The Book of Broken Hearts (21 page)

After my family left the Bowl, Emilio and I walked back to the lemonade stand to collect Rosette, who spent the entire march back to their blanket hissing like a viper. When we hooked up with the rest of their friends, Samuel took one look at us and then he was all,
Look at the time!
, and he and Marcus and the other girl packed up their stuff, including Mom’s sandwiches and one extremely irritable Rosette, who finally agreed to leave but not before pasting herself onto Emilio for a good-bye hug.

Most of the crowd had funneled out after the grand finale; only a handful of stargazers remained. Emilio waved for me to follow him along a narrow dirt trail on the other side of the Bowl, close to the woods.

“I wanna show you something,” he said.

“This totally sounds like a stranger danger video.”

“I’ll give you some candy if that’s what it takes.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What kind?”

“You’ll see.” He held out his hand and I took it, and together we strolled along the path, the sounds of car doors and laughter and cell phones fading behind us. The trees thickened as we walked, and soon there was only us and the woods and a metal sign nailed to a charred stump.

PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRAIL ACCESS—

CROSS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

SNOWMOBILING, CAMPING, HUNTING FORBIDDEN.

“Should we keep going?” I whispered. I didn’t want to alert whoever had hung the sign.

“Says cross at your own risk,” Emilio said. “That’s what we’re doing.”

He held back a pine branch so it wouldn’t whip me in the face, and as I stepped past, I caught a whiff of his leather and softener scent.

“It’s risky for me to be here with you?” I was only half kidding; my heart sped up and my body was electrified with nervous energy. Emilio was still his flirty, jokester self, but in the shadow of our conversation behind Duchess today, all words had more meaning.

He put his arm around my shoulders and leaned in close. “Scared?”

My skin zinged from the current that passed between us. It was all I could do to keep one foot in front of the other on the moonlit path. Somewhere from the distant past, a little voice called out . . .
never, ever, under any circumstances . . .

I shook off his arm and stepped ahead as if I knew the way, but he reached for my hand and I let him take it, lacing our fingers together. He’d stopped walking, and I had no choice but to do the same.

I turned to face him, bodies and lips and skin and scent closer than they’d ever been. I forced myself to hold his gaze, stared at a tiny freckle beneath his eye, hidden behind a fan of soft black lashes.

“Close your eyes.” His breath grazed my lips, teased every hair on my scalp to attention.

I did as instructed, my other senses heightening in the sudden absence of sight. Emilio released my fingers and wrapped his hands around my shoulders, giving me a gentle nudge.

The ground, cushioned by old leaves and moss and things that time forgot, gave slightly. We’d stepped off the hard-packed dirt path and now headed deeper into the woods. A jolt of exhilaration raced up my spine.

“Keep ’em closed,” he said softly. “No matter what.”

It was so still and silent. I’d lost track of the frogs and crickets whose songs usually flooded the summer night. The air sweetened and thickened, and it felt like an eternity passed, no sounds but our breathing, opposite and out of sync, and the heartbeat in my ears, and maybe the trees growing cell by cell.

Emilio’s hands slid to my neck. He gathered my long hair and held it behind me. I fought not to shiver, not to shudder.

“Lean forward,” he said. “Take a deep breath through your nose.”

“Seriously?”

“Would I joke about something like this?” Even through the softness of his moonlight voice, a playful taunting rang out.

I leaned in and inhaled.

A cloud of sweetness. It wasn’t sugary or syrupy. It wasn’t a flower. It was softer, yet more potent, underlined with
something woodsy and ancient. Here in the dark, alone in the woods with Emilio Vargas, everything had taken on a new intensity, a surreal magic that didn’t exist in the daylight.

It was intoxicating. The scent. The feeling. The simultaneous hope and fear.

“It’s like . . . vanilla bean?” I said.

“Butterscotch.”

I thought he’d finally produced that promised candy, and I was about to give him some serious credit for building up the suspense. My heart was still hammering behind my ribs.

I opened my eyes. I was standing a half inch away from a giant tree trunk.

“Ponderosa pine,” he said. “The bark smells like butterscotch.”

“When did you become a tree sniffer?” I took another whiff. “I’ve lived here my whole life and I never knew we had butterscotch trees.”

“My cousin Danny taught me. He was a hobbit or something. Serious. When we were kids, right, we’d go out in the woods for hide-and-seek or Dungeon Defender, and hours later everyone would be, like, where the hell’s Danny? We’d find him off in the woods, looking at leaves and bugs and shit, doing his thing. He always told me stuff about trees. Thought I wasn’t listening.” Emilio shook his head. “Crazy nature boy bastard.”

I remembered the picture on Emilio’s desk, the lizard one, but if I mentioned it, he’d know I’d been in his room. “Where is he now?”

“He’s . . .” Emilio didn’t answer right away, like he was trying to remember an address. “In Puerto Rico. Hopefully surfing some gorgeous-ass beach. There’s more. Come on.”

He edged deeper into the forest, and I followed in silence. I wanted to ask about Danny, about his brothers, about the maps in his room. I wanted to tell him how that thing with the ponderosa pine was so small and special and how I knew, in that moment even more than at his house baking cookies, that my sisters were wrong about his family, that he could never come from cruelty, that he could never hurt me the way his brothers had hurt them. That it was okay to want this—being alone in the moonlit woods, talking about trees while the smoke of fireworks still hung faint and blue in the air.

Automatically I thought of Celi again, crying in her bed, and Mom’s face in the weeks that followed as she tried to get their money back for the wedding flowers and catering and everything they were once so sure about. I thought of Mari, washing Celi’s hair in the sink because she didn’t have the strength to do it herself, and how Mari had flatironed it and all Celi did was go back to bed. I thought back to Lourdes, too, the morning I’d found her prom corsage in the trash. I’d assumed it was a mistake at first—it was so pretty—so I retrieved it and left it on the edge of the sink, and later it disappeared and no one said anything about it.

Lourdes had cried a lot too, and after that, Miguel got his eyes scratched out in all the pictures that had once been
so lovingly arranged in her bedroom mirror. They all met the same fate in the black book.

But Emilio wasn’t his brothers. He was different. He was kindhearted and funny. He was sweet. He was . . .

Always wild . . . one foot out the door . . .

Leaving.

And that, more than his family legacy and the oath and all the warnings, was Emilio Vargas’s fatal flaw.

“It’s right up here,” Emilio said, and I followed the white glow of his T-shirt deeper into the trees until we stepped into a clearing encircled by tall, silver-barked aspens. It was a sacred place, some impossibly perfect creation that none of us was meant to see.

“Did you come here with your cousin?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I never came here with anybody but me.”

I met his eyes and braced for a jab about Rosette or some other girl but there was none, and then he stepped close and reached for my chin and gently tilted it to the sky.

“Orion,” I whispered. The constellation, like everything else, had taken on some kind of magic intensity. “Araceli had a telescope when we were kids—I remember him. The three bright stars are his belt.”

“I never remember their names,” Emilio said. “This one . . . Orion? He follows me everywhere. I gotta try to outrun him on the road. I mean, not for real. I get this feeling when I look up and he’s always there, like . . . hey! I’m watching you! I don’t know. . . . It’s hard to explain.”

He was stammering in the wake of my silence, maybe mistaking it for confusion or boredom or judgment, but when I looked at him again, my eyes were watery and I knew he’d noticed and he finally stopped babbling.

Something passed between us then, and my heart kick-started and I smiled.

“Not worried about the risks anymore?” He slipped a finger through one of my belt loops and pulled me close. Our legs were almost touching, everything hot and charged.

“This is the second time today you dragged me alone into the woods,” I said. “No one knows we’re here, and I still haven’t seen any candy.”

He slipped his arms around my waist and looked deep into my eyes, his own unblinking.

“So.” My voice was shaky. “You don’t have any candy, do you?”

He traced his fingers over the flower clip in my hair, brushed a lock behind my ear. Now our legs were touching. Everything was touching, fabric on fabric and skin on skin, all the space between us erased. “Nope.”

Moments passed like eons, and his hands were in my hair. All around us crickets and frogs started up their night songs again. The entire forest seemed to open up and bloom in the dark.

“Your heart’s pounding like mad,” he whispered. Fingers brushed my collarbone, tapped gently. “Ba-
bom
. Ba-
bom
.”

His breath fell against my skin, soft as a breeze, and my lips could already taste him. My mouth watered, and something
swirled from a deep place inside me and my heart continued its mad dash beneath his fingertips and my whole body ached with the desire to touch him, to feel him against me.

I’d never been so exhilarated in my life.

I’d never been so scared.

“We should go,” I said. The trees rustled overhead, the aspens quaking, and despite the warmth between us, I shivered. “It’s late, and . . . Mari’s waiting up.”

Emilio smoothed my hair, calming the strands that had gone wild under his touch. He held my gaze a moment longer, and I thought he might say something else, but he just smiled and took my hand and led us out of that magic, beautiful place, back through the woods, and I looked up at Orion one last time and sighed.

“Looking good, looking good!” Papi clapped his hands and I jumped, yanked back to the present, back to the dusty barn and the bike parts and the bright yellow sun outside.

“Think she’s ready to make some noise?” Emilio straddled the Harley frame. He’d rolled it off the lift, and it looked like something out of
The Terminator
, all metal bones and bolts, naked without its seat and fenders.

“She’s ready.” Papi was alive with excitement: eyes sparkling, cheeks pink and healthy, all evidence of last night’s fireworks overload gone.

Emilio turned the key to open the ignition switch. “Drumroll, please.”

Papi and I rolled our tongues and tapped our thighs. Not exactly the Colorado Symphony percussionists, and Papi’s attempt was more of a sputter than a roll, but Emilio smiled. He looked up at the ceiling, said a little prayer, and jumped with all his weight on the kickstart. The bike coughed and shuddered, and then . . .

Nothing.

Emilio jumped again.

Another cough, another nothing.

Papi and I cut the sound effects. After two more failed attempts, Emilio hopped off. He knelt beside it, poked and rattled a few pipes, squinted, scratched his head.

Papi hadn’t heard the growl of that engine in more than three decades, and the anticipation crackled around him like mountain lightning. I laced my fingers through his and squeezed, nodding for Emilio to give it another go.

“Come on, baby.” He patted the engine gently as he threw his leg across the frame again. “Here we go.”

Papi crushed my fingers.

Emilio jumped.

Hit the kickstart.

The bike coughed.

The engine sputtered.

Everything shuddered and shook.

And after thirty years of silence, Papi’s Valentina roared to life.

I squealed and flung myself into Papi’s arms. He couldn’t
speak, just kept opening and closing his mouth like a fish, his eyes glossy with emotion.

Emilio slid off the bike and leaned it on the kickstand, still rumbling.

“Welcome back, old girl.” Papi pressed his hand to the engine. Valentina, finicky old girl, returned his tender greeting with a cough and a sputter and a final gasp.

The day was silent once again.

“No worries,
jefe
,” Emilio said. “First breath in thirty years? You’d probably cough a little too.”

“Do I look worried?” Papi waved him off. “No way, José. You know how many times she tested me like that on the road? More than I can remember, even if I
could
remember.”

“Papi!” I rolled my eyes.

“It’s true,
querida
. One time I
do
recall, we got caught in a rainstorm near Mendoza, you know?”

“Sí.”
We’d visited the region a few summers ago for Lourdes and Alejandro’s wedding.