“She seems familiar. Is she from around here?” he asks, leaning in to me. Too close. His breath moves the hair on the back of my neck.
“Maybe you don’t have to go.” Ravenswood’s hand moves under my dress to cup one of my butt cheeks. “There seems to be enough here for both of us.”
He starts to slip his fingers between my legs.
I try not to gag.
Toño’s body turns to steel as he pulls me out of the security guard’s reach. I feel one of his arms leave my body at the same time as his thigh shifts and I know instants later he’s got his gun in his hand.
“Back off, man,” Toño says, soft and dangerous.
“I’ve got the cops on rapid dial,” Ravenswood counters. “We play nice and share our toys, or I have you busted. She’s young enough to earn you statutory.”
I’d tell him I’m not, but he’d recognize my voice and then he’d really have a reason to call the cops.
I hear a click as the safety releases. “Try phoning,” Toño says.
Ravenswood grunts.
“I thought not. Turn around and go stand by that wall with your back to us. Keep your hands where I can see them. You do all that, I might decide let you live.”
Toño hands me his phone while he watches Ravenswood follow his instructions. “Press five. As soon as it rings through, star, twice.”
Seconds later the limo pulls up and jumps the curbing to idle right behind us. Its plates are obscured with custom cut magnetic sheeting, as is the logo on its side. All that instruction conveyed by punching three keys.
“Go,” Toño gives me a gentle push. “I’ll catch up with you.”
“No.” I grab his hand and start inching toward the limo.
Toño keeps his eyes on Ravenswood. “He and I have unfinished business.”
I vaguely register the limo driver getting out of the car and the rear passenger door being opened as I continue to pull Toño toward it.
“America, I’m not going to kill him. Just mess him up a little,” he says as he finally turns to look at me. His eyes are hard, but then, not.
“This is who I am. You have to know this.”
“I know.”
The thing about being small is everyone underestimates how strong you are. I yank him into the back seat of the limo with me, then lean over him to pull the door shut. Seconds later the driver gets inside and we tear off.
“I’m sorry,” Toño says after a moment.
He returns his gun to its ankle holster, then leans back in the seat and closes his eyes. “About all of it.”
I move close to him and lean my head on his shoulder. After a second, I feel his hand stroking my hair. “You okay?” he asks.
“Fine. You?”
“Pissed off.”
“At me?”
He kisses the top of my head. “No. Not at you.”
He removes his arm and starts to turn away, but I pull him by his shirt so he has to turn back. When I have his attention, I straddle him and start unbuttoning his shirt.
“America … don’t.”
But the longing I see in his eyes blows anything I’ve seen in John’s clear out of the water.
I pull his shirt open over his chest. A deep, pale indent runs in a diagonal from the clavicle near his shoulder to the lower primary feathers of the hawk tattooed on his stomach. I run my finger down the scar. His abdominals tense as I get closer to the waistband of his pants.
“What does the scar mark?”
“The night I wasn’t quick enough, or good enough, or strong enough, to save my brother.” Then, “The night I figured out the world doesn’t care about inks like me.”
I lean in to kiss the cut that bisects him. The one that splits his heart.
“I care about inks like you,” I say when I straighten up and meet his gaze.
“Yeah?” his voice is husky, as if his control over it has slipped just a bit.
“Yeah.”
I lean in and give him a soft little kiss on the chin. He closes his eyes when I move to his forehead, each eyelid and each cheek, working my way to his mouth, Just a tiny, light and darting thing there, like a butterfly landing for a second.
His breathing changes. When he opens his eyes again, he doesn’t say anything.
“Take me home with you,” I say, soft as the kisses I’ve been giving him.
“No.”
A lump forms in my throat. “Don’t you want me?”
His laugh is short, rough. “You already know the answer to that.”
“Then?”
His eyes are dark. “I’ll wait. For you not to break your promise.”
“I don’t care about that anymore.”
“But I do. I live by the oaths I make, and the ones made to me. It means something, America, and I’m not taking it away from you.”
Then he gives me a bitter little smile. “Besides, you’re flying on adrenaline right now. You can’t trust that what you think you want at the moment is what you really want.”
The limo comes to a halt, then idles in front of my house.
The kiss I give him then isn’t the kiss of the dithering 18-year-old I’ve been all night, but something else. Wolfish. Alpha female to the male she’s chosen to recognize as alpha also. His arms come around me so tight I wonder if I could break out of them, supposing I ever wanted to.
“Go home,” he says, when we finally draw apart.
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you more than I remember wanting anything,” he says.
“So?”
“So.”
I plant my hand in middle of his chest and push myself to an armlength away.
“You’re not even going to text me after you drive away. Are you?” I say.
“No.”
“Or call me.”
“No.”
“Or come to see me.”
“Not until.”
“Are you planning to go home and fuck some other girl while you think of me?”
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“Because you won’t be with another girl, or because you won’t be thinking of me?”
He takes my hand from his chest and pulls me to him, “Are you looking for a promise, America?”
After a moment, I take one of the diamond solitaires out of my ear and push it through the hole I see in his lobe.
He winces as the sharp post pierces closed-over skin, then puts his fingers up to feel the earring. “No one’s ever given me anything without expecting me to pay,” he says.
“I don’t expect anything,” I say. “And I don’t ask for promises. Because they aren’t worth spit if they aren’t freely given.”
Then I climb off his lap, open the door and start home.
“America.”
I turn back, scowling.
“See you in a year.”
3.
“Speak,” he says when he picks up.
There are other voices. A babble behind him. Girls among them.
After a few seconds: “Is that you, America?”
When I don’t say anything, his voice pitches low. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Yes. No, not really.”
“Hang up. But stay there.”
I do, and a few seconds later, my phone rings.
“What happened?” He’s moved somewhere because there’s only silence behind his words now. “You need help?”
I laugh. But it comes out all wrong because I’m also crying.
“Speak to me, America. Who did this to you?” There’s steel in his words; a keen edge.
“You did.”
I hear him exhale. “Stop. I don’t have time for this.”
“No, right, what do you care how I’m feeling,” I say. “Get back to your party.”
“It’s not a party. It’s a business meeting. An important one that I stepped away from at a crucial moment to call you back. You understand?”
Silence, then, “You’re not the only one, you know.”
“I kind of suspected that when I heard women’s voices in the background.”
“What?” The surprise gives way to a laugh. “No, America, your earring’s still planted in my ear. I’m not going anywhere.”
“That’s because you already did.”
I hang up.
Weeks later I try again.
“Speak,” he says, sleep evident in his voice when he picks up.
“Sorry it’s so late, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t interrupt business this time.”
“America, nobody bothers me at this hour unless they’re bleeding. Real blood. And a lot of it.”
There’s a long silence.
“Toño?”
“I’m here.”
“Am I waiting for something? Or is all just hope and imagination?”
More silence.
“Because if it is, I’d rather know.”
“America,” he starts, then stops again.
“Forget it,” I say, then fumble with the phone.
“Don’t. Hang. Up.” Each word falls hard, like a bullet.
It takes him a while. “You know how some people have this thing where they get to see bits of the future sometimes?”
“I guess.”
“I knew. The first time I saw you in the freetrade zone. That someday I’d get caught on those sharp little wolf teeth of yours.”
“Toño ….”
“Go to sleep, America.”
Then he hangs up on me.
* * *
I’ve taken to bagging the last two periods of the day since they’re both study halls and hoofing it to the Bowlarama with Frank.
“It sucks that you aren’t going to be around this summer, Jobs.” I say.
My nickname for him. Not only does he look like Steve Jobs did, he loves Macs and all their cocky, quirky crap.
“Told you to apply for the same game design camp, Gates.”
I hate that he gets to be named after the cuter tech genius, but I’m pretty sure Gates was the richer, so maybe it all balances out.
“I’ve still got community service time to do at the inkatorium.”
I manage to knock down four pins in my next shot. In time for John, who’s just walked over to our lane, to verify that I’m pathetic at this too.
“Get lost, Lloyd. I need to talk to Abbie.”
Jobs looks over at me.
I nod.
As soon as he’s gone, John sits in the hard plastic chair of the scorekeeper.
“I’m going to spend this summer in England.”
I try to swallow my envy. “That’s great,” I say.
“My parents told me I could invite one of my friends, all expenses paid. Want to come?”
I come closer, study him.
“No,” I say after a bit.
“Aren’t we ever going to be friends again?”
He looks so miserable, I cave and sit next to him. “Yeah. But it’s still a no. I’m almost done with community service but I have to get a paying job after that so I can put some money away for MCC.” Mackensie Community College. Not my first choice, but dreams adapt to means.
He looks over to the counter where Jobs is waiting for his slice order, then shakes his head. “Bet he’s never offered you what I have. Nor that low-life you brought to the prom.”
“Love isn’t bought,” I say.
“You’re an idiot,” he says as he walks away.
Two days later, when I skip out of school a period early, a gavilán limo is parked in front of the school. The driver rolls down the passenger side window. “Get in,” he says.
I go for the same door as the rolled-down window, but he jerks his head to indicate the back seat.
“You were driving the night of the prom,” I say before he slides the glass partition up between back and front.
“I go where he wants me to go. I’m his second.”
“What’s your name?”
“Ernesto. Neto.”
“So, is this a good thing, that he’s sent for me?”
“Not to my mind,” he says. Then the thunk of the partition closing seals us into separate worlds.
When the limo stops, he rolls down the partition and motions to the cement factory chute. “He’s up there.”
I hesitate, then realize the whole factory is idle.
Toño’s back is to me when I get to the top of the chute. He’s looking up at the afternoon sky.”If you really look, you can almost see the stars out there now,” he says when he hears me come up.
“Told you. Unconditional.”
He turns around. “You look good, America.”
“What are you doing here?”
He gives me one of his mocking smiles. “Wait, is this the same girl who called me in the middle of the night?”
I dig a couple of small rounds of concrete out of the chute with the toe of my sneaker. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
Now that he’s in front of me, I can’t look at him. I squint down the chute to the factory building. The sign is in one of those big construction dumpsters and there’s scaffolding still up on the blank wall.
“How strange,” I say. “The factory must have been sold.”
“America,” he says softly, “I drove three hours to see you and you’re going to stand there talking about the factory?”
Some kisses are just kisses. Others are filled with promises overlaid on regrets, and future overlaid on history. When we stop kissing he doesn’t let me go.
“How long can you stay?” I ask.
“Not long. And I can’t do this again, America.”
I close my eyes, rest my forehead against his chest. “You’re killing me, Gavilán.”
I can feel his laughter.
“Are you laughing at my pronunciation?” I look up at him.
“Maybe.”
“Nice. See if I call you ever again.”
“You shouldn’t anyway. I’m not ready for anyone to find out about you.”
“Because I’m not an ink.”
“Because you’re up here and I’m in Hastings and I can’t protect you.”
“But it makes a difference, doesn’t it? That I don’t have a tat.”
“Yes.”
When I pull away from him, he studies me for a moment, then takes a knife out of his pocket. He slices through the patch covering his tattoo. He’s so practiced he doesn’t even raise a welt on the real skin beneath. When he peels back the pieces of instaskin, the mass of blue lines reveals itself.
“Each line is really a number,” he says, then recites them as he glides his finger across the tattoo. As he does, I know I’ll remember them always. It’s that way with me and code.
“It tracks everything the government cares to know about me. From who I was born to and where, to whether I get the full rights of citizenship or not. Their measure of who I am.” His mouth twists a little as he says it.
“Someday it won’t be that way,” I say.
“They’ll still see me as they want to see me,” he says. “That’s really the mark inks bear that you’ll never understand, America.”
“Never? Like, not even if we got married and lived together for years and years?”
He grins. “So, we’re talking marriage now?”
I feel the heat rise to my cheeks.
I start to mumble something, but his mouth steals whatever my words are going to be. And there’s no more time for words in the couple of hours he’s stolen for us. Just what passes between us as it always has, fully clothed with desire and aching with promise.
4.
My father starts coming to have dinner with us two or three times a week. There aren’t any embarrassing public displays of affection, but I do catch my parents giving each other moony looks that make me want to knock them both about the head and ask them why they couldn’t have done this when it mattered to me.
&n
bsp; We’re on week number three of this strange new routine and a handful of days away from my 19th birthday, when the limo pulls up to the door of the trailer. It’s around eight at night and, as it’s been since my father’s reappearance, my mother is at home instead of the inkatorium.
Neto is out of the limo and is halfway up the porch steps when I meet him.
“I need your help,” he says without a hello. “Toño said you’re good with computers. He and six other gavilanes were injured on their way to a job, they got hauled off in official-looking vans. I got part of a license plate number from a witness. Can you figure something from that?”
“Wait,” I say. I scramble past my parents and into my room. I grab the duffle I’ve kept intact since Meche put her laptop in it for me in Hastings. I’d discovered the money Meche was going to pay me for Blue Belle tucked in there, along with a stack of wireless/broadband cards, soon after I got back. Now I stuff some clothes in there with them and the laptop, and turn to go. My mother’s standing in the doorway.
“Toño’s hurt,” I say. “I don’t know how bad. And he’s an ink. You know what that means.”
She turns away without a word. I see her go into her bedroom and get on the phone. She’s probably calling the cops. I book.
My father wraps his arms around me before I get to the door. I can’t break out of them.
“You know, right?” he says. “That love and desire aren’t enough? You need luck, too. And we’re dogged by its opposite.”
“Cut the shit and let go.” My mother.
“Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not chasing you,” he says stubbornly, but he drops his arms.
She’s got a plastic kit about the size of what you’d pack to travel. She hands it to me. “There’s some stuff that might be useful in it. You’ll figure it out. Go.”
As soon as I’m in the limo I get on the laptop and the Internet and pray that we don’t hit a Smithville dead zone.
“You think we can do anything?” Neto asks as he drives to the interstate. Anywhere we have to go will be more easily reached from there.
“Not with a partial. The DMV’s database is too huge. Were they instaskinned?”
“They were supposed to be meeting with the leadership of another gang, so I don’t think so. But I’m not sure.”
“Okay, given your drive time if they’ve been taken to an inkatorium, they’ve probably gotten the GPS chips in them already. Which means as long as they’re still instate, Hipco’ll have them on track. And thankfully, Hipco’s network security is laughable.”
Ink Page 20
