.”
I stare at him. “Wh—what?”
“Luciano and Ruby are getting married.”
“What?!”
He nods, a smile curving his lips. “Yes, the poor bastard. Finally joining the club.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, getting to my feet. “Luciano and Ruby…didn’t they just get engaged?”
Luciano Ribeiro was the captain of the Real Madrid team, a team that Mateo still coaches. I mean, of course it’s not just any team, it’s Real Fucking Madrid. But he retired over a year ago. He was a really good friend of ours and we’ve missed him ever since he moved to a Portuguese island off the coast of Africa.
But his mother lived there and, before she died, he spent every waking moment with her there, taking care of her. Once he retired, he moved there full time. Bought like a horse or sheep ranch or something like that. Probably the last person I expected to take up the country life, but that’s exactly what he did.
Anyway, it turns out over the past three years he had a long-distance relationship with Ruby, a woman I supposedly met once, but honestly it was after they had won one of their many cups, and I was pretty drunk.
Then, suddenly she moved to Madeira, they got engaged, and now they’re getting married?
“Isn’t that a little fast?” I ask. “I mean, how well does he know this woman?”
Mateo gives me a patient smile. “My dear Estrella. Who are we to ever question if something has moved fast or not? I fell in love with you in an instant. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
“Ay, Dios mío!” Chloe Ann exclaims, giving her father a disgusted look. “Can you please?”
“Talk more about our love story?”
“No. The opposite. Never talk about it.”
That shuts Mateo up. Considering Chloe Ann was five years old, and Mateo was still married to her mother when we fell in love, she’s been extremely adult about the whole thing. It definitely wasn’t easy for her at first, having to go through a messy divorce, and it took her a looooong time to like me. But she’s resilient, just as her father is.
“Why is it so last minute?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “They want to get married. And you know, they were secretly engaged for those three years they were apart.” He pauses. “I thought you would be excited. I know how you think of Luciano as a substitute husband.” His eyes twinkle at that. I do like Luciano an awful lot, so it’s a running joke.
“I will be excited,” I tell him. “It’s just a lot to comprehend. And I’m happy for him, I really am, but I don’t know this girl at all.”
“You’d like her,” he says. “From what I’ve heard about her, she reminds me a lot of you.”
“Trouble?”
“Definitely trouble. The good kind.”
Hmmm. Maybe I will like her.
“Luciano knows what he wants. He’s in love. In fact, he’s been in love with her for a very, very long time. It goes back further than you even know. So we need to be there to support him. We want him to be happy, don’t we?”
“Yes, of course. But, Chloe Ann is staying with us this weekend.”
“I know,” she says, clapping her hands together, her bracelets jingling. “Which means I get to go too!”
I look back to Mateo, brows raised as if to say, is this true?
He nods. “Luciano said it was fine. It’s a really small wedding. Just us, Thalia, Alejo, and David Roberto, plus his brother Marco and his wife. I think maybe Benedito and Teresa, his friends from Lisbon. That’s it.”
I sit back down on the couch beside Chloe Ann, looking at her. “Are you sure you want to spend your weekend at a wedding?”
She rolls her eyes again. “Uh, yes. Of course. It’s a trip to Madeira. I’m very excited. Plus, I can talk to Ruby,” she says. “Papá said that she used to be a sports journalist, on camera and everything. And that’s what I want to be.”
“Ah, I see,” I say, even though if Ruby is going to be a bride, I doubt there’ll be any time for her. Still, if Chloe Ann is excited, and Mateo is excited, then I ought to be excited too. I’ve never been to Madeira
