“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

 I turn in my chair and give Vera a curi­ous look. Yet another Eng­lish say­ing that I don’t know. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

 She gives me a soft but tired smile and sits down on the arm rest. I imme­di­ately wrap my arm around her waist and pull her down into my lap, where she comes to a rest with a gig­gle, her hair obscur­ing the imp­ish smile on her face. No mat­ter where she is, I can never stop touch­ing her and now more than ever I need her to relax, to feel safe, to know I’m going to get us out of this.

 “Explain,” I demand. “Or I will pun­ish you with kisses.”

 She raises her brow. “Fol­lowed by pun­ish­ment by penis?”

 I shrug. “That can be arranged. Now, tell me my Estrella.”

 She sighs and buries her lips into my neck. I can’t help the small moan that escapes from me, nor my hard­ness build­ing beneath her plump, round ass. I close my eyes and fight the urge to pick her up and take her to the bed­room, the only other way I know how to make her feel safe and sated, the only way I know how to escape.

 “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” she says against my throat, “is a say­ing. I don’t know where it’s from but it means, well, noth­ing is scarier than a pissed off bitch.” She pauses, suck­ing in her breath and I know she fears she’s said the wrong thing. “Sorry,” she quickly adds and I feel her body tense up beneath my fin­gers. “I didn’t mean that Isabel is a bitch.”

 She is still so skit­tish over her words, the way she blurts things out, but it’s one of the rea­sons why I love her. I cup the back of her head with my hand and let the soft­ness of her hair sink over me. “I know you didn’t,” I assure her. “And, well, she is being a bitch.”

 “Can you blame her though?” she asks, her voice ris­ing a pitch and when she pulls away from me, her eyes are wet. It breaks my heart. I’m get­ting tired of my heart break­ing and I know that this isn’t going to change any­time soon. Every day there is another weight on us, another crack appears.

 “No,” I tell her hon­estly. “I can­not blame her.”

 A silence lapses over us, heavy like a wool cloak. It does this some­times. What we’ve done, it coats us.

 Finally she clears her throat. “She’s going to hurt for a long time,” she says. “She’s going to be angry. This isn’t going away. I thought every­thing was behind us now, that she’d move on. You’ve been divorced for a year, if she’s still this mad a year out…”

 “She is mad because I am going back to Atletico,” I tell her. “She is mad because of the paparazzi, the way they are hound­ing us again. She is mad because she feels she is being made to look like a fool. If I had just stayed with my head down, she wouldn’t be doing this.”

 “But you can’t live your life in fear, Mateo,” she tells me.

 I smile at her and brush her sun­set hair from her face. “And nei­ther can you.”

 She set­tles back against my body, sinks, con­forms, melds. She is sec­ond skin. She is a part of myself I can’t bear to sep­a­rate from. I pray I never have to. I pray we can sur­vive what­ever is com­ing our way.

 And I can feel it com­ing, that ten­sion, that storm rolling in the weeks and days.

 I pick her up in my arms and for all her pil­lowy curves, she weighs noth­ing more than a feather. I take her down the hall to the bed­room, throw her on the bed. She glows in the after­noon sun that streams in through our win­dow and it isn’t long before we are both naked and I am climb­ing over her, pin­ning her arms above her head and drink­ing in her body like the most beau­ti­ful, deca­dent wine.

 I will devour her until all of this is gone.

 I will con­sume her until we are all that’s left.

 I push inside her and let my hunger take over.