The night was like an oil spill over the wide ocean of sky. The darkness slouched up against the corners of a glowing sliver of moon, thin as a single strand of hair. There was a hot breeze, and every so often, the curtains swayed over the only window in the bedroom and revealed a rectangle of city and sky. The couple had since finished their tired, crescent march, which had started some feet away in the kitchen, and which had left in its wake a drunken mist that ribboned through the air. Now, as they lay together, Alberto stared at the dark curls on Xiomara’s head as she drew circles across his torso with a long, brown finger. At its base was the gold band. He had grown accustomed to it now—to its weight and the contrast between its bright yellow and Xio’s skin. During moments like these, he often felt the overwhelming conviction that a ring was unnecessary when two people had already managed to become so close. What more did a man need to prove to a woman when his soul had already touched hers? He had never liked the idea of marriage, though he knew the whole ordeal meant a lot to Xio. She liked such formalities, insisted on them—these sorts of expensive metaphors and written promises. Her mother had taught her that only such things promised safety to a woman at the edge of her youth.
“That ring suits you,” he told her and kissed her on the mouth.
She smiled.
“You know, Beto,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but you remind me of the first boy I ever did it with.”
Alberto laughed. “That bad, huh?”
“No, just something about you. Maybe it’s your eyebrows. You have very feminine eyebrows.”
Xiomara was thirty, and crow’s feet were beginning to sink their claws into the putty of her freckled cheeks. She had the face of a fallen cherub whose hair had been dyed a dark black before being plunged deep into the dirt of the earth and stripped of her immortality. No matter how old she grew, she’d always look like a child, with the roundness of her face. Alberto draped his arm around her, and she leaned her head on his chest.
“How old were you?”
“When I lost it? Thirteen,” she said. Then paused. “He was eighteen.”
“You beat me. I was fourteen.”
“Oh, it’s been so long now.”
“How’d you lose it?”
She bit her lower lip. “I’ve forgotten now.”
“What was his name?”
“I can’t remember.”
She was lying. Alberto had learned to recognize the faint tremor of shame in her cheeks whenever they touched on subjects like this one.
“I remember my first time like it was yesterday,” he said. “Ten years ago. I actually lost it at my first party ever.” He chuckled as the memories flooded the sheets before him. “I was fourteen and I’d never been to a party. My Piti wouldn’t let me because she was old-fashioned. I wish you’d met her; she would have loved you. She would have called you little Xiomarita and packed you tamales to take home, enough to last you a week.”
He leaned away from her enough to pinch her cheek.
She squealed.
“Anyway, early that day,” he continued, “I went out and bought her a box of pan de queso with my own savings, and I cleaned my whole room. I think she caught on to what I was doing after that, and she asked me to clean the patio and then the attic. I spent the whole day cleaning all the nooks and crannies of that house—”
“And she let you go?”
“No.” Alberto chuckled. “I snuck out.”
“Alberto!” Xiomara laughed.
“First party, first time having sex, and to complete the trifecta, it was also my first time drinking.”
“To think you do all three of those almost every day now.”
He nodded. “I remember exactly what I was wearing,” he continued. “These blue, knock-off Converse with my jeans tucked inside, my brother’s red and orange striped polo, and a green army jacket.”
Her body shook against his as she cackled, this terrible laugh that he’d learned to find endearing. “My, you truly were a child. You must’ve had unbelievable labia, to lose your virginity dressed like that.”
“Ha!” He squeezed her tight. “The only labia I’ve ever had was whatever I said that got you into bed with me.”
He paused and let go of her as he thought for a while. The sound of a car drifting along the street below made Xiomara tense at his side. They lay in silence until she relaxed again.
“It was years till I had sex again after that first time. Did you ever hear of choque and rastrilleo?”
She shook her head.
“Yeah, might’ve been just a Pasto thing—you rolos think yourselves too sophisticated for these sorts of things up in Bogota. It was basically sex on the dance floor. With choque, you and your partner faced each other and clashed your pelvises together with the beat of the music—and there were all the specific songs that were popular for these sorts of dances, like ‘migueleo,’ if you’ve ever heard it—remind me to play it for you later, you’ll see what I mean about the beat. Then, there was rastrilleo, where the guy got up against a wall and the girl put her back to him, and she just grinded all over him with the music.”
She pressed her body against his. “Didn’t need to name those to have done them.”
He traced her body as she lay sideways against him on the bed. He had memorized the grooves, the dips, the mounds of skin. He pressed on the moles and drew circles around a scar on her side, near her pelvis. He’d asked her what happened there, but she didn’t remember. She always lied about those sorts of things.
Xiomara’s eyes were closed, and her breathing grew softer. Alberto stared at her face and at the way her eyelashes rested on her cheeks. He felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over his body, and knew the sun would be coming up in a few hours, and he would have to get up and get dressed.
A few minutes passed and Xiomara stirred and opened her eyes.
Sometimes, when a woman looked into him for long enough, he couldn’t help but think that the spirit of his beloved Piti had possessed them for a moment, just so that she could stare into his eyes one last time.
“So, what happened at the party?” she asked.
He looked away and toward the curtain swaying in the corner of the bedroom. “Piti always thought my friends were bad influences. She was right. She was always right. I had this friend named Brayan—it was actually his idea to get the pan de quesos for La Piti and to clean my room—he said I had to go to that party, that there was no way I could miss it. He was older, 17 or something. He picked me up from my house in his car and drove us to the party. I was really trying to see this girl, Maria Isabela, at that party. I had asked her out a few weeks earlier and she’d rejected me. But when we got there, Brayan went up to this older girl in the crowd and told her that I didn’t know how to dance, and asked if she could please go ahead and do the little boy a favor.”
“How old was she?” Xiomara’s words were soft, almost slurred, and he knew that she would fall back asleep soon.
“Probably seventeen as well, but she looked way older—at least to a virgin fourteen-year-old she did. It’s funny, though, cause no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to remember her face. Anyway, we danced for a while. Migueleo, rastrilleo, regueton. I was sweating, flying, on top of the world. Finally, the older girl has to go to the bathroom, so we separate. And right then, this other girl, Maria Isabela, comes and finds me. She grabs me by my army jacket and pulls me into this corner. We talk for a while, and maybe something might’ve happened with her—except the older girl comes up and asks me what I danced all night with her for, if I was just going to leave the party with some other girl. I’d been taught older was always better, so I left Maria Isabela and followed the older girl up to some room and—let’s just say, I had no idea what I was doing, but she definitely did.”
“Poor Maria Isabela,” Xiomara said.
“You know, that was also my second kiss ever.”
“You’re kidding.”
There came a loud pounding of the front door. The apartment was small, just a room, a kitchen, and a cramped living room to connect the two.
“Who is it?” Xiomara yelled.
Pulling the sheets up to her chest and around her body, she got up and Alberto, naked on the bare mattress, got up and began looking for his pants. The floor was a darkened mess of clothes, blankets, and pillows. Xiomara stepped up to the front door and peered into the peephole.
She cracked it open. Someone just out of Alberto’s view mumbled something, and she closed the door again and locked it.
“Who was it?” he whispered.
Xiomara turned to face him. Her face was so pale that it glowed in the darkness of the living room. On the mantle to her right, by the television stand, the clock read five in the morning.
“That was Marta,” she whispered. “She said she saw him coming back.”
Alberto cursed and began searching for his pants again, lifting the bundle of clothes and blankets all around him with both hands.
Xiomara, with the sheet still wrapped around her body, rushed back to the bedroom and stood in the doorway, watching him get dressed.
“He’s going to be here any second—quick! Hide under the bed.”
He groaned and almost laughed at the absurdity of her suggestion. “I’ll be damned if I stick around here to get shot by some girl’s husband.”
Someone slid a key into the lock with practiced swiftness. The door swung open. Xiomara rushed out toward her husband, but her feet got caught in the sheets around her body and she toppled to the floor.
Alberto cursed.
“Who is this?” the husband yelled, glaring past his wife at the stranger in his apartment. Crying, Xiomara crawled to a corner of the living room, collapsed, and began to whimper.
The husband opened his mouth to speak, but only guttural sounds and broken words escaped. He groaned and stepped into the kitchen.
Alberto ducked back into the bedroom as drawers slammed open and tumbled to the floor, their contents clattering loudly. Moments later, Xiomara’s husband emerged, a gun in his hand. He aimed at Alberto, who was perched up on the open bedroom window. Xiomara screamed, covering her face, as her husband fired round after round, and Alberto’s body toppled out into the early morning light.
Marina Castillo is a contributing writer for the Nassau Weekly.