Pajarito…?
Time as we know it comes to a complete stop. The entire universe is on pause while I stare down at the boy, and he up at me. Even in darkness, those irises gleam like the rarest emeralds.
Seconds pass like days, weeks, months, years…Fifteen of them, to be exact.
But then reality snaps back into focus when the bartender speaks, praising the kid while tucking himself away. But the green eyes remain locked on mine, holding my gaze just as hard as I’m holding his. Maybe even harder.
That’s not fear.Not this time.
It’s hostility. Anguish and rage, though controlled enough that his breathing barely hitches. If anything, it’s visibly slowing from the way it was pumping his chest while he was…
My jaw tics.
Sucking a stranger’s dick? And sovigorously…
What would your father think, pajarito?
I almost smirk, overcome by so many things that have me frozen in this moment. But the headiest of them all is a fierce sense of pride.
He stands slowly, my eyes climbing to stay with his all the while. And then he hums, “Diablo…”
Dios, it’s really him.
My head cocks to the side, like a reflex.
You made it…
I’ve been waiting for you, Angel.
My muscles are stiff, thankfully, becauseI swear to God, my knees could buckle from that one word, uttered inthatvoice, coming fromthatface…
Jesus, I have been waitingfifteen yearsto be stabbed in the heart with it.
Cards on the table, I never stopped thinking about the boy. The one I left alive when I most definitely shouldn’t have. The son of my former mentor, the king whose throne I usurped in a very callous and bloody display.
All these years, I’ve known he could one day come for me. I might’ve been praying for it.
Don’t ask me why, because I honestly couldn’t tell you. Maybe it speaks to the Machiavellian in me, but there was always something so satisfying about the idea that the son of the man I killed to avenge my family would one day come to avenge his.
Vengeance is hot, I don’t care what anyone says.
Andno, I didn’t leave the boy alive on the off-chance that he would track me down as an adult and enamor me in such an intoxicating way, buthey… I’ll leave this one somewhere between deeply rooted psychological issues and inexplicable cosmic chances of fate.
Perhaps it’s a conversation for Carl Sagan and Sigmund Freud to have wherever they’re bopping around right now.
Nevertheless, last I’d heard, he was still living with his aunt in Bogota. So this is a welcome surprise, that’s not all that surprising. There was a strong possibility the kid would come for me eventually, and I may have hoped that if itdidhappen, he’d look like that.
Like an Achillean fantasy doused in hatred.
The bartender is being all post-coital clingy, and I feel that sizzle rising in my extremities again. Watching him kiss the visibly soft flesh ofmylittle bird’s neck and throat is bringing forth another disturbing urge…
I could dislocate his jaw with my bare hands.
But then I catch something in the glimmering green. Uncertainty…
He’s not sure that it’s me.
Right… I’m wearing a mask.
