Roatan Plunge | Love Travels #2

Seventeen - Lorena

If someone told me I was superglued to Óscar's hand right now, I'd believe them.

As the night progressed, the clouds outside cleared to reveal the most beautiful stars I'd ever seen. The band stopped playing and was replaced with a DJ, and the faster-paced music or the late hour brought in at least three times the people, crowding the dance floor with strangers. No one can see anyone else.

I have no idea where Carla and Bianca and the rest of them are, and honestly I don't care. I'm just dancing so hard I can't feel my jelly legs anymore, so I'm clinging to Óscar for support.

"Can I ask you something?" I have to press up onto my toes and shout into his ear to make sure he hears me, and his hand instinctively presses into my waist as I do. The warmth spreads through me, searing my already scorching skin.

"Anything."

There it is again. I don't think I can feel my legs.

"You might regret that," I laugh.

"I won't," he says simply. "Go ahead." He pulls me into him and twists to the left just in time to avoid an angry woman making a bee-line for the door.

"Can we go outside for a few minutes?" Suddenly I'm nervous about asking, but he just nods and guides me through the narrow spaces of the dance floor until we're out on the beach under the stars.

"Better?" he asks, draping an arm over my shoulder.

I can only nod, swallowing the lump in my throat. But I need to know if he means this. I need to know if I'm just another girl in a headline or if... "Tell me about your childhood," I say, looking out over the ocean so I don't see his response. "I mean, tell me what it was really like."

His deep breath is audible even over the waves crashing against the reef and the group of teenagers playing an aggressive game of dominoes on a nearby table.

"I don't even know where to begin," he whispers, and I catch him looking at me before returning his gaze to the stars. "I was taken from my family at a young age."

"You were taken?"

"That's how it felt. Porfirio found me playing in a local field outside the public school I attended. We were off school because the teachers were striking but I had nowhere else to go. Anyway, he found me there and asked me where my parents were, but they were both working. They were always both working until..."

"I know," I whisper. His dad leaving is a well-documented sore spot with him in interviews. I admit to having done more research than I should have in the last few days. Whoever put the internet in my pocket did not know me well.

"Well, anyway, he sat outside the little house we lived in until my parents came home—his ostentatious car was really asking for it, but people mostly left him alone. Anyway, when my parents got home and found me awake there was a brief argument in which I tried to explain the strange man who had approached me."

"And what did they say to that?" I ask, looping my own arm around his waist and pulling him closer.

He responds by pulling me closer into his side and guiding me down the beach, away from the bustle of the band dance behind us.

"They never let me get it out, just sent me to bed and said we'd talk in the morning. But I wasn't even half way to my bed when the knock at the door came. I still remember the tune of it all these years later, rapping with uneven beats like a drummer missing one of his drumsticks."

"So he just told your parents he was taking you?" I ask. "I can't imagine they would just be okay with that." His mother, unique as she is, definitely doesn't seem like the kind of person who would just let her children go without a fight. She seems to love them, in her way.