Her breath was coming in shudders, now. I frowned and released my grip on her. Suddenly, my theory about her being some man-eating New Yorker looking for fun didn’t feel right. Which only left—
Was it really possible that she was some innocent? With a face and a body like hers? What the hell had she been doing—hiding under a rock?
And it wasn’t as simple as her not liking me. She kept looking at me and then looking away. Every time she met my eyes, I could see the raw need in her; every time she looked away, she looked terrified. She was into me...but some fear she had was winning out. I was pretty sure it wasn’t me she was scared of. Who, then?
“Are you married?” I asked.
She blinked. “What? No!”
“Then what the hell is your problem?” I moved my head in closer and lowered my voice. “Lily, I want you. I want to bang seven shades of hell out of you. I want to hear you screaming my name until your goddamn throat is raw. And I’m pretty sure you want me, too, so why do you keep running away?”
She shook her head. “I can’t be with you.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“I can’t be with anyone.”
I sighed in exasperation. “Why? You promised your body to Jesus? Give me a straight answer!”
She was silent and, for a second, I thought she was going to do just that. But when she met my eyes again, I could see something there...something awful.
She was an innocent. An innocent who’d seen some seriously bad shit.
Then, before I could say something, she’d pushed me back and was running away down the street.
Goddamnit! I felt like pulling off my hat and throwing it in the dirt, but then I remembered Kirsten was still wearing it. I stalked back into the bar, horny and frustrated and in need of liquid solace.
Instantly, Kirsten was by my side, pressing her body to mine from ankle to shoulder, her ash-blonde hair brushing silkily against my neck. “City girls,” she said disparagingly.
I looked down at her lithe body and all the pleasures it offered...then grabbed my hat off her head and pushed her away. For some reason, I wasn’t in the mood anymore.
Lily
I made it to the corner before the tears started. That was the important thing—I didn’t want him to see. Once I was around the corner, I slowed down, sniffing and swallowing and trying to hold on long enough to—
There. My little red Toyota, just about the dullest, least conspicuous car you can buy. Exactly what you want, when you’re trying to keep a low profile. And exactly the safe place I needed, right now. I needed to calm the fuck down, if I didn’t want all the memories to start welling up.
I slumped into the driver’s seat but didn’t start the engine. I sat there with my face in my hands, the hot tears filling my eyes. How could I have been so stupid?
I’d nearly kissed him. When he’d gathered me up into his arms, it had been like every teenage dream I’d ever had. A big strong man, ready to save me from whatever the world threw at me. It had felt so good.
Except no one can save me. There’s no escape from the sort of prison I’m in and, if I got involved with him, I could get him killed. Just like—
No.
I squeezed my eyes shut tight, willing it not to happen. But the memories were already stirring, monsters awakening from their sleep.
Two Years Earlier
Other kids drew their mom and dad as stick figures with sunburst hair and big, happy smiles. My teachers used to ask me why mine were different each time I drew them: sometimes princesses and sometimes astronauts and sometimes with useful tentacles. I explained that I didn’t know what my mom and dad looked like because they’d gone to the angels when I was just a baby.
So they told me I should draw my Uncle Erico, instead. The man who’d raised me since they died.
You think you know where this story is going, but you don’t. Uncle Erico never touched me. His was a different sort of evil.
I understood from an early age that my family was Italian-American. But I didn’t understand, at first, the things people said about us. I heard the word Don and didn’t know what it meant. I heard family used a lot, and couldn’t comprehend why that would be a bad thing. Didn’t everyone have a family?
I especially didn’t understand the way people sometimes shied away, when they saw us coming, or the way mothers wouldn’t let other children play with me. I didn’t understand why our surname—Fiorentini—was spoken with such fear. I didn’t understand what they could possibly be scared of, because we seemed so normal.
There was Uncle Erico, who acted as my dad but who didn’t really seem like one of the caring dads I saw on TV. He never seemed to have time to drop me off at music lessons or pick me up after swimming. But he did have an endless supply of friends, some of them distantly related, who scurried to do his every bidding. And I didn’t have a mom, but my uncle did have a string of ladies who lived with us for a while. They were always blonde, with big, complicated hairstyles that needed a lot of preparation, and they thought I was cute and did my nails until Uncle Erico shouted that he didn’t want Tessa growing up like you.
Oh—Tessa. That’s my real name.
I always wished the ladies would hang around because then maybe one of them would sort of morph into a mom who would teach me to bake and shop for prom dresses with me and do all that mom stuff. But inevitably, after a few months, the arguments would get louder and louder and then there’d be the sound of something shattering, suitcases would be hurled out of the front door and a tearful, cursing woman would stagger down the driveway to a cab.
I always used to side with Uncle Erico, of course. I mean, he was family and everyone was always telling me how important that was. He was the only family I had, and he’d kindly taken me in after the car crash that killed mom and dad. And he gave me so much—a nice room and a fancy house in New York with its own pool, and a cook who made all our meals. I owed him.
I heard plenty, growing up in that house. People get used to kids—they forget they’re there and say things they shouldn’t. I heard about people who needed to be taught a lesson or take a holiday or simply disappear. I knew the real meaning of all those phrases by the time I was eight.
I heard the word loyalty a lot, too. Especially when I started to leave the house by myself. But I didn’t really understand until, when I was sixteen, a female FBI agent befriended me in Starbucks. I didn’t know she was FBI, of course. I thought she was just a fellow artist, who’d seen my half-assed doodles in my sketchbook and thought they were cool. I only found out the fourth time we met, when she asked me if I had any idea what Uncle Erico did.
I went home that night and sought my uncle out in his study. He was practicing his golf putts, knocking balls into a can. When I told him about the woman—Lisa—he sat down and laid the putter across his lap, gripping it with both hands. He isn’t an especially tall man or especially wide but, somehow, facing up to him in that room, watching him grip that golf putter harder and harder, he seemed seventeen stories high.
When I’d finished, he threw down the putter and told me I’d done the right thing in telling him. I nodded, staring at the putter. He’d bent it so hard across his knee that it was twisted out of shape. I think that was the first time I was truly afraid of him.
Then he told me I would never leave the house alone again. And I never did. One of his most trusted men, a guy named Antonio—became largely responsible for me. He’d either drive me places or organize someone else to do it. He knew where I was at every second of every day. The other kids at the exclusive private school I attended thought I’d been given a bodyguard. The truth was, he was my jailer. I was too valuable, too dangerous for my uncle to ever let me go.
Antonio was about ten years older than me with blond hair and a sour face that only got sourer as the years passed. He resented the fact he had to “nursemaid the brat,” as he put it when he thought I couldn’t hear. I knew he’d hurt people. When he wasn’t watching me, he’d sometime
s go off on an errand for my uncle and return with a satisfied smile, as if that was the sort of work he really enjoyed. Sometimes, there’d be tiny flecks of blood on his shirt collar, almost invisible unless you were looking for them.
When I turned eighteen, my plans of going to Caltech were scorned. I was told I’d go to New York State, dropped off each morning outside the doors and collected again outside the same doors when my last class finished. Study dates, revision meets—all fine, as long as I could persuade people to come to my house. I rarely could, so I studied alone.
By the time I was in my junior year, my eyes had fully opened. I saw that I was trapped in a gilded cage. I saw how it was going to be, how my uncle was lining up good, clean suitors for me, men who weren’t actually related but might as well have been—men who worked for him, men he could trust. The honors degree in computer science I was working so hard for would be irrelevant—a curiosity, just like my hobby of sketching. I’d be a trophy wife.
The first time I realized it, I was physically sick. I knew I had to escape.
I had a best friend, Annette, who I’d known ever since I was a kid. A pretty girl with long, dark frizzy hair and an infectious smile. We’d gone to school together and then, when I’d been forced to attend New York State, she’d applied there as well, claiming it just happened to be the best choice for her, too. She was too close to the family for Uncle Erico to suspect anything.
So we plotted.
I had money saved—Uncle Erico gave me a generous allowance and I didn’t see the point in spending money on fancy clothes when I wasn’t going to be allowed to go to parties anyway. My only indulgence was coding and hacking, chatting away to hackers in Beirut and London and LA long into the night. And that’s cheap, as hobbies go.
Annette had bought a car for me—an old, clapped-out thing most scrap yards would reject, but it would get me into the next state. I’d be dropped off at her house by Antonio, supposedly for an evening of giggling about boys.
We’d sneak out through the window above the garage, pick up the car from where she’d parked it down the street and I’d be gone. I’d been stashing clothes and possessions for months, smuggling a skirt or a top to college in my backpack each day and giving it to her to pack for me. We thought we were so fucking clever.
We were so fucking stupid.
I showed up at her house, said hi to her parents and ran upstairs to her room. We hugged, double-checked the plan, then slipped out of the window. It took us thirty seconds to reach the car. This is it! It’s happening! I’m free!
I opened the door and the interior light came on. Antonio turned to me from the driver’s seat and smiled a smile that had absolutely no warmth. A smile that said he was finally going to get his revenge on me for all those years spent nursemaiding me.
“Get in the car,” he told us. “Both of you.”
He drove us back to my house. Annette was shaking and sobbing in the back seat, but there was nothing I could do. When she tried to dial her parents on her cell phone, Antonio snatched it out of her hand. And because we’d oh-so-carefully instructed her parents not to disturb us—we had boys to giggle about—no one would miss us for hours.
When Antonio pulled up outside our house, three of my uncle’s men were waiting to hustle us out of the car and into the living room. Standing in the middle of the room was my uncle, his face dark with fury. I realized the blinds were all drawn and the TV was turned up loud. That’s when I started to get really, really scared.
There was a kitchen chair next to my uncle and the men pushed Annette down into it. One of the men stood on either side of her with their hands on her shoulders, to keep her in place. I was pushed into an easy chair across the room from her.
“How dare you?” Uncle Erico spat. “How fucking dare you?”
Annette and I stared at each other, eyes huge. She looked like I felt: pale and shaky, ready to throw up from fear.
“I’m really, really sorry,” I said. “I’m really, really sorry.” I kept saying it, repeating it like a litany.
“You want to get involved with our family?” Uncle Erico asked Annette. I’d never heard his voice so cold. “Congratulations, you’re fucking involved.”
“I wouldn’t have talked to anyone!” I yelled. “I wouldn’t have gone to the FBI! Ever! I just wanted to get out!”
Uncle Erico snapped his head around to look at me. “You will never, ever leave your family behind,” he told me. Then he squeezed Annette’s cheeks until her jaw was forced to open.
And he popped the first pill inside.
Antonio had a cardboard pill carton and was systematically popping pills out of the foil and making a pile in his hand. I read the carton and the name printed on the side and felt sick. Annette’s mother’s sleeping pills.
Uncle Erico shoved another pill into Annette’s mouth. Another. Another. Annette was sobbing, mascara running down her face. She was too scared to spit the pills back out and I could see them rolling around her dry mouth.
“Please,” I sobbed. “Please stop.”
“You need to learn, Tessa,” my uncle snapped. “This is what happens when you get involved with outsiders.”
My uncle took a bottle of water and upended it into Annette’s mouth. She thrashed and struggled but, with two men holding her down, she had no hope. I saw her throat bulge and swallow.
And Antonio handed Uncle Erico the next mouthful of pills.
“Stop!” I yelled hysterically, tears coursing down my cheeks. I still thought, at that point, that it was just going to be a warning, that he’d stop before he’d done more than knock her out for a while. “Please! I’ll stay. I promise, I’ll stay. I’ll never leave.”
Uncle Erico looked over his shoulder at me. “You’re goddamn right you won’t,” he whispered. And stuffed another six pills into my best friend’s mouth.
Annette was kicking and thrashing, now. She knew what was being done to her and she knew she was powerless to stop it happening. It must have been like drowning in slow motion, feeling pill after pill slide down her throat, knowing what they’d do to her. I can’t imagine anything worse, except maybe watching it happen.
Uncle Erico kept going until the pills were all gone. His men kept holding Annette down until they took effect. That was the worst part—sitting there, staring at each other, feeling the seconds tick away, knowing that if she could only stumble to a toilet and make herself sick, she might still be okay. A couple of times, she whipped a hand up to her mouth and tried to shove fingers down her throat, but my uncle’s men always caught her in time, gently but firmly holding her wrists.
I saw her head start to nod and her eyelids slide down. She fought it as long as she could, sobbing for mercy, pleading with them. And, when that didn’t work, pleading with me.
And finally, just before she went to sleep, she half-opened her eyes and looked right at me. A look that I’ll never forget, one of pure hatred and anger and shattered loyalty. Her eyes asked me, why?!
And then I watched her die.
Uncle Erico explained what would happen if I ever tried anything like this again. Anyone who helped me would get the same treatment.
He made me help his men carry Annette out to some woods near her house and lay her body on the ground, along with the empty sleeping pills box from her mother’s medicine cabinet. Antonio must have sneaked in and stolen them earlier that day, when Annette’s parents were at work. My uncle had known about our plan the whole goddamn time.
I had to sneak back into Annette’s house and then come happily down the stairs and tell her parents that Annette had dozed off upstairs and that they probably shouldn’t wake her. Then I went home and cried my heart out.
The next morning, Annette’s parents found that she wasn’t home and that her bed hadn’t been slept in. The police were called. I was summoned.
I’m sorry, I told them. Annette asked me to cover for her. She slipped out the window—said she needed some time alone. No, I don’t know where she went
. I’m sorry I lied.
Then Annette’s mother discovered the missing sleeping pills and the search turned frantic. They found her body in the woods, cold and alone and without a friend in the world.
I had to pretend she’d been depressed. I had to stand there and take it as her mother sobbed and screamed and cursed at me, demanding to know how I could be such a terrible friend. There was free counseling at our college for her friends and our parents were told to put us all on suicide watch.
No problem, Uncle Erico told the college. I’ll keep a real close eye on her. He even came to the funeral, clasping Annette’s mother’s hand and telling her how awful it all was. She blamed herself, of course, because they’d been her sleeping pills.
I couldn’t even look her in the eye. She’d been right—I was a terrible friend.
Uncle Erico thought he’d broken me. I did everything I was asked without complaint or hesitation. I went to college every day like a good girl and was driven home every night by Antonio. I never left the house without an escort.
But I hadn’t given up. I’d simply made a decision. I was going to escape, but this time I wasn’t going to bring anyone else into my problem. I was going to do it all on my own and, if I failed, I’d be the only one who suffered.
At college, I slept, dozing off in a quiet corner of the library. My grades plummeted. In my room at night, I returned to hacking and coding with a vengeance, learning everything I could. This time, I wasn’t exploring aimlessly; this time, I had a purpose.
I was learning everything I could about government databases and forgery. I was going to create a new identity for myself.
I learned about where in China makes the best fake holograms and how to trick the DMV database into thinking you’re an engineer running tests. I struck up relationships with people who could help me—hackers and forgers and low-paid clerks in government departments. I switched some of my college classes to arts so that I had an excuse to spend hundreds of dollars on plastics and paper. My uncle didn’t care about that or my falling grades—when I was married off, I wouldn’t need a college degree anyway.
Texas Kissing Page 4
