Page 41 of Guarded

I’ve been here for over three hours, and I already want to leave. I keep looking around to see if I can find what I’ve been restlessly searching for.

Who I am searching for.

I haven’t seen Nero since I made a fool of myself at the clubhouse. I should apologize, but I’m not sure what to say. “Hey, sorry I kissed a random guy, but I saw you talking to Shawny, and even though you are absolutely oblivious to it, I have a huge crush on you.”

In my defense, Shawny had provoked me. My insecurities were evident, and she found a way to pick at the surface of them. She brought out the Don Julio, and my temper tantrum did the rest. No wonder my family was still placing me at the kid’s table.

I look around at all the familiar faces. Lucia and Luca, seven years old, sit on each side of me. Lucia reserved a chair next to her just for Guapo and is attempting to feed him with a spoon. Luca is smiling and looking around at all the light setups. The visual stimulation in the room, the large floral centerpieces, the shiny vases, and the small tealight candles likely comforted him.

Luca was autistic, and while most people saw that as something that held him back, I was always jealous of the way he saw the world. He could see details we never could and appreciate the simplest of things. I look up at the ceiling, following Luca’s eyes, and stare up with him at the chandlers.

Luca would likely be the first of us at the table to tap out. He didn’t last long at these events. A few hours into the music, and he would cover his ears. He was done. It was too overwhelming.

The other kids at the table are Rosie and Maikel, Silas’s younger siblings, the three-year-old Zamora twins with their nanny, and Gordo and Kamila, Genesis’s younger siblings.

“Gordo, where’s your sister?” I ask the twelve-year-old, whose eyes are glued to his phone.

He answers with a shrug, so I look to the chismosa Kamila. Kamila has bit holes into her tortilla and is now wearing it as a mask. She turns to be robotically.

“Genny has a headache,” Kamila replies in a low voice through a very carefully constructed tortilla mask.

Kamila was eight, and like her big sister, she was an artist. The precision of the holes she bit in the tortilla mask is perfectly symmetric. If Gen were here, she’d give her a ten out of ten. She’d praise her for the level of creepy. I sigh internally. I miss my best friend.

In a perfect world, Genesis would be forced to sit with me at the kids’ table. We would be careless about it since we both loved kids and preferred their company over the adults.

They weren’t as superficial as adults could be. Even Lucia and the 5,000 questions she asked me never made me feel like repeatedly banging my head against the wall.

She never cared when I was getting married or how many kids I wanted. She just wanted to know why mosquitos didn’t just drink water instead of our blood. Or why McDonald’s didn’t serve pancakes all day? Which, by the way, were all valid questions to me.

Besides that, Gen, our gang of mini broke besties, and I had our own fun. Fun that lasted a good four hours before they went to bed, and we got the entire table to ourselves. I would spend most of the night dancing, and she would sit with her sketchbook, drawing funny cartoons of me and the men I danced with.

Now that I am alone, I realize how pathetic it is to be at the children’s table. I look across the room at the table where Thalia sits with her husband. Like our table, it’s round and has a large floral centerpiece in the middle surrounded by tealights. They had more tealights than we were allotted since my gang of broke besties was a fire hazard.

Next to Thalia sits her friend Alma, and next to her, my cousin Adrian’s fiancée, Mireya, and Adrian. Next to Adrian were three empty seats reserved for my brothers and Yelizaveta.

Efren is on the other side of the table next to Silas. The sous chef I had met the Sunday the Italians showed up. I checkmy surroundings to find Adan talking with my father and his friends at the bar. I don’t see Axel or Yelizaveta anywhere, so I decide the empty seats were the perfect opportunity to escape the children’s table.

Finding Guapo too content with the pampering, I double-check to make sure the kid’s bodyguards are on standby before I make my way across the dance floor to Efren. Or at least that was the plan. I’m not even a step past the table when a man stops me and asks to dance.

Then it begins. I am swept away song after song. I never reach my destination because the moment I dismiss one dance partner, another waits to grab me before I can sit down. I never have the heart to say no.

My mother always said the whole point of these parties was to dance, not judge someone by their age, looks, or even height. This is how I ended up dancing with Juan. The man lacked all of the above.

He was almost two feet shorter than me, so I opted to dance side by side with him to the cumbia rather than suffocate him with my breasts.

Halfway through the song, I lock eyes with my cousin Thalia. I send her a “please save me look.” She nods, and Silas turns her possessively on the dance floor to see who she’s talking to behind his back. I wave at him, and Thalia lets out a laugh before he spins her a few times.

As soon as the song ends, she’s by my side.

“Don Juan, thank you for coming. My family appreciates your generous support.Con permiso,I need to speak to my prima.” Juan nods in gratitude, and Thalia wraps her arms around me.

“Pinche Lord Fauquier was not gonna let you go!” she teases.

Silas follows behind her, watching her every move back to the table. I greet Adrian and Mireya and say hi to the others. I moveto the empty chair next to Efren, and a big smile washes over his face. Only the smile isn’t directed towards me. I follow his gaze to Alma and then back to him.

“Oh. Am I? Are you two?” I say, confused, looking between the two.

Alma rolls her eyes across the table, and Efren laughs. Suddenly, I feel gross. I never want to be that girl.

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