Crash Into Me

by Jill Sorenson

  “Quit your bellyachin’, boy,” Arlen yelled over his shoulder, “or I’ll throw you in with her.”

  “Maybe we should call the Coast Guard,” Stephen suggested.

  Arlen squinted at him. “We’re on the preserve,” he said, as if that were reason enough to throw a dead girl back into the sea like undersized catch. It was illegal to drop a net in protected waters, and the penalty for breaking that particular environmental sanction was a $500 fine. “Besides, don’t you recognize her?”

  Stephen glanced down at the body and shuddered. “No.”

  Arlen eyeballed him derisively. “Drugs done fried your brain, son. It’s that little neighborhood whore. Don’t look like she’ll be putting out no more.”

  Shaking his head, Stephen turned away from the gruesome sight.

  In the end, Arlen did the job himself, muttering about lazy boys and loose women, shaking the body from the net instead of cutting her free, to save the time and hassle of having to mend it later.

  The rest of the day passed in taut silence.

  After work, Stephen took his daily wage without a complaint. When James asked if he could spend the night at Stephen’s, Arlen grunted his permission. His truck was squealing around the corner before they got to the front door.

  Stephen sat on the stoop, pulling out his pack of cigarettes and a wad of cash. “Here,” he said, counting out half his pay. He knew their dad never gave James a dime. Living expenses, Arlen claimed, ate up every cent of his little brother’s paycheck. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Thanks,” James said, pocketing the cash and taking a seat next to him.

  Stephen lit up a smoke and waited for James to speak, although he dreaded the conversation. He was coming down hard, his brain like mush, his body ready to crash. Times like this he hated being an addict. The higher the high, the lower the low.

  “Did Dad ever bring home whores, when you used to live with us?”

  Stephen took another drag. “You know he did.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I remember.” James came around to the real question he wanted to ask. “Did he try to make you do stuff with them?”

  Stephen inhaled deeply, wishing it was dope. “Yep.”

  James looked away, his mouth drawn. “I can’t do it.”

  “You don’t have to,” Stephen replied. “Don’t let him bully you into it.”

  “He rapes them,” James said. “Whether he pays or not. Whether they tell anyone or not. That’s what it is.”

  Stephen nodded, thinking that what he and Rhoda did behind closed doors wasn’t much different. Hell, he was so screwed up that he’d begun to think pain and depravity were normal. No better than he deserved. No worse.

  “I never want to have a girl like that. If she’s willing, you don’t have to pay her.”

  “Don’t think about it,” Stephen said, giving the only advice he could. “Don’t worry about what he does.” Reaching out, he wrapped his fingers around James’ upper arm. “You’ll be eighteen soon. You’ll get out.” His voice shook with intensity. “Promise me you’ll get out.”

  James squirmed in Stephen’s grip. “What will you do?”

  “Don’t think about that,” he repeated. “Don’t think about anything. Just go. Go and never look back.”

  “What about Mom?”

  Stephen released him with a sigh, returning the cigarette to his mouth. His stomach was hurting now, and he longed to go inside, to heat the glass until the smoke rose up, to inhale over and over again. He wanted to forget about the day, forget himself, assuage his ache.

  That query went unanswered, so James asked another. “You think he killed that girl?”

  Stephen didn’t look at him. Couldn’t look at him. The next logical question, the one about their mother, remained unspoken.

  Carly didn’t have any trouble choosing Christmas presents for James.

  With Ben’s help, she selected a handsome diver’s watch, the same kind he used, of such stellar quality it boasted a lifetime guarantee even under the brutal wear and tear of salt water. She also chose a midnight blue cable-knit sweater, claiming it matched James’ eyes.

  Ben rolled his.

  Carly would have bought out the whole store if he hadn’t stepped in. He didn’t care about the money, but he had to draw the line somewhere. “You’ll embarrass him, Carly. He doesn’t want to be thought of as a charity case.”

  “I guess you’re right,” she sighed. “What should we get for Summer?”

  Ben shrugged.

  “Jewelry?”

  He pictured the tiny silver cross she’d had around her neck last night. “No. Too personal. We don’t know each other that well.”

  “What does she like?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t you ask her about herself?”

  “No.”

  “You are so clueless.”

  Actually, he wasn’t. He knew better than to encourage a woman into thinking they were embarking upon a long-term relationship.

  “Lingerie, then?” she teased.

  “Even I’m not that obvious.”

  “Good. Perfume?”

  “She doesn’t wear it.”

  “How do you know?”

  He knew because he’d smelled and touched and tasted her skin at most of the places women put perfume. Although he could think of a few more spots he’d like to introduce himself to. “I just do.”

  They came back to jewelry, having exhausted all other options. Carly found an unusual pale blue stone pendant, hanging from a platinum chain. It was smoky and ethereal, like Summer’s eyes.

  “Why don’t you say it’s from you?” he asked when Carly insisted that he buy it. It was too expensive, too lovely, and too fitting to be an offhand gift.

  “You have major issues,” she sighed, but agreed.

  In the car, on the way home, she said, “She’s been dead a long time. When will you let her go?”

  Never, he thought.

  He couldn’t let her go any more than he could forgive himself for killing her.

  As usual, Sonny had difficulty deciding on an outfit to match her assumed role and the occasion. She finally settled on a calf-length skirt and soft leather boots, both vintage, and her own. The black cashmere sweater was new, bought with federal funding, and it had a neckline low enough to show off Carly’s silver cross.

  She figured she may as well wear it again, especially since it was Christmas Eve.

  Sonny Vasquez wasn’t fond of religious accoutrements. Summer Moore, she decided, could wear one without overanalyzing its symbolism. Besides, the necklace drew the eye to her cleavage, and although she wasn’t planning on letting Ben round second base again, she wasn’t above making him wish he could.

  When he opened the door, he didn’t say anything about her appearance. Gone was the simple charmer who’d told her she looked delicious.

  “Come in,” he said, very formally.

  He was wearing gray suit pants and a white dress shirt. A black-and-gray-striped silk tie hung loose at his neck, and his toes were covered by black socks. He had sexy feet, she recalled, missing the sight of them bare.

  “Do you know how to do a Windsor?”

  “Yes,” she said, following him upstairs. Sonny had knotted ties for her brother every time he’d gone to court, so she’d had a lot of practice.

  While he sat to put on his shoes, she studied the room. On the wall to her left, a framed portrait of a nude Hawaiian girl stood against a backdrop of brilliant green palm fronds. A strategically placed hibiscus-giant, luscious, and gorgeously red-made the full-length picture more artistic than erotic.

  The rest of the room was austere in comparison. White walls, sand-colored carpet, and white crown molding. The bed was huge, but low to the ground, its white down comforter and fluffy white pillows blending in with the surroundings rather than dominating the room. A black mahogany dresser had a pair of cuff links on top, nothing else. Across from the bed, there was a fireplace, its hearth cold and u
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  Beyond a half-wall partition, a pale green love seat and matching chair faced a smart-looking plasma screen TV. The weather channel was on mute. Mahogany bookshelves, filled with scholarly-looking volumes, completed the room.

  The space was visually striking, modern, and sterile. The shock of red hibiscus in the framed photo and the green leaves in the background, a motif that was repeated on the designer couch as well as the floor-to-ceiling curtains, were the only splashes of color.

  The focal point, however, was not the floating bed, flat screen TV, or naked island nymph. It was the view. The west-facing wall was all glass, with windows so tall and wide Sonny felt as though she could step right out into the Pacific.

  She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself tightly.

  Ben ducked into the master bath, probably to make himself even more devastatingly handsome, so she browsed his book collection while she waited. Jean-Paul Sartre. Karl Marx. Dostoyevsky. Immanuel Kant.

  He liked philosophy. Ew.

  “You read this stuff?” she asked, raising her voice.

  He reentered the bedroom, crossing it to stand in front of his dresser drawers.

  “Uh, yeah. Some of it.”

  She pulled a book off the shelf. Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents. “You believe in this crap?”

  “What crap?”

  “Penis envy.”

  He glanced at the book she held and fastened his cuff links. “That one’s not about penis envy. But no, I’m not a fan of that particular theory.”

  “Oh? Explain why.”

  “Well, oversimplified-”

  “By all means, oversimplify. Otherwise, my penis-deprived brain will explode.”

  He laughed. “I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t delighted with what she had. Are we in agreement?”

  “Yes,” she said, replacing the book, disappointed that she hadn’t been able to start an argument.

  “Are you going to knot this tie for me?”

  She walked up to him, looking into his deep brown eyes. He was so controlled today, so reserved. It made her want to mess up his hair and unbutton his shirt. Instead, she formed a nice Windsor knot, taking longer than was necessary, standing closer than she had to, smoothing the tie down over his sternum and her hands across the impressive breadth of his shoulders when she was finished. “Done,” she whispered, pressing her stocking-covered knee to his thigh.

  “Thanks,” he said tersely, stepping away from her.

  “I didn’t know this was such a formal affair. I would have worn my ball gown.”

  His eyes raked over her, lingering on the swells of her breasts. “You look fine,” he said in a low voice, then lifted his gaze to the doorway.

  Sonny didn’t have to look over her shoulder to know Carly was standing there, eavesdropping. In over five years as an agent, and a lifetime of hyper-awareness, she’d never been snuck up on.

  Nor had she ever lost herself so completely in a role.

  Sonny bit her lower lip, on the cusp of madness. Here she was, old enough to know better, dumb enough to do it anyway, in danger of falling for a man who wasn’t even bothering to pretend he was interested in a real relationship. On the job, no less.

  She turned toward Carly, vowing to stay focused on her assignment, not Ben Fortune’s bedroom eyes, for the remainder of the evening.

  Before crossing the border from San Diego to Tijuana, Ben explained that Carly’s grandparents had been married on Christmas Eve fifty years before. They’d hired a professional photographer to mark the occasion, and invited Ben and Carly to be part of the family photo, hence the more formal attire.

  Over a hundred friends and family members were in attendance, also decked out in their finest, most of whom didn’t speak a word of English. While Ben and Carly posed for the photo, Sonny sat out the festivities at a long table in the banquet hall.

  When Ben found her again, she was chatting with several other revelers and enjoying some delicious holiday fare.

  “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” he said.

  “You don’t know much about me.”

  He couldn’t argue that. “What are you?”

  She finished off her tamale with a smile. “A woman. What are you? A space alien?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “My mother is Guatemalan.”

  He raised an eyebrow in surprise, and Sonny reacted defensively, having encountered this reaction many times. Her mother was of Spanish descent, but the majority of Guatemalans were native Mayans, marginalized to coffee plantations in their homeland, often used as farmhands in the United States. In San Diego, Guatemalan heritage was synonymous with cheap labor and dark skin.

  “There are light-skinned Hispanics in Guatemala, just like any other Latin-American country,” she explained.

  He held his hands up, claiming innocence. “I didn’t say there weren’t. I’ve just never met a blue-eyed Guatemalan.”

  “And how many Guatemalans do you know?”

  He smiled. “One. My gardener.”

  “You have a gardener? You don’t even have a yard.”

  “What I do have, he’s done an excellent job with.”

  She smiled back at him, shaking her head at the extravagancies of the disgustingly wealthy.

  “You take after your mom?”

  “No. People tell me I look like her, but I don’t see it. She’s very pretty.”

  “So are you.”

  She just shrugged, not bothering to disagree. In her experience, when she tried to deflect a compliment, it was assumed that she was fishing for more. “She and my brother have dark hair. When I was a kid, everyone called me guera.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She couldn’t believe he didn’t know. Several of Carly’s relatives had been calling him the masculine equivalent of the word all evening. “It means light hair or skin. Or, in your case,” she added, for his hair was dark and his skin sun-browned, “white boy.”

  “Oh. I wondered about that.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Carly?”

  “I don’t trust her translations.”

  “That’s probably wise. She told her grandmother I was your fiancée.”

  He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I knew it.”

  “She’s made quite the turnaround. Was it less than a week ago she was warning me away from you?”

  He glanced at his daughter, smiling and beautiful, posing for photographs with her grandparents. “Just wait. When she has her first fight with James, she’ll be cursing you to hell and lighting herself on fire.”

  “You have a morbid sense of humor.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Maybe James is good for her. She looks happy.”

  “He’s a fucking martyr,” he said sullenly. “If he were just some dumb jock, or a spoiled rich kid, like she is, I wouldn’t worry half as much.”

  “You may be right. I think he cares about her, though.”

  He didn’t dispute her. Instead, he brought her back to his original question. “So where’d you get the blue eyes, my little Guatemalan princess?”

  “My dad, I guess.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t even know his name.”

  “Isn’t it Moore?”

  “No. That’s my stepdad.” She felt a twinge of guilt for deceiving him with the phony name, but she was telling the truth. Everett Moore had been her stepfather, and the thought of him made a darkness pass over her, like a cloud occluding the sun.

  Ben must have seen it on her face. “Is he the guy?”

  She didn’t have to ask what he meant, but she did. “The guy who what?”

  “Who made you afraid.”

  “He was one of them.”

  Ben’s mouth made a thin, hard line. “Where is he now?”

  “Why? So you can find him and beat him up?” She laughed, shaking her head.

  “I feel protective of you, and you think it’s funny?”

&nb
sp; “No. What’s funny is that you assume I need a protector. That tough-guy avenger crap is more about you than me, and it’s insulting. You want to make him pay for ruining your good-girl fantasy, for turning me into a real person with a lot of sexual hang-ups.”

  He was silent for a moment. “So where is he?”

  Her jaw dropped. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  “So, I think it’s bullshit. I’ve known you had hang-ups from the beginning. Who doesn’t? I still have nightmares about the Japanese girl with the Kung Fu grip. I’ve always thought of you as a real person-you saved my daughter from drowning, for Christ’s sake. And believe it or not, in my fantasies, you’re a bad girl.” His eyes flicked over her. “A very, very bad girl,” he emphasized. “Nothing has changed, except that now I want to kill your stepfather.”

  “My brother beat you to it,” she said. “He’ll be paying for that mistake the rest of his life.” Upset with herself for giving too much personal information away, she made a nervous gesture from him to her, indicating their relationship. “Last night you told me this was about sex. No emotional involvement.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Sex continues to be my primary objective,” he said with a lazy smile, looking out at the open floor. “Let’s dance.”

  She cast him a skeptical glance. The music had just started, and several other couples were already dancing. “You cumbia?”

  “Does it involve a lot of thrusting and grinding against each other?”

  She smiled back at him, amused in spite of herself. “No.”

  He sighed in mock disappointment. “Let’s do it anyway.”

  James borrowed some clothes and a duffel bag from his brother and left. He couldn’t face the idea of fighting off Rhoda, or anyone else, tonight. Stephen didn’t know it, because he’d been more interested in drugs than sex for years, but James had already been with some of the party girls who drifted in and out of his brother’s house.

  On James’ seventeenth birthday, Arlen gave him a shot of whisky and a punch in the eye, saying that anyone who was still a virgin at his age was either queer or retarded. James was just a teenager, all hormones and attitude, with a lot of anxieties and even more to prove, so he set out to prove he wasn’t queer with the first girl he laid eyes on, in an awkward but consensual grapple against Stephen’s bathroom sink.