A moment later, Matt opened the door and looked from me to the gun in my hands. “Drop the gun if there’s no chance of you shooting me today,” he said calmly like he was negotiating with a criminal.
I dropped the gun on the desk and he walked across the room to sit across from me. “What’s wrong?”
I stood up and started to pace the room. I felt out of control and I didn’t like it. I needed something. I needed a one-on-one session with a punching bag. I had so much pent up energy and words that just wanted to be free, I felt like a bomb, each second a loud tick before I couldn’t take it anymore and just exploded.
Right now seemed like that time.
Even though I never told Matt about Hector, not even when I visited him in the hospital the day after I punched him. “It’s his fault,” I boomed, clenching my fists at my sides. “I never wanted him. I wanted one thing and he took that one thing away from me and now I want him. Only him. All of the time and I have no fucking clue how he feels. And I hate him. I hate him so fucking much for making me love him.”
I huffed out a breath and then the only sound in the room was my chest heaving. It felt good to say the words out loud. To share them with anyone even if it wasn’t the person I was dying to tell. It felt like someone had been standing on my chest for months and finally, they took their feet off of me. I could breathe again.
Matt whispered, “He loves you.”
I whipped around to face him. “What did you just say?”
He looked from me to my empty chair and he leaned back into his seat and folded his arms across his stomach waiting me out.
I was desperate for his words and I didn’t pretend otherwise. I plopped my ass back in that chair and looked at him expectantly. “You know who he is to the public, right?”
I leaned forward, propping my elbows on the desk. “That’s the one thing he doesn’t talk about. All he tells me is that he is a dangerous man and I know he kills.”
“He is dangerous and he does kill. The Rivera name is powerful but with each new leader, they turn less into a crime organization and more into a martyr for this city. In the past couple of years, he has raised the prices of drugs so kids of color won’t have easy access to them. He built a private tuition-free primary school for kids with autism. In the past five years, he has killed close to one hundred women beaters and rapists.”
Matt smirked but I could barely see him through my blurry vision. I thought I knew what kind of man Hector was, but I was wrong. He was so much more. “Basically, he’s the real police. He’s the one who promises justice and actually follows through.” Matt respected him, maybe even admired him.
I knew Hector was a mixture of good and bad, of Heaven and Hell. He was a blurred line. And I loved every inch of him.
“He got married young and no one knows what happened to her, just that she disappeared and left their son behind. That was over ten years ago, Annie. And he’s never even looked at another woman. No one until you.”
And boy, does he look at me.
“The day you came back to work, about an hour before you showed up, he called me. He asked me if I knew you and then he told me that you were under the Rivera protection. Not a harm would come to you now or after what situation you have going on with him ends.” He looked at me like that should mean something to me. From what it sounded like, he protected the entire city. “The only other two people on that list are his son and Nolan.”
His son and his childhood best friend. And now me.
His family.
I was already gathering up my things to go home, to go to him.
“He would burn this city alive for you, Annie,” Matt said. His face wasn’t its usual cocky, smirking swagger, it was serious.
I rushed outside without calling Nolan or Hector or having any idea where home actually was. But it turned out, I didn’t need it. Hector was still parked where he left me, his head leaned back against the seat’s headrest with his eyes closed. I walked to the driver’s side and pulled open the door. His eyes snapped open but I didn’t wait for him to say something.
I fell into his lap and crashed my lips against his. He caught me. His hands slipped around my waist and gripped my hips closing any gap between us. I blindly reached for his hat and knocked it away before my fingers sunk into his hair. Our kiss was as frantic as my heartbeat. I couldn’t get enough of him. I would never be able to get enough of him.
I kissed him to tell him that I was sorry for running, for lying.
I kissed him because I wanted to. Because I needed to.
I kissed him because he was the first man I’d ever loved.
When we came up for air, I let my forehead rest against his as we fought hard to get our breathing back under control.
“Take me home,” I whispered and he did.
* * *
In college, you learn a lot of things. It’s kind of what the entire four years are about. But there are a lot of things that you learn outside of academics. You learn through experience or through entertainment. And in my case, poetry.
Eliza Reyes at a poetry reading and through her two books of poems I had absolutely devoured in the past couple of weeks taught me something. Something that seemed so simple but I had never come to fully realize before.
A woman doesn’t need a sword to be a warrior. A woman doesn’t need to have the strongest muscles or the best reflexes. A woman doesn’t need to know how to wield a knife or aim a gun. A woman is strong in her passion and in her fight. There’s strength in softness and there’s strength in intelligence.
It wasn’t a conscious decision but when I had an hour of gap time after a shift at the range, it wasn’t food that was calling my name. It was something else entirely.
The Center, the only women’s shelter located in the city, offered refuge to women escaping pasts of domestic violence and sexual assault. I stopped just outside of the old Victorian building. It competed with major businesses and corporations as being the tallest building in this part of the city but it had no competition of being the prettiest. It felt like it belonged in a small town rather than a vibrant city.
My heart pounded against my chest as I forced my legs to move up the few stairs leading up to the front door. It wasn’t the first time I’d been here, but it had been awhile. The door had an old-style brass knocker and my shaky fingers wrapped around it, slamming against the door three times before stepping away, my head knowing too well how it feels to get hit with the heaviness of that wooden frame.
It took a few minutes, a few minutes I willed my feet to stay planted on the ground and not run as far away as I possibly could. Out of all the workers I knew from when I interned here between my sophomore and junior year of college, the person that opened the door with a booming smile was Eliza Reyes herself.
My mouth gaped open as she stood there with a smile on her face and the door half-opened. This woman who I didn’t even personally know who absolutely touched my soul was standing in front of me smiling like my world wasn’t just thrown off balance.
“Annie, right?” she asked.
I nodded, still staring, still in awe. She reached out to grab my arm and dragged me inside. I was thankful for it because I would have probably stayed glued to the same spot for hours.
“Yes,” I confirmed slowly and suddenly suspicious. How did she know me? I was pretty loud when she was on stage at McNutt’s Cafe, but I didn’t think I was so loud that she would pick me out of the crowd.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she questioned, still having a hold of my arm and pulling me through the house. I followed her upstairs and into one of the empty offices.
She was hard to forget when I had just seen her weeks ago but it didn’t sound like she was talking about weeks ago. “Should I?” I went with, confused as hell.
“Yeah,” she said, finally letting go of me and moving behind the desk and sitting in a chair. She worked here, I realized. I racked my brain searching for a memory of mine that she was in but I came
up empty.
“You worked here three years ago,” she stated. “I sought out help three years ago.”
I blinked back my surprise. Was she here when I interned? This shelter held a lot of women and some went faster than they came; it was impossible to recognize every single face in the span of the three months I spent here.
“If I’m being perfectly honest, back then, I didn’t come here believing that anyone could say or do anything that would help me. I fell in love with an angry man. A man who told me he loved me and told me he would protect me always. His promises lasted as long as the honeymoon stage did. A few months, if that. I didn’t make his favorite thing for dinner, he backhanded me. I didn’t iron his clothes, he filled up the iron with scalding hot water and poured it over me while I was sleeping.”
Her words were honest, so honest I felt like her words were a knife lodged into my heart and with each syllable, she twisted the knife. “The thing about abusers is that after they hurt you, they take care of you. And for a reason unknown to me, you believe them. You believe them when they tell you they’re sorry. You believe them when they say that it will never happen again. You believe them when they tell you that they love you. And you stay and you let it happen again and again.”
At some point, while she poured her truth out to me, my eyes fell shut, my body sagging against the chair. “But you said something, Annie, you said something that changed my life.”
My head snapped up and I saw she was fighting back tears with her hands stretched across the desk. I slid my hands in hers and squeezed. “It was just a couple of weeks before your internship ended. You held your first group meeting and you told us the story of your mom, of what happened to her. You stood up in front of a group of strangers and shared your biggest lost. You lost your mom to domestic violence and you weren’t bitter. You weren’t mad at your mom, you were devastated for her and for yourself. The last thing you said that night was, ‘Love yourself enough to get out and if you don’t love yourself enough to do that, think about those who do love you. Whether it’s your child, your sister, your mom, or the lady at the supermarket who says hi to you every time you buy groceries. Your life matters and the only person who has the power to say enough is enough is you.’”
I nodded, tears running down my face as I remembered that night. I hoped I would get through to one woman. That was enough for me. I knew I couldn’t save every single one of them; not everyone wanted to be saved, but I was just hoping for one.
That one sat across from me today.
“I left right after you did. I went back to him. We hit the reset button. The only way he put his hands on me was to show me how much he loved me. Three months passed and it started all over again, this time with a vengeance. It wasn’t just his hands this time. He was a welder and I was his favorite piece of metal. And then, I found out I was pregnant.” I barely held back a gasp as my hands grew tighter in hers. “I didn’t want her to be Annie 2.0. I didn’t want her to grow up and watch her mother be degraded and destroyed. I waited until he left for work and I left with nothing but the clothes on my back and I came here. That was over two years ago and the girls here, they did help me. They helped me find a job and then a house. Even after I left, they helped me submit my application to community college. They stood with me throughout it all. I look back at the woman I was then and I can’t recognize her and every morning when I wake up to the sound of my little girl crying for breakfast, I thank God I can’t.”
I was speechless. So utterly speechless. So in awe of this woman.
“Thank you for sharing your story, Annie. I’m afraid of who I would be today if you didn’t.”
“Shut up,” I told her because I didn’t know what else to say. She withdrew her hands from mine, reached into her desk and supplied us with tissues. After we wiped our eyes and blew our noses, I said, “Your poetry reading was amazing. I was there.”
She smiled knowingly. “I know.” She batted her eyes at me while looking me up and down.
“What?” I demanded.
Just then, the two workers I knew from years ago busted in the door. Jessica and Rachel. “Annie,” they both exclaimed in unison and I found myself lifted out of my chair and in a three-way hug. When we pulled away, Jessica took my face in her hands and had a good look at me. Rachel looked past us and grimaced at Eliza. “We couldn’t wait any longer.”
“How did you know I was here?” I looked between the three of them. “I get the feeling you were expecting me.”
“We were also at Eliza’s poetry reading. Two tables behind you. Watching you kissing an older man senseless.”
Jessica screeched so loud I had to cover my ears with my hands. Rachel peeled my hands away and all three of them were looking at me expectantly. “The Annie I knew a few years ago would rather light her eyes on fire than to ever be involved with a man.”
I shrugged my shoulders. How could I explain Hector? There weren’t words in the dictionary or anywhere else that could describe the man he was and more importantly, the man he was to me. “I always thought I had my life mapped out. I had a checklist and every day, I was living to mark one of those boxes off. I’ve come to learn that life is unexpected and the unexpected changes you. He hijacked my plans and made me love him without even trying.”
I looked at each of them and they all wore different expressions. Jessica sported a sappy smile. Rachel held a prideful glee in her eye and Eliza had tears welling underneath her eyelids once more. “You deserve it,” she whispered.
I stood up and checked the time. “I would love to stay but I have to get to work.”
“Do you still work at the shooting range?” Jessica asked.
“Yeah.”
“So, you don’t have any time to volunteer here?”
I perked up at that, looking between the three of them. “Do you have a spot available?”
Rachel nodded. “As long as you can provide me with a copy of that Social Work BA and your clearances come back clean, we want to have you. Right now, we have a lot of young women. Teenagers and women in their early twenties. We would love a badass woman around here. They have been pleading for months for a self-defense class.”
That I could do. I would have to cut back my hours at the shooting range but if I could go back to honoring my mother’s memory in a way she’d be proud of, I’d drop everything.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “I’m in.”
I had no idea what the night held.
An hour ago, Hector barged into the house and ordered me into the shower, requesting me to wear the outfit I bought on my mother’s birthday.
The past week had been hectic. Philly Range had a state inspection due at the end of the month so it would be another two weeks before I could cut down on any hours. Matt said I owed it to him, for not seeing what a fine specimen of a man he was. I ignored him but still worked my eight hours despite already working my way into the day to day routine at the shelter. I scheduled an appointment at a clinic to take a drug test. I dug my diploma and license out of my backpack and handed it over to Jessica to make me official. I went in a few hours a day to tour the building, re-learn safety clearances, and sign papers.
Today, I worked at the range for eight hours and spent an additional two hours at the shelter. I worked side by side with Eliza who I was still a little too star struck by. It was like meeting Wonder Woman and her telling you, you inspired her to be the strongest woman known to mankind. It didn’t feel real. She introduced me to a few of the women in the shelter. Some snuffed their nose up at me but some of them really opened up to me.
It was a good day but I felt drained emotionally. All of the feelings I shoved down, all of the memories I’ve done a stellar job of forgetting, rose up like demons haunting me. It felt good to talk to some of the women and their children. My heart soared any time they sought me out, but I felt my mom in each look, in every conversation. She was with me. I could feel her but I’d never be able to see her. Two years ago when I in
terned here, the feeling almost drowned me. And if I was being honest, even now, my head barely bobbed above the water.
But this was Hector. Hector who always gave me what I wanted. So, it didn’t matter if I could barely keep my eyes open or if my bones hurt from exhaustion, I would get dressed and I’d let him take me wherever he wanted.
Dressing in the green shorts, white tank, and the black leather jacket I picked up on a shopping spree with Nolan this week, I headed downstairs. I found Hector at the kitchen table, his eyes closed as he hummed along to the soft music playing from the kitchen.
“I’m ready.”
His eyes snapped open, immediately seeking me out before traveling down my body. He looked at me long enough the goosebumps on my arms turned into shivers. “We’re going out tonight.”
I raised my eyebrows at his admission. “We’re going out? In public? Willingly?”
A noise escaped him, sounding like a mixture between a grunt and a chuckle. I followed him to the car, a warmth settling underneath my skin that had nothing to do with the humid Philadelphia air I stepped into.
Spending five minutes with Hector felt like winning a lottery ticket. Roping him into dates was the best part of my day. To have him take me out for a change, grumbling and all, felt like all of my wishes had been granted.
I tucked my hands underneath my thighs so I wouldn’t mess with the blindfold Hector placed over my eyes before he started to drive. Just as I started to wonder where he could be taking me, I felt a warmth settle over my thigh.
His hand gripped my bare leg in a reassuring hold. I sat up straighter, feeling his hand everywhere. “Relax, bonita,” he whispered when the car stopped. “You’re safe with me.”
I knew that. No one would fuck with me with him by my side. Unless it was the man himself with his warm brown eyes and his soft but electrifying touch. Unless it was my traitorous heart that skipped a beat by just looking his way.
Hijacked Page 24
