Kiss and Tell will be published as a paperback and e-book from W by Wattpad Books under the new name "As Long As You Love Me". The book is available for pre-order now: https://a.co/d/bV1ARdt

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What can be sown in the streets of Venezuela is death.

Someone said this at my brother's funeral with the kind of acceptance usually preceded by a sigh and followed by qué se puede hacer. Like we were talking about losing a contest, rather than normalizing the fact that venturing in the streets might mean returning home in a casket.

My body trembled during the entire service but my chin didn't waver, my eyes didn't rain. I was so full of anger that my insides were a volcano about to erupt, ready to wipe away civilizations. In that moment, it was my civilization that I wanted to clean the slate on.

How had we got to this point? How was I the only one bursting at the seams with anger like lava and ashes? Wasn't anger supposed to be one of the early stages of loss? And yet everybody around me either cried or shook their head, murmured that he'd been so young, so full of promise.

Mami was on the former camp. Ever since we'd received the news she had been unable to draw a breath that didn't come along with a fresh wave of tears. Papi's face was stern, which probably was a compounding reason for mami's sorrow. My brother, Carlos, had died fighting for the opposite side from papa's. He loved Carlos with every fiber of his being but he'd never really moved past the disappointment that Carlos didn't share his support for the revolution. Meanwhile my twin sister, Coralina, clung to her boyfriend, Rodrigo, with a vice that would probably leave a bruise. She was stuck in a combination of shaking her head and crying, also floored that her brother would give his life in protests against the chaos our country had descended into.

And then there was me. The black I wore during the funeral service seeped into my heart, inflaming me with the same kind of anger that Carlos felt that fateful morning. It had already been close to two months since he was last able to go to class at university because the teachers were on strike. A bunch of his friends and guys from other schools had agreed to protest downtown, close to the main newspaper of Maracaibo. I helped him prepare bottles full of vinegar and cut up rags from old t-shirts so that he'd protect himself from the tear gas that was sure to hit them and almost as if I knew, I clutched at his hands last minute and wouldn't let him go.

"Yo también," I said, gripping him tighter. "Let me join you."

Carlos' dark eyes twinkled. "I never would've imagined that a day would come when you'd want to skip school."

To make the point he looked down at my school uniform. I'd got up as soon as papi left for work at five thirty in the morning, got dressed and sneaked out of my room to wake Carlos up while mami and Cora still slept. The plan was that after Carlos left, I'd wake them up with breakfast and act as a smokescreen for Carlos.

His joke made me wrinkle my nose because never in my thirteen year school career had I ever skipped a day. I was the best student in my class, so advanced that my teachers always told mami it was a shame that there was no way to accelerate my education. And yet that day I didn't care about school. I didn't want to let go of my brother. I wanted to cling to him, school record be damned.

He flicked my fringe like he knew annoyed me and gave me a hug, saying, "Leave the ugly fighting to your champion, mi princesa. One day we'll be free and I'll give you this kingdom again."

I remembered rolling my eyes. I remembered watching his back disappear down the corner outside of our apartment as I closed the door.

That was it. He was gone. I would never see him again, hear his obnoxious laughter, bury my face in the crook of his neck when he hugged me, watch him banter with Cora until her face turned red like a tomato.

And I had a hand in it. I prepared him for the final joust. I sent him off. But it was my country who killed him.

The biggest question I asked myself was, how could we possibly move on from this? How could we pick up our lives as though Carlos was no more, or had never been, and as though none of us could be next on any given day?

How could I move on? At least the answer to that question was easy. I couldn't.

Coralina cried herself to sleep that night. Her top bunk bed shook for hours with the force of her sobs until finally they ebbed away and her breathing evened. I still shook, my eyes so wide open that it was painful. The feelings roiling in my heart threatened to explode but above all, blinding terror paralyzed me. The terror of what my parents would think once they knew the role I'd played in Carlos' death, the terror that tomorrow it could be mami or papi or my sister or my best friends or myself. The terror that came with knowing I had to face a lifetime, however long or short, without my brother.

I kicked the blankets away from me and shot to the bathroom, bile rushing up my throat and out my mouth. In the aftermath I felt hands rubbing my back and dizzy, weakened, I made out the blurry face of my mother.

And finally the feelings came out into a word vomit that made little sense. She never stopped rubbing my back or caressing my hair, even as I told her what I'd caused, what I'd almost done—and finally, a day after Carlos had died, I begun to weep. That was when papi joined us and things got even worse.

"Que hiciste qué?" The scream echoed against the bathroom tile, hitting me harder every time it bounced back into my ears.

Mami shot to her feet and got in his face, her voice raised as high as her temper could go. She said something similar to, "Don't you dare! Don't you dare blame Catalina when you know who did this!"

His face had gone almost purple when he retorted with, "You're right, this isn't Catalina's fault but Carlos'!"

Faster than he or I could react, mami raised her hand and slammed it on his cheek with enough strength to send him stumbling. Behind him stood Cora, who also had just seen everything. Silence fell over us that night like a heavy blanket that drowned out laughter and chatter.

The Diaz Solis family had struggled with the ideological differences of each of its members. Papi had always been a supporter of the government, even when its policies made his business falter. Cora, the quintessential daddy's girl, went along with whatever he thought. Mami had always been the ni-ni of the family, ni esto ni aquello, going to herculean efforts to maintain harmony despite the fact that Carlos and I were firmly on the opposite side.

But the night after Carlos's funeral was when the Diaz Solis family broke. That was the moment I understood that without Carlos I had no place in it and no future in a country where my life was worth less than the cost of a loaf of bread.

Months later, as I received my high school diploma from the Catholic school all three Diaz Solis siblings had attended, I decided that if I wanted to live I had to leave. I discarded my plans of enrolling into LUZ, my hometown's university and the one Carlos and my parents had attended, and started looking into programs abroad. I'd saved some money working part time at papi's company that I spent on the endless paperwork, just so that I could apply, and a year later I had an acceptance to a college in the state of Florida, US, with a partial scholarship.

Since papi would never allow me to go to a school in the US, I did all of this in secret until it was too late and I needed help buying a plane ticket to Caracas to get my visa.

"No," he said at once, tossing aside the stack of bank notes he'd been counting on the kitchen table. He rose from his chair with the single-minded purpose of getting a better angle to blow my eardrums with screams, but mami turned around from the kitchen sink with the same fire in her eyes she'd had the night she slapped him.

"Yes, she's going."

I was torn with the impulse of jumping between them to keep them at bay from each other, and the opposite impulse of running away and locking myself in my room. Instead, they talked.

"How can you be fine with losing a second child?" papi asked her and mami shook her head.

Her answer was, "We're not losing her, we're saving her."

The next day I traveled to the capital to get my visa. A month later I rode on a bus for eight hours to get to Bogota, where I flew out to Orlando, Florida, to start my new life. I was full of hope like I hadn't felt in my chest since the day Carlos went ahead of us to heaven. I was determined to have a chance at actually living, at building a life at a better place.

For almost four years of an intense college life everything seemed to work out. Until, just about to graduate, the rug got pulled from under my feet when my work visa request was denied and I was faced with having to return to my home country.

And right there, as my world tilted sideways with a notice written on a paper, salvation presented itself in the face of the boy I hated the most as he made the most outrageous proposal. To marry him.

And in desperation I decided to take it, not accounting for the consequences that would come our way.

KISS AND TELL won two Wattys in 2021, one for New Adult and one for Wattpad Originals, and as of April 20th, 2022, it's joining Wattpad Originals! This is such an honor for me, and it will really help me to continue bringing you other free stories as well 💙

Before you embark on this book's adventures, a few disclaimers:

- I first started writing this book in March 2020 and started publishing it here on Wattpad in May 2020. While the blurb shows a similar premise to The Spanish Love Deception, TSLD was published in February 2021, almost a year after Kiss and Tell here on Wattpad. We share the trope of needing a fake date to a wedding and the main character's first name (which I find just as freaky as you), and by just reading this prologue you'll be able to see the execution, voice, perspective, dramatic aspects, age category, spice level, plot journey, characters' ethnicities, etc., of the books is world's apart. TSLD is a good comp to Kiss and Tell, but Sandra Bullock's The Proposal is even better! :)

- This book can be read as a standalone and is also loosely connected with the other novels of Marianna's Book Universe Phase 1. For more information, please see the book A Reading Guide on my profile!

- While topics about politics from Venezuela and indirectly also from the US are a big part of this story, this is entirely a work of fiction.

- The main character, her family and the love interest speak Spanish as mother tongues, which means there will be phrases in Spanish in the book that are an extra layer of meaning for readers of similar backgrounds. If you don't speak Spanish, don't be afraid! These sentences make maybe 1% of the book and there will be plenty of context clues for you to have a grasp of the situation. A lot of lovely readers also translate them in in-line comments.

- This book is not mature (aka it doesn't contain any smut). I'm not comfortable writing such content and I appreciate you respecting those boundaries 💙

Thank you so much for all your support!