Uptown Thief

by Aya De León

  “Te gusta?” he asked.

  Marisol blinked in surprise, as he leaned down and teased her with just the head. She felt the pleasurable pressure of his size, the welcome intensity of his hardness.

  But then he pulled back, licked her, kissed her some more.

  “Ay, Dios,” Marisol moaned.

  And then, with both arms, he lifted her up and moved her farther back on the bed, so he could get purchase, leverage.

  “Are you ready?” he asked her in Spanish.

  “Sí,” she breathed, through open mouth, open thighs, open pores, open.

  He entered her slowly, with care. As he pressed into her, Marisol was aware only of the sensation of him, the sweet pressure, the gentle hardness. And then, slowly at first, he began to move. He held himself up over her on strongly muscled arms, rocking his hips. She ran her hands down the muscles in his back, grabbed his ass, caressed his chest. He lowered himself down onto the bed, onto one shoulder, and caressed her breast with the other hand.

  Marisol sank into the bed with the pleasure of it, the surrender of it. Her body melting to liquid.

  He pushed a little harder, tilted the angle. She cried out with the pleasure.

  Now that he had found the right stroke he was merciless. Slowly gliding himself down along the fault line of her pleasure. She felt her body tense as it headed toward climax. His rhythm became insistent. And then, with a final acceleration, she screamed and grabbed him around his chest, coming hard and sweet.

  And just as she would have lay back, spent, he heated up. Vladimir opened his mouth as if to speak, and with a gasp that was half groan, thrust his way to his own climax.

  “You are a delicious woman,” he murmured to her a few moments later, as he gripped the top of the condom and pulled out.

  Marisol lay back and sighed. She felt an uncomplicated satisfaction in the present moment that she’d never felt before.

  Cristina was right, a stiff dick was good medicine. But not the kind that heals, just the kind that temporarily relieves the symptoms.

  * * *

  A week later, Marisol was reading on the couch when Cristina came in.

  “Honey, I’m home,” Cristina said, and they kissed hello.

  Marisol set down her book. “I was walking on the malecón this morning,” she began. “I met this nineteen-year-old jinetera. Are there still travel restrictions? Would the Cuban government let me take her back to New York? Her family situation is fucked up and I think—”

  “Marisol, what are you doing?” Cristina asked.

  “I’m trying to help this girl,” Marisol said.

  “In the middle of your vacation, you manage to find someone in crisis?”

  “She asked for help,” Marisol said.

  “Of course she did,” Cristina said. “And if you were a man, she’d ask if you wanted a date. She’s trying to hustle you. The girl just wants a few bucks, not an intervention.”

  “Cristina,” Marisol said. “You didn’t see the look on her face. She really needs help.”

  “You think everybody needs your help,” Cristina said. “You’ve got eight million dollars stashed in your apartment to save half the young women in Manhattan. Isn’t that enough? Or are you always gonna look for someone to rescue?”

  “That’s funny,” Marisol said. “I thought you were studying to be a medical doctor, not a shrink.”

  “Oh please,” Cristina said. “I know you better than anybody. And you’ve been in the rescuing business a long-ass time.”

  “After all the shit that’s gone down, you’re gonna throw that in my face?” Marisol said. “Like you would even be here if it wasn’t for my rescuing?”

  “I don’t mean it like that,” Cristina said. “We both know I owe you my life.”

  “That’s right,” Marisol said. “You were little and I had to protect you.”

  Cristina walked over and put her arms around Marisol. “That was twenty years ago,” she said gently. “We were both little and we both deserved to be protected.”

  “It’s not about what I deserved,” Marisol said, pulling away. “It’s about what I had to do so we would both make it out alive.”

  “I know that!” Cristina said. “But you’re fucking stuck there. Stuck in that stinking-ass crowded apartment, trying to get us out alive. You go walking on the malecón, and you don’t see the ocean and the waves and the sea spray. You see teenage sex workers who need your help.”

  “She does need my help!” Marisol yelled.

  “This is a Caribbean country with socialized medicine,” Cristina said. “She’s not gonna freeze to death or be denied health care. She’s not gonna get beat up by a pimp . . . She’s older than you were when you started fucking for money. What’s so goddamn special about you that you could handle the same thing two years younger under ten times harsher conditions, but she couldn’t possibly survive without you?”

  “You just don’t get it,” Marisol said.

  “Oh, I definitely get it,” Cristina said. “You had to rescue me, because it was the only way you could survive what happened—what Tío—”

  “Don’t say his name!” Marisol yelled.

  “You don’t want to hear his name?” Cristina said. “Then tell me what the hell happened to him. One day he was there. The next he was gone. We never even had a funeral.”

  “We didn’t have money for a funeral, so I just left him in the morgue,” Marisol said. “He got mugged in the hallway. You know that.”

  “Stop lying,” Cristina said. “I’m not eleven anymore, but you’re still fucking trying to protect me. I knew you weren’t telling the truth even back then. I don’t know if you killed him, I just know you were different that night.”

  “How would you know how I was that night?” Marisol asked. “You were asleep.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Cristina asked. “I was never asleep. Do you think anyone could sleep through what he did to you? I heard everything.”

  “What?” Marisol asked. It was as if the humid air grew suddenly still.

  “The only dignity I could give you was to pretend that I didn’t hear what happened.” Cristina’s voice was barely above a whisper. “I knew your only consolation was thinking that you had protected me. How could I take that away from you?”

  “You knew?” Marisol asked. “You knew the whole time?”

  “Of course I knew,” Cristina said. “I knew you did it for me. The only gift I could give you in return was to let you be the hero. To let you believe you had sheltered me from all of it. It was obvious you stayed to protect me.” Tears ran down her face as she spoke, but her voice didn’t shake. “When you got older, you could have run away. I know it crushed you that you couldn’t protect yourself. At least I could let you believe that you had protected me.”

  “I did protect you.” Marisol shot up off the couch. “He never touched you.”

  “I know I was the lucky one!” Cristina said. “But you can’t honestly believe that it was a party to hear him every night. To live in constant fear that I would be next. I had nightmares of my own. Nightmares that he’d come home and you wouldn’t be there. I know why you didn’t date, or go out past five. You had to be home every night when I was.”

  “I can’t believe you knew,” Marisol said, her voice choking up. “But of course you did. The room was tiny. Nobody sleeps that soundly.”

  “It was how I protected you,” Cristina said. “I played the role of the saved one, so you could be the savior. Like in church. Christ died for us. Was crucified and suffered for us. But it wasn’t noble. It was fucked up. Nobody should have to go through what you did. What we both did. That night he died something was different. I knew but I couldn’t say. How could I explain that I had been awake as always?”

  “What was different?”

  “Every night you’d wait in bed,” Cristina said. “Your bed closer to the door, like a sentry. He would have to get past you to get to me. But that night—”

  Marisol cut her
off. “I wasn’t in the bedroom.”

  “At first I was terrified,” Cristina said. “Were you leaving me exposed? I heard the apartment door open and close. I just lay in bed and prayed that everything would be okay.”

  Marisol shook her head. “He started looking at you. So skinny, but you were sprouting breasts. I know you tried to hide them.”

  “They weren’t hard to hide,” Cristina said.

  “But somehow he knew you were developing,” Marisol said. “I could tell it flipped a switch in his sick head.”

  “I was panicked,” Cristina said.

  “I knew I’d rather die than let it happen to you,” Marisol said. “But then I thought, what good would that do? If I died, then there would be nobody to protect you. That fucker needed to die, not me.”

  “But how did you manage it?” Cristina asked. “He was such a big guy.”

  “I would lie there,” Marisol said, “when he was in our bedroom, planning it. I didn’t know how to get a gun. I wasn’t strong enough to throw him out the window, even when he was drunk. But I could get a kitchen knife.”

  “A young Latina buying some kitchen shit,” Cristina said. “Unremarkable in our hood.”

  “I was seventeen, but I could have been ten,” Marisol said. “That day I bought four things at the supermarket: a kitchen knife, a flashlight, a knife sharpener, and an onion.”

  “You bought an onion?” Cristina asked.

  “Getting only hardware might look suspicious,” Marisol said. “Why kill him if I ended up in juvie and you went to foster care? I had to do it and get away with it.”

  “You stabbed him down on the fourth floor?” Cristina said.

  “No,” Marisol said. “I waited for him at the top of the landing, and when I stabbed him, he fell down the stairs.”

  “You must have waited for hours,” Cristina said.

  “My hands sweat so much in the gloves,” Marisol recalled. “I held the knife in one hand, and the flashlight in the other one. Every time the downstairs door opened, my heart raced. I couldn’t watch from the window because the light on the stoop was burned out. Finally, he came up the stairs. Do you remember how creaky the steps were on the last flight up to our apartment?”

  “I hated everything about that place,” Cristina said.

  “And I smelled him,” Marisol said. “His particular brand of rum. His particular stink of sweat. The sound of his keys jingling. And as he neared the top of the stairs, I just—I switched on the flashlight and flew at him with the knife.”

  Marisol recalled how the surprise of the sudden light in his face was surpassed only by the shock of the blade in his chest. His eyes and mouth widened in slow motion as he gasped and fell back, tumbling down the stairs. As she snapped off the light, she caught the glint of his keys on the landing, and scooped them up in the dark.

  “Was he dead?” Cristina asked. “Were you sure?”

  Marisol shook her head. Before the sound had even stopped, she had stepped back into the apartment. In the quiet that followed the thudding of a falling man, she locked the door with her own keys. She waited for some commotion of neighbors. Some siren or flashing light.

  She had sat by the door, terrified that a bleeding and wounded thing would drag its drunken self up the stairs and claw at the door. “I held his keys in my fist to remind me that he couldn’t just walk in. I was ready to stab that motherfucker as many times as it took.”

  “You never actually told me he was dead,” Cristina said. “You just told me he wasn’t ever coming back.”

  “That’s what mattered,” Marisol said.

  “I still have nightmares sometimes,” Cristina said, her face puckering.

  “Me too,” Marisol said.

  “Thank you,” Cristina whispered through her tears.

  Marisol could only nod, as she cried, too.

  Chapter 30

  Marisol had been in Cuba for nearly two months. Her skin glowed copper, and she’d put on a little weight in her belly from all the slow meals.

  Tyesha had gone back after a week, Kim and Jody after two weeks, but Marisol had extended her ticket twice. She also filed for an extension with the IRS, and would have until October to make a paper trail for all the cash “donations.” Meanwhile, she took the positive weekly e-mails from Eva and Serena at face value. The clinic was finally stable.

  She had gone to the beach and stood alone in the surf, enjoying the sound and feel of the water, the sinking of her feet into the sand. Gazing out to the horizon, she let the warm currents sway her body gently back and forth. The ocean’s authentic majesty washed away the memory of her dream with Raul and the bitterness of his final drunken words to her.

  The reality of love was Cristina. Marisol spent as much time as possible with her sister. Sometimes, when Cristina came in to crash from her residency, Marisol would lie on the bed next to her, reading a mystery novel in Spanish. Marisol could see that the extra hours Cristina stayed awake to visit were wearing on her. She became increasingly fatigued. This was a rare morning, when Juan was working but Cristina had a whole day off.

  “Too bad Vladimir’s not around to keep you busy while I’ve been at the hospital,” Cristina teased.

  “Vladimir’s been away with one of his paying girlfriends,” Marisol said. “He got back last night, I think.”

  “Any chance you’ll stay in Cuba for a while?”

  Marisol sighed. “Maybe another week. It’s already May, and I can’t miss Tyesha’s graduation. Besides, you and Juan are coming in December.”

  “About that . . .” Cristina began.

  “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?” Marisol asked.

  “I’m pregnant,” Cristina blurted out.

  “What?” Marisol’s jaw dropped. “But what about the birth control pills I’ve been sending?”

  “There’s that point-oh-one chance.”

  “Such fucking bad timing,” Marisol said.

  “Why are you freaking out?” Cristina asked. “This isn’t a tragedy.”

  “What about becoming a doctor?”

  “I can be a doctor here,” Cristina said. “And have a family with Juan.”

  “Cristina, don’t be naïve,” Marisol said. “It’s not that simple.”

  “It’s not that simple in the U.S.,” Cristina said. “Day care is free here. Doctors practice locally. I know lots of women doctors with kids. They’re happy.”

  “What about me?” Marisol asked.

  Cristina shrugged. “What’s keeping you in New York?”

  “I’m not ready to just pack up and—”

  “Why choose?” Cristina asked. “You have plenty of money now. Live there. Visit a lot.”

  “You’re having the baby?” Marisol said. “Is Juan pressuring you?”

  “I haven’t even told him,” Cristina said. “But I’m not having an abortion just because the pregnancy wasn’t planned. Maybe a couple of years ago, but not now.”

  “I don’t want us to be apart anymore,” Marisol said.

  “So don’t be,” Cristina said. “I love you, Marisol, but not only you. I love Juan, and I’ll love this baby.”

  “You’re building a family without me.”

  “I’m just building a family in Cuba,” Cristina said. “You can be as big a part of it as you want. We had a good plan, but this baby changes everything. Why can’t you be happy for me?”

  “It was supposed to be you and me in the center of this family,” Marisol said. “Not you with some man and me as a fucking visiting aunt. What happened to ‘tú y yo siempre’?”

  She grabbed her shoes and left the house.

  * * *

  Marisol showed up unannounced at Vladimir’s. She was ravenous for him.

  After the second round of sex, he looked into her face for a while.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked in Spanish. “Is it because Cristina’s pregnant?”

  “She told you?” Marisol asked.

  “Juan did.” Vladimir shrugge
d. “She hasn’t said anything but he can tell.”

  “I’m her sister. How come I couldn’t tell?”

  Vladimir shook his head. “You still see her as a child.”

  “No I don’t,” Marisol said.

  “She was a child when she first came to Cuba, but she’s a woman now,” Vladimir said. “You need to let her have her adult life.”

  “I thought you understood wanting to be near family,” Marisol said. “Why shouldn’t I expect her to come back to New York?”

  “Because I’m hoping this means you’ll stay in Cuba.”

  Marisol laughed. “I don’t think—”

  “Or at least you’ll come visit,” he said, leaning in to kiss her.

  “I’m thinking about it,” she said as they sank back on the bed.

  * * *

  The moment Marisol walked in the door the next morning, Cristina leaped up off the couch.

  “Marisol, I can’t do this without your blessing. I told Juan I wasn’t sure about keeping it.”

  “You have my blessing,” Marisol said, smoothing back Cristina’s hair. “I’ll be the tía who comes from New York all the time.”

  “You better mean that,” Cristina said, tears falling. “No more lame excuses, like thousands of women in New York depending on you to rob corrupt CEOs or billionaires.”

  “Fine,” Marisol said, crying, as well. “But you gotta keep up your end, too. No more bullshit embargoes.”

  Chapter 31

  From the plane’s window, Marisol watched the blue-green water turn to a lacy streak of foam at the beach along the Rockaways.

  After landing at JFK, she took a town car back to the city. Marisol felt relaxed, unencumbered. The driving force of her life had always been about survival. Surviving her mother and grandmother’s deaths, surviving her uncle. Doing sex work to survive, and then fighting for the clinic’s survival.

  Marisol crossed into Manhattan after more than eight weeks in Cuba, several shades darker and better rested than she’d been in decades. Dusk fell as they sat in Monday post–rush hour traffic, and Marisol leaned back against the seat, unfazed. Her phone sat at the bottom of her purse with zero percent battery. An accident on the bridge had traffic backed up, but she didn’t care. There was nowhere Marisol had to be until Tyesha’s graduation the next day.