by A. L. Woods
Maybe she could have spent today with my family and me…and not in this dump of a place.
South Boston was a gentrifying neighborhood formerly infiltrated with the Irish working class that abutted Dorchester Bay and possessed as much charm as my left pinky—which wasn’t saying a whole lot, given the depth of the callus that edged the side and the hangnail that I’d yet to rip off in a fit of frustration.
The buildings here were tired and close together, just like the people who lived in them. The further I got into Southie, the more decrepit the place seemed to get. People stood under porticos, huddled together in a plume of smoke from the lit ends of cigarettes, the nicotine warming their bodies in spite of the late November chill. Their eyes tracked my Jeep as I veered toward a street that was as thin and narrow as the houses that stood there. The further I edged into Raquel’s mother’s neighborhood, the darker the sky seemed to grow. Where the sun had shone in Fall River, what was left hanging above me was a dull oyster color that had a shiver rolling out of me.
I didn’t like it here, but what I hated more was the sight of Raquel sitting on the curb, hunched forward, in front of a rundown triple decker that had probably seen better days some thirty years ago. It made me sick.
She was spaced out, her gaze fixed on an empty Burger King cup that rolled back and forth on the street, caught in the wind that also tickled the ends of her hair. Her jacket looked too thin for the weather, but she seemed unbothered. I parked a few feet away from her, noticing her body jerking in response, as if she hadn’t been prepared to see the Jeep.
Raquel looked at me like I was a mirage when I climbed out of the Wrangler, my hand pausing to close the door, hesitation licking my insides. I had been so hell bent on getting here as fast as legally possible that I hadn’t spared a minute to consider what I would say to her when I got here.
Anger heated my blood at the sight of a bruise that was ten different shades of purplish blue and the size of a golf ball under her cheek, and blood crusted around a wound over her brow. But it was the discolored bruises along her throat that had my lungs burning with a roar of rage that threatened to break from me. I didn’t need to ask whose handiwork that was, but I would confirm it when I had a minute to collect myself.
I rushed to her, not speaking when I held out a hand to help her to her feet. The vacancy that had resided in her face vanished into thin air. Now those pools of honey glared up at me from the ground and her lips thinned. She brushed my hand away dismissively and climbed to her feet herself.
She didn’t need me; I got the message loud and clear.
Her body had other plans for her, though. Her legs faltered, knees buckling as if she had run out of gas from what I knew must have been an adrenaline rush. I caught her by the hips before she went down, her scent filling my senses and giving me a head rush. My hands held her steady, assessing her with a sweep of my eyes. The interaction must have been too much for her, because a muffled garbled cry caught in her throat. I watched her bruised throat swallow it away, her eyes shifting away from mine. She stepped out of my embrace, pausing to smooth her hand over her backside before calmly climbing into the passenger’s seat, after which she shut the door as hard as she could, the sound ricocheting through the street.
The niggling sensation that I was being watched had my eyes passing over each house until my eyes fixed on a narrow Victorian with a front-facing gable and a pitched roof across the street. The curtains in the front windows swayed, telling me someone had been there watching. At least the fuckers that stood under their porticos met my eyes dead on. Whoever had been watching in the window had ghosted.
I swallowed my annoyance and rounded the hood of the Jeep, my stare still tight on the house, waiting for someone to reappear, but nothing happened.
The Jeep’s engine purred to life when I turned the key in the ignition. Pulling the car away from the curb, I remained quiet until we left her neighborhood behind and joined the throng of traffic of the rest of the city.
I dragged my teeth over my upper lip as I searched for an ice breaker. We hadn’t spoken since we had decided to part ways. Decided? No, that wasn’t right. That sounded like it had been a mutual decision made by levelheaded adults. It hadn’t been a mutual decision, for I hadn’t given her a choice in the matter. I’d spoken for both of us.
“What happened?” I finally said.
Raquel shuffled in her seat, tilting her body away from me. I caught a shiver roll through her as she wiggled against the seat, obviously cold.
I turned up the heat, warm air billowing from the vents. “Raquel?”
“What?” she snapped, irritation tightening her jaw. “My ma shoulda been a pitcher for the Sox, okay?”
No. It wasn’t okay. She had confirmed my worst fear. My fingers tapped against the steering wheel as I marinated on what she had said.
“No,” I said, my voice low and threatening. “It’s not okay.”
She didn’t reply. Instead, her gaze trained on watching the buildings we drove past.
“Where am I taking you?” I asked gruffly. I hadn’t the slightest fucking idea where she lived.
Her shoulder lifted in a half shrug, then spoke without taking her gaze away from the window, “If I’d known when Pen told me to sit tight that she was going to call you, I would have…” her voice trailed off, not completing her sentence.
“You would have what?”
Her silence confirmed what I already knew; she wouldn’t have called at all.
I strangled the steering wheel, my molars compressing. “Where am I taking you, Raquel?” I repeated.
I decided whatever came out of her mouth next better be good.
Raquel cleared her throat. “Drop me off at O’Malley’s. Ronan will let me in.”
Her lack of hesitation pissed me off. She wasn’t spending Thanksgiving in a bar with Einstein’s doppelganger.
“I’m not taking you there.” I shook my head, though she didn’t notice because she was still looking out of the window.
“Why not? That place is the closest thing to a home right now that isn’t my empty apartment,” she offered. “Ronan lives above it with his wife. I want a familiar face.”
If it was a jab, it landed on its intended mark. I was a familiar face, but clearly not the one she wanted to see. I shoved a hand through my hair, tugging on the strands. O’Malley’s wasn’t a home; in fact, it wasn’t any better than the dump I just picked her up from. It wasn’t where she belonged.
My jaw rocked from side to side before I offered her my rebuttal, choosing to refrain from commenting on her familiar face dig. “That’s not the type of place where you celebrate what you’re thankful for. That isn’t a home.”
She turned her head to face me, looking so fucking sad that I wanted to turn the car around and go wring her mother’s neck with my own two hands until that bitch begged. My molars connected on the realization that I would kill for this woman.
“Today is just another Thursday for me, Slim,” she confessed, reclining her seat. “So tell me, what’s there to be thankful for?”
I must have looked like a guppy out of a fish tank, my mouth opening and closing, though all cognizant thought evaded me, because she was right.
What did she have to be thankful for right now?
Her spine flattened against the seat that she had lowered, her eyes lidded, her long lashes curling skyward, the rest of her features tight. I could almost hear the constriction of her masseter muscles as she clenched her teeth.
Heartbreak shouldn’t look so damn beautiful.
Raquel’s breathing evened out, and when I glanced at her, I saw she had managed to doze off. My mind roamed as I drove toward O’Malley’s, racing to think of a plan that would keep her with me a little while longer. When we got to North End, I saw the familiar O’Malley’s awning, saw the glow of the sign that would have beckoned her inside. But with her eyes still drawn shut, and the steady rise and fall of her chest as sleep drifted her off somewhere else, s
omewhere safe—I drove right past the bar.
She wanted a home? I’d give her one.
CHAPTER NINE
There were a bunch of maniacal Polly Pocket-sized people driving jackhammers into my head right now. My hands went to the crown of my head where the tension headache brewed, my body twisting in the seat. I needed a fucking ibuprofen and a beer, stat.
At the thought of beer, my eyes opened. By now, the taste of hops should have already been dancing along my taste buds while I slumped over a bar top and poured out my troubles to Ronan. How long had I been passed out? Why hadn’t Sean woken me up when we got to O’Malley’s? North End was only ten minutes from Ma’s place in Southie.
My hand reached for the lever to raise my seat, springing my body upright. Alarms rang in my mind as surprise infiltrated my system. Where brick brownstones and skyscrapers should have existed with a cacophony of city sounds playing in the background, I was seeing acreage and trees that stretched as far as the eye could see, and a soundtrack of silence.
Where the fuck was I?
I whipped my head to look at Sean, anger spearing me in the center of my chest at the ease of his posture in his seat and the relaxation of his angular features. He held the steering wheel between loose fingers at six o’clock, his other hand weaving lazily through his hair. I could see the grooves of where his fingers had raked back and forth.
“Did you take a wrong turn somewhere?” I asked.
He didn’t humor me with a response; instead, his jaw rocked from side to side. The car slowed as he made a left turn onto a street where a couple of houses sat on a stretch of road, acres apart. Sean steered the Wrangler into a long driveway that eventually led to a farmhouse that would have made the Ingalls family stroke out a hundred-and-fifty years ago. Eggshell white beaded siding made the place look fresh, and both American and Portuguese flags flew from a flagpole in the middle of the yard.
“Where are we?”
My question met with more of that radio silence that was getting my hackles up. I was going to be shooting quills from my body like a damn porcupine soon if his jaw didn’t start flapping with a reasonable explanation for all of this.
Sean shifted the gear stick into park and then without so much as a quirk of his damn brow, turned off the ignition. He rested his thumb against his lips, the pad working back and forth against the lower.
He dropped his hand into his lap and without looking at me, said, “This is my ma’s place. You wanted a home, so here it is.”
That is not what I meant by home. More importantly, had he said his mother’s? I blanched, my whole body recoiling in my seat as if he’d just given me a deadly prognosis. The quick motion was something I immediately regretted, as the Polly Pocket people inside my head started jumping around in protest.
Grimacing, I pressed into my temples. “I told you to bring me to O’Malley’s, not home to meet your mother.”
He brushed the comment off with a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders that was akin to him flipping me the bird. “I expect you to be polite at a minimum,” he said, his eyes still fixated on the house the Jeep faced. He brought me here against my will, and now he was going to rattle off demands?
“Fuck you, Slim.”
That got his attention. Sean finally looked at me, his ardent dark eyes burning with something I couldn’t place despite the rest of his features remaining devoid of any kind of reaction. Blank sheets of paper had more substance to them at this moment in time than he did.
“You don’t get to bring me somewhere I didn’t ask to be and then tell me how to behave,” I said. “I’m not a child.”
“Good. Glad we got that established.” He gave me a clipped nod. “Just think about how you would normally behave, and then do the exact opposite.”
His sarcastic suggestion made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as he undid his seatbelt.
“Why would you even bring me here?” I protested, my heart in my throat as I bounced my stare between him and the massive house. Suggesting that O’Malley’s was the closest thing to a home right now couldn’t have possibly inspired all of this. Sean made it clear the last time we spoke that he wanted nothing to do with me. So why bring me here?
The longer the silence stretched between us, the worse I felt. The mounting tension between us could be cut with the flat edge of a fork, never mind a knife. Hell, any dull object would do. The air was so heavy that it felt impossible to breathe in the Wrangler, the oxygen in the cabin suddenly evading us.
Finally, he shrugged again, making me wonder if he was sure himself.
“I don’t belong here,” I argued. “Just take me back, or drop me off at a bus station. You’ve got one of those around here, right?”
He stroked the stubble on his jaw for a minute, perhaps considering my suggestion, then he kicked his chin toward my car door. “Get out of the car, Raquel.”
“I am not going in there,” I hissed, my panic lighting up a forest fire inside of me that threatened to engulf me if I set even one foot inside that house. I’d rather sleep in that dump he bought than go inside of his mother’s house.
I’d take my chances with Freddy Krueger, thank you very fucking much. At least with Freddy, I knew what the hell I was dealing with.
While my heart palpitated in my chest and my ribs squeezed with protest, he cleared his throat, drawing my attention to him.
“Look,” he began, his eyes arresting me, ceasing my thundering heart that was ready to violently claw its way out of my chest. “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.”
I swallowed, my eyes tightening on his as he held my stare. “Either you can walk inside yourself, or I can carry you in. The first option gives you the opportunity to appear dignified, the second option might have my mother asking some questions and trying to marry you off to me.”
I blanched as the threat—no, the promise—loomed over me. The words were eerily similar to his demand that I go back to our table in the diner with him last weekend, but it was the implication of marriage if I remained steadfast that rounded my eyes to the size of dinner plates. Sean’s smile was brittle as the gravity of his sentiment weighed on me, his dark eyes breaking the trance with my own, his gaze dropping to my mouth with the concentration of a student as he stared at my lips that I knew had constricted into a tight and painful line. I worked at the lump that registered in my throat, my focus zeroing in on him.
“Would that really be the worst thing in the world?” he asked, his hand reaching for the ejection button of my seatbelt. His thumb hesitated, causing my breath to hitch at his proximity. Why did he have to be so damn good-looking with all those hard angles, golden skin, and bottomless dark eyes? I ignored the burn that coasted through me as his scent lined the inside of my nose, all cinnamon spice and everything but nice.
I careened away from him, creating as much distance between us as the seatbelt and car door would permit. “Being carried inside by you? Yes.”
“No.” He lifted his eyes to mine, and for the first time under the stolen rays of sunlight that broke through the overcast day, I noticed the rim of amber that circled the ruddy brown irises that suddenly reminded me of whisky. “Being married to me.”
The anticipation of his next move pebbled my nipples under my shirt as he feasted his eyes over me like he wanted to do things to me that would have us banished from the property if anyone saw.
“Would that really be the worst thing?” he asked.
My heart kicked in my chest, but my mind was what screamed in protest. This had to stop. He had broken up with me. We lost the right to fantasize. He had made it clear as day that whatever we had engaged in hadn’t meant a damn thing. The M word was a word so out of my realm of understanding, never mind my lexicon, that I wasn’t going to waste time indulging the idea at all.
I was never getting married, and certainly not to him.
“I’m not answering that,” I said, averting his gaze. “And I’ll remind you that you ended things with me.” Ju
st when I thought the air couldn’t get any denser, it did. It was like we were trapped in a glass jar that had just been lidded, all the oxygen leaving our lungs, each pull of air a fleeting effort. I heard the sharp inhale of a breath dragging through his nose, the exhale sliding out through his lips as if it had taken everything in him just to expel it.
Sean pushed down on my seatbelt, the strap sliding free, the motion drawing my attention back to him. He held my stare, regarding me like he had so much to say to me, but never would.
“Pick, Hemingway,” he said, opening the driver’s side door and sticking out one of his long legs. He looked at me over his shoulder and said, “Only one option allows you to leave here without my grandmother’s engagement ring on your finger.”
He got out and rounded the front of the Jeep, all dignified and masculine, his posture ramrod straight, shoulders rounded. I considered hitting the lock button to buy myself time, but the tick in his jaw made me realize that maybe I was all out of that, the last tiny granule of sand sliding through the throat of the hourglass.
I didn’t want to go in there with him. Not under some false pretense.
I opened the door before he had the opportunity, dropping my shoulders and lengthening my neck. I jutted my chin out, looking up at him under the curl of my lashes.
“I’ll walk.”
“Smart girl.”
“And in exchange, you’ll stop eye fucking me.”
Sean’s laugh rang out across the property. “I can look, Hemingway,” he said, leaning forward his breath fanning across my cheek, “but I won’t touch. Scout’s honor.”
“You’re full of shit,” I grumbled. I trailed him through the garage door he had opened. We slid past a parked white BMW 328i on our way to the door that led inside.
