But now the little girl sat with her tiny arms crossed over her chest, stabbing me with a scalding glower, albeit an adorable one. Oh, yeah, she wanted me dead.
“Why do you have two beds?” the boy asked next. He was bouncing on his knees, clearly wanting to jump. “You look older than the last time we saw you,” he added. “And you have bedhead.”
“Oh, my goodness.” A woman rushed into the room to scoop up the two children and set them on the floor. “I am so sorry, Charley.”
I waved a dismissive hand at Bianca. She was married to Reyes’s best—and pretty much only—friend, Amador. The two little munchkins at her side, one beaming and one glaring the heat of a thousand suns, were their children, Ashley and Stephen.
Amador walked in, nodding his head in approval. “Hey, Charley. I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“Thanks,” I said, climbing out of bed and smoothing my pajamas. Nothing like greeting guests in my pajamas.
Amador read my T-shirt, raised his brows playfully, then said, “Reyes told Ashley about the you-know-what.”
I walked around the bed and gave his lovely wife a hug. “The you-know-what?”
“You know,” he said, coming in for his own hug before I scooped up the rascal doing jumping jacks at my feet. “The, er, Post-it note.”
“Oh.” I looked down at her.
“No, ’jita,” Bianca said, kneeling down to scold her daughter, “you don’t glare at people that way. It’s very rude.”
Reyes walked in, two cups of coffee in hand and an impish expression on his face.
Amador slapped him on the back. “No, I do,” he said, surveying the area. “I like the blending of two cultures, the definitive lines separating the two: minimalist and, well, not minimalist.”
“Oh, heavens,” Bianca said, “you will never get hired at Architectural Digest if you don’t learn the lingo.” She glanced around my area of our connected rooms and nodded, having made up her mind. “Minimalist and lavish.”
I laughed softly. “I like it.”
She took Stephen from me so I could accept the coffee Reyes had brought me. She must know me better than I thought.
“Can we do our beds like this, Mama?” Stephen asked Bianca. “Pleeeeeease?”
I hid a look of amusement behind my cup as I took a sip. Then I stifled a shiver of delight.
“Are you going to say yes?” Ashley asked me accusingly. Her lower lip quivered as I bent down to her.
“I’m still thinking about it. What do you think I should say?”
“I think you should say no. You’re too old for him anyway.”
“How old do I look?”
“I’m so sorry,” Bianca said, her smile suddenly nervous.
“Is that yours?” She pointed to a tiny doll made out of strands of soft rope. My sister, Gemma, had given it to me when we were kids.
“It sure is.” I took it down as Reyes and Amador discussed the finer points of Reyes’s décor, or lack thereof, in his room. Clearly my side outshone his, and Amador felt bad for his friend. It probably wouldn’t take long for my stuff to leach over to his side anyway. Poor guy. He was the one who took down the wall. He removed its only protection.
“Do you like it?” I asked Ashley. Maybe I could bribe her into liking me. I was so not above bribery.
“I guess.”
“I got two words for you, pendejo,” Amador said to Reyes. “Eight ball.”
Reyes tossed me a grin before he and Amador went to his luxurious pool table in the room adjoining his living room. Barely visible from where I stood, it was carved from dark woods with a rich cream-colored top. Good thing he knew the owner of the building. Neighbors rarely appreciated the noise of a billiards table in an apartment building.
It was good to see Reyes’s friends over. His life was slowly becoming normal. Or, well, as normal as his life could become. I couldn’t say returning to normal, because as far as I could tell, he had never had anything near a normal life. I studied him from my vantage point and wondered what he would consider normal. Was it a family with 2.5 kids? He had been a prince. A general in hell. A severely abused child. An inmate. Could he adjust to what we humans considered normal?
I sat on the bed and patted the mattress beside me. Ashley climbed up and took the doll to study it.
“What if I said yes to Reyes? Would you be very mad?”
She shrugged one slender shoulder. “A little.”
“Because he is supposed to marry you?”
“Yes. He promised.”
“Well, what if I only kept him for a little while? And when you grow up and become as pretty as your mother, you can decide then if you still want someone as old and grumpy as Reyes Farrow.”
The corners of her mouth tipped up. “He’ll always be pretty, though.”
She knocked that one out of the park on her first swing. “Yes, he will always be pretty.”
“Boys can’t be pretty,” Stephen said, squirming out of his mother’s grip. She lowered him to the floor and he ran to see what the menfolk were up to.
“Can so!” I called out to him.
Bianca chuckled and sat beside her daughter. “Sometimes, God gives us something even better than what we want. You have to have faith that he will give you someone just as pretty as Uncle Reyes.”
She eyed her mother, bewildered. “There’s not anyone as pretty as Uncle Reyes.”