Dominican Sunset

"Are you sure Eskarne?" She asks, her hair falling over one shoulder in a tight braid. The red of it looked like flames consuming her neck. Her eyes shaded in big, oversized black shades that came back into style and her lips in this perfect shade of pink and flesh. They were the sort of pink that you get from kissing, and she wore no lipcolor over it. She seems to be aware of the very nature of her beauty; since she is wearing no makeup to conceal any lines or blemishes. The only thing she hides is her eyes, their beauty kept thinly veiled behind a lens of designer plastic. "Are you sure?" She asks again. "I mean if we really wanted to go to Santo Domingo today, we could catch a taxi now, and make it before midnight."
He looks at his watch, glancing over the time. 8:23 p.m. It will be time for sunset soon. "I don't care," he says, adjusting his back in the wicker chair. "I hate we have to meet like this."
She leans foward, takes a sip of her El Presidente beer. "I have an idea," she says, with the cold beer rudely rolling over her tongue. "Why don't you stay here, with me a while longer?"
He rubbed his jaw. The speedy job he had done of his shaving had left quite a few hairs uncut on it. "Perhaps. Or we can catch a plane to Miami." She sighed in the heat. "It's so hot. I want to be cooled off."
The waiter swung by the table.
"Can I help you?" He asks.
Eskarne took his hand off his jaw. "Can you pull down the panels, please? It is getting muggy, and my wife here has a baby to take care of." The waiter smiles. He doesn't understand english, they both realize soon. He repeats, "Can I help you." Eskarne tries to translate. The wind is coming through the shutters of the piazza, humid and warm. Isabella smiles at the waiter, rests her hand gently on his arm, and sends him away with a look of mercy, like that of a mother to a toddler who doesn't understand the concept of something.
"Is there anything we can do about this situation?" Eskarne asks. She leans back. "I don't hardly see how you can call it a 'situation', why not call it a family?"
He thinks for a moment. He hates those tones she gets. "Why didn't you call sooner?"
She holds her braid in her hand. "Because I was afraid."
"Afraid of me? What i would say?"
"No, afraid of my family. It isn't fitting for someone who's getting married in eight months to be pregnant with the help's child."
"I was never, Just the help, and you knew that." He motioned and caught the waitor's attention. Making a bottle/drinking motion, he told the waitor, without words that he wanted another beer. Now here's a language we all understand, he thought.
"I could have an abortion." She said, the word rolling off her tongue like bitter vomit. "It's not too late. I have three weeks left until it will be."
"Abortion?!"
"Yes," she says pulling a few pesos out of her purse. She and Eskarne get up and start to leave. The light outside is bright, and it takes a few moments for their eyes to adjust. "We can leave, you know. Santo Domingo to Miami." Eskarne takes a ciggarette out of his pocket. "What about New York?"
She looked at him through her shades. "What about it?"
"Well, you can't be in Miami all that way from your parents."
She sighed, putting her hand on her stomache. "I can't believe you did it again."
Eskarne grumbled under his breath. "What do you mean now? You confuse me."
She starts to walk down the sidewalk, her pink sundress stretching vainly over her curves to conceal them.
She holds her stomache. "Why can't we start over, somewhere we can be together, and noone has to know. Noone."
She looks coldly at him. His face isn't the face of someone she ever wanted to be with, or let alone have a child with. "It's your baby. You decide."
A few sparse rainclouds heaved towards them polluting the azul of the tropical sky. "Why don't we just stay here a while longer? Just till we get it figured out."
She nodded. "If that's the way of it."
They rode in silence to the hotel. After they had gotten there she expressed her desire for a nap. When Eskarne went out to the bar to get some more beer with the money he had borrowed from her, she grabbed her faux-Louis Vuitton bag and tossed in her passport and sunglasses. She headed out through the lounge, slinking past the buisnessmen sitting at the bar with their beers and latinas on their arms. They always favor black hair. What had she done, why had she fell into Eskarne that day, at the University. She couldnt think of it now, what's done is done, she says to herself as she walkes out the front open door. The curtains blowing out the door due to the crossbreeze made her appear as an angel when she descended the stairs. The taxi-moped she ordered waited. The driver waited on it, his face shielded by the white helmut. He noticed the angelic illusion, thinking her to be a redheaded reincarnate of Jackie O, with her lips and figure and oversize shades. She slinks onto the seat of the Moped.
"Where to?" He asks. "To Santo Domingo, por favor." He smiles, an american smile, and he speaks in fake broken english, "And from there?" She is glad to hear some comfort of home. "The airport." This is one trip they came together on, sneaking away for the weekend. As far as her family knew, she was safe in her apartment in Buffalo, snowed in. The driver asks if there is anyone else coming along. "No," she says, as an alarming pain fills her with coolness and security. She places her hand on her stomache. The baby shouldn't be kicking yet, it's too small for that. She comforts herself. Perhaps it was the beer taking its revenge. This time it's over between us, she tells herself, as they speed through traffic her hands around the drivers waist now. The driver stops at a pulloff half covered in white sand. "What is it?" She asks, noticing the surreal sunset for the first time. She had been so deep in her thoughts that she had forgotten that the sun was fleeting over the palms, it's orange color looking like a lump of butter in a bowl of pink and yellow soup. She smiled, for the first real time since she found out abt the baby. The driver pulled off the helmut, letting his black hair fall gently in it's curls she knew so well. He leaned back and kissed her. "I love you," he said, and as he said it, the security flushed inside her again. She giggled under her breath, as he stood and wrapped his arms around her. She was stupid to have ran away out of fear of the situation. "You want to get marryed? We'll run away." He said. As the ocean rolled under the sky with it's banners of color, in San Pedro de Macoris, she felt for the first time in her life that she was home. And she realized she loved Eskarne more than anything in the whole world, except the little being that now lived inside her. She felt Eskarne's breath on her neck, and as she surrendered to his kisses, the sun fading on the horizion, she felt the baby move. This time she was sure it felt the same joy she did, and she closed her eyes, Eskarne's face illuminated by the sunset before her as her last image she saw in the retreating light.