Exposing Alix

Home > Other > Exposing Alix > Page 13
Exposing Alix Page 13

by Scott, Inara


  Emilio gave a short laugh. “You wouldn’t dare. I’d lay you flat.”

  Ryker forced his shoulders to relax. “I’d like to see you try.”

  “I can’t. I promised your sister no more fistfights in her front yard.”

  A reluctant smile teased the edges of Ryker’s mouth. “Is that so? You and I haven’t brawled since I was sixteen. Have there been other fights I don’t know about?”

  Emilio nodded. “At least one a week.”

  “Must be that midlife crisis finally catching up with you.”

  Emilio chuckled. They shared a rare moment of peace.

  “How’s the movie?” Emilio asked.

  Ryker shrugged. “We’ve run into a few speed bumps.”

  “You’ll get it in shape. You’ve never been one to let a little speed bump get in your way. That was the first thing your mama told you about me. He’s a good kid, she said, but stubborn as a mule.”

  Ryker grunted. “Is that right?”

  “Told me you were going to win an Oscar the day you got your first part. Believed it too. Right up until the day she died, she wanted to see you holding that little statue.” Emilio shook his head. “I guess she thought maybe then you’d stop fighting so hard.”

  Ryker ran his hands through his hair and turned away. He exhaled slowly. It was going to be a long night.

  #

  Alix twisted the stem of her wineglass as she looked out the kitchen window to Rosalia’s tiny backyard. Rosalia’s house was filled with the same warm, vibrant colors as the quilt she’d made for Ryker. Tall glass candleholders decorated with pictures of religious figures filled the fireplace mantel and stood in clusters on end tables and on a wide wooden sideboard. A large, framed picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe looked down serenely over a sofa covered with a bright-red-and-yellow-striped throw.

  Outside, Rosalia’s husband Tony flipped chicken and steak on a shiny silver grill and chatted with Emilio. Ryker’s younger brothers, Eduardo and Hector, laughed and joked with each other. Ryker stood a few feet apart from the group. He nursed a beer as he stared into space, absently raising it to his lips and then bringing it back down without even taking a sip.

  The tension between him and the other men was palpable. The younger set seemed willing to include him in their conversation; he gave them a few halfhearted smiles but never really joined in their banter. Tony and Emilio made no such effort. They all but turned their backs on him, and Ryker seemed to pay them even less attention.

  “It’s sad, isn’t it?” Maria said quietly.

  Alix spun on the tall wooden bar stool on which she’d been perched. She’d almost forgotten Maria was there. “What do you mean?”

  Rosalia buzzed back and forth in the background, setting the dining room table and tidying up the kitchen. She seemed to enjoy her role as hostess, never sitting down for more than a minute at a time before finding something else to occupy her. Without a trace of modesty, she had put Maria and Alix to work, first as part of her tamale assembly line and then chopping tomato, onion, and cilantro for fresh salsa.

  Alix appreciated the distraction and found she enjoyed Maria’s company immensely. The younger woman had a sharp, biting sense of humor that she turned on her family and herself with equal measure. Once the men went into the backyard, the children came into the house, and Maria disappeared every few minutes to find some new way to entertain Felicity and keep her out of trouble. It wasn’t hard to see she doted on her rambunctious toddler.

  Maria waited until Rosalia had left the room again before she spoke. She gestured toward the window. “That. It’s always been like that. Ever since I can remember.”

  Alix studied them again—the way Ryker held his head and looked directly between the other men, the angle of their bodies away from him, the cold set to his lips. “He’s not that way with you,” she said.

  Ryker was the only one in the family Maria seemed unwilling, or unable, to satirize. Alix appreciated the way she directed the conversation away from him every time Rosalia tried to subtly—or not so subtly—probe about the nature of his relationship with Alix.

  Maria took a sip of her wine, the deep red of the cabernet matching the color of her lips. “We’ve always had a special bond.” She gave a wry smile. “Or maybe he was so busy fighting with everyone else he didn’t have the energy left to fight with me.”

  “Why?” Alix felt guilty asking, but she was hungry to find out more, to understand what Ryker had been through. “Why all the fighting?”

  Maria shrugged. “You’d have to ask him that. I suppose it was hard, figuring out his place in the family. We were so much younger than he was, and so different. He didn’t want to follow Papa’s rules, and I don’t think he ever forgave Mama for getting married. Rosalia was too much like Mama, and the boys were young and desperate for attention. They drove him crazy. I was just me, too busy screwing up my own life to cause him any trouble.”

  Alix picked up a bright red-and-yellow-striped cloth napkin from a stack and began to fold it. “You have a beautiful daughter, and you’re managing to raise her on your own while attending nursing school. That doesn’t sound like screwing up to me.”

  “I got pregnant when I was nineteen, with a boy I haven’t seen since. Ryker was the only one who didn’t give me hell about it. He just told me if I ever needed anything, I should come to him. And when I had nowhere else to go, he was there.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Alix folded another napkin. She was struck by an unexpected wave of emotion. Memories of her arrival at the hospital after she’d lost her own baby assaulted her. She remembered the anguish, the fear, and then the incredible relief when Gunther had said he was on his way. “I…” She had to stop and clear her throat. “I guess that must have been pretty important. To have someone say that, I mean.”

  Maria gave her an assessing look. “It was. It’s hard to explain how frightening it is when you see that double line on the pregnancy test.”

  Alix nodded involuntarily, and then turned her eyes back to the napkins. They took turns folding and adding their napkins to the stack.

  “So, I guess you must have needed a change?” Maria nodded sideways at Alix’s outfit.

  Alix’s lips twisted in a rueful smile. “I suppose I should have thanked you for the clothes.”

  Maria laughed. “No problem. I have to admit, I was a bit surprised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of his other, er”—she stumbled over the words—“friends, wearing my skirts. You must be very close.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly.” Alix darted a look at Rosalia, who had begun lighting candles on the table in the next room, and lowered her voice. She wasn’t sure what Ryker wanted the others to think about her or why he’d brought her, but she had the sense he wouldn’t want to lie to Maria. “We’re just friends. He was desperate for company tonight, and I happened to be the first human being he could find to drag with him. No offense, but I wouldn’t read more into it than that.”

  “Hmm.” Maria eyed her shrewdly. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t entirely agree. I know my brother a little. There’s more between you than just friends.”

  Alix drew back. “What makes you say that?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  Alix slid her hand across the crisp broadcloth, smoothing out a wrinkle as she did. “We’re about as different as two people can be,” she said, staring at the woven threads under her fingers.

  “But you’re interested. How could you not be?”

  “He’s out of my league. I’m sure that’s painfully obvious to everyone here.”

  Maria chuckled. “Don’t let appearances fool you. It’s a funny business, being a movie star. He’s had to change a lot, just to keep sane. But I suspect you’re more alike than you think, deep down.”

  Alix pictured Ryker describing how he felt about romantic love and gave Maria a tight smile. She wasn’t sure why acknowledging the truth suddenly seemed so sad. At least, it didn’t seem worth arguing about with
Maria. “If you say so.”

  “He likes you,” Maria observed. “He looks at you differently than he does other girls. Believe me, I’ve seen him with a lot of women, and he doesn’t think much of them. He respects you. I can tell.”

  Alix decided not to mention the fact that Maria had little experience on which to base that conclusion; after all, she’d only seen Alix and Ryker together for a few minutes that evening. “We’re in a similar business,” she offered. “Maybe that’s it.”

  “Maybe.” Maria looked unconvinced.

  “I’m helping out on his movie,” Alix elaborated. She’d been deliberately keeping quiet about her role on Salva’s Revenge because she didn’t want to lie any more than necessary. “We respect each other, even though we don’t agree on much of anything.”

  She paused, struck by what she’d said. Amazingly enough, she had the funny feeling it was true. Ryker might think she was crazy and lived in a fairy-tale world, but he respected her work. They couldn’t have worked together so seamlessly if he hadn’t.

  “But…?” Maria interrupted her thoughts.

  Alix grabbed the stack of napkins and pushed her stool back from the bar. “But nothing. Respect is more than I could have expected, to be honest. I’m not planning to ask for more.”

  “Hmm.” Maria turned her head deliberately toward the window, where Ryker tipped his beer toward his lips and then lowered it again without drinking. His gaze traveled from the men by the grill to the glass patio door and the people inside, lingering on Alix. When he noticed them looking at him, he raised his beer in a mock salute. Alix’s face suffused with heat.

  Maria chuckled. “Listen, I’m not going to tell you it will be easy. Ryker’s the stubbornest man you’ll ever meet, and then some. But the toughest shells grow around the softest fruit, right? Give him a chance. Maybe he’ll surprise you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alix tried to keep her hands steady in her lap as she slid into the leather seat beside Ryker and clicked her seat belt into place. The sun was setting in a glorious display of gold-tipped clouds, but Ryker didn’t spare it a glance. He roared out of the driveway and down the street without looking back.

  Should she try to make conversation?

  Alix peered at the white line around Ryker’s mouth and decided to remain silent. He blasted through a red light and onto the freeway in a squeal of tires.

  Dinner had been long and painful. Rosalia questioned Ryker about his relationship with Alix, his movies, and how long it had been since he’d been to church. He repaid her questions with cynical looks and bare, three-word sentences. Emilio sent disapproving looks at Ryker and quizzed Maria about her classes. Hector and Eduardo seemed oblivious to the family tensions. They chattered away about their girlfriends and Ryker’s past dates. That earned them a cold look from Rosalia. Alix tried to smooth over the rough spots where she could, offering stories from her years photographing weddings and hoping they wouldn’t ask too many questions about what she was working on now. Luckily, they seemed to assume her only connection to Ryker and his movies was Gunther.

  Two hours later, Maria changed a cranky Felicity into a pink pajama set while the older children passed out in front of the television. Rosalia gave up her attempts to make conversation, and the room fell into silence. Alix and Ryker helped Rosalia clear the table, and then Ryker made his good-byes. There was a lot of hugging, though much of it looked forced, and Emilio only glowered from the other side of the room.

  Now, she could almost see the tension boiling inside of Ryker, from the white knuckles on the gearshift to the muscle twitching in his cheek.

  Alix endured fifteen minutes of silence, determined to force Ryker to be the first to speak.

  “Sorry about that,” he finally muttered. The little Mercedes wove in and out of the cars packing the busy road.

  She held on to her door handle and swallowed hard. “Sorry about dinner, or sorry for nearly killing me on the freeway?”

  Ryker looked down at the speedometer. “Oh.” The insane pace slowed a hair. “Sorry about dinner.”

  “It was fun,” she said lightly. “Kind of like Leave it to Beaver.”

  “Only everyone hates each other.”

  “Yeah, something like that.” He slowed another hair. Alix decided keeping him talking could actually be an effective safety precaution. “Is it usually that bad?”

  Ryker drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Actually, that was particularly unpleasant. Sometimes, Emilio and I don’t talk to each other at all. That seems to work better.”

  “I hope I didn’t make things worse.”

  He shot her a quick look and frowned. “No, no, absolutely not. I shouldn’t have dragged you along, but I wasn’t up to doing it by myself tonight.” He paused. “To be honest, I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

  Alix slouched down in her seat and tried not to let a silly smile break across her face. “No problem. It isn’t as though I had so many other offers.”

  He chuckled, and his fingers relaxed. “Still. They can be a bit overwhelming.”

  Alix nodded. “Rosalia is rather…er…efficient, isn’t she?”

  Ryker snorted. “That’s putting it mildly. After Mama passed away, Rosalia appointed herself the caretaker of the family. Luckily, I had already moved out. Rosa has been mothering Maria to death ever since. I don’t know how Maria swallows her tongue when Rosalia gets going. You would think Maria’s two, the way Rosa treats her.”

  “It’s better than nothing, though.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Alix shot him a wry smile. “No. I have no idea, really.”

  He paused. “So you don’t have any family?”

  “Nope. I had a grandmother, but she died when I was two. And there was a distant cousin. She took me in for a few years, but in the end she wasn’t really interested in raising a child.”

  “That’s when they put you in a foster home?”

  “Yep. First of ten, to be exact.”

  “Wow.” Ryker leaned back against his seat. “Ten homes. That’s amazing.”

  “Ten is nothing. I knew kids who went through that many in a year. But I was with relatives until I was five and pretty lucky after that.”

  “I bet you were a cute little bugger. Hard to believe no one would make it permanent.”

  “I’m not sure how cute I was. When I was seven, they placed me with a couple of pretty tough families. I started to lock myself in my room a lot. I wasn’t exactly cuddly, if that’s what you’re imagining.”

  “Tough as in…?”

  “They didn’t touch me,” she said. “They just didn’t care. At Mama Clark’s house, there were six of us foster kids. She never really got to know any of us. At the Noskowitzes’, there was a lot of fighting. Fighting between the grownups, fighting between them and their real kids, between the real kids and the fosters. I tried to stay quiet and not bother anyone. Things went downhill from there. Older kids are notoriously hard to place. I never expected anyone to keep me.”

  Ryker whistled. “And I thought it was hard adjusting to Emilio. I can’t imagine doing that more than once, and you did it ten times?”

  She shrugged. “You get used to it.”

  “A lot of my buddies in junior high bounced between their parents and foster homes,” Ryker said. “Looked like a miserable way to live. I don’t think any of them managed to finish high school. I can’t believe you managed to get to college, let alone finish an MFA.”

  Alix muffled an embarrassed squeak and studied her hands.

  “I guess in that I was lucky to have Emilio,” Ryker continued. “Every time I tried to drop out, he kicked my butt back into school. He even helped me get the scholarships to go to USC, though at the time it felt like one more way to manipulate me and keep me from making a career in the movies.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without Gunther,” Alix said. She remembered her conversation with Maria and looked at Ryker with new eyes. He h
ad done for Maria what Gunther had done for her. Now that she knew that, it was impossible to see him the same way. How could he pretend to be so cold when he was capable of so much love? “He helped me get my photography business going and write my application for NYU. Things sort of fell into place after that. I actually feel a little guilty now that I hardly ever see him. He’s always after me to come visit LA, but I only get out here a couple of times a year. Traveling is expensive, and I’m busy with the book.”

  “Aren’t you lonely out there?”

  She shrugged. “I’m used to being alone. To be honest, it’s the only way I know how to live.” Emotions backed up into her chest, and she turned from him to squint at the horizon, where the sun had begun to slip behind the hills. “Are we headed back to the studio? I hate to bring it up, but we only have a few weeks left before I leave, and there’s still a lot to get done.”

  Ryker looked pained. “I can’t think about it right now.”

  Alix leaned over and grabbed her purse, rifled through it, and extracted her glasses. She started to slip them back on, but Ryker’s hand came out and landed on her forearm.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “I can’t see the road.”

  “So imagine it. You’ve got a good imagination.”

  She turned the glasses over in her hands. “Why?”

  “Because I need to talk to a real person tonight, not an actress.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I just mean that I never know what to expect with you. One minute, you’re walking into Tiger Lily’s like some kind of siren; the next, you’re having dinner with my family and convincing them you’re a harmless wedding photographer.”

  Alix paused and bit her lip. “I really do need glasses, Ryker,” she said softly. “And maybe you’re right, and they are a bit unflattering, but that’s part of me too. It’s all part of who I am.”

  He didn’t respond but threw on his blinker and cut across all lanes of traffic to exit.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to my place. To the beach.”

 

‹ Prev