Page 22 of No Sweeter Poison

I look down at the book in my hands. “Really?”

“She used a penname but yes. She stopped after she had children—couldn’t find the time for it. But that’s how my grandparents met,” he tells me. “My grandfather stumbled across her in the park one day, reciting poetry to a group of at least a hundred people. He said he fell in love with the first words that fell from her lips and loved the last ones too.”

I place the book back on the shelf, not wanting to hold something so precious. “They sound like they were very much in love.”

“They were,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Were your parents?”

He nods. “The Narvaez men are very lucky in love.”

I lean against the desk behind me. “Is that so?”

“It is. Except for me. The luck skipped a generation.”

I laugh. “You don’t know that.”

He smiles like he knows something I don’t. “I have terrible taste in women.”

“Present company excluded, of course.”

He dips his head. “Of course.”

“So I’m assuming your views on love are…?”

“Love is overrated, archaic, and manipulative.”

“Really?”

He crinkles his nose. “Gotta leave room for the exceptions. Like my parents and grandparents. Somehow, they made marriage look like something to aspire to and not voluntary misery.”

I only mean it as a tease when I say, “Jilted at the altar?”

I don’t expect it the moment he says, “Yes.”

At the look on my face, he laughs.

“I’m so sorry—”

“God, don’t be.” He holds up a hand, silencing my apologies. “It was the best thing she could’ve done. We were young and stupid and I was about to make the worst mistake of my life.”

I almost ask him if the mistake was getting married so young or if she was but I’m not brave enough to do so. Alejandro isn’t the type of man I’d go after back home and instinct tells me I’m not usually his type either. And yet, there’s something that attracts us to one another.

I don’t voice as much aloud, but I believe in true love. Maybe it’s because I have no real sense of what love is that I crave it so much. Any examples I had growing up were deeply unhealthy and nothing to aspire to. Hook-ups aside, if I was to date someone seriously, it certainly wouldn’t be someone who viewed love with such cynicism and associated marriage with misery.

“You disagree.”

It’s a statement, not a question.

“You grew up surrounded by love and yet, you’re so cavalier about it.”

“There’s nothing cavalier about heartbreak,” he tells me. “Most people never recover from it. Doesn’t that kind of pain frighten you?”

“There isn’t a heartbreak on earth I can’t recover from.”

For some reason, he smiles. “I think you might be right.”

Neither of us says anything. He peels himself away from the wall and I remain where I am, leaning against the desk, perched on the edge in a half sitting position. Alejandro closes the distance between us and pushes my legs apart, settling himself between my thighs. When he leans down, I feel his breath against my ear and it sends a shiver down my spine.