Sleeping with the Frenemy (Vega Family Love Stories #3)

Chapter 12

12

Leo opened the car door for Tostón and clipped his leash onto his harness before allowing him to jump down. “You’re doing well, son,” he told the dog. “No one would know that just last week you were living in the alley and eating trash to survive.”

Of course, the dog didn’t respond except to immediately sniff the grass, but it was still true. In the last week, Tostón had flourished from scared and shy to happy and sweet. He was still the chillest puppy Leo had ever seen, content to just hang out on the couch and frequently napping most of the day away, but he was also down for long walks and some playful wrestling with his new dad.

Leo and Tostón walked a short distance to the dog park which was really just a fenced-in concrete slab, but at least they had some kiddie pools full of water to help the dogs cool down on the hot summer day. Even better, there were only a handful of other dogs in the big dog area.

Leo walked Tostón into the space and took off his leash, but he didn’t go anywhere. Tostón stayed right at his side, practically causing Leo to trip as he made his way to a short wall to sit. Leo wasn’t surprised. Tostón was shy and he definitely liked people more than other dogs. The last time Leo had brought him, it took Tostón a bit to warm up but then he’d played and enjoyed himself.

Leo sat and waited for Tostón to get comfortable while also waiting for his friend to arrive. He took out his phone and texted Sofi some pictures of Tostón lying on the concrete watching the other dogs play.

Your son is as anti-social as you are.

Less than a minute later he got a response.

We aren’t anti-social. We just don’t waste our energy on the unworthy.

Otherwise known as being stuck-up.

It’s called reclaiming your time.

Well, he’s sitting here lonely, so I don’t think it’s the best path to take.

Es mejor estar solo que mal acompa?ado.

You sound like my grandma.

Good. She was a smart woman.

You got me there.

Leo, when are you going to learn that I will always “get” you?

Sofi, when are you going to learn that I want to be “had” by you?

Leo watched the bubble with the three dots show up and disappear a few times. HA. He’d gotten her.

She had no idea what to respond to that and he loved it. There was nothing he loved more than keeping Miss Control Freak Sofi on her toes.

“Which girl are you texting that has you smiling like that?” a voice asked, making Leo jump and look up.

His buddy Ahmad Singh stood in front of him with a slick smile on his face.

Leo stood and put his phone in his pocket. “Your mother, obviously,” he told Ahmad. “She was just thanking me for last night.” He grabbed Tostón’s leash.

“I’m glad you showed her a good time. Now I know to step my game up for my date with your mom tonight.”

It was a long-standing joke between them ever since they’d watched the Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake “Motherlover” skit from Saturday Night Live in the middle of the night during a shift years ago.

They made their way out of the dog park. Leo would’ve apologized to his dog, but Tostón was more than happy to leave. He practically dragged Leo out the gate. “Please, as if my mom could ever overlook that ugly mug of yours,” Leo teased Ahmad.

The truth was that Ahmad’s father had been a model for many years and Ahmad looked just like him. He was a good-looking guy and he knew it, just like Leo knew that his own looks were nothing to scoff at. The other guys at their station referred to them as “the calendar boys,” claiming they looked more like they were from a sexy firefighter calendar than from the academy. At first it had bothered the two of them and they’d bonded over their dislike of being seen as pretty boys. But they had both proved themselves many times over since then. Everyone they worked with knew they were legit.

“Just for that I’m going to work you until you cry like a baby,” Ahmad told him. He’d been putting Leo through the wringer for at least an hour three times a week. They worked out at their old coworker’s gym that was a few blocks from the dog park. Their buddy Derek had his own dog he brought to work with him every day, so he had no issue letting Leo put Tostón in his office while they worked out. Leo had hoped that Derek’s eleven-year-old boxer, Blue, would help bring Tostón out of his shell, but as far as Leo could tell, the two dogs basically ignored each other and napped in separate corners.

“Vega! Drop those hands or I’m going to give you weights to hold,” Ahmad yelled at him.

Leo immediately dropped his hands to his sides. He already had on a sixty-pound vest. He did not want dumbbells on top of that. Not when he still had so much more left to do. He stepped off the tall wooden box only to step right back up. Box climbs were one of the easier parts of the workout because Leo had always had good stamina and endurance, but with the heavy vest tugging on his shoulders it was hard for Leo to ignore the way his arm tingled.

Ahmad and Derek had come up with a workout that was designed to mimic the movements Leo would be doing during the test. They also claimed to have made it harder than it needed to be because “then the test will feel like a breeze.” Leo wasn’t sure about that seeing as he had yet to make it through the entire workout without his shoulder/arm causing him to mess something up.

“Stop trying to run through the whole test in your mind,” Ahmad barked. He and Derek were off to the side sitting in some janky-ass lawn chairs while drinking beers like they were at a lakefront barbecue. Bastards. “Focus only on the movement you’re doing. You keep psyching yourself out by thinking too hard.”

As he stepped off the box for the final time and took a few seconds to catch his breath, Leo snorted. “I think that may be the first time in my life that anyone has ever accused me of thinking too hard. Usually they beg me to think at all.”

Ahmad threw his empty beer can at Leo, almost hitting him in the chest. Luckily Leo ducked. “What the fuck,” Leo yelled. “You could’ve hit me in the face with that!”

Ahmad ignored his chiding in favor of continuing his own. “Stop doing that. You always act like you’re nothing but a meathead who can carry a tune. You’re one of the smartest people I know.”

“That doesn’t say much for the people you hang around,” Leo tried to joke, but Ahmad wasn’t having any of that.

He stood up and got in Leo’s face. “Dude, do you know how many members of my family are doctors, lawyers, engineers, or just overall highly educated? I hang around some very smart people, but none of them can problem solve on the fly like you can. They’re all super regimented and stifling to everyone including themselves.” He grabbed the straps of Leo’s weighted vest to give him a shake. “You see the world and people in a different way, and it allows you to get to the root of the problem. Sure, you daydream more than the average person, but it makes it easier for you to shuffle through a bunch of options quickly to find the best idea.”

Leo didn’t know what to say to that. He’d always viewed his tendencies to jump right in as a sign of his impulsivity. He didn’t brainstorm before he acted, he just acted. Most of the time it worked in his favor and sometimes it didn’t. “I appreciate that, but I think I’m just lucky.”

Ahmad picked up the discarded can. “You’re wrong, but I’m not going to argue with you about it. I’m not your damn therapist on top of being your free personal trainer. Now get a fucking move on instead of wasting all of our time. I know you’re trying to stall.”

He was right. Leo was trying to stall. He dreaded the next part of his workout—carrying two forty-pound buckets a hundred and fifty feet then back without stopping. Normally that would be nothing to him, but his grip wasn’t as strong as it used to be and he struggled to maintain hold of the bucket for the entire time. Usually by the time he was done, his hand and arm had checked out at least for a few minutes. But Leo didn’t have a few minutes to recover during the test. He had to make it through all of the tasks without stopping or messing up if he wanted to pass. Not for the first time, Leo wondered if he would ever be able to actually do it. Every time the workout seemed to get harder instead of easier. He knew that wasn’t good. But he’d promised himself that he’d get back on platoon duty and while he had the tendency to disappoint everyone else in his life, he would never disappoint himself. So he sucked in a few more breaths, told himself to fucking man up, and ignored the pain while he continued his workout. Just like he always did.

A bit later, Leo and Tostón bypassed the front doors to Casa del Sol and instead went around to the back where the building shared a large courtyard with the clinic and the main building. There he found Abuelo Papo and Do?a Fina sitting at a patio table with what looked like glasses of lemonade.

“Look who it is,” Abuelo said in Spanish. “My favorite grandson.”

“You told me to come over,” Leo pointed out. “And just to be clear, I’m telling everyone you said that.”

“I was talking about the dog,” Abuelo said.

“Rude,” Leo responded.

Abuelo ignored Leo and held out his hands. “Come here, Tostón. Come to your abuelo.”

Tostón started wiggling in excitement, so Leo dropped the leash. Let him maul Abuelo with overexcited puppy affection. That would show him.

Except Tostón didn’t go to Abuelo. He went right to Do?a Fina and tried to jump in her lap. “Ay!” she yelled. “No, Tostón! Bajate!”

Since Tostón had no idea what she was saying, only the high-pitched tone of her voice, he got even more excited. He jumped and barked and licked.

Leo rushed forward to grab the leash and tug him back, but he made the mistake of using the wrong hand. Tostón gave a hard tug and pain shot down Leo’s arm then back up. “Fuck,” Leo shouted, immediately dropping the leash to grab his shoulder.

Abuelo shot out of his chair and stood in Tostón’s path to Do?a Fina. “No,” he said in the deep and loud authoritative voice Leo had only ever heard a very few times in his life. It was the voice that had all of his kids and grandkids jumping to follow his orders without comment like little soldiers. Apparently, it also worked on great-grandogs because Tostón skidded to a stop right at Abuelo’s feet and sat down. Abuelo calmly bent down, grabbed his leash, and walked them back to the table to sit in his chair. “Quédate aquí y pórtate bien,” he told the dog with a rough pat on the side. He looked to Leo then, concern written all over his face. “Are you okay?”

Leo nodded. His arm was no longer screaming in sharp lightning-like pain, but tingling in the all-too-familiar pins and needles sensation. He continued to breathe through the feeling as he made his way to the table and plopped into one of the two empty chairs.

“Do you need an ice pack?” Do?a Fina asked in Spanish.

Leo shook his head. “I’m fine.”

She didn’t look like she believed him. “Escucha esto, it was 1965 and I was preparing for Miss Puerto Rico. Mi mamá estaba nerviosa. I was the shortest of all the contestants. She went to the nicest boutique in San Juan and bought me the highest pair of—” she paused for a second, a look of deep thought on her face and her hands making circles next to her head as if that would make her thought clearer “—tacones,” she said, apparently giving up on remembering the English word. “I mean, así de grande.” She held up her thumb and forefinger in an L shape to demonstrate about a six-inch heel. “She wanted me to wear them all of the time, so I could practice walking in them, but I was still dancing every day and my feet were always sore. I didn’t want to wear those shoes too, so I lied to her and told her that I wore them when really I didn’t.” She paused to take another sip of her lemonade. “Time passes and finally it’s time to practice walking on the stage for the swimsuit competition. My mami brings me the shoes and tells me to put them on. I’m as tall as the other girls now and, because I already know that I look the best in my swimsuit, I feel amazing. I know I’m going to win. Then I take one step down the stairs y—” she made a wretching motion with her hands “—mi tobillo se dobla. I fall down the rest of the stairs and land right on my face. I mean, I thought I broke my nose.” She shakes her head. “They had to carry me out and they made me miss the rest of the practice so I could stay off my feet. But you better believe that I wore those shoes every day after that. And when the day of the contest came, I was back out there in those shoes strutting up and down that stage like nothing ever happened.” She waved her hand in the air while saying, “After that I discovered I had done damage to the ligaments in my foot, ankle, and knee, so I couldn’t dance professionally anymore.”

Leo sat there for a moment trying to figure out what that story had to do with anything. “I’m sorry, Do?a Fina, but I don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.”

She shook her head as if sad that he was so dense. “Sometimes we have to deal with a lot of pain in order to reach our goals, but it’s worth it.”

“But didn’t you just say that you’d damaged your ligaments and couldn’t dance anymore?”

“Si, pero gané Miss Puerto Rico and that’s all that matters.”

Leo frowned. He didn’t see that. He saw a woman who’d ruined her chosen career in order to reach a short-term goal. “Are you telling me that it was worth getting shot and losing my career, because now I can dedicate my time to winning Sofi over?”

Her eyes widened. “No! No! Claro que no! I’m saying that sometimes things happen that we can’t control and we need to find a way to make the outcome a positive one.”

He still didn’t see how her story demonstrated that, but he wasn’t going to argue with her about it.

“We called you here to talk about the next steps of the plan,” Abuelo Papo said.

Leo almost rolled his eyes. They acted like they were all on some intense secret mission. All they’d done was sit there pretending like they knew nothing of the situation while other people convinced Sofi to move in with him.

“Having the two of you adopt the dog was a good idea,” Do?a Fina was saying, “but Sofi now knows that your sister’s fiancé isn’t allergic.”

“Yeah. I know. She already chewed me out for that, but I wasn’t lying.” Leo had honestly thought Liam was allergic to animals. He could’ve sworn he’d heard it somewhere, but he could not remember where or who’d said it. “And it wasn’t an idea I had. It sort of just happened.”

Abuelo and Do?a Fina looked at each other and then away. Do?a Fina bit her lip while Abuelo looked like a cat with a stomach full of canary.

Leo got a bad feeling. “What’s going on?”

“Yo no hice nada,” Do?a Fina said, her hands up in the air like a criminal being confronted by the cops. “I only mentioned how cute the dogs were when they came for pet therapy.”

“And you said that Sofi always wanted a dog when she was little,” Abuelo added.

“Abuelo,” Leo intoned, rubbing at his suddenly achy temples. “Please tell me that you didn’t plant Tostón in the alley for us to find.”

Abuelo threw up his hands. “What was I supposed to do when I saw him sniffing around the parking lot? Leave him there so he could get hit by a car? It was a sign! Destiny! Fate, I tell you!”

“Oh. My. God.” Leo closed his eyes and shook his head. “How could you have known that he’d stay in the dumpster enclosure? Or that Sofi and I would go into the alley?”

“I left him a big pile of arroz con gandules and why do you think I told you to take out the garbage?”

There were so many ways that could’ve gone totally wrong. The odds of it working out exactly as his abuelo had planned were so slim. Leo was astounded that it had worked. He wanted to be upset, but he was more impressed than anything. But still, he needed to put a stop to their plotting behind his back. “No more planning things that include innocent creatures that could get hurt,” he said firmly. “And talk to me before you do something else.”

“Claro. We didn’t mean to overstep,” Do?a Fina said, all big eyes and pouty lips.

Leo snorted. That one was about as innocent as a three-time convicted felon serving a life sentence.

“You act like it didn’t work out perfectly,” Abuelo grumbled.

“We now have a dog that neither one of us planned for!” Leo pointed out.

“And you love it,” Abuelo said. “Also who watches the dog when you both work?” Abuelo asked.

Leo wanted to point out that Abuelo should’ve thought about that before he foisted Tostón onto them, but he knew it would be a waste of time. “The number of people who’ve volunteered their babysitting services means that I never have to worry about that. But when I have to go anywhere, I leave him with Liam since Liam has moved his office into his place, we don’t have to worry about him wandering around the distillery all day.”

Abuelo nodded as if he’d figured as much. “You need to make this work for Sofi otherwise she’ll get frustrated and blame you for tricking her into keeping him.”

“ I didn’t trick her into anything,” Leo pointed out. “That was you two.”

Abuelo ignored that. “Just try to make sure you’re both there waiting for Sofi when she gets home.” Abuelo sat forward as he began to get excited with the ideas he was spitballing. “Cook dinner, clean, take care of stuff.”

“You want me to be her housewife while working two jobs?” Sure his position at the distillery hadn’t officially started yet—it was mostly just planning at the moment—and once he got back on platoon duty he would have more daylight hours available, but still, he had a lot going on.

“I want you to prove to her that you will be a good partner. That you want to make her life easier not harder.”

“No woman with common sense wants a man who requires her to do more work to be with him.” Do?a Fina took a sip from her cup. “What purpose does he serve, then? Good sex? We can get that without a relationship. Most of us can get it without even needing the man.”

“She’s right,” Abuelo said, patting Tostón’s head as the dog leaned against his leg. “The time for all that ‘women need men’ nonsense is over. It’s time for us men to prove that we are worthy of them, not the other way around.”

Leo blinked. He didn’t know what to say to that. On one hand, eww old people talking about sex. On the other, they were right. He didn’t want to be a burden for Sofi. He didn’t want to tie her down or hold her back, like an invasive species of ivy coiling around a flower’s stem and preventing it from reaching the sunlight. He wanted them to be like two fruit trees planted in the same yard because they cross-pollinate and therefore help each other bear fruit. He wanted...to flourish together.

“I get it,” he told them.

Leo was feeling pretty good about the next steps until Do?a Fina threw out her next idea. “I also think she should go on that dating app her friends want her to join.”

That was not going to happen. Not on Leo’s watch. “Why would sending her out with other guys be a good idea?”

“Because what better way to show her that what she thinks she wants is not actually what she wants?”

“You want to purposely send her on dates with dudes just to make me look good?” Leo wasn’t sure if he was more offended for these other guys or himself. Did she really think that he needed all of that to look good? And, sure, most men were trash humans who only wanted relationships as long as they didn’t require any type of work or personal growth, but there were good dudes out there and Leo wasn’t going to risk one of them crossing her path.

“That could work,” Abuelo Papo said.

“No.” Leo shook his head. “That could easily blow up in my face. She could make a real connection with someone and it would push me way back.”

“That’s true,” Do?a Fina agreed.

“Besides,” Leo continued, really needing to drive home the point. “If she’s spending her free time going on dates, it cuts into the little bit of time I’ll have to spend with her.”

Do?a Fina tapped her finger on her chin, her gaze focused into the distance. “Okay, fine. We won’t do that part, but I’ll keep thinking about what else we can do.”

Leo really didn’t want them doing anything more. It was enough to get their advice. He didn’t need Abuelo to start pulling more shenanigans. He knew all too well his abuelo had the tendency to go way too hard. “Listen. Let’s not plan anything else until we give this a chance. I know Sofi better than anyone and she needs to be guided gently into things. You can’t try to force her to do anything or she will shut you out completely.” He reached for Tostón’s leash before standing. “I have to get going, but I’ll do what you said in terms of dinner, chores, and such. I do want her to know I can be a good partner.”

It wasn’t until he’d said goodbye and got in his car that Leo realized they’d never agreed not to come up with more schemes. Shit.