Chapter Text
She looks at the freckles on his face as his breathing evens out into slumber. She tries to remember them by just staring, their order, their colour, their shape, the way she remembers words on a page by staring. As if she can have a constant photo of him in her mind before she leaves. As if it will be recited if she is tested to recall them.
Nadia has studied his freckles for nights and nights, days and days, watching them through sunlight and moonlight, testing herself when her eyes can no longer stay open. Yet no matter how long she stares and how long she tries to remember them, it’s simply impossible, like memorizing stars. Goodness, she knows for a fact that memorizing stars would be easier than memorizing those freckles, that are scattered across his face like specks of paint, imperfect, unpredictable, and somehow more human, less of a sculpture, closer in her reach. Had the inspector ask her to describe his features, oh the descriptions she could offer. Most of them would be much too poetic to actually know what he looked like.
It has never been in her to pursue the arts. Her sister loved to draw before things went downhill. Perhaps she always loved to draw, even during her drug abuse. Nadia looked up to her so much and despite not having much of a passion for charcoal sketches and abstract watercolours, she followed her sister and learned to draw realism, to shade, to draw from reference, then from the mind. Though her sketches never showed emotion like a piece of exposition rather than a poem, her lines were precise enough to see what something was, but was never art. Her technical skills were good, above average to say the least, and had you told her to draw a face, someone’s face, May’s face, Omar’s face, her ability to observe and her practice would be able to do it. Yet him, she couldn’t. She tried several times, but couldn’t.
Never had she ever observed someone’s face with such intensity and desperation and never has she drastically failed at something in her own eyes and not in another’s. People saw her trying to draw him and recognized the shapes as him. He recognized himself, was impressed at her but she increasingly practiced, trying and trying to get him right. She didn’t know what she was doing anymore. She’d just pick up a pencil and all the traces of his face were automatic, but all the lines felt wrong. He recognized himself. Ander recognized him. Lu recognized him. But Nadia couldn’t. She had only learned to draw his face through references of photos and making him stay still. But had she one day chose to draw him in a new perspective, she’d fail. She cannot conjure up his face into her mind.
It isn’t that she doesn’t know his face because sometimes it is all she knows. All she knows is uncountable freckles and blue eyes the colour of the ocean and a strong nose and structural but soft lips but when she goes to try and think of his face she just can’t. When she tries, he’s gone but otherwise, he’s everywhere. She dreams of him in the day and in the night, her heart always racing like it will combust. She closes her eyes and he’s there. He’s everywhere like he has consumed her mind, her soul, but she is ok with that.
She’s ok with trying to count his freckles over and over. Perhaps she cannot draw him because of how raw he is when he’s with her. He is not afraid to be emotional. He is passionate all the time and does little to suppress what many would. Perhaps she can draw him but she cannot recognize him because she doesn’t draw poems but exposition and he is most definitely a poem, not an exposition. He’s the embodiment of art, the embodiment of the passion she is unable to convey onto a canvas.
As long as he looks at her as if he too, is trying to remember her, when he stares at her hair then her eyes then cannot focus on a part of her and ends up burying his face into the crook of her neck, his nose against her jaw, she is fine with being unable to put what he is to art. He looks at her as if she is art. A part of her hopes that she is.
When she doesn’t try to figure his appearance out anymore, when the freckles on his face seem to multiply by the second and she confuses herself more and more, Nadia sees his expression.
They all wonder what would have happened if this and that happened and this and that didn’t. If one thing was different, would it all be different? Would Marina be dead? Would Polo be dead? Would none of this turn to shit? Yet when she’s about to fall alseep, she looks at him and sees him. Sometime’s he’s already dozed off, sometimes he’s dozing off, sometimes his eyes are wide open. He always looks tired. Not that he knows at the moment. But she can see a void, a sister-shaped, best-friend shaped void that has not and will never be filled.
But she wonders who he’d be had the shit never happened, who’d they be. The part of her that is still innocent and hopeful says that they would, that they’d find a way no matter what and that the circumstances would have been easier, somewhat. Yet another part of her wonders if he would have laid his eyes on her, if he would have fell for her had he chose not to even see her as more than a conquest. Had Marina’s death opened their eyes to something? Would she have fought for herself against her family, of the things she thought she believed in? Would he have left Lucrecia?
Sometimes she wonders what she’d do had she the choice to go back and fix everything, at the cost of losing him. She knows she would. Yet selfishly she also would want him to stay. Considering it makes her heavy with shame. She is always heavy nowadays. She is heavy because she can see the changes in his expression and the aging in his ocean irises, just a little duller when she looks closely. His eyes are also filled with constant, lingering guilt, the type that doesn’t go away even when you don’t to feel it.
Nadia feels it, everything, him, loving him, needing him. She feels something when they are together, in their most intimate, vulnerable moments. She feels it in the moments she should feel shame for but absolutely no regret, things she would choose to do in every life. He is hesitant, always, soft, so gentle that she wonders if she will break.
Every time, she doesn’t expect it. He treats her so softly that she can barely breathe. It is in those moments where she understands why sex is not at all the same as making love. She can barely move when his touches are like feathers and his voice is like silk. The hesitancy to treat her even a little harsher than delicate somehow makes her break, but not in a way that hurts. She just has trouble breathing when she looks at him as he caresses her face or sighs into her collarbone because somehow, somehow she is completely convinced that she is the most important thing to him in the world, that he will do anything for her, not just love her.
There is fear in his touches.
Perhaps that is what scares her the most.
The fact that she is now aware of how much he has shown her and all the possible blades pressed to his neck that she can move to strike. She is scared that he loves her like this, not because she is scared of love, but she is so utterly afraid of breaking him too. Somehow, him treating her like delicate china makes her try to do the same.
Nadia has learned that she knows nothing, that everything can be questioned, but one of the few things she does not is that fact that she is not delicate, closer to a cement wall than sugar glass. He no longer has to touch her like in any moment, she will run from him, she will be broken, and he will lose her. Her trust for him is no longer wavering, she is not a china doll. She can take pain. It will take much more than a rough kiss to drive her away. Sometimes she craves one, when desire is so heavy that she quickly initiates it the moment they are in privacy, and he laughs, his voice deep and alluring, making her melt.
He has given in only a few of times and even then, he catches himself, not daring to do what she is to him, so then they go back to the delicacy, as if they are saying goodbye. Sometimes she wants to cry out in frustration because she knows that all of it is in very good intention and that he is very good, even though she has no one to compare him to. What place is she in to ask for something else when he has never mistreated her, always puts her before him in these situations. She doesn’t need rough sex, the type Lu and Rebe always talk about with enthusiasm. She really doesn’t need anything but him. Even though it’s clear that some of his desires that have a little more to do with lust than to do with love, they are always pushed away like it’s his sin, like he was taught strictly that intercourse was gifted.
It hits her one morning as she watches him wake up and her heart flutters as he smiles.
It was like every other morning but she had wondered if the smile was the one reserved for her or the one he gave everyone else. He does it subconsciously, he can’t help it. He can’t change his smiles, she can’t change her observation. However, she figures out that the whole concept of being unable to change such a small thing is precisely the reason he acts like he is so terrified of breaking her. It was never about her, at least not completely.
It’s because he’s Guzmán and he’s broken and his gentle touch isn’t completely because he doesn’t want to hurt her, but because he doesn’t want to hurt anyone anymore.
Everything went to shit and of course since he’s Guzmán, he has to blame someone and this time it’s him. This time he’s terrified of himself, of doing something he is completely at fault for, something that no amount of anger can give him any bit of satisfaction, not even for a second. Passion isn’t always a blessing when passion includes hate.
She should be scared of him. She has every reason to be scared of him. How many people he had nearly killed, the way he’d resort to cruelty in a blink of an eye, provoked by a glance not a word. She should be scared that one day she may be the victim of his knuckles and she will be the one who has to avoid his line of vision. Yet she is not scared of him, not when she knows somewhere deep down that he will never hurt her no matter what she does. That scares her too.
Upon this realization, she starts to observe him a little closer to test this theory. One thing she notices about Guzmán is that he always does something. His words are always followed by actions and he’s very easy to read. She knows he loves her, it took her a while to really be able to say that out loud without doubting him. It’s in the way he looks at her, the smile reserved for her, the kisses that linger even when they don’t. He has told her a handful of times and she doesn’t really need him to say it when she believes him.
She can’t sleep one night. It’s probably the fear of nightmares, the blood, the shit that they went through, but she doesn’t move much. His arm is draped over her waist and his chest is pressed to her back and even through she feels safe, nothing can protect her from her own mind. Nadia pretends she’s asleep, breathes slowly and sinks into him.
Out of the blue, he tells her he loves her, not like the other times, but like he’s not speaking to her. Well, of course he’s speaking to her, but he’s speaking her like she can’t hear him. His voice is built of weight like he has been meaning to tell her that for years, like it is a sin he has been kept in and released, a confession. She decides not to answer him because her thoughts are blinded by the intrigue and for the rest of the night, the thought haunts her like his face does.
It’s the first time his words have probably meant much more than his actions, though arguably, in the circumstance, it’s always the circumstance in which he breathes those words where Nadia herself cannot breathe.
She is acutely aware of the multiple incidents in which the smae thing happens. It doesn’t happen every day, not at all, but that’s probably what makes her even more confused. She confused as to why he says it to her face and then says it as she’s sleeping when she knows and she loves him back. He hasn’t anything to fear yet he says it with such anyway.
She wonders if he believes that she loves him, though she remembers her own words of love not being enough. It’s true. She will not retract them today nor tomorrow and cannot blame him for that fear. But is his fear when saying he loves her in the middle of the night while he’s certain she’s asleep because of fear of unrequited feelings or because of something much deeper?
Another night, she stares at his freckles and draws constellations in her head. He kisses her nose and she presses her cheek to his jaw. She tells him she loves him. He says it back easily.
It’s fine like this.
She doesn’t need to know what he’s afraid of because she’ll be there to love him no matter what.