Healey laughed out loud. He couldn’t help it. That was not the worst thing that’d happened that night. He had to say it. “You broke a hell of a lot more than my phone.”
Ford stood abruptly, folding thin arms over his chest. “I said I was sorry.”
“No. I’m sorry. Sit down.”
“I broke your arm. I know that. I just—”
“You broke my trust.” Healey gritted his teeth. “You broke my heart.”
“Not your heart,” Ford said woodenly. “That was never really mine.”
Healey winced. “Where the hell did the gun come from?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about that.”
Visceral, painful emotion always welled up around that fucking gun. Healey’s throat tightened just thinking about it. “That was—”
“A deal breaker. I know.”
“That was more than a— You— I—” Healey swallowed and tried again. “The pain is gone. But I relive that fucking gun every time I close my eyes.”
“Shut up.” Ford stepped away to pace back and forth between the posts holding up sections of the glass wall. “I knew. I knew you’d never forgive me for that. Never in a million years.”
“Is that why you did it?”
“I have no idea why.” Ford turned to him, mouth half open. Maybe it was surprise, or maybe he had a song stuck in his head.
“I guess it doesn’t really matter now.”
Ford dropped his arms, suddenly, and turned, holding out his hand for a single, awful second. Healey flinched, expecting to see a gun. His heart practically exploded. He tried not to let it show, but he was pretty sure his pulse was rattling like a pressure-cooker top and Ford could see it in his throat.
Fucking nonsense. He blew out a deep breath.
“Good-bye, Healey.” Ford waited to shake his hand.
That was a fucking test and you failed.
Healey’s heart broke all over again, and he stayed where he was. “Good-bye, Ford.”
Without looking back, Ford entered a code on the keypad. He left Healey standing outside, waiting awkwardly for security to notice him there and come let him in.
Fucking Ford. Always had to have the last word, even if it wasn’t a fucking word at all. Healey waved his arm toward the camera. He wanted to go back to Bluewater Bay. He wanted to go—
Wait. Not home.
Healey wanted to go wherever Diego was going.
The sleek black SUV pulled up in front of the facility. Cameron got out and opened the door for Healey. Diego waited inside with a bottled water for him.
“It’s official. I’m a luxury whore.” Healey cracked open his water. “Didn’t take long for me to abandon my principles, did it?”
“You had principles?”
“At school,” Healey said lightly.
“I’m not used to luxury, believe me.” Diego picked up a water, then slapped it back into his cup holder. “I didn’t grow up with this, you know.”
“I know.” Healey wondered at the heat in Diego’s voice.
“I was embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan. We didn’t have executive cars there.” Diego picked up his backpack and dug through it. When he found his phone, he thumbed at it for a bit, and then handed it over. “Look. Those are some of the places we called home for months at a time.”
Healey looked through picture after picture. Crowded military encampments, soldiers sleeping on mats on dirt floors, men and women digging shitholes with grim affability, convoys of Humvees traveling over endless roads—rutted and pockmarked with potholes and burn marks and shrapnel.
“Wow.”
“Just saying . . . it hasn’t been all private jets with me.”
Healey met Diego’s gaze. Where was the resentment coming from? He smoothed Diego’s frown lines with his thumb.
“Are you okay?”
With a huff, Diego glanced toward his window. “LA makes me itchy.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Healey asked. “You didn’t have to come.”
“I miss Cecil.” Diego keep his face averted. “It was a free ride. What can I say?”
Happiness blossomed under Healey’s ribs. “You can say whatever. But I know you’re only here because I—I needed you to be here. If it’s weak to say that—”
“It’s not.” Diego turned back. “But I think there are things I need too, so maybe you can help me out with that? Cecil and his fiancée, Rachel, are going to want to know what I’ve been doing about my mother’s papers and photographs, and I’m not sure what to tell them.”
“What do they want?”
“We’re supposed to be working on some projects together.” He pursed his lips. “I’m creating a short documentary.”
“Your mother was a photographer?”
“She did everything. Painting, sculpture. Graffiti.” Diego let his head fall against the seat cushions. “But if you want to get the real picture of my mom, you have to talk to her students.”
“She was a teacher.” Healey could see that.
“And a mentor.”
“You have pictures of her work?”
Diego’s lips twitched. “Google Gabriella Maria Montenegro Luz.”
Healey did, and as he scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, he was drawn in by playful colors, joyful people. Light that felt like it pierced your heart.
“Those are gorgeous.”
“Here. These are my favorites.” Diego took Healey’s phone and brought up a recent image gallery from one of his mother’s last shows. “Mami went through a fascination with doorways just before she passed. Her final works were little jewels.”
Healey studied them, miniatures featuring vibrantly colorful doors, cracked open just enough to reveal vividly imagined slices of magical worlds beyond. “How come you don’t have one of your mother’s paintings hanging in your house?”
“I don’t know.” Lips pressed into a tight line, Diego shook his head. “It hurts.”
The words went straight to Healey’s heart. “You have lots of photographs of your mother.”
“The public Gabbi Luz and my mother were two very different people.”
“Tell me something about her?”
“You really want to know?” he asked. “Or is this about making conversation?”
“Of course I want to know.” He fussed with his window shade. “Only I don’t want to pry.”
“My mami was born in LA, but her parents got deported after her dad got busted for a DUI. She was about three then, maybe? Her father had a legit work visa, but it had expired. That’s how most illegals get here, by the way. They don’t all crawl through some tunnel, and a wall’s not going to stop them.”
“But being born here,” Healey asked. “That makes your mother a US citizen, doesn’t it?”
Diego’s hard expression said he’d been asked this before. “Yes.”
“So when did she come back?”
“She got pregnant with me at fifteen. I guess she talked an old dude into smuggling her into the USA in the trunk of his car. Everything was easier before 9/11.”
“Wait—” Healey allowed the reality of that to set in. He did the math. Fifteen. Pregnant. Alone in a new city—a new country. “Why the hell—”
“Her parents wanted her to get rid of it—me, I guess,” he corrected. “She supposedly told some guy her sob story, and he agreed to help. Maybe that’s the sanitized version. One time, I overheard her say the dude who brought her across the border was the frat rat who got her pregnant.”
“God.” Shelby was older than that.
“She was tough. Smart. Didn’t take shit from anyone. Or she did, but she kept this”—his gaze drifted to a point over Healey’s shoulder—“ledger in her head. Wrongs got righted. She didn’t always move in a straight line, but she expected justice when people hurt her.”
Diego picked up his phone and thumbed through his image files. “Here.” He pulled up a painting that could only be about his accident. She’d re-imagined the crash in he
r trademark bright colors. The mountain bike, Diego, and his wheelchair, all flying across a cloudless blue sky—flung there from some invisible point of impact. They were being watched over by stylized brown angel, holding an extra pair of wings . . .
“Holy cow.”
“That’s Mami for you. She had really unfortunate expressionist tendencies.”
“No wonder you’re superstitious as all hell.”
Diego gave him a shove. “Wait till you get your nipples pierced. I am going to give you such a pinch.” He sat back and gave his chest a light tap. “I feel my mother here. She’s on my mind. Looking over my shoulder. She’s talking to me all the time. I don’t care whether you believe. I believe.”
Healey watched as one after another light cycle passed without more than a single car making it across the intersection. Part of his brain was caught up with traffic solutions, while the other came to a screeching halt with a single, sudden thought. “You want to know the truth?”
“Sure.” That sigh. Maybe he’d stretched Diego’s patience a little thin, what with the science and the five senses and the teasing about superstition.
“It’s only sour grapes that make these things so hard for me to believe. I can’t remember what my mother looks like. I can’t remember her voice. And I wish I could.”
Diego’s face fell. “I’m so sorry.”
“What will it take for you to write that book? Is there anything I can do to help?”
“What do you mean?”
“It makes sense to go backward sometimes. I went home after my accident. I went to ground in the last place where I felt safe.”
“I can relate to that.”
“But didn’t you do the opposite?” Healey preempted the argument he saw building in Diego’s eyes. “No. Hear me out.”
Terse nod.
“Didn’t you do exactly the opposite? Didn’t you leave the place where you grew up? Your family is here in Los Angeles. All your touchstones are here. They must be. You put the photographs you’re talking about in a room you couldn’t even reach—”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I have doctors for it—”
“It was an observation,” Healey admitted. “I can’t go anywhere with it. It’s not really any of my business.”
This time it was Diego’s turn to frown. Neither of them spoke for a while. Not until Healey saw the low curtain of clouds meet the blue-green water of the Pacific ocean in the distance.
Diego leaned forward to speak to the driver. “Could you pull into the parking lot of Gladstones for me?”
Healey glanced at him with some surprise. “Are we making an unscheduled seafood stop?”
“Didn’t you read your texts? We’re meeting Rachel and Cecil here for dinner later. I’d like to talk for a few minutes first. Do you mind?”
Something in Diego’s manner worried Healey. Cameron pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot, curved around, and parked. While they watched, he stopped by the kiosk to talk to the parking lot attendant. Healey got out and waited for Diego.
In the background, surf rushed against the cliffs. Gulls wheeled overhead. If Healey closed his eyes, he could almost feel sand between his toes.
Was this the point at which Diego was going to say they came from different worlds? That they wanted different things?
Diego stared out over the railing. “I was trying to bury the past.”
Healey nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“And you just kept picking and picking at it—”
“I literally dragged it out of your attic,” Healey supplied. “But you never really wanted to forget.”
“No,” Diego admitted. “The past is part of the story. You can’t just start anywhere you want, you know?”
“I know.” Healey’s heart sank.
“I need to go back all the way. Not just to my beginnings, but to my mother’s. I need to find out who my mother really was. I need to help Cecil and Rachel honor her memory. Can you understand that?”
Healey heard the words but didn’t quite comprehend what they meant. They’d come to Los Angeles in order for Healey to get closure with Ford. Whatever happened after, whatever those dickheads and their lawyers threw at him, whatever Cecil said, whatever happened in court, he now understood that what he’d really come for was to end things with Ford so he could start something with Diego.
It looked like Diego wanted time, as well. It sounded like he was asking for the chance to put his past behind him before starting his future too.
Healey could hardly blame him for that. “I understand.”
But where did that leave them?
“My mother’s life, her ‘journey’ for lack of a better word, is topical right now.”
“I’ll say.” With anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise all over the world—even in the so-called American melting pot—it could hardly be more topical.
“I’m torn.” Diego glanced up at him, and then back toward the ocean. “I could cobble together a nice presentation of pictures and art, and call it done. But there’s a longer, deeper story there. A good story. And I want to tell it from start to finish. It’s a much bigger project than anyone anticipates. A novel. A full-length documentary. I’d need to crowdfund it. I’d need—”
“How can I help?” Healey’s heart filled with unexpected things. Admiration, chief among them. If Diego wanted to dig deep into his mother’s past, if he was willing to face his own past with that kind of unflinching courage, Healey wanted to help.
“God. You are so—” Diego broke off with a laugh.
“What?”
“This shit terrifies me. How can you always be all like, ‘Allons-y, Alonso! Mush. Let’s go.’ You’re always ready to lead the charge, so confident. So—”
“I’m privileged.” Healey nudged Diego when he glanced away. “Don’t say you weren’t thinking it.”
Diego nodded. “I wasn’t.”
“Like hell.”
Diego grunted. “A’ight.”
“Because it’s true. I mean, I’d be crazy to think otherwise. Shelby pointed out a long time ago that, despite being in the queer minority, I’m able and male and white. I might feel isolated or oppressed because back in the day I couldn’t marry or serve in the military. But if I wanted to hide my otherness, I could do anything I choose. I could easily pass for straight. I could enjoy my privilege and suck cock too.”
Diego’s brows rose. “Your little sister said that?”
“I blame Tumblr.” Healey followed the progress of a pigeon that decided since Diego was sitting down he must have food. “But at the same time, I’m kind of awed by how painfully perceptive her observation was.”
“I want to meet her.”
“I’d love for her to meet you.” Healey’s heart was so full, he couldn’t help but smile.
Diego smiled back, and it looked dopey and totally wrong on him. And sincere.
Completely sincere.
“So . . .” Diego gave him a little pinch. “Instead of a hundred things you could say about a creative endeavor that could cost a fortune, take the better part of a year, and ultimately, be a total failure, you ask, ‘How can I help?’”
Healey resettled the pin in his hair. Charging ahead was always easier when his hair was secure.
“I’m in. What do you need me to do?”
“Just like that?” Diego asked.
“Name it.” Healey cupped Diego’s strong, solid jaw between his hands. “I’m in.”
Diego’s lips twitched with mirth, maybe. Emotion, possibly.
He didn’t answer right away, and Healey wondered how much more anticipation his heart could stand.
Diego turned and kissed the palm of Healey’s hand.
“Have you ever been to Jalisco? That’s where they make tequila.”
“Oh.” Healey pressed his forehead to Diego’s. “I like this plan already.”
Healey stepped through the French doors, leaving the heated, candlelit hous
e. Cecil’s back yard was huge. A hundred thousand fairy lights winked in the trees. A million more points of light twinkled from the city beyond. In the shadows at the far end of the property, Diego sat gazing into a koi pond. He held his camera idle in his lap.
The ceremony was supposed to start in five, but of course, Diego lingered in the quiet, keeping his thoughts to himself—which, granted, looked like a pretty great idea. But if Healey couldn’t get out of this, then Diego couldn’t. It was Diego’s family after all.
Tables had been set up on the lawn and cater waiters were putting the finishing touches on Cecil and Rachel’s wedding dinner. The pool was glowing with submersible lights, full of little flower islands with flameless candles inside acrylic hurricane lanterns.
Diego was a genius. Inside, there was nothing but human chaos. Out here Healey could think. He could even see some stars. Still, a promise was a promise. Healey flexed his fingers—his arm ached from the cold since he’d broken it. He shrugged the pain off.
“I think Cecil is starting to get a little worried you won’t show.”
“I’m right here. How can I not show?” Diego glanced up, caught sight of Healey’s formalwear, and opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it.
How disappointing.
“You’ve got nothing?” Healey twirled, causing the sharp pleats in his kilt to flip dangerously. “You have nothing to say to me right now? This is the real thing. Spenser got them for us. All the Holly men have them now, they’re official.”
“Nash wears it?” Diego asked, incredulously.
“I can neither confirm nor—”
Diego’s laugh was sharp. “Man’s gotta pick his battles, I guess.”
Healey leaned over Diego with his hand cupped to his ear. “I didn’t quite hear you? Are you saying you don’t like my nice outfit?”
Healey loved the look on Diego’s face. It said, Holy shit. And, What the actual fuck? and more pathetically, Are you really going to make me say it?
He smiled down at the man he’d come to depend on in so many, many ways . . .
And let Diego off the hook. “You’re going to blow a gasket if you don’t let yourself have a good laugh at my chicken legs.”
“Who says I’m laughing?”
All Wheel Drive Page 28
