Marianna laughed. “Very insightful of you.”
She looked out the window as they crossed over a dry riverbed.
“The air feels different here,” she said. “Not like Miami.”
“I like it,” said Simon. “No hurricanes. No swamps. I’m just an American here. No one gives a shit that my parents came over on a fishing boat from Cuba with nothing.”
His jaw tightened and released.
“There are some wonderful things about Miami, too,” she said after a while, a little defensively. How could he write off his entire childhood like that, move away and never look back?
Simon took off his sunglasses and looked at her, his eyes like liquid, dangerously hot. “I haven’t forgotten that, Marianna.”
His eyes trailed down her body, making it clear exactly what he considered to be one of Miami’s wonders.
“Should you be watching the road?” she asked, her voice a little breathless.
Simon grinned and put his sunglasses back on. But his smile disappeared quickly, and his expression hardened.
“My life is better here, Mari. I’m not going back.”
She crinkled her brow and frowned. “What do you mean by better? Is it the money?”
“I thought it was the money at first. That’s what this is all about.” He gestured to his car. “People treat me a lot differently now that I have money. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. And as much as it made me mad, I got off on it. For a while, anyway.”
Marianna nodded slowly. Once she had been in love with this man, but that didn’t mean she had really understood him. She had seen only the burdens Simon had shouldered for keeping their family afloat. The burdens her own father had worked so hard to keep her from.
“It took me a long time to really get it, to really understand what I was looking for,” he said. “What I hated back in Miami was the powerlessness. That our family was so vulnerable. We were hit over and over until the only choices were to harden against it or lie down in defeat.”
His face was blank, but he had the steering wheel in a death grip.
“My mother’s passing was too much for my father. He couldn’t fight back anymore. By the time I met you, he was already halfway to defeat. I guess my brother and I were too young to give up. The military doesn’t allow a lot of vulnerability to survive, and I’d imagine Javi thinks the same about working on the oil rigs.”
“How often do you talk to your brother?” she asked.
“Almost never.” He looked at her, his jaw set.
Marianna blinked at him in surprise. “But your family was everything, Simon. I watched you take care of your father. You and your brother were the best things in his life. I could see that on the first day you all came to our house, when he introduced you two to my father.”
His jaw was working. Then he smiled a little.
“You were watching that day?”
“Hell yes.” Marianna laughed. “You and your brother were hot as sin. And off-limits. How could I resist?”
“My brother, too?” Simon’s voice was harder.
Javi was older, cockier, maybe even better looking, if she compared them objectively. Marianna opened her mouth to tease Simon a little, but when she saw the scowl across his face, she stopped. Toying with him was losing its appeal. And the truth was that she had never wanted Javi. Just Simon.
“It wasn’t like that, and you know it,” she said quietly. “Yes, your brother is hot, too, but it’s different with you.”
The scowl faded.
“Simon, when I saw the three of you together that day, I wished I had something like you had.”
He laughed. “Right. Trade your pool and your Mercedes for a run-down two-bedroom house and a list of debts a mile long.”
Marianna rolled her eyes. It all came back to this, didn’t it? Simon, like everyone else, weighed every sign of sadness against her privilege. When her mother died, she learned that no one thought she had a right to complain too much. Not when she had all that money to console herself with. But for those long summer months, Simon saw beyond that. Even though his pain weighed more than hers on everyone else’s scales. Or at least she had thought so.
