‘So are you.’ I take her hand and gently pull her from the bed. She makes a tired grunt but lets me.
‘It’s nearly midnight.’
‘Don’t care.’
‘You should. You have qualifying tomorrow.’
‘That’s tomorrow’s problem.’
‘This is so stupid and random,’ she whines, but she starts dancing. She’s good, especially considering a couple of hours ago I thought she was too rigid to do the Macarena.
I tilt my chin up. ‘You want to sing along, don’t you?’
She fights a smile. ‘No.’ With one hand, she grabs my face and smushes my cheeks. ‘You’re annoying.’
When we’re back in bed, I promise I’ll go in five minutes. Jules takes a drink of water and my eyes follow her every move. How much do I really know this woman I spend so much time with? Who just deep throated my cock like a champ. Who doesn’t have a stick up her ass after all – I can say that with confidence because my thumb was just there.
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I say.
I half expect her to kick me out for overstepping, but she settles back down and pulls the duvet up to her neck. ‘I’m an introvert.’
I blink slowly at her. ‘Wow, never guessed that one.’
She huffs. ‘You saw mine. You go first.’
‘I saw a whole lotta things. Which are you referring to?’
She slaps my arm through the sheets. ‘Themug.’
‘Sure, sure,’ I say around a laugh. ‘Alright…’ I stick my hands behind my head. What to choose. Wait, I got it. ‘We came to the States when I was eight. My dad and his brother wanted to expand the family business into North America.’
When I glance over at her, I have her full attention. Smudged eye makeup, dishevelled hair, naked collarbone. A man could get used to a sight like that.
‘Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: being an immigrant kid sucks balls.’ I tuck my arms under the sheets too. ‘We did it legally and with money, and it still sucked balls. My dad didn’t know rich areas were white, and moved us to White Street USA: Newport Beach.
‘Everyone thought we were Mexican. I knew three phrases in English on my first day of school. A teacher asked if I was from the barrio. Some kid wanted my dad to mow his lawn.’ She lets out a little gasp. ‘I didn’t know what any of it meant. In Colombia, even racism’s different.
‘I’d always been the joker, popular, and suddenly I didn’t feel funny, I didn’t feel cool. I felt… like everything I said came out wrong.’
This is harder than I thought. I haven’t dug up that period of my life in years, and it’s not like we talk about it honestly as a family because everyone dealt with the move differently. Isa was four and seemed to learn English overnight. My older sisters dove head-first into Heelys and Club Penguin and Pinkberry. I felt alone for the first time in my life, which totally blindsided me. Being one of twelve, the only thing you can count on is always havingmi gente. That, and personal space is a fun fantasy.
I felt like I’d moved to another planet. All the buildings were beige and white, so planned, so organised, so sterile. Cartagena’s nothing but colour. Old, walled, cobbled, and loud. Shrieking food vendors; warm Caribbean water; chaotic traffic; life spillinginto the streets. I couldn’t make sense of muted California, where everyone jogs and your neighbours are strangers.
‘My eldest brother took me karting one weekend,’ I continue. ‘Figured I needed to get out of the house.’
I catch her nodding slowly out the corner of my eye. ‘And an F1 driver was born,’ she murmurs.
‘We used to love quad biking through the forest and beaches back home, so it wasn’t that different. I couldn’t get enough of it. I felt like I belonged for the first time in months. It gave me my confidence back.’
‘It’s hard to imagine you not having confidence,’ she says lightly.
I nudge her. ‘It’s because I’m so sexy.’
She rolls her eyes but her mouth kicks up. We lapse into comfortable silence. It’s crazy to think how far I’ve come from that lonely little boy. I wish I could give him a Pinkberry and tell him to chill out. We’d move to Miami in a year and it’d feel more like home than Colombia even did.
‘You should go,’ Jules whispers.
‘Nuh-uh. Not without hearing yours.’
