Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (58 page)

That was fine with her. That was beginning to feel like the whole point.

Noah dropped to his elbows, panting against her neck.

She cried again, but the tears felt clean and right, and he held her through them, his body relaxed.

They drifted off. He woke her a few hours later and made love to her again.

In the morning, he took her out on his boat.

The way Heberto was looking at the plate made Roman want to curve his arm around it. Protect his food from the curl of the other man’s lip.

“Ceviche,” Heberto said. “That’s what Carmen gets.”

“Today, it’s what I get.”

Heberto narrowed his eyes at the sampler of six oversized spoons. The spoons came arranged in two rows on the plate with a spill of roasted corn down the center. Each one was bright and colorful, overloaded with raw fish, citrus juice, vegetables, and spices—ingredients Roman couldn’t name and wouldn’t have been able to taste two weeks ago.

He tried to remember how Carmen had eaten this when she ordered it. You didn’t scoop food off a spoon with another spoon, did you?

“Looks like you’re having second thoughts,” Heberto said.

“No.”

Roman grabbed the handle of one egg-drop spoon at random and tipped the contents into his mouth, tasting ginger, salty soy sauce, a spike of chile. Then cool, creamy—cucumber, avocado. A symphony in his mouth.

He’d wasted too many years not tasting things.

Heberto took a big bite out of the steak sandwich Roman had ordered him. “I’ve only got twenty minutes.”
Get on with it
, he meant. He’d come to lunch late and would leave before the check came.

“We need to talk about Coral Cay,” Roman said.

Heberto wiped his mouth with his napkin. “We needed to talk about it last week. You wouldn’t pick up the phone.”

“I took a vacation.”

“Is that what you’re calling it?” Heberto tore another bite off his sandwich. Ground it to pieces between his molars. “You broke your word.”

“I didn’t give you my word. We shook hands.”

“That’s a contract.”

“Sure, it’s a kind of contract, but we agreed to do the development together, not to any details. Since when do you micromanage?”

Heberto shook his head, decisive. “You cut me out of the loop. You screwed around on my daughter, messed with the plan, took off for two weeks without explanation, and I’m supposed to pretend you were on vacation? No. Fuck no.”

“I think we can still make this thing work,” Roman replied. “I’ve been talking to Ashley, and I have some new ideas I want to run by you, a different angle on the segment of the tourist market we’re targeting, and—”

“I don’t work with people I can’t trust.”

“I’ve known you fifteen years. One thing happens and you can’t trust me?”

“One thing is all it takes to show me what you’re made of.”

Roman picked up his fork and tunneled it under the roasted corn in the middle of his plate. Put it down. His hand shook.

Two weeks ago, he’d been ready to build a future with Heberto at its center, because the older man possessed power and money and influence, and Roman had believed he needed all those things to keep his fear at bay. He’d lurked at the margins of his mentor’s life, blending into
his family by degrees, never inhaling all the way or venturing his own opinions because he’d convinced himself, in his grief, that the scrap of life Heberto offered him was preferable to the wreckage of what he’d had in Heraly.

But two weeks could change everything. They’d changed him.

They’d made him into a man who could allow himself to feel so angry, his hands shook. So angry, his stomach heaved, bile rising in his throat because the anger felt violent, and violence made him ill.

“Bullshit,” he said, through clenched teach.

Heberto paused with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. “What did you say to me?”

“That’s bullshit. It’s not trust. If you trusted me, you’d give me a chance to explain. You’d show me some fucking loyalty after all this time.”

Heberto dropped the sandwich and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He stood. “We’re done.”

Roman shot to his feet. “I’m not.”

Heberto snagged his suit jacket and began walking toward the door of the crowded restaurant. Without thinking, Roman pulled a fifty from his wallet, threw it on the table, and jogged after him.

Outside, he paused on the brick sidewalk, looking left and right for Heberto’s familiar form, furious with him.
Furious
.

He found him crossing the street on a diagonal, holding his phone to his ear. Probably calling his driver to bring the car around. Roman waited for a break in the traffic and darted across three narrow lanes in pursuit.

Heberto whipped around, eyes narrowed, and began walking faster, finishing his call with a burst of rapid Spanish. When he put the phone away, Roman said, “Stop and talk to me.”

“We’ve got nothing to talk about.”

Roman grabbed his elbow, gripping tight and yanking him to a halt. “What’s your problem with me? What is it
really
?”

Heberto’s mouth was tight. Roman had never seen him so grave. “I never promised you anything. I told you a hundred times that you have to count on yourself. Just you. Nobody else.”

“I heard you, all right? But
you
took care of me.
You
did. You paid for my college, invited me to your house. Maybe you told yourself you were teaching me how to make it on my own, but that’s not how it was. You made me part of your family. You’ve been like a father.”

Heberto looked past Roman’s shoulder and lifted his arm, hailing his driver. “You never heard me,” he bit out. “That’s why I kept fucking telling you.”

The car pulled up. Heberto opened the back door.

Roman shook all over now, his mouth flooding with sour saliva. “This isn’t over. You talk to me or I’ll follow you around until you do. You watch.”

“I’ve got worse ghosts to worry about than you, kid.”

When the door slammed shut and the car pulled away from the curb, a wave of grief rose up and hit Roman so hard, he stumbled and retched, his stomach heaving, though he managed to keep the food down. He had to lean against a nearby tree, grateful for its shade and the solid trunk beneath his hand.

He had to take a deep breath, and then another one and another, just to get a grip.

When he got it, his hands clenched with the need to lock himself down. His body remembered how to do it. Three turns of the screw, and he’d be closed off from all this feeling.
He would be able to breathe without pain, to banish all this fear and anger, this
chaos
, so he could carry on.

He could wipe it away.

But he’d wipe himself away with it.

Not again
.

He wouldn’t lose Heberto, and he wouldn’t lose himself.

Roman extracted his phone from his pocket and pulled up Ashley’s number. Breathing against the blackness, he fixed his gaze on the letters of her name and thought about the way he’d left her in the condo when he went into the office this morning.

Barefoot on his couch, wearing his green T-shirt and nothing else. Bed-rumpled, gum-cracking, twisting a lock of hair around her finger as she poked through employment ads on his iPad with one desultory finger.

Trying so hard to put her best foot forward. She’d smiled at him and wished him luck as he let himself out the door.

Roman looked at her name and breathed until his hands stilled.

Then he found Carmen’s number and put the call through.

Roman found Heberto in the prayer chapel at La Ermita de la Caridad—the National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity, the Virgin of Cobre, patroness of Cuban Catholics.

Carmen had told him where he’d be able to find her father.

Bathed in blue light filtered through stained glass, Heberto sat alone. Canted forward, head bent, his clasped hands draped over the pew in front of him.

The shrine faced outward from the lip of Biscayne Bay—the heart of Miami Cuban Catholicism, yearning toward its homeland. Roman had approached the building with uncertainty, feeling like the tourist.

He’d always felt that way—like this wasn’t his city. The Virgin of Cobre wasn’t his saint.

But in the hushed space of the sanctuary’s interior, watching Heberto’s lips move in a silent prayer, Roman heard his own heart beating.

He shifted his weight from back foot to front.

He approached the pew.

Heberto sat frozen at the far end, which meant a long slide for Roman—eight or ten feet of undignified scooting, polishing the wood with his ass. When he fetched up next to his mentor, he leaned back and studied the stained glass that filled the wall in front of them.

The pale-skinned Virgin of Charity floated in the clouds above a green sea, holding the infant Christ in one arm, emitting beams of glorious light into a sky the color of Ashley’s eyes.

Roman had seen the Virgin on murals around Miami, painted with brown skin and blue eyes, floating above an ocean full of refugees in boats. He knew she’d first appeared four hundred years ago, a statue of Mary on a floating scrap of wood discovered by three Cuban farmers caught in a maelstrom. Forty-odd years ago, she’d come to the United States, a replica idol secreted away in an emigrant’s carry-on and flown over the water. They’d built her a shrine on donated land, paid for with schoolchildren’s pennies and workmen’s weekly tithes.

The rioting Mariel refugees imprisoned in Atlanta had prayed to her. For all Roman knew, his father invoked her name from his cell at the prison in Waupun.

If Patrick were here, he would kneel before the altar and search his heart.

According to Carmen, Heberto always came here when he needed to think.

The web of connections tightened across Roman’s chest, too dense for him to breathe his way through it. The stained glass brightened and blurred, tears in his eyes, a swell of emotion raising him up and dropping him down until he felt seasick and helpless in the middle of it all.

He didn’t belong, except that he was the man in the boat. He was the farmer caught in the storm, the boy who’d been rescued, the teenager cast out and taken in.

He belonged nowhere and everywhere, flung from the island that had given him birth, his parents destroyed along with whatever legacy they might have offered him, stranding him in the Midwest, where he’d acquired his own culture, his own lessons—and then been gathered up by Heberto as though he were a piece of flotsam on the waves.

Brought to Miami to sink or swim by a man who insisted that he didn’t believe in charity while he doled it out in small, hard crackers of sustenance that Roman had learned to ration.

Until Ashley had taught him that he couldn’t ration life out into bearable portions. He had to eat if he wanted to live.

“I need to ask you something,” he said.

Heberto remained where he was, stiff and frozen in place.

“Why did you call me? When I was in high school, what made you do that?”

Heberto didn’t say anything for so long, Roman thought about getting up to leave. Or asking some other question.
Why are you here? Do you believe in God?

Do you believe in virgins who protect and forgive, who grant wishes to the faithful and dispense charity to people in need?

Roman didn’t, but he believed there was
something
here—something in this network of connections that mattered more than he or Heberto did as individuals. A process unraveling over time, eddies of consequence, relationships with meaning.

When he’d told Ashley he wanted belonging, he hadn’t been thinking of this, but here it was, this web he already belonged to. Not just him, but his fathers—all three of his fathers—and this virgin who could change her skin color, her eye color, but whose promise of succor never altered.

“You had everything wrong,” Heberto said. “That essay you turned in … I couldn’t believe it.”

“You called me a moron.”

“You
were
a moron. A cheeky little moron with cojones.” Heberto sank back against the pew. His knee bounced against Roman’s thigh. “I come here to be alone, you know.”

“Too bad. You’re stuck with me.”

Heberto crossed his arms. Eyes fixed on the glass before them, he sighed. “I didn’t like the idea of this
Marielito
kid in Wisconsin figuring out how to be Cuban from the Internet. You were fucking it up.”

“You thought you’d be my guide?”

“I thought I’d get you here, that’s all. Get you closer to where you belonged.”

“Where do you think I belong?”

Heberto’s only response was to look at the glass.

It wasn’t that he refused to answer, Roman thought. It was that he had no answers. If he’d known where Roman belonged, he would have helped him get there, but instead he’d taught him what he knew, which was how to survive in exile. How to build a fortress with thick walls that dulled the pounding demands of the past, the slings and arrows of doubt, the pain of memory.

“It’s not easy for you, either, is it?” Roman asked. “You haven’t got people any more than I do. You’re a couple hundred miles from where you were born, but it might as well be another planet.”