by Elle Aycart
“No. My grandma swore right to her death that they stole it from her to begin with.”
“How did Celeste Macarena become Sky?”
“Have you ever met a Celeste Macarena Gonzalez who didn’t speak Spanish? Besides, I needed a shorter name if I didn’t want to waste half my life introducing myself.”
“Must have been lonely not understanding those around you.”
“Not really. My grandmother was always busy working. My mother was busy dying and I was busy staying away. Talk about dysfunctional, huh?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s water under the bridge now.” She paused, then asked abruptly, “What’s your damage?”
“No damage. My parents are still together and healthy.” Nagging at each other and at Megan and at him, but together.
She lifted her brows. “Really? No damage? And this phobia about commitment?” At his frown, she continued, “Remember the first time we hooked up?”
“When you came on to me in the living room and the whole pandemic squad was in the yard, wrapping the house in plastic?”
She smiled. “Yes. Do you remember your first question to me?”
“Not exactly, no. I remember how hot your pussy felt on my cock, how hard your nipples were, tenting that flimsy camisole with every one of your breaths. I remember how soft your hands felt when you were running your fingers through my hair. I remember—”
“You asked what I expected to get out of the sex,” she said. “You didn’t seem to believe I only wanted orgasms.”
He pondered for a second. Yeah, maybe he had some damage too. “Manipulative ex. Although I would remind you that I’m the one who’s been insisting on you living with me while you’ve been dragging your feet.” She had needed the convincing, not him.
She was about to say something, but at that moment the door of the main building opened and a muttering Lola came out. She stomped into the clearing. With what looked like a cell phone in hand, she raised her arm and began walking left and right, searching for a signal.
Shaking her head, Sky let out a soft snort. “Innocent soul.”
Yep. Lola continued her pointless endeavor, moving her device close to her face and then far away, squinting.
“I don’t know why she even bothers,” Sky said. “She doesn’t see squat without glasses. Even if she got a signal, she wouldn’t be able to type or read anything.”
Lola stepped into something and her heels sank in the mud. They didn’t need to know Spanish to understand she was swearing like a sailor.
“Quite fluent, her Spanish,” Logan observed.
“You bet. Grandma raised Lola. And Grandma never left El Barrio. Lola loves the neighborhood. It’s her heritage.”
“You don’t? It’s your heritage too.” And she wasn’t an angry teenager anymore.
She shrugged. “I’m part of a culture that I can’t represent because I don’t know it. It’s an awkward place to be, you know what I mean?”
Logan remained quiet for a long while. “Is your sister going to be okay, or should we worry there’s going to be an arrest warrant against me for kidnapping her and you?”
Sky smiled. “She’ll be fine, I think. Can’t promise about the warrants. As a matter of fact, her latest plan was to hotwire Alec’s truck and make a run for it.”
Alec’s truck was unstealable. Then again, a sneak attack would be a good test of these people’s readiness. “You told her the preppers aren’t dangerous or holding anyone against their will, right?”
“Uh-huh. It would have been more credible if they hadn’t scheduled a POW protocol training at the compound. Or if Pam hadn’t insisted on showing her the bunker and the food supplies.”
True. As botched first impressions went, this one took the cake. “What’s she doing in Minnesota?”
“I fell off the grid for several days. She was afraid we were about to ingest cyanide and join our leader in the mothership coming for us before the end of the world.”
“Why didn’t you answer her calls?”
“We kept missing each other,” she said, obviously lying. “By the way, how did we do in the bug-out evaluation?”
She was hiding something, but he let it slide. “We brought a hostile hostage with us and Arnie is an uncontrolled lethal weapon, gassing friends and foes indiscriminately. Take a wild guess.”
“You sure you don’t want to stay and travel to New York with us on Friday?” Sky asked as she walked her sister to the rental car.
If looks could kill, Lola would have incinerated her on the spot. “Forty-eight hours was enough, thank you very much. I’m running away while I can, before they barricade the town and proclaim an independent republic or some shit like that.”
Sky grimaced. “You’ve been unlucky. They’re normally less… active.”
“Less crazy, you mean?”
That too. Lola had caught the emergency drill, the POW protocol training in the compound, and the survival exercises in the forest. Once at home, they’d invited her to the best-and-only restaurant in town so she could relax, and—surprise, surprise—it had rained.
Lola hadn’t been amused.
At all.
Sky should have called Elias and taken Lola to whatever club he was playing at. That would have mellowed her sister out. Too bad Sky hadn’t thought of it.
“It was a pleasure to have you with us,” Logan said, offering her his hand.
Lola smiled tightly. Translation: “I wish I could say the same.”
“See you on Friday?” Sky asked, hugging her sister.
“You bet.”
Sky wouldn’t be surprised if, once she was in New York, her sister kidnapped her to make sure Sky wasn’t going back to Minnesota.
“Can she see enough to drive?” Logan asked as they watched Lola speed away.
Sky lifted her shoulders. “She can’t see the numbers on the speedometer. But then again, she can’t see the numbers on the road signs either, so it’s just as well.”
Logan shook his head and called Arnie, who was sniffing around in the yard. “Come on, boy. Let’s go home.”
Arnie ran to them—and climbed the porch steps. Then he jumped down and climbed them again, barking for attention and looking at them smugly.
“The rascal is trying to impress you,” Logan said, opening the front door. “Okay, show-off, let’s see if you can climb all eighteen steps to the second floor.”
As if he’d understood the challenge, Arnie ran inside. Last time his resolution had faltered halfway up. Not now. Now he managed the stairs all on his own. A bit shaky in the last stretch, but he succeeded. He trotted down, looking so happy and pleased with himself, Sky’s heart swelled. She went on her knees and embraced her beloved beast.
“Seems it will stick,” Logan said, petting Arnie’s head. “Thank fucking God we can stop giving him those treats. Cows have nothing on him. He’s solely responsible for Minnesota’s net methane emissions.”
“You did this. Thank you for not giving up on him.”
“Well, we don’t give up on the people we love, no matter what, right? That’s your mantra.”
The words clenched in Sky’s chest. “Not really,” she whispered, turning around. She sat on the sofa. Got up again.
“What?”
“I abandoned my mother. I’m a hypocrite.” She tried very hard to steady her voice, but she didn’t succeed. It broke. “I totally gave up on her. More than that—I bitched at her and criticized her. Accused her of not trying. I couldn’t stand to look at her. So eventually I didn’t. I stayed away as much as I could during her last years. I was fresh out of compassion and deep into rage territory. She disgusted me. I yelled and screamed, but I didn’t get a reaction.” Fat tears were rolling down her face. “There was always that sadness in her eyes, Logan. Despair. She was defeated and trapped. Lost. And I was unable to find it in me to accept her and help her without judging her.”
He gathered her in his arms. “I’m sorry, baby.”<
br />
She’d love to say she had tried her best, but she hadn’t. She’d run away and stayed away because she couldn’t watch her mother decay any longer. Impotence had turned into fury and disdain.
“I tried to fix her for so many years. Make things better for her, get her back to the land of the living. But I couldn’t snap her out of it. It made me so angry. At the end, her physical state caught up with her mental one. She had the beginnings of renal failure, diabetes, and osteoporosis. She had no muscle mass whatsoever, and her pulmonary capacity was very reduced. She only ate, slept, and watched TV. Her teeth were all but gone, and she was wearing diapers because she wasn’t fast enough to make it to the bathroom. Barely sixty, Logan.”
“You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, Butterfly.”
She looked up and wiped her tears with the palm of her hand. “So I’ve heard. How much of that statement is true, and how much is letting yourself off the hook?” She didn’t know anymore. “Lola handled it much better than I did. With acceptance. She came to visit as often as she could. She would wash my mother’s hair and dye it. Give her a salon day, so to speak, even if Mom stayed in her pajamas. Lola treated her like a human being. It was hard for her to watch Mom in that state, but she did the best she could for my mother. I didn’t.”
“So when Arnie came to you with baggage…”
“There was no way in hell I was going to give up on him, whether he got over his shit or not.” After her mother died, it had taken months for Sky to see clearly past the pain and hurt. When she did, the horror of her behavior had hit her like a ton of bricks. How little compassion she’d shown. How intolerant she’d been.
“That’s why accepting Arnie’s weaknesses and helping him are so important?”
She nodded, new tears rolling down. “I abandoned my mom, but I’ll be damned if I abandon him. Even if tomorrow he forgets how to climb stairs and I have to frigging carry him everywhere for the rest of my life, I will. I’m not giving up on him. On anybody, ever again.”
Logan tucked her hair behind her ears and kissed her. “I know, babe. That’s why you weren’t trying to teach him. He’s your penance.”
“Love should be unconditional. I learned the hard way. When it was too late.”
“He’s very lucky to have you.”
Sky glanced at her dog, sitting by her feet. Looking worried and distressed as he always did when she cried. She petted his head reassuringly. “He sometimes disagrees.”
Logan chuckled. “He gets frustrated, but he’d go to hell and back for you. I know the feeling.”
“You do?”
“Sure. I get frustrated with you all the time.”
Even in this situation, Logan managed to make her smile. “Not that. I mean the going to hell and back part.”
He nodded.
Sky couldn’t move her gaze away from him. Those gorgeous eyes, that rough face. Jesus, she loved this man so much. He meant the world to her.
“Having your sister around was fun, but I’m glad she’s gone,” he said. “Not being able to make love to my woman in my own house... Don’t misunderstand me. Fucking you in the bathroom, with the shower on full force to muffle your moans—that blew me away. But I like hearing you scream.”
His woman. She loved the sound of that too. “Make me scream now,” she whispered.
“My pleasure.” Whistling, Logan turned to Arnie and motioned toward the kitchen. Arnie huffed but obeyed, leaving them alone.
“That’s impressive, Alchemist.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Her man was macho tripping again. Good.
Chapter 20
New York, three days later…
“So what do you think?” Sky asked after sipping from her cocktail. “Do you like your beer? They brew it here, in Brooklyn. Everything is locally sourced. The chili peppers too.”
The beer was awful. If the brewer was the same guy who’d served it, the one with a weird knot in his hair, a greased Dali-style moustache, and suspenders, it was no wonder. Making something look old didn’t mean it was good. Sometimes it was just plain crap.
Arriving in New York that morning, they’d spent most of their time in Manhattan, where Sky obviously felt most comfortable. Then they’d been summoned by her sister to East Harlem, or El Barrio, as Lola called it. Logan must have passed whatever test that had been, because he’d made it out of Lola’s flat alive and in one piece.
At the moment they were in Brooklyn—hipster hell or heaven, depending on your perspective. Now he knew what she had meant when she said that people in NoName were a shaggy, impoverished version of hipsters. He wasn’t too convinced; he’d seen extremely old-fashioned haircuts on horribly dressed men tapping on typewriters in the parks. How they dragged around those heavy-as-fuck, impractical machines that made the Enigma decoder look like an iPad was a mystery. One of the EMP preppers had the same model, and it required three men to move it from his car to the compound.
“Where to now?” Logan asked.
Sky in her world was a sight to behold. She was like a kid in a candy store—running from place to place, high on sugar, unable to decide what to eat next, and stuffing all of it in her mouth at once.
“We need to head back to Manhattan, base of corporate fashion,” she declared. “To the department store where I used to work. There’s something I have to discuss with my former boss.”
“What?”
“Nothing important. Just taking care of some loose ends I left when I quit.”
She was lying again. She’d been doing quite a lot of that lately, being withdrawn and secretive, but he let it slide. Which irritated the living crap out of him, really.
Logan had always been a straightforward guy. Deception was just delaying pain, and he had no use for that. Better to get it over with, whatever it was. Now he was too afraid of what he’d find if he forced her to open that door.
He paid their tab—an exorbitant one for a shitty “artisanal” beer, a cocktail, and a couple of stuffed, locally sourced chili peppers, probably grown in goat shit on the roof of some building. Then they left the beer hall or bodega or whatever hipsters called a plain and simple bar.
They took the subway, trying to navigate the mass of people hurrying around.
“You don’t like it here, do you?” she asked, probably catching his frown.
“Not particularly, no. Too many people, too impersonal. Even the boroughs have something fake about them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Who the fuck needs suspenders when his pants are that tight? Or a long mustache he has to roll in grease every five minutes to make it stay in place?”
“Still hung up on the brewer?” She smirked. “It’s just fashion. A statement. They’re into noncorporate entrepreneurial practices. You preppers should value that. There’s no one more alternative than you.”
“It’s fake. There’s more ‘real’ on Main Street in my prepper land than in all your Brooklyn.”
“The Whyte’s sea views were real.”
“Right,” he grunted. “The price tag on them and that ice cream they served us were quite real too. I think the bill equaled Minnesota’s budget for a month.”
Sky laughed. “You’re exaggerating.”
“Exaggerating? I went to the men’s room and they charged me separately for the toilet paper. I think they charged me for the water I flushed with too.”
She laughed some more. God, he loved seeing her laugh. The way she squeezed his hand and leaned on his shoulder, or threw her head back when she really let it rip. He’d follow her to the ends of the earth if that meant keeping her by his side, laughing or frowning. Hell, even yelling. It didn’t matter.
“Don’t undervalue toilet paper, Alchemist,” she said as they hit the street again. “It’s the number one prepper necessity.”
True. Nothing like having to wipe your ass with leaves to make you hate the apocalypse.
They walked for a couple of block
s before she stopped. “Here it is,” she said, motioning toward a famous department store. “Base of New York corporate fashion and my home away from home for the past four years.”
They stepped into an elevator marked for personnel only. “So this is where you worked,” Logan said, looking around as the doors opened. They were on the top floor. Gowns and couture were displayed all over. Every big name was represented.
“Yes.” She pointed at an office at the far end, decorated all in glass. A skeleton of a woman, wearing a black power suit, was sitting in a transparent chair. “That’s Doreen, my ex-boss.”
“You want me to wait for you?”
“I don’t know how long it will take. I have an appointment, but she’ll make me wait, just on principle.”
Of course. One needed to show who was in charge. Logan remembered that very well from his corporate life. He shrugged. “I’m not in a hurry. I can use the time to check my notes for the award gala.”
“Not too keen on that either, are you?’” she asked, reading his expression perfectly.
“I’ll survive.”
“Indeed you will. I’ll make sure of it.” She kissed him and shooed him away. “Go. Enjoy the city. See you back at the hotel.”
“I think I haven’t understood you,” Doreen said, pursing her meticulously Botoxed lips. “When you contacted me to arrange a meeting and said you were calling in all favors, I assumed you wanted to beg for your old job back. Or for me to put a good word in with the store in France. After you wasted my previous efforts, I might add. This request is a surprise.”
“Yes. I guess it is.” Sky glanced around. Doreen’s office hadn’t changed a bit. Correction: it had in one respect. There was no Sky running errands up and down. In her place was another eager girl whom Sky didn’t envy in the least.
“If I do this for you, we are even, Sky. Do you understand what that means?”
“Perfectly.”
Doreen intertwined her fingers. “Tiallino’s wedding dress was the jewel of Bridal Fashion Week. What makes you think I can get that dress? You know very well that runway gowns have a long life. Trade shows, trunk shows, editorials, advertising… By now, those pieces have been sent out to magazines all over the world.”
