Reid’s joy made him look half his age. He took this as a triumph, his show starting off the night, the guests leaning into one another and wondering if all the brown-skinned girls were as entertaining. He glowed with the satisfaction of seeing how festive Estrella’s trick had made them. When the music started again, they paired together and spun across the gleaming floor inside. Some swept out onto the flat stones around the fountain.
Estrella brushed off her dress. She looked as wrung out as when he’d found her in the grass.
A flash of her ankle, and he remembered the story she’d told him. Something about red shoes. How her family had to make these flowers because they couldn’t help letting their gifts stream from their hands, but how forcing it hurt.
Always, the Nomeolvides women looked like they were giving the ground flowers willingly, doing what their fingers would ache to do if they didn’t give them the chance. But they made a row or small bed at a time. They wore themselves out so they slept, dreaming of new gardens.
They did not work themselves into this, how Estrella shivered even though the air had not yet grown cold.
No stranger would have noticed. To them, there was only the sea of flowers. But Fel knew her, and her half-closed eyes were a sign not that she was demure but that she was tired. The way she tipped her head toward the flowers was not shyness, but the will going out of her.
Reid had already been pulled aside by an interested couple, so Fel took his place in the hedge’s shadow.
“You didn’t have to do what he told you,” Fel said.
She shook her head, eyes on the ground between them.
But when she spoke, she lifted her face and held his gaze. “Don’t try to save me from things you don’t understand.”
There was no anger in her words, not even warning. Just advice wrung out of her.
They had both stopped at the edge of the courtyard. A few guests looked up from their conversations, taking sips of their drinks to hide it. Dancing couples inclined their heads to catch glimpses of the girl who had grown a small sea.
“And now people are staring,” she said. “So thank you.”
He held out his hand. “Then let’s do something about it.”
She shook her head, but her smile was there, enough to let him catch it.
“Do you know how?” she asked.
“Not at all.” He set a palm on her back before they got swept into the rush of all those skirts.
She dug her hand into his shoulder, shifting them so they didn’t crash into another couple.
Estrella looked him over.
“You clean up well,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said. “So do you.”
She was kind enough to smile at the joke. The Nomeolvides women would always be beautiful, and he would always be hard to look at. He saw it in the grandmothers’ faces, how even now that he was filling out his clothes a little better they still stared at him more with pity than pride.
The wind picked up, bringing a rain of blossoms. The moon and the garden lights blinked off the bronze wire and yellow beads in Estrella’s hair.
She turned her head toward the lit-up fountain. Streams of glowing water fell from the stone.
“Bay always loved this,” she said. “She always had some fantastic outfit. Satin. Pants of course.”
“She’s not dead,” he said under his breath.
“But she’s not here.”
Fel put pressure on her back with his palm, moving her so she wouldn’t collide with a woman in a cream dress.
Estrella laughed. When she laughed, she was the girl eating candy buttons off paper, one color at a time. She was the girl who’d turned his face to hers, her mouth finding his in the dark.
Her eyes landed on the small ocean, the wide span of borraja and forget-me-nots. The men and women stood over it, bending close to look but afraid to touch it, as though it might be hot.
He felt her fingers worrying on his shoulder.
“Look at me,” Fel said.
Her eyes moved back to him.
He got a firmer grip on her right hand, and her left stilled on his shoulder.
She knew what to do with him. She could hate him, or she could tear his shirt off his body and bare his back, and he would let her. But her own flowers were turning on her.
“Don’t look at it,” he said. “Look at me.”
She did, her stare all focus and intent.
A flare of heat rushed through him, and then a second, like one flash of sheet lightning following another. This was the spell of Estrella Nomeolvides. Not the flowers grown by her fingers. But the way she lured him toward things that made him feel as though his life before was knowable, even if only in glimpses. She showed him this world, the bright colors and green, the spiced powders and raw sugar, and in this world he found narrow paths to ones he had known before.
He tried to keep space between his left hand and her right, hoping she wouldn’t feel how hot his palm had turned, but she kept her hold. He kept his right hand still on her back, her dress low enough that only three of his fingers lay against the fabric. His thumb and forefinger were on her bare skin.
He took his right hand off her, and readjusted his hold, his hand now closer to her waist. All his fingers on her dress.
They stumbled into a pair of Reid’s guests.
“Sorry,” Fel said, both to them and to Estrella.
The other couple widened their distance from them.
“You’re awful at this,” Estrella said.
“Thank you,” Fel said.
“No, I mean it, you’re terrible.”
This was not the deep, steady pulse of music he almost remembered. It was not the hard rhythm of boots on the dusty earth beneath olive trees. This was music as airy as the flowering branches, and he didn’t know what to do with it.
“Here.” Estrella grabbed his shoulder harder. “I’m leading.”
The force of her hands pulled them closer. The front of her dress brushed his shirt. A loose piece of her hair trailed across his neck.
Fel lost the feeling of the flat stones under him. The blur of every color pulled back. The thread of flower nectar in the air dulled. There was just Estrella, with the blue of her skirt whirling around her.
She didn’t let him keep still. She pulled on him, and they stayed in the current of dresses and suits.
“How do you know how to do this?” he asked.
“My cousins and I have been waltzing around our rooms together since we were four.” She gripped his hand. “I was the tallest girl for a couple of years, so I was the boy.”
“How long did that last?” he asked.
“It didn’t. Thanks for reminding me.” She pinched him again, other arm this time.
Her skirt fanned out, showing the cloth underneath. With each filmy piece closer to her skin, the blue got a little lighter. The one against her legs was almost the shade of the slip he’d seen at the hem of her pink dress.
He lifted his eyes.
Instead of losing his gaze in the crowded courtyard, it landed on faces he knew.
Estrella caught his worry. “What?”
He turned her like it was part of their dance, so she would see:
Dalia laughing so hard she threw her head back, lightly shoving Reid’s shoulder.
Gloria, Azalea, and Calla all watching, the oldest cousin looking like she was trying to talk the younger ones out of strangling Reid with his own starched collar.
TWENTY-FIVE
“I will cut out his heart” was the first thing Estrella got close enough to hear. Calla.
Then, “And I’ll make him eat it”—Azalea.