“Those are good reasons,” I say honestly. “Also terrible ones.” I angle my head, making sure he can see my grin in the dark. “We don’t have to name it. We don’t have to label it. We can just… not be miserable for five minutes.”
He huffs another tiny laugh that ghosts my mouth. “You make it sound easy.”
“It isn’t,” I say. “But it doesn’t have to be impossible.”
He looks at the closed back door, at the dark yard, at me. That small war plays over his face again—duty versus want—and want wins by the slimmest of margins. He leans in first this time, like he’s testing whether gravity works the same way twice. It does.
We kiss again, longer, the pause between us collapsing until there’s nothing but heat and the slow press of his mouth against mine. It’s not practiced—hell, it’s clumsy in a way that makes my chest ache—but it’s real.
His hand tightens on my shoulder like he’s steadying himself, then slides up, fingers grazing the back of my neck. The touch sends a shock straight down my spine, electric and raw. My own hand fists in the fabric at his waist, tugging him that fraction closer, and I feel it—the tremor that runs through him. My pulse hammers everywhere at once: in my throat, in my fingertips, in the hollow just beneath my ribs. The world shrinks down to this—his breath mingling with mine, the scrape of stubble against my lip, the way his chest rises and falls unevenly, trying to find a rhythm.
When we finally break apart, it’s only because oxygen insists on being part of the equation. We’re both breathing hard, foreheads almost touching, and my body is lit up like I just stepped offstage after a set that left me wrung out and alive all at once.
He doesn’t freak. He doesn’t run. He just stands close, breathing like he just finished a sprint.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I say, because facts help, because if I don’t say something real, I might say something stupid. And I’m also fully aware we’ve already had this conversation, but I’m grasping here. “Stupid o’clock. Back in a week.”
He nods against my breath. “Practice Monday. Home after.”
“Text me,” I say.
“I will.”
Noise swells behind the door—someone opening it down the hall, laughter spilling out, a voice calling his name with a smile in it. We step apart an inch, then two. The air feels colder, which is rude, honestly. I squeeze his hand once before I let it go.
“You okay?” I ask.
He thinks about it like it’s a test, then nods. “Yeah.” A beat, then his voice drops, rough and embarrassed. “But… I can’t tell anyone about this. I just… can’t.” His eyes flick away like the words burned coming out.
It twists in my gut, sharp and sour, like hitting a wrong note in front of a packed bar. But I get it. Hell, I get it in ways he doesn’t even know. I’m bi, Mexican, living in a country that only likes its immigrants if we’re convenient and palatable. I’ve spent years code-switching, slipping into skins people expected me to wear, learning what to hide and when. So yeah, I get it.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting.
And damn if the word doesn’t stick in my head like a chorus:can’t, can’t, can’t.Three notes, sharp and final. The kind of word you want to bend, break, turn into something else until it stops cutting. My pen hand itches like I should be writing this down, scribbling lines about how hiscan’tfeels more like awon’t—how it rubs against the way he kissed me like he’d been starving.
“Okay,” I say, steady as I can, because what else do you say when someone’s still figuring out how to breathe?
We go back in together, the bass swallowing the yard’s hush, the party folding around us like we never left. Someone thrustsa cup into my hand; someone else tells Ollie to come settle a debate about whether Jason’s dunk was better than it looked. He slides back into captain mode, easy as a jersey. I slide back into band guy, easy as a smirk.
But his shoulder finds mine once in the press of bodies, a bump that doesn’t have to happen. He looks at me just long enough to make the room tilt. No one notices. Or maybe they do and decide to be kind.
I take a sip of something that still tastes like headaches and sugar and grin into it, because beneath the noise, something quiet exists now. And once something exists, you can’t pretend it doesn’t. Not when your chest is already writing songs about it. Not when every strum of a bass string is threatening to turncan’tinto something louder, something true.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Christmas Eve in my parents’house smells like heaven and chaos rolled into one. Tamales steaming in pots big enough to bathe in, cinnamon and clove clinging to the air from the atole Mamá’s been stirring all morning, the faint burn of candles flickering in the Virgen corner by the living room. Rosa’s got reggaetón blasting from her phone even though Papá keeps saying “Bájale, hija, the neighbors,” and she keeps pretending not to hear him.
It’s good. It’s loud. It’s home.
I’ve been back less than forty-eight hours, and it’s already like I never left. My guitar case is leaning against the couch with a pile of coats dumped on it, my duffel half unzipped in my old bedroom where Rosa keeps sneaking in to “borrow” my band shirts. And me? I’m standing at the kitchen counter, rolling tamales with my mamá like I’m sixteen again instead of twenty-two and too restless for my own skin.
“Your folds are sloppy, Rafael,” Mamá says, snapping another corn husk into place like she’s got the devil on a deadline.
“They’re fine,” I argue, but yeah, mine look like they’ve been through an earthquake compared to hers. “They’re going in people’s mouths, not a beauty contest.”
“Mm.” She shakes her head, her lips twitching like she wants to smile but won’t give me the satisfaction. “Ay, Rosa,ven a ver. Your brother thinks ugly tamales taste the same.”
