Richard craned his neck from side to side, willing the bones in his stiff and stressed spine to crack, rolling his shoulders forward and back when nothing else seemed to work. “I’m not sure what time we’ll be done but I’ll text you and let you know what’s going on, okay?”
Jasmyn bounced Miguel on her hip, dipping his bottle in the warming water on the stovetop to heat it. “Amor, this doesn’t really have to deal with you. If you don’t want to deal with the stress, don’t go.”
His straight spine slid back into his typical swagged slouch. “Baby, how would it not deal with me? This is about the band, and the band is my life. I have to go.”
She nodded resignedly. “I get it. I just hate that you had nothing to do with all the downfall and now you’re suffering.”
He shrugged. “I gotta go deal with this. They’re my brothers.”
She shrugged back. “And they’ve got to figure their own shit out. You’re all in contracts you’re all fucked if you break, so they’ve just got to man up, have one good fight, and get the fuck on with it. At the end of the day it’s a job with coworkers you either like or you don’t but you still make it work. You don’t have to fucking mediate.”
Richard grit his teeth. “It ain’t like that at all, Jas,”
“Then how is it, Rich? Chris did Zabdiel dirty and now everybody has to deal with the consequences of them fucking around? It’s not just the band that has to face the consequences of it, but you guys are taking the brunt of it. It’s fucked up,” she hissed, trying to control her infuriated force as she gingerly strapped Miguel into his high chair.
Aaliyah and Joaquin tried to stay quiet as they peered from the playroom into the kitchen, trying to translate the heated and tense words into small terms they could comprehend.
“Why is everyone going to see Tio Chris y Papi?” Joaquin whimpered softly.
Aaliyah pulled his arm back to bring him out of earshot of the adults still bickering. “They all got mad when Tio Chris got hurt before they went to see your baby sister.”
“Is that why they’re mad?” Joaquin asked quietly. “He’s feeling better and they all got to see mi hermanita en el hospital. There’s no reason to be angry then.”
Aaliyah took out the plastic plates and cutlery from her kitchen set and began to set her playskool table for a meal. “Daddy said Tia Isa had the baby but didn’t tell me- what’s her name?”
Joaquin pulled one of the seats at the table back a little too far and just leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his chin resting in his palms. The memory of his new little sister was already bitter, her arrival just triggering a series of events that now seemed to have everyone tense and angry. And with that sort of welcoming introduction, he didn’t exactly smile at the mention of her. “Xiomara.”
Aaliyah’s head cocked to one side. “See-oh-what?”
Joaquin counted the syllables on his fingers for emphasis. “See-oh-mah-ra. Abuela showed me it starts with X, but that sounds like X-ray so I don’t get it,”
Aaliyah shook her head adamantly. “But X makes the Z like xy-lo-phone sound, so it’s just weird. Must do the ‘see’ sound too. Or they got it wrong and just don’t spell right.”
Joaquin hardly took the effort to shrug his shoulders.
Aaliyah started stirring the imaginary ingredients in her stovetop pot. “But everybody came home sad from seeing her, and Tio Zab was really really angry. What happened?”
Joaquin’s face went white and his hands trembled around the play fork he’d been toying with, letting it clatter to the floor. The last thing he knew that had happened before Zabdiel had frustratedly screamed at everyone in his path was he’d hugged his father’s legs and asked him for help. He’d been too needy, he hadn’t asked nice enough, he’d been too annoying. Zabdiel being upset was his fault. Joaquin knew he was the reason his papa was angry and that had set this all in motion. The light in his eyes faded and he stared straight ahead.
Aaliyah, not having turned to see the expression on her cousin’s face, waddled back to the doorframe to eavesdrop. “Maybe Daddy and Jazzy are talking about it still and we can find out. Shush.”
Jasmyn smiled softly at Richard as she walked to where he stood, kissing his furrowed brow. “I know, baby. Just don’t take their problems onto you. This is tearing everyone else up - don’t allow it to bring you down, papi. Te amo.”
“Yo también te amo,” he whispered as he kissed her cheek in return. “You gonna be good with the kids by yourself?”
“You know they’re never a problem, amor. We’ll be fine. You want to help them sort this, go do it, and I’ll see you later.” She silenced them both with a chaste kiss on the lips while Miguel impatiently hit his palms against the tray table of his high chair.
“Missed it,” Aaliyah groaned as she stomped back over to her toy refrigerator, pouring herself a pretend glass of juice to sip while her pot simmered on the stove.
“Missed what, traviesa?” Richard asked with a wink as he turned the corner into the playroom. Aaliyah giggled and ran into his waiting arms to be scooped up in a hug and have her cheeks peppered with kisses. “What are you doing? You making lunch?”
“Yuh-huh,” she squealed, half laughing from the tickle of his hand on the side of her hip. “Arroz con habichuelas in the pot. Tienes hambre, papi?”
Richard looked down and saw Joaquin staring at his own feet at the play table, speaking to his daughter but keeping his eyes on his distressed nephew. “Not now, princesa - I have to go to a meeting with your tios but when I get back I’d love some.” He set her down on the ground to tend to her simmering pretend meal and turned to Joaquin who immediately stiffened in his seat, turning his eyes lowly to his tio. “Tu ta bien, Quin?”
He barely nodded. “Si.”
He instinctively held a hand against his back and Joaquin’s eyes went wide. “You gonna have fun with Aaliyah today while I’m at Clara’s office with tu Papi?”
The nod was more sharp this time. “Si.”
Aaliyah turned away from the play stove and looked to her father. “When you talk to the tios, is it going to make them all stop being mad at each other, Papi?”
Richard sighed heavily, not able to find any words appropriate to explain the damage to a child so young. “We’re gonna try, amor, pero sometimes making it better doesn’t make it back to the way it was.”
Joaquin tilted his head down further towards the floor to hide the tears that were welling in his eyes.
“You guys be good for Jas today, okay? Que disfruten,” Richard said with another press of his lips to the crown of his daughter’s head.
“Si,” Joaquin whimpered, but so lowly that Richard left the room without hearing.
“Bye, Papi!” Aaliyah waved as he went out the front door, but her attention was immediately back on Joaquin. “Hey, you okay?” Joaquin didn't react, afraid that the slightest movement in either response would have him let the tears flow. Aaliyah put her oversized plastic cooking utensils down and kneeled in front of his chair in an effort to force eye contact. “Quin?”
“La culpa es mia,” he murmured beneath his breath, so lowly that she hadn’t distinguished the words.
“Que?” She tried to clarify but now he shut his eyes tight and his shoulders began to shake.
It was all too much. Tio Richard had seemed calm, but he’d heard the discussion with Jasmyn- he was angry. They all were angry. And he didn’t know what he'd done, but this was his fault. Whatever he had done to make his father upset had now spiraled into everyone being frustrated and acting differently. His parents went sour at the mere mention of each other, abuela had been acting distant and different, and, on top of dealing with the idea of his new sister, he was simply overwhelmed.
The tears finally poured out, cascading down his cheeks one after the other, more frightening for Aaliyah to watch because they were so completely silent. Did Quin get hurt? What happened? How did he break?
“Quin, que paso?” Aaliyah stepped to him, reaching to touch his shoulder. Joaquin immediately recoiled at the contact, placing his palms on her chest and knocking her backwards to the ground. Tipping backward, she hit the back of her head against the kitchen playset cabinet and immediately yelped, bursting into tears.
Jasmyn ran into the room, reaching for Aaliyah to lift her up. “Aaliyah, amor, que paso?”
“Quin pushed me down!” she screamed, still nursing the back of her head with her hand.
Checking first there was no real visible injury, she soothed Aaliyah with a hand down her back and immediately looked at Quin, noting that he was crying too but visibly trembling. “Joaquin, that’s not nice at all! Why would you push your cousin?”
Joaquin fell off the chair and down onto his knees, gripping tightly onto the hem of his tia’s shirtsleeve and burying his face against her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Tia. Please don’t tell Papi. He hates me, I don’t want him more mad. I’m sorry.”
Jasmyn’s head was spinning between soothing her stepdaughter’s sobs and trying to bounce from how her nephew had gone from saying goodbye to Richard to being so hysterical over his father’s nonexistent reaction. As the pieces began to fit, she struggled in her thought process of how best to explain the present situation to the mindset of a child. All she could do was hold them both close against her chest as the crying slowed to a stop and pull out her phone to text Richard.
‘I told you it was more than just the band. Call me when you can.’
-
Clara and Ali, for the first time that anyone present could ever recall, were sitting at the conference table, completely silent. The blonde scrolled idly through her phone, fighting the urge to again anxiously bite off the end off her nail. Clara fidgeted with her insulated coffee mug as her eyes darted between her apple watch and her nails clicking against the cup. She began tracing her fingertip along the cursive glitter design of Boss Lady written across the stainless steel, and the irony was not lost on her that for all her usual prowess, she had absolutely no control. These pollitos were under her care, her charges, and she had no say in what happened next. She could try to set up the surroundings to arrange the least explosive impact, but that couldn’t change what resulted. She just knew if something wasn’t organized to move this to the next stage, there would be either nothing but silence or another trip to the hospital.
Erick was quietly sipping from a paper coffee cup, his eyes focused on the liquid swirling around when he set it down but his mind off in the distance. This band was his entire world and it was going to be made or broken by the moves of two men he deemed brothers that now wanted each other dead.
Joel was equally quiet, drumming his fingers across the tabletop in nonsensical patterns. He had reverted to a place in his mind where his emotional valves had been completely shut off. His face was expressionless, his breathing almost inhumanly slow. His mind should have been on how he had returned to his home the night before with Kaja and a lot of her things gone, and he hadn’t even felt any sort of reaction. He had shut the lights off and drifted into a dreamless sleep.
Clara squinted her eyes and slammed a heavy palm against the table, drawing all eyes to her. “How the fuck did none of you know? This makes no fucking sense.”
“You didn’t know either,” Ali, usually Clara’s sidekick and support, shot back. Clara glared in her direction but couldn’t negate it.
Joel shrugged, his voice monotonous. “They hid it from Zabdiel for this long, what makes you think they weren’t just as good at hiding it from us?”
“There had to be a slip up,” she seethed. “This all didn’t just unfold at once.”
Erick nibbled at his lower lip, the confession ready to burst free, but the chills from the daggers in her eyes kept him silent. But she knew him too well for that.
“You fucking knew?” She nearly screeched, her glare venomous.
And with that, the dam broke. “I saw them that night at their party at Zabdi’s house… We talk and he say please have respect, that he talk to Zabdiel first, for me not to say. And that was same night that we go to the club. I did not know before.”
Clara scoffed and rolled your eyes. “After all this, and then he’s the one that asks for respect. Unreal.”
“But I didn’t know hardly before you guys. No looking at me like I kept a secret,” Erick defended, crossing his arms over his chest.
Joel grumbled beneath his breath, “Can we stop fucking bickering? There’s no fucking point.”
Clara tilted her head, shocked at the usually mild-mannered Mexicano was using such a biting tone. “Joel, de que hablas?”
He shrugged and pulled on his hoodie strings. “We can’t do anything about this until they get their shit together. What’s the point of us even being here?”
Clara shot daggers at him, but all eyes were drawn as the conference room door opened and Zabdiel entered, Richard behind him with his eyes darting as if ensuring Zabdiel wouldn’t make an off move on his way in.
“Everything okay, Richuki?” Clara questioned in attempts to ease his tensions.
“Yeah, no, we’re fine,” he reassured. “Zab was just having some coffee in the parking lot and needed a little persuasion to come upstairs.”
“Zab,” Clara began slowly, “You alri-“
“Don’t even ask me,” he snapped, sitting down at the chair furthest away that was still facing the door. “You know I’m not alright.”
Everyone was silent and stone-faced, anticipating his next move.
“What do you expect me to do?” he growled, leering up at Clara.
She sighed, looking down at her clutched hands. “Pollito,” she attempted to calm him, but it had no effect on his rage, “you know that to continue with the group the way we need to, this has to be discussed.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, huffing out an angry breath. “Right now, I’m trying to deal with being in the same room as that hijueputa. I can’t imagine sharing the stage with him.”
Clara clicked her acrylic nail tips against the tabletop again. “Zab, this impacts more than just you. This impacts your record deal, your management, your fans, your networking, your-”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he scoffed, “I forgot that I’m the one who was fucked over and now I have to forgive him to keep everyone in the world happy but myself.”
“Zabdiel-” Ali began, possibly intending to soothe him but sounding gruff and exasperated.
He roared out his interruption. “So now I have to not only make decisions about my family and my life, but my reaction about him has the band hanging in the balance? Sounds fair to me.”
“You’re right, pollito, that’s not fair,” Clara murmured apologetically.
“Todavia tenemos que hablar, todos nosotros juntos,” Richard said beneath his breath, but loud enough in the silence.
Erick’s eyes were darting back and forth, watching the tense tennis match of banter across the table. Joel hadn’t even looked up.
Zabdiel was frighteningly quiet when he finally spoke. “My career, what I’ve worked my life for, now is at risk because my best friend and wife betrayed me. My life is not my own. My family is not my own. Everything is out of my hands while you’re saying everything is my decision to make.”
Ali opened her mouth, abnormally ginger, but snapped it shut when the doorknob slowly turned and the man in question carefully slipped through the small gap between. He hesitated in shutting the door behind him, contemplating if he needed it slightly open as an easier escape route.
Richard straightened his shoulders, stiffening and preparing to jump between the two. Clara stood, her arms up as if to hold the two apart, although still distanced. “Chris, entra. Sientate.”
His eyes focused on Zabdiel’s white-knuckled fists as if ready to jump back out, but clicked the latch of the door shut behind him and sat directly across the table from his raging friend.
Clara clicked the lid of her travel mug shut. “Okay, we all understand that massive things have happened that impacts not only you two and your relationship with each other, but how the band is supposed to continue on from here. Now I know that you two haven’t discussed any of this, and there’s obviously things that need to be addressed. But I know that you both are mature enough to understand this and-”
“Ese puto? Obviamente no,” Zabdiel snarled.
“Silencio,” Clara hissed in his direction.
Zabdiel’s teeth visibly began grinding together but he allowed Clara to continue.
“And,” she went on, “You both need to set the ground rules before we know how any of us can proceed.”
“Pendejo, hijo de fucking puta,” Zabdiel grumbled.
“Oye!” Clara exclaimed. “Bastante! You can be pissed, but stop being so aggressive! It won’t get us anywhere!”
Zabdiel shot up, his knuckles still white with his palms flat on the table. “How am I the aggressor when this animal is the one at fault? You treat him like he’s fragile when none of this would be happening if he hadn’t taken advantage of all of us.”
Clara’s eyes were understanding, but still attempting to be firm. “Zab, ya lo sabemos, pero te tienes que callar.” He slowly started to sink back down into the chair behind him.
Chris stammered, “E-en realidad, yo-”
Zabdiel shot immediately back up. “Que fucking mentiroso!”
Clara finally screamed. “Enough!” All eyes widened and turned intently towards her. Only Joel remained transfixed on his hands. “Do you care at all about the band?” she questioned, her voice audibly cracking. “Do you want your career as CNCO to continue?” The fire in Zabdiel’s eyes calmed and the tremors of Chris’ shoulders slowed. “You two have to decide if you can agree on where we all go from here. This is all up to you. We can’t be involved. And it’s easier if we’re not. Come on, guys, everyone except them.” Everyone rose out of their seats and went to follow her, but she stared Zabdiel down one more time. “You already beat him up once. When we’re gone, don’t try it again.”
Zabdiel’s eyes shifted to his enemy across the table. “He’s not worth the time it would take to wash the blood off of my hands.”
“Zab,” Ali barked, “seriously.”
His fingers still shook with rage but he obeyed and sat back down. Chris hesitantly pulled the chair before him out and sat across from Zabdiel, still eyeing the exit.
Ali sighed. “You both have to solve this together. We’re here to support you, but you both have to talk.”
Clara held the door for everyone to exit, watching the two of them intently. “We love you. Text me when you’re done discussing.” Quietly shutting the door, she turned to Ali. “Sit right here and listen in. Use your judgment- if there’s only arguing, let them talk, but if it sounds like it’s getting too intense, you call Jose to get in there to break them up and call me to come back.” Her attention turned to the Dominican and Cuban in front of her. “You guys, go grab a coffee downstairs and hang in the interview space to just clear your heads.” The last of the group seemed to have already made it halfway to the elevators when Clara shouted his name. “Joel!” His attention turned to her and she pointed to the empty conference room across the hall. “In here. Now.”
Joel shut the door behind him and didn’t even look Clara in the eyes before he sunk down into the first available chair. Infuriated more by his lack of focus, her attitude leapt to its heights. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
He clicked the fingertips of his right hand against the tabletop while his left hand cupped his cheek and elbow supported the weight of his head. He almost looked bored and unaffected by the surrounding conflict, but Clara knew him too well to believe that facade.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” He shifted and finally met her eyes before rolling his own to interject, but her voice sounded over his scoffing. “You’re all my boys, but don’t think I don’t have a code with your mujeres and know what happened with Kaja. And don’t think for a fucking minute that I don’t see through you acting like you don’t give a fuck because this is breaking you and you’re trying to be alone so you can implode in peace.”
His stoic expression flickered to shock and back to guarded, transparent to only the woman who stood before him. “Clara, I’ve got my own shit to handle rather than be here for shit that doesn’t affect me.”
She laughed and slammed her mug down. “You think that this doesn’t affect you? This is the band that you all fought for, and that band became a family. Now that two of them have had a falling out, that affects the rest of you. This affects your future, your career. How do you think that doesn’t affect you?”
He almost snarled like an animal at the blunt attack. “So why don’t you focus on them and how to keep the group together rather than worrying about me and my personal life?”
Her eyes went alight at his ferocity, but the lioness that she was wouldn’t allow her to back down. “Why are you telling off the only people who want to help you through this?”
He kicked his feet up on the chair beside him and crossed his arms across his chest. “I don’t need help. I can fall back on my own. All this happened without me being a part of it, they don’t need my help, so I don’t need anyone else’s.”
She nearly growled. “And then you have a woman who not only loves you but is,” she stopped to emphasize her words by slamming the back of her hand against her other palm with each syllable, “preg. nant. by. you, you want to suffer alone and make her feel worse? When you need support you push her away?” She kicked the chair beneath his feet backwards to force him to sit straight and she leaned over the table to have them eye to eye. “Look, you can be unnerved by this, you can be hurt and confused, but she doesn’t deserve to deal with you having a tantrum. You gave her a ring promising her your life together. You made the choice to create a family with her, intentional or not.”
He pulled uncomfortably on the sleeves of his hoodie sleeves, his arms still protectively across his chest. “I’m not a toddler. I’m not having a tantrum. I didn’t see us working so I ended it. It wasn’t meant to work. None of this seems to. As far as the rest of it, I’m not stressed. They need to do what they need to do. I’m not bothered.”
Clara pushed herself up off her place leaning over the table and scoffed. “Really? Because you don’t seem to even realize - you not trying to feel anything is because you’re too hurt to function. If you want to live in your little isolated bubble to try and get through this, that’s your choice, but I’m telling you that if you don’t rectify this now, you are going to be the one that destroys your chance at having love in your life when she could be the one to prove your theory wrong.” Not having a retort for her point, he sat unmoving, staring absently at the window on the opposite wall. She picked up her mug and began to storm out of the room, muttering almost more to herself than him. “I just hope you haven’t hurt her enough to already have lost her. And haven’t pushed us all away enough in the meantime for us all to be done with your shit.”
prguitarman
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
