Lost Ones

by Nicole French

  Shit. This is not good. Mr. Pineo is the old-as-fuck Italian who owns my mother’s building. To be real, the dude’s a slumlord and was probably mixed up with the mob back in the day. Now he’s just a grouchy old man who takes a wad of cash each week from his tenants in exchange for cheap apartments that wouldn’t have a chance in hell at meeting New York City housing standards.

  But the neighborhood is changing. Hell’s Kitchen isn’t crime central the way it was when I was a kid. More and more of the buildings are being bought by developers interested in building skyscrapers for the Wall Street hacks to live in. One of these days, Mr. Pineo will decide he can make more money without collecting cheap rents, and my mother, along with the rest of his tenants who may or may not be there legally, will be shit out of luck.

  Immigration pokes around the building every now and then because it’s full of people who speak English with an accent, but they rarely get anyone because most of the building is from Puerto Rico, which means they are all citizens. My mom, even though she’s from San Juan too, is a different case. Smuggled to Puerto Rico as a baby from Cuba, she looks like a Puerto Rican and talks like a Puerto Rican. It’s the only culture she’s ever known. But to the U.S. government, she’s as Cuban as they come and here without their permission.

  Mr. Ramirez was a newer neighbor, one from Ecuador. I don’t know if he knows about my mom, but I don’t want to wait to find out.

  “Have Ma stay uptown for a while,” I say. “You or Maggie can stay in the Kitchen. Just until you know ICE isn’t poking their nose around anymore, and you find out more about Pineo’s plans. Maggie would probably appreciate the extra space.”

  Gabe exhales loudly. “Fuck that. I’m taking the apartment for myself. Ma can come help with Allie. That kid never stops crying, and I’m going to need to study!”

  I chuckle. “You just gotta find her Dora the Explorer. She has that, she never cries.”

  “Dora the Explorer,” Gabe says, like he’s writing it down. “Got it.”

  “Anything else? You need money? For food, utilities, school supplies, whatever?”

  “We’re good, man,” Gabe says. “Your last check came two days ago, and I just got a job on campus so you won’t have to pay for everything, okay? We’re fine.”

  “Everyone else good? You hear from Flaco––”

  “Nico, we’re fine,” Gabe says. Then he pauses. “Just check your mailbox.” Then, with a quick goodbye, he hangs up.

  The rest of the night is slow. Labor Day weekend, said the manager. Most people are out of town for the long weekend, partying it up in Vegas or getting out of the city. I wouldn’t mind camping on the beach or something like that. Not that I ever have before, but something tells me I’d like it. Especially if I was with the right person.

  Her face pops up again, like clockwork. Whenever I start daydreaming, there she is.

  This time, I don’t even fight it. I pull out my phone and text her again. I haven’t stopped in the last week. She won’t take my calls, but sometimes she’ll respond to my texts. K.C. thinks I’m crazy for caring so much––why should it matter if a girl three thousand miles away hates me or not? But I do care. I’ll always care what Layla Barros thinks about me.

  ME: hows the night? its nine oclock and im already bored as fuck. LA ppl suck.

  It doesn’t take long to get a response. I nod to myself. A good sign. Sometimes she doesn’t answer at all.

  LAYLA: Im out w the girls. yeah, LA ppl do suck.

  It’s not an overt insult, but I’m pretty sure that’s for me. Or maybe Jessie. Or maybe us both. Well, she’s allowed a pot shot or two after what happened. I just want to keep her talking.

  ME: Hot night? Send me a pic.

  It’s a long shot, I know, not to mention torture. I know what kinds of Band-Aids Layla tries to pass as clothing when she and her friends go out. She’s probably looking at the message right now thinking, what the fuck is this guy’s problem?

  I hope she asks. I hope I can tell her that my problem is her. That she needs to get her ass on a plane so we can finish what we started.

  My phone buzzes, and I flip it open with surprise. It’s a picture, probably taken by one of her friends, grainy the way most cell phone pictures are. My phone barely gets them at all, and I’ll have to delete it immediately to save memory, but damn, I’m glad I asked. Layla’s tiny black dress might as well be underwear. It’s small and tight, even for her. Her hair is wavy around her shoulders. Even with the lack of focus, I can still see the tilt of her hips, the defiant posture, the eyes that stare a hole through me.

  My baby is mad. And she wants to show me what I’m missing. Well, message fuckin’ received. She wants to play games, I’m up for that. It’s better than the silent treatment.

  ME: u wanna take that off and show me what else im missing?

  Not my finest, I know. But the green-eyed monster showed its face for a moment, and suddenly I’m not feeling like such a “nice guy” anymore.

  It backfires, though, because she doesn’t text back. Two hours later, my phone buzzes in my pocket again. I open it up to find another picture from Layla. I check my watch––it’s close to 3:00 a.m. New York time. I don’t know why she’d be texting me now unless it was to––

  I can’t even finish my thought. The picture is grainy and kind of out of focus, but I’d know those shoulders, that hair, that ass anywhere. There’s Layla, wrapped like a vine around some dude in the middle of what looks like a crowded dance floor. His hands are hovering just over that part of her body I’d secretly love to have tattooed with: “Property of Nico fuckin’ Soltero, so step the fuck off.” Her hands are shoved into this creep’s hair, and he’s staring at her neck like she’s a piece of meat he’s going to bite into. It takes me a solid ten minutes to realize there’s a caption. A fuckin’ nasty one too.

  LAYLA: This is what you’re missing. So you can fuck off.

  I swear. In Spanish. In the dirtiest phrases I can think of, ones I couldn’t translate if I tried. Because when I see this picture, I am barely literate. It takes everything I have not to hurl my phone on the ground and kick the shit out of it.

  And it takes hours––many of them––for it to occur to me that the text wasn’t written in the usual shorthand that Layla uses when she texts. That maybe she wasn’t the one who sent it. All I can see is some bloodsucking motherfucker about to kiss my girl. And my girl is going to kiss him back.

  ~

  It’s almost four when I unlock the door to my apartment. It’s not until I’ve taken off my shoes and tossed my jacket over the back of the couch that I realize my bedroom light is on.

  I push open the door. My room looks the same as always: simple, with a twin bed in one corner and my clothes hanging from a rack, since it doesn’t actually have a closet, a ratty armchair in one corner, and a small desk pushed under a window. The only difference is Jessie.

  Things have been weird between us. I still haven’t forgiven her for fucking up things between Layla and me, and she’s done a pretty good job of staying out of my way. Which is why it’s strange to find her sitting cross-legged on my bed like a fairy, paging through my sketchbook.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Jessie starts and looks up. She’s dressed like she was just out, in a skin-tight dress that’s basically a shirt because of the way she’s sitting. I can see her red underwear. It has white hearts on it. Her makeup is smudged a little under her eyes, and her blonde hair, which is usually all done up, is stringy and messy over her shoulders.

  “This is that girl,” she says with a slight slur.

  I frown and walk in, pulling off my tie in the process. “What are you doing in my room?”

  “This is that girl from the beach,” Jessie replies as she gets up from the bed. Damn, she’s really drunk. She doesn’t even bother to pull down her skirt.

  I turn around after I toss the tie on my armchair and start undoing the button of my shirt. Jessie stands in front of me and do
esn’t even try to hide the way her eyes raze up and down my body.

  I take the open sketchbook out of her hands, close it, and put it on top of my dresser. “You’re toasted, Jess. Go to bed.”

  “I’m not drunk,” Jessie says. “I was. But I’m not anymore.”

  “Don’t you have an audition tomorrow?” I take off my shirt and toss it on the chair too. I’m grabbing a t-shirt out of my dresser when I feel a set of cold hands sliding around my waist from behind.

  “Mmmm,” Jessie hums as she presses her face into my back. “I swear, you just get hotter every day, babe. It’s not fair.”

  I take her hands, which are knotted around my stomach, and push them away. “Jess. What are you doing?”

  She pulls back with a pout, and I put on my shirt. I’m not in the mood to be ogled like a piece of fuckin’ meat.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” she says snottily when I turn around. “I’m doing the same fucking thing we’ve been doing for months. You never say no to me. Then Baby Spice shows up on the beach all of a sudden, and now you’re a Boy Scout. What gives?”

  I’m about to open my mouth to tell her she better keep Layla’s name out of hers when I catch a look at my bed behind her. In my shock at finding Jessie paging through my sketchbook, which is fuckin’ private, I hadn’t noticed the ten or so envelopes scattered all over my bedspread.

  “What the fuck is this?” I ask as I stride around Jessie and start picking everything up. “You went through my mail?” I look up, shaking the letters. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I should say the same thing,” Jessie returns, coming back to the corner of the bed. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Nico?”

  I glare at her. This is insane. I don’t want to have a fight with my roommate/fuckbuddy about her boundary issues. I just want to get some fuckin’ sleep.

  Jessie wiggles her nose like a rabbit. “I was just bringing it in to put on your desk,” she says. “I promise. But then I saw your sketchbook open on the bed. I didn’t know you could draw like that.”

  I just grip the stack of mail harder. I haven’t actually drawn much in the last few months, but when I have, it’s only been one thing. Or one person, actually.

  “There are a lot of pictures of…her,” Jessie ventures again. She pops her lower lip out in a pout I’ve seen in some of her photos. It’s a look she wants to make her “signature,” whatever the fuck that means. All I know is that she spends a lot of fuckin’ time practicing it in the bathroom.

  I frown. “Yeah. There are.”

  “I didn’t see any of me.”

  I just sift through the mail. Bill, bill, another bill. Nothing interesting. I want her to get the fuck out of my room. I want to sleep. Jerk off. Dream the dreams that are going to drive me crazy, since I know I’ll be thinking about that fucking almost-kiss all night long.

  “I also saw this.”

  Jessie flips a letter to me, one she must have been sitting on, or maybe one she’s been holding the whole time. When I see the scrawl over the front, I smirk.

  “Who’s it from?” Jessie asks as she watches me open it.

  “My little brother.”

  I tear open the envelope. I’m still curious about why the fuck Gabe would send me something.

  The reason becomes clear as I take out a wrinkled piece of paper. It’s rough, torn out of a newspaper. No note or anything––Gabe’s not the type. But the message is clear.

  “The FDNY?” Jessie scoffs next to me. “Are you kidding?”

  I give her a look. “What’s so funny?”

  “Haven’t you applied to take the exam about five times?”

  I frown. “Twice. They weren’t hiring then.”

  I look back at the clipping, which states clearly that the FDNY is holding another exam in less than two months. An open application. Anyone who’s qualified can take it.

  “Holy shit,” I mumble, flipping the page over and then back again. I know from previous attempts that this only happens maybe once every five years.

  “This is ridiculous,” Jessie says as she snatches the page away.

  “Hey!” I bark. “What the fuck!”

  But Jessie’s already crumpled up the page and tossed it in the waste bin under the desk. She turns around with a hand on her hip. She looks every inch the party girl––a little worn down from the night, but still glamorous, tan, everything most women in California try to be. You’d never know she grew up in a trailer in Nowhere, Oregon.

  “That is a waste of your time,” she says as she walks back to where I stand. “You’re here now. Not in New York. Why do you keep looking back to a place that clearly doesn’t want you? A girl who doesn’t want you. A job that doesn’t want you. Last year, you couldn’t wait to leave New York.”

  I open my mouth to argue with her, but the thing is, she’s right. New York only ever treated me like shit. I was born into a situation where people looked at me like I was nothing because of my family, my neighborhood, my skin color, the way I talked. Every time I tried to do better for myself, it just pushed me back down again. The FDNY was always a pipe dream.

  “People like you and me,” Jessie begins as she reaches a slow hand to stroke my shoulder. She traces the lines of the tattoo that snake out from underneath my right sleeve. “We have to leave the places we come from. You can’t be something in a place where you’ve only ever been nothing.”

  It’s the one thing Jessie and I do have in common––the fact that both of us came from so little. Raised in a trailer with a deadbeat father, she knows exactly what it means to need to get away from a past that pigeonholes you. She’s been running from hers her whole life.

  She draws a line down the center of my chest, scraping her fingernail up my abs, pulling the shirt with it, then back down. Her hand tugs suggestively on my belt buckle.

  “I bet I could bring you back to the here and now,” she says, stepping a little closer while her hands pull slowly at the leather.

  She gives me a little nudge, then another, until I hit my mattress and sit down on it. Without waiting for me, Jessie finishes unbuckling my pants and sinks down to the floor. And I’m not going to lie. She’s a beautiful girl, and the look of her there, on her knees for someone like me…it turns me the fuck on.

  Looks like I didn’t lose my dick after all.

  “You want this?” Jessie asks as she unzips my pants and pulls down my briefs. It’s pretty fuckin’ clear I do.

  I close my eyes as she takes me in her mouth. Like magic, a pair of sad blue eyes flash in my mind. She’s always there, lurking behind my thoughts. But then I think of that dude’s hands, grainy, but obvious, all over Layla’s ass. His tongue slipping out like a snake while he touches her body.

  I growl. Jessie, not realizing why, releases me and smiles.

  “I guess that’s a yes,” she says haughtily.

  I glare at her and wrap her ponytail around my fist so she has to look at me.

  “It’s just sex,” I state clearly. “That’s all. And when you’re done, it’s back to your own room.”

  Jessie gulps, but her brown eyes gleam. She nods.

  “It’s just sex,” she repeats. “Fine.”

  She bends back to her work, taking me further while I rock my hips forward. Maybe it makes me an asshole, but I need this. I need the control. I need the release. I need to feel like I’m not being played from three thousand miles away.

  But every time I close my eyes, the hair wound around my hand is black, not blonde. And the eyes that look up at me from that vulnerable position are a bright, all-seeing blue. Eyes that know the truth that echoes through my soul.

  I slam my hand on the wall above Jessie’s head with a force that makes her jerk. You’re mine, those eyes say. And the fuck if it’s not true.

  ~

  I don’t sleep. Usually I sleep like the dead, especially after a long night at the club and definitely after sex. Jessie was true to her word. She shuttled back to her room, leaving me to
lie in mine, staring at the popcorn ceiling while I wait for sleep to come.

  It doesn’t. And I know why.

  With a sigh, I roll off the bed and pad to my desk, where I sit down and reach underneath for the wastebasket. I pull out the crumpled piece of paper, open it, and smooth it out on the desktop. There’s a corny-looking dude on the front, smiling while he carries an ax. But in serious block letters, the announcement is clear: there’s an open test date for the exam.

  I pick up my phone and open my messages from Layla. Before the anger in my chest takes over, I delete the shitty picture of her in the club. She obviously didn’t take it––maybe she didn’t send it either. And I don’t want to think of her like this, angry and out of control.

  Without thinking about the fact that it’s almost 8:00 a.m. New York time, my thumbs slide over the buttons, punching out a message. It’s all I’ve thought about all night. Sometimes it feels like all I can ever think about.

  NICO: I miss u.

  I say it because I mean it. Because even though I’m angry, I know she has the right to kiss whoever the fuck she wants. Because I’m the one who left, I’m the one who shacked up with another woman. Because a part of me knows I have nothing more to lose by saying it, and if there’s any way I can keep some piece of her in my life, I’ll do whatever it takes. She’s always looked at me like she believes I can be anything. And the thing is, when she looks at me like that, I start to believe it too.

  When I’m done, I punch in the number on the flyer. I won’t be telling anyone else about this––not for a while yet. But I have to try. I’ll regret it if I don’t.

  ~

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Layla

  The tiny, inconsequential ding of my phone is a small sound, but it might as well be a knife by the way it’s stabbing through my brain.

  I am not exaggerating, I swear. My eyes open like creaky windows. Everything is foggy and out of focus. How much did I have to drink last night?

  The first, second, and third round of shots, I remember. The weird, peacock-style dancing in the middle of the club. Another three drinks. Getting way nastier than I ever intended with Intense Dude on the dance floor. Leaving the club with––