i know that you'll find me there, after the fall. Who: Nadia Costa & Antón Guerrero. WHEN: Backdated to the late afternoon/evening of September 05. WHERE: LBJ Presidential Library. SUMMARY: A long-awaited reunion.
After two years on the run—two years of haphazard shelters and ghost towns—the relative stability of Austin was a lot to take in. Antón drifted through the halls of the LBJ Presidential Library on the edge of shock, brimming with nervous energy. He was still reeling from his reunion with Marina, still astonished it had been so easy to locate her and Nadia after so many trials and tribulations. It was a miracle they were both here, safe and sound, healthy and whole. It was the sort of coincidence that could only be chalked up to an act of God, and he ran his thumb over the edges of the cross hanging from his neck as he made his way through the makeshift shelter.
It, too, was a lot to take in. Survivors nestled in empty shelves. Young children milling about, more carefree than the frail, underfed creatures he’d met in his travels. His gaze lingered on a woman arranged the cucherías in her little nest, and a small smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. It was cozy, almost homey, and the sight pulled at something in Antón’s chest. Nadia had made a home here.
He earned a few curious looks from some of the shelter residents (and a few shy smiles from a few pretty girls), and an elderly woman who vaguely reminded him of Margarita assured him he was going in the right direction when he asked after Nadia.
Antón hovered in front of the aisle labeled Social Justice, a dozen different emotions suddenly vying for precedence. The feeling was somewhat reminiscent of the first time he’d asked a girl out, magnified tenfold. He suddenly wondered about the state of his hair—but Nadia had said she found the grey handsome, hadn’t she?
“Nadia?” he called out, shoving his hands into his pockets. His eyes swept the aisle for her dark curls.
Normally she might have been camped outside of the library, hunkering down by Mort and his security station, to lie in wait for Antón’s arrival. But hearing that he was here, here in Austin, and alive, and on his way, had sent Nadia into a tizzy to prepare. She’d scrubbed at her face with a wet-wipe, scrounged up some of her dry shampoo and worked it into her lank hair, then started tidying up her living space, even small as it was—re-stacking the nest of blankets and pillows, straightening her belongings on the empty shelves. Even checking and counting her ammo, then realising what she was doing, and chiding herself (o que diabos você está fazendo?). She didn’t have perfume, but resorted to a dab of peppermint oil to try to improve the situation a little.
She was still fussing with her few personal belongings when she heard the voice.
Matching up that sound and inflection, Nadia spun on her heel and hurried out into the aisle, almost tripping over someone else’s stack of belongings in her rush. She turned the corner and froze for a moment as their eyes met, and then instantly looked him over: not missing any limbs, not secretly a zombie, and his face was breaking into his familiar smile and Nadia flew into him, causing a bodily impact as she crashed into his chest, wrapping her arms around the man’s torso.
Most others might have expected her to say something sweet and careful. But instead, she hissed in Spanish, “You fucking idiot, making me worry like this,” but she was grinning from ear-to-ear, burying her face in his neck.
“I know, I know. But it’s one of my few skills, you know?” Antón murmured into her hair, his hands sliding down to her waist. There was another joke on the tip of his tongue, but the thrill of having her back in his arms again had his heart hammering against his ribs. He pressed a quick kiss to the crown of her head as one of his hands settled on her neck, thumb tucked under the hinge of her jaw.
For years now, home had been an abstract concept. It was more about the people than the place, whether that was a platoon in Afghanistan, Los Nahuales, or a brassy little Brazilian. It was something he had been missing since the two of them had been torn apart at the border, a feeling that went beyond simply missing Nadia. As he tightened his grip on her waist, he thought on that old saying: you can’t go home again. Maybe there was some truth to that—maybe the past few months had changed them in ways that ways that would make them incompatible—but, in that moment, it didn’t matter. She had survived this. They had survived this.
He was home.
“But you’ll be pleased to know I didn’t worry about you a bit, chiquita,” he said, matching her broad grin with one of his own. “I knew you’d be able to take care of yourself.”
“Cabrón. Flatterer.” Her hand swatted at the spot between his chest and his shoulder, a little thump of the fist, more empty gesture than true anger. Nadia was still folded into his arms as if she couldn’t remember leaving, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to withdraw far enough to even look at him. There was just too much comfort in the feeling of warm arms around her, and familiarity.
She hadn’t experienced this sort of closeness outside of Nate or Marina. Not for a long while.
“I didn’t even think,” she began, still in Spanish, then petered out. “I stopped thinking,” but that didn’t work either. Finally: “I didn’t even dare to hope that you were still alive, the odds looked so fucking awful. I kept focusing on Alejo, on continuing our trip and finding Alejo. I thought you must surely have…”
Then her voice cracked and muffled and her grip tightened briefly. “Sorry, I’m a complete mess,” she said, finally letting go enough to swipe at her eyes. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” he said, firmly. “For anything.” There was another kiss pressed to the top of her head, then another. For a moment, it seemed as if the kisses would drift downward, and it was a very tempting idea. But Antón held back, and there was restraint in his touch when he brushed his hand idly up her side. A shiver ran through the woman at the touch, and when she met his eye, she seemed fully aware—and wryly amused, as always—of exactly where he’d almost drifted.
How long had it been? He had gone over the exact number of days before arriving, but it seemed unfathomable now, as if she’d never left his arms. Still, he held back.
“And you met Marina,” Antón added after a moment, tilting her chin up toward him. He sounded slightly distracted now, and his gaze dropped down to her mouth. “You made a hell of an impression.”
“As did she. She’s fantastic. I didn’t know what to expect from her or the meeting but she welcomed me like a sister, you know? It felt like we might’ve known each other forever. Despite the fact that I was a complete stranger, and God knows what I might have been like, what person I might have been. She welcomed me in.”
Nadia was talking, but they were close, too close; her skin was prickling with the awareness of where his eyes were wandering.
But once upon a time, she’d been headstrong and passionate. And seeing Antón’s dark eyes—just like she’d first seen them on her doorstep two years ago, if more softened with affection, less bored and droll—she could, for one fleeting moment, remember what being that girl had felt like. Could feel the old Nadia shifting beneath her skin, stretching and yawning and waking up.
So, after a moment of that heady giddy relief and no other way to express it, Nadia gave up. She seized at Antón’s tattered collar and pulled him down within reach, catching him in a firm kiss: wild and instinctive and unthinking, and who gave a damn what it meant, because why not? He was alive.
That was all it took for his restraint to melt away. The hand on her cheek moved to her dark curls as he returned the kiss with matching force, fingers possessively threading through her hair. Antón kissed her as if the last kiss they’d ever have, as if he meant to take everything he could while he had the opportunity. They weren’t the type to waste time—not when they’d already lost so much time, and the future so uncertain.
The hand at her side slid to her lower back and he leaned into her, slowly steering her toward the nearest vertical surface. His mouth dropped lower then, trailing kisses down her neck until her back collided with the empty shelf.
(He was too absorbed in Nadia to notice the snickering teenagers behind him, or the middle aged woman clearing her throat a few short yards away.)
Nadia, however, had names and faces to put to the sound of her neighbours—and so that noise just a few feet away broke through their bubble of self-absorbed happiness. She jolted and drew away from the kiss with a gasp, hands splayed against Antón’s chest. Her face was already flushed, but now her cheeks heated with a blush.
In an urgent, mortified undertone: “I have eight roommates.”
Antón blinked. “What?” He swallowed hard as he ran a hand through his own hair, his horror growing as Nadia’s words sunk in. “Eight?”
She couldn’t bear to look away over Antón’s shoulder, lest she accidentally meet the eye of one of those teenagers. So Nadia kept her eyes fixed very firmly on Antón’s face when she nodded, abashed. Antón groaned as he took a step back, muttering a string of curse words under his breath as he scrubbed his face with his hands.
Her shoulderblades still stung from hitting the shelf; her hands had been on the verge of roaming and tugging at the edge of the man’s shirt, welcoming him back in the strongest way she could. But.
“Eight. Space is, ah, a little. Hard to come by. It’s a very full shelter.” Nadia could barely get the words out; this time because they were caught on a laugh.
“And what, no one thought to, ah, you know….” He trailed off as he made a made a circular motion with his hand, and his mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Leave a couple rooms open for—conjugal reasons?”
“There’s a ‘family-building room’, but would you believe: it’s for board games and private family meetings and, they made this very clear, absolutely none of… this.” The laugh was bubbling up and Nadia couldn’t hold it back anymore. It was a small blessing that they were still chattering away in their usual Spanish, so the others couldn’t eavesdrop; Nadia’s matronly neighbour had finally sniffed and gone back to her knitting.
“That’s Mrs. Peterson. She makes blankets for us,” Nadia said in a whisper, but then broke down into giggles again. Part of it was hysteria, she supposed: the emotions over the past several months throttling until they didn’t know what to do with themselves, until they burst out in gasping laughs, until everything seemed punch-drunk and too-funny.
His gaze flicked over to matronly Mrs. Peterson, who made no attempt to hide her judgmental expression, and flashed her the most innocent smile in his arsenal, raising a hand to wave over Nadia’s shoulder. She buried her face. When he turned his attention back to Nadia, his smile became decidedly less innocent. He reached for her waist once more, his fingers curling around the belt loops of her jeans.
“Do you think,” he said slowly, pitching his voice low as he tugged her forward, “Mrs. Peterson would be willing to make us a special blanket for the family-building room?”
“Antón! No! Misuse of the facility will result in being banned from it,” she said, mock-aghast, even as her hips hit his and then Nadia was leaning up on tiptoe to press another kiss to his jaw (that familiar scratch of stubble), the corner of his mouth, his lips. Briefly giving in to the hunger that she’d (mostly) tamped down over the last few long lonely months.
“Do you have your own room at the hospital?” she asked, when she could, genuinely curious for more reasons than the obvious. It was too late to head over there anyway—not with night encroaching, and the walkers starving and restless outside, and them on foot. But it was certainly a thought for future, a little piece of potential to be set aside on the metaphorical shelf.
He shook his head. “No, unfortunately. But I only have one roommate instead of eight, and it’s a proper room with a bed.” Antón was quiet for a moment, then he bent to kiss the column of her throat once more, his hand splayed against her jaw. Another little shudder up her spine, and she had to keep suppressing the urge to cross that line.
“So. Do you want to give me the grand tour?” he murmured against her skin. “Or show me your, ah, room?”
“If by room, we mean corner. But yes, come on. We need to catch up. I need to hear everything, how you got here, what happened—” And she grabbed his hand, tugging him over to the nest she’d obsessively tidied up earlier, the neat little rows of her few sparse personal belongings.
It wouldn’t be the charged telenovela reunion she’d suddenly envisioned, perhaps, but it was Antón, and he was here. That was, frankly, all that mattered.
They ended up sitting in her pile of blankets, talking in low voices so the neighbours couldn’t hear (not that they would have understood to begin with): filling each other in on the intervening time, and there was the occasional laugh, the warmth of linked hands and feeling his steady pulse beneath her cheek.
And they behaved themselves, and Nadia eventually fell asleep below the curve of Antón’s arm, curled into the crook of his neck.