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He decides very quickly that he's going to let her control it all.
It's what she deserves, he reasons, and so Héctor retreats as well as he can. Because she does deserve that much, doesn't she? Time to think. Space from him. Whatever questions she needs answered on her time truthfully. And so one sunrise after his prospective last (saved from a final death, waking to a world no less terrifying, no less uncertain) he bows from center stage, mentions nothing of love or memories, and let's his beloved have the time that she needs.
"Thank you for your help," he tells her and her family, who are waiting for him backstage, sun just hanging against the horizon, and watch him curiously, like he's some sort of old relic that found it's way past the museum walls.
"Are you coming with us?"
To which he'd responded, at the same time as Imelda, "I'm not sure if that's a good idea" - "it's up to him."
And she'd eyed him and he'd looked away, and he'd apologized quietly before slipping past.
"You're leaving?" she asks him, eyes and mouth thinning, and he shakes his head and says, "just until you call on me."
(it's a ridiculously old fashioned statement, he realizes. but it fits him. her. them. and feels familiar- like whispering up to windows at the turn of a century, with the smell of laelia stubbornly attached to the breeze)
He wants her to call on him then. To reach her hand out and tell him come with us, mi amor. He wants her to so much and the want leaves him raw.
She doesn't.
He didn't expect her to.
His Imelda (not his, he corrects. never his) deserved time. But, he thinks, she also deserved more than what she had in a husband. She deserved one that didn't leave her to raise children on her own, and who chose music before family- who couldn't cross bridges and who couldn't come home.
It's what she deserves, he tells himself again - the mantra a worn one by the end of the week - as he fiddles with guitar strings and tries not to write another love ballad
(and fails, spectacularly; almost every song becomes about her- and when he sings them he can see her, dancing in his peripheral and wonders if age, like wine, had turned her lips richer)
"Héctor." She finds him at the town square two weeks after the fated sunrise. There's a basket in the crook of her elbow, filled with small rolls of leather and a spool of blue thread. When she says his name, it sounds like leather. Bold. A little familiar, maybe.
He wasn't sure if familiar was good.
"Imelda." he rises to his feet from where he'd been sitting on the edge of the steps. He's without his guitar, but his notebook is in his hand, and he snaps it closed, fast. As if she could see the newest song from where she stood. It was about her, again, of course. But he'd taken to calling her la luna. It seemed fitting. That she be everlasting. Illuminating.
(she would have scoffed at that)
She's just as he remembered her from two weeks ago- proud and tall (he's taller, but she somehow always found a way to loom) and fixing him with a stare that went right through his ribs, and he slides his hat off his head and fiddles with the brim. "You're looking better," she says, eying him up and down. And then: "you haven't visited."
The last part was said with a bit more ire and salt, and he nearly takes a step back, in case a boot came off. "I thought it might be good," he says. "To wait."
"For what."
"Until you called on me."
She looks at him again. The same Imelda. The same lovely, perfect Imelda, who was as present and unchanging as la luna. "Alright," she says. She shifts her basket in her arms and walks past him.
He sits back down and takes out his notebook again, but the inspiration had seemingly taken hold of her hand and followed her down the cobblestones.
She does call on him, finally, three weeks and two days later (he counts it, subconsciously making little ticks in his notebook), and he walks down the winding alleyways towards the iron gate that separates cobblestones from the courtyard. It's unlocked, and he pushes it open, walking up the path of the Rivera courtyard with his hat in his hands. She opens the door to their house after the first few knocks and pulls him inside. "Héctor," she says, by way of a greeting before snapping "You're here for shoes." And then she's dragging him through the parlor and out to the back, where their little workshop sits inconspicuously besides rows of potted gum trees.
"I…" he swallows, "okay?"
"You're here for shoes," she says again, "because everyone who comes here is here for shoes. And, so, you're here for shoes."
She has him sit on a chair in front of her work desk while she measures his feet (and the way she does - quickly, without much thought - makes him think she'd remembered his shoe size-
"Do you want dark leather or light?" and before he can answer she says, "dark" and fishes out the molds.
-which is a mundanity that finds its way against his ribs and settles, cloying and sharp.)
She lays out the materials while he sits in the chair in front of her desk, watching her work silently, fiddling with his hat. "Uf," she unrolls another few inches of leather. "Do you know how expensive your feet are? Size twelve. Por Dios-"
"Imelda, you don't have to-"
"No," and she points a box cutter at him before returning to looting through spools of brown thread. "No Rivera will be walking around shoeless. Think of how that would look on our family name."
"Right," he says. "Family name."
He sits there in the chair until it gets dark, lifting his foot up for her ever so often to measure or eyeball, watching her turn on small lights, cut, snip, and sew, until the bits and pieces are collected around by the sewing machine and she's switching off the lamps and gesturing for him to rise.
"They'll be ready in a week."
He nods. Follows her out the door and waits while she locks it. "Should I come back in a week, then?"
She marches past him. "Ay, Héctor, I still need to fit you. You'll need to be back earlier."
"If you'll call on me," says Héctor.
"Tomorrow," she says. "Come back tomorrow," before muttering a few more exhausted exclamations under her breath and seeing him out.
He does. The gate is unlocked again, but no one answers the door, and after standing there for a few minutes, rocking on his heels, he goes round the back to the workshop. She's already there, hunched over, and he's about to greet her when he notices that they're not alone. This time Oscar is there with blue fabric and a measuring tape, standing just besides Imelda who is once more at her desk, and is once more ignoring him in favor of piecing together bits of leather.
The tck tck tck of the sewing machine is almost a blessed distraction from the curious eyes of his brother in law.
"We thought it would be better if you had something new to wear," says Oscar, who doesn't even give Héctor a chance to breathe before he's taking his hat off his head and snapping at the victim to take off his shirt. "It was a family vote, last night."
"You had a family vote about me?"
Both other Rivera's continue to skillfully ignore him.
By the time he leaves, he has a new pair of pants and a new shirt. The one thing neither could confiscate was the hat on his head, which Oscar had tried to grab back, but Héctor had snatched it away. "This stays."
"Really, Héctor," Imelda doesn't look up from where she's stitching small designs into the edges of the toe. "Es un sombrero."
"Sí, pero es mi sombrero."
"You can get another one. A better one."
"No," he declares, stuffing it atop his hair. "This one."
He wont tell her that it had been picked up outside the Rivera house 87 years ago, thrown away because of a faulty collection of stitches below the brim. He remembered, still, picking it up for the first time. For one week it had carried her scent round with it. Marigolds and leather and greasepaint and the molasses that she used so liberally in all her breads.
They finally let him keep it by bargaining for at least a new pair of suspenders, and he relents.
"I thought everyone who came here came for shoes." he says, once he's out once more in the alleyway, gesturing to his new set of clothes.
She closes the gate outside their house, separating them through iron, and says, "they do."
When she turns to leave, her hand lingers, and he watches it there, gripping against the cool twists and turns.
And then;
"I'm not."
It's said quiet. But not so quiet that she can't hear. Imelda's hands grip tighter before letting go and sliding away with a hiss.
"You'll be back tomorrow?"
"If you call on me," he says.
"Vuelve mañana," she intones. "For shoes."
"For shoes," he agrees numbly. And when he walks away, he wishes idly for his old clothes back, suddenly feeling all too exposed in something from her, wishing that he'd perhaps never said anything, never tried to explain-
(mistake, his brain whispers)
(mistake mistake mistake)
Shoes, he thinks back, and continues on.
He goes back three more times.
Each begin with the greeting of "Héctor" and each end with her asking when he'll be back before he intones the same phrase;
"If you'll call on me."
It's what she deserves, he tells himself, over and over. She'll see him as long as she wants to.
And when she's done calling on him, then that will be that.
(still, as much as he tries to concede the thought with some sort of shrugged off understanding, he can't stop the wave of loneness from leaving him tossing at night)
The next time he returns is what he expects will be his final time. Imelda is there, still dressed in purple, still looking as stern and eternal as ever. But this time, she's presenting him with shoes.
"Try them on." It's an order. Because everything Imelda says in an order, and he scrambles to comply.
"They fit!"
"Of course they do," she says. "I made them."
"Oh, of course." The slip of a tease has her narrowing her gaze, and he quickly relents back, fiddling with the edge of his new vest. The shoes really are lovely, and he rocks back and forth in them, noticing the lift added to the left one to keep him from teetering too terribly on his limp.
And it's there, in new shoes, in the little Rivera courtyard, that he realizes his order has been received. Everyone comes here for shoes, he remembers her saying, and it quickly washes over him that his feet are in the pair that gave him reason for her presence. "So…" he says, quiet. Terrified, maybe. "Should I…?"
"Perhaps." She lifts her chin, arms crossing. "Do you want to go?"
"I… I don't know."
Her response is almost acidic, and he curls in on himself when she spits, "Then go."
"Alright," he says, numb, and cold, and soft all at once.
Imelda slams the gate loud enough to crack cobblestone and hisses, "come back when you're zapatos give out or something. When I can be useful again."
Héctor watches her storm back up the path. "If you call on me," he says to iron and stone, before turning about in his new shoes, and making his way down the path.
It happens just three days later.
When the Department of Information and Communication finds a way to get in contact with him (done with a series of networks, all of them people, and all of them irked that he didn't just have a damn phone they could call) and let him know that Imelda Rivera of Rivera shoes wanted to see him.
If he'd had a stomach, it would have contracted with dread.
When he arrives, she's standing at the gate, and she looks furious. La luna, he remembers saying, and thinks that even while she burns so bright and fierce, she still finds a way to hang against stars. "You left," she says. "Again, you left."
"Imelda-"
"You nearly die, and you leave. I make you shoes, and you leave-" her fists curl into the filigree of the gate between them, but even so, he can see the tears (frustrated, angry, furious tears) preforming balancing acts against the sides of her eyes. "You don't stop leaving."
"I didn't want to." and he can feel his own eyes beginning to burn. "I didn't think you'd want-"
"Ach- what do you know of want, Héctor! What do you know-"
He wants to tell her that he knows of want. That he's wanted her -to be with her, beside her, against her- for as long as he's lived and as long as he'd died. That he wants to see his child, to see his family. That he wants for everything but deserves none of it.
"I should go," he tells her again. "Lo siento, Imelda, I should go-"
And it's then that she's letting out a wild exclamation of frustration, pulling open the gate and winding her hands through his scarf. He expects to be hit.
He doesn't expect her to fall upon him.
Her mouth is almost cruel in its force. Her hands digging into his ribs, and around his spine, and whatever fire she released was just as quickly passed into him. Deserving or undeserving- it didn't matter when he was pressing her against the stone wall, lifting her up around his hips, and kissing her back just as hard and fast and desperately. her fists beat his shoulders, and his hands wound about her waist, and she spit curses from between breaths, and he exhaled apologies like the alleyway was a confessional.
Nearly a centuries worth of despair comes tumbling out, and the reims of her purple dress are easy targets to bury his hands against and he wants nothing more than to stay right here, with his tears and the roaring in his ears, because if this is the last time he gets to hold her, then so be it.
She deserves better, the voice in his head hisses, and he kisses her harder in response. Because oh how he knows, but oh how he doesn't care. Not now. Not in this moment. This is his final one, he suspects, and he doesn't even deserve this much, and so he takes, takes, takes-
-and then, as quickly as it started, it stops. Her mouth pulling back and both their eyes opening, and the two of them are left breathless, lightheaded, and silent. One standing, the other with her legs wound round him. The two of them panting in the alleyway with the sound of foot traffic beyond the bend and the sight of the moon above.
Her hair is messy and his hat had fallen off, and the two of them look at one another and try to speak.
Words are suddenly very hard to find.
"Oh," says Héctor, voice rough.
"…" says Imelda, who is rarely speechless.
He goes to put her down.
She stops him, hands reaching out. One of them touches his face. The other winds through his hair, almost as if she's trying to straiten out the wild briar of locks that never seemed to settle (as she had in kitchens so long before- dripping in sepia sunlight). "Héctor…" she says. Like windows and leather and molasses, and Héctor finds then that if he wasn't crying before, he is now. "Héctor…"
And then there are too many words. Too much undeserving. Too much everything.
"I missed you," he whispers, and his voice is out of tune and rough, and he says every truth, not caring if it hurts to speak it. "Every day I wanted- I missed you and I thought-"
"I never stopped. Estaba furiosa, Héctor. But I never stopped."
His head falls at that. Face pressing into her shoulder, breathing her in. His mouth moves fast. What he's says, even he's not sure. Lyrics, maybe. Prayers, perhaps. And her fingers move against his spine, up and down, up and down.
(thank you- he thinks)
(please let this be real - he prays)
(te amo te amo te amo - he rambles, words familiar but achingly out of practice and the music of her is something he can't keep up with, but oh how he's trying)
She says his name again, and it's only then that he lifts his head and kisses her. Her face, her shoulder, the heel of her hand. There are still words falling from his lips, and she silences them with hers.
(because she is Imelda, and she controls the universe and the moon and language and time)
"I didn't ask you here for shoes," she says, finally.
"I thought people only came here for shoes."
"Did you?"
"No." A smile finds its way on her face, and it's infectious.
From behind them, they hear the door to the house beyond the gate open, and Julio is calling for his missing mother in law.
"You should go." Héctor finally puts her down, her back sliding against the wall, and she brushes the creases from her dress while he steps away, picking his hat up off the ground. "They're looking for you." He moves to leave. To turn around in his size twelve shoes and wait for the next time.
"Héctor?" He stops. Waits. His chest seizes tight. There's moonlight on her when he turns around, and it catches against the whiskey in her eyes. "You'll stay?"
He wants to say yes. He wants to say forever. He wants to get onto his knees and bless the ground she walks upon.
Instead:
"If you'll call on me," he breathes, and his words come out choked.
She reaches out her hand. "I am. Now," she says. He takes her hand, and she leads him through the gate. "And every day after, until you stop asking." and the frustration is too laced with affection to be anything else.
La Luna, thinks Héctor. Because nothing but her could make the darkness so extraordinarily bright.
The gate closes behind them.
It's what you deserve, she'll tell him later from beside him in their bed.
Héctor will just bury his head against her shoulder and breathe.