He snorted. “You were already in trouble. You came in at 2:00.” More of the covers came down, and then she felt the touch of his tongue along the line of her spine. She gasped, arching up. “And you came into my room.”
“I was delirious.” Her voice was breathless. “I got lost.”
Another scoff. “Okay, you got lost. But instead of realizing you were in the wrong room when you saw me sleeping—the way you want to be asleep now—you didn’t leave.” He nipped her shoulder. “You woke me up.”
“Mmm. There was a monster under my bed. You can’t expect me to sleep alone when there’s a monster under my bed.”
He moved her hair off one shoulder, his breath hot against her ear. “As I recall, you weren’t interested in sleep.”
“I’m interested in sleep right now. Go away.”
“Mmhmm.”
Then the cool morning air was replaced by the heat of his body against her back. She gasped and groaned again as he pushed her legs apart with his knees.
He was gentle, tender as he moved in her. As she came fully awake, Mina found it was hard to breathe. Not because he was smothering her, though he was. She was engulfed. He’d even taken both her hands in his, stretching them above her head, their fingers twined.
But that wasn’t why she couldn’t breathe. No, she couldn’t breathe around the emotion that welled in her chest.
This was love-making. He was making love to her, pressing kisses to the side of her hair, and despite the fact she’d specifically told him she didn’t want to think about what they were doing, she knew one thing without thinking about it.
She was in love with him.
“Shh, mija.” Val pressed his hand over her mouth, muffling the cry that escaped as that knowledge hit home. “Are you going to come for me?” he whispered.
She really was, and that was a surprise. For slow, early-morning sex?
Some minutes later, when they’d caught their breaths again, she arched her back, bucking him off her. “I’m going to be late for work,” she said.
He rolled onto his back, ruffling his hair as he watched her rush around the room. He yawned, and she shook her head. “You should move out,” she said without thinking.
He sucked in a breath and stared up at the ceiling. “What?”
Mina’s heart skipped a beat, but the words were already out there. She busied herself in her closet, pulling on her robe and finding clothes for the day as she tried to gather her thoughts. She searched for the right words, but Mina had never been good at eloquent words. She said what she felt.
“You’ve been working for a while,” she stated, coming out of the closet. “And you’ve got an even better job now.” She offered a small smile, pretending she wasn’t as nervous as she felt. “We both know how hard it’s been for you to be back in this house.”
He grinned at her, a smile that made her blood tingle and her heart beat too fast. “I don’t know. A few good things have come out of it.”
Mina went to him, and when he pushed up onto his elbows, she leaned down to kiss him. “I know you want to be sure before you leap again. I know that.” She took a steadying breath, running the back of her knuckle down his cheek. “I’m just saying it would’ve been nice if I could’ve crashed at my boyfriend’s house last night without either of us having to sneak around like we’re sixteen.”
Val stared at her, blinking hard. Then, his smile went wide and soft. He reached up and traced a thumb over her lips. The tender look in his eyes sparked with mischief. “I have another solution. Maybe it would be easier to live here if I could crash at my girlfriend’s place every now and then.”
Her lips quirked. It was a decent point. With her side job, it wouldn’t take her long at all to gather first and last months’ rent, a healthy deposit, and enough to buy a few things she would need. “We’ll talk about it,” she said, leaning down for another kiss. “When I’m not late.”
“For work, right?” he called after her as she grabbed a towel.
She laughed. “Yes, for work. Calm down.” She paused at the door to blow him one last kiss before she opened it and stepped out into the hallway.
Right into Momma Cora’s path.
Mina yelped and jumped back, pulling the door closed a little too hard. Cora stared at her with narrowed eyes.
“Do you have a boy in there, Mina?”
“What?” Mina asked with a squeak. She cleared her throat. “No.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“I was on the phone.”
“Uh-huh.” Momma Cora looked her up and down and then gave her a little smirk. She shook a finger in Mina’s face. “If you’re going to have a boy over, don’t let your father find out. I’ll have to take his side. You got it?”
Mina’s cheeks went hot. “Momma!”
“Aye.” Momma Cora waved a hand at her. “You’re twenty-two years old, and I’m no fool. Just don’t get caught.” She tilted her head. “Is he a boyfriend?”
“I… No.” Mina rubbed the back of her neck, completely thrown.
Momma Cora sighed and nodded resignedly. “Be careful, mija. Be smart.” She patted Mina’s cheek and headed downstairs.
Chapter 17
“Why are you staring at your Chinese food like it owes you something?”
Val looked up and smiled. He’d been exhausted and moody a half-second before, but the sight of Mina leaning in the doorway, her arms crossed as she looked at him in amusement, gave him a rush of energy.
His girlfriend? They still hadn’t talked about that, but the idea made him happy.
And nervous. He glanced around as Mina came up behind him, resting a hand on his shoulder and letting her fingertips play with his hair. He knew his mother was somewhere in the house, but he was probably being too paranoid. It was a fairly innocent gesture. Just because his body was now programmed to react to her touch didn’t mean it was intimate.
Val cleared his throat and gestured at the Styrofoam container of food. “I didn’t feel like cooking tonight, so I pulled into the first place I saw, but…”
“But you got home and realized it wasn’t what you really wanted.” She made a grunting noise. “I mean, this is not the best-looking Chinese food I’ve ever seen. It looks like it’s been out most of the day.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Hmm,” she hummed. She was practically petting him now, her fingers running along his scalp absently. He would’ve purred if he could have. “You starving, or you got some time for me to repurpose it?”
“Have at it.”
Rather than pick up the container, Mina strode to the fridge. Val watched as she began pulling out vegetables. “What are you doing?”
“You trust me or what?”
“Sure, I trust you.” He watched her as she set the vegetables on the counter and pulled out a cutting board. “You want me to help?”
She made an exasperated noise. “For God’s sake. Would you let me feed you?”
He smirked, almost forgetting for a moment that his mother could come downstairs any minute. He reached out, hooking a finger around the loop in her jeans and drawing her toward him. He circled her waist with his arms, looking up at her. “You want to be a nice girlfriend, huh? Make me dinner after a hard day?”
She rolled her eyes, but her cheeks were pink and she was smiling. She gave him a gentle cuff upside the head before she returned to what she’d been doing. “I was raised by a Mexican family. Feeding people is what we do.”
“How are you going to turn my Chinese food into Mexican rice y frijoles?”
“I said I was raised by Mexicans, not magicians.”
They talked as she chopped onions, cabbage, carrots, celery, and tomatoes. She tossed those with some butter in a soup pot. She cut up some fresh garlic. It smelled so good as they started to roast. He watched her as they talked about his job and her burgeoning plans to go back to school, which she said was looking especially good since
she couldn’t seem to find steady work.
He scoffed. “Yeah. I know that song pretty well.”
“But you have something now, right? You know what I mean? You have a job that’s more than just a way to make money.”
“A chef. How about that?” He shook his head. “Life’s funny, huh? See, you should’ve let me cook. It’s my job. It’s what I do now.”
“Which is why you were too tired to do this for yourself.” Mina set a bowl in front of him. The last half hour had turned his limp Chinese into a fragrant bowl of soup. It wasn’t any particular flavor. There were a lot of spices, but he recognized the taste of tomato bullion that came in the jar with the red lid and the rooster on the side.
“This is delicious,” Val proclaimed.
“I call it leftover soup. You know, you always have that half an onion, two celery sticks, and whatever leftovers there are from whatever dinner. You stick those in a pot with some water, tomato sauce, and bullion, and boom! Delicious soup.” She dropped into the seat beside him with her own bowl. “Extends the life of the leftovers another couple of days. That’s some broke college student wisdom for you.”
“It’s not a bad thing to remember.” He met her eyes over his spoon. “Since I’m going to be paying rent again soon, yeah?”
She flushed again, and her eyes darted down to her bowl. “Yeah. That’d be nice,” she said, almost shyly. She raised her head and opened her mouth but closed it again when a creak upstairs reminded her that this wasn’t the time to talk about that. She cleared her throat. “So, obviously, you never thought about being a chef. What did you want to be when you grew up?
He laughed. “Hell, I don’t know.”
“You went to school, right? I remember that. When I was little, I remember asking you a million questions about why the hell an adult had to do so much homework.”
“I don’t think you phrased it quite like that.” He took a spoonful, remembering the way she’d looked at him when she was a little girl, like everything he did was fascinating and worthwhile
“The point is you must’ve gone to school for something.”
His lips twitched. “Sure, but it wasn’t like it was something I dreamed about. It was just something to do.”
“But what was it?”
“I was trying to get a Human Resources Business degree.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “HR? Why?”
“No good reason. They have all the answers. When can I go on vacation? How do I get health insurance? Does that really constitute sexual harassment?”
“Ah, that’s a good answer to have.” Mina’s smile gentled as she looked at him curiously. “But really. You didn’t want to be anything when you grew up?”
Val put his spoon down and rubbed at his chest as if he could soothe the ache of a heavy heart. He tried to smile and shrugged. “I was born bad, remember? Came out of the box that way. I don’t think I ever thought about what I was going to be except for out from under anyone’s control. That’s all I wanted—not to have to pay attention to a word any adult said.” Another shrug. “I was a punk.”
“Man, prison must’ve been a real kick in the pants, then. You turned eighteen the day you went to prison, didn’t you? You started adulthood way under someone’s thumb.”
He wanted to respond with equal lightness, but he found he couldn’t. His mouth was set in a hard line, and his fingers clenched around his spoon. He had to swallow hard past the painful lump in his throat.
“Oh, shit.” Mina set down her spoon with a clank. “I’m sorry. That’s not funny. That’s not funny at all.”
He looked up, attempting to smile. “It’s okay.”
“No. No, it was the wrong thing to say. And you weren’t born bad. You’re not a bad person.”
“No one who gets sent up for attempted murder of their baby brother can be that great of a person,” he muttered, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
“I don’t think that’s true.” Mina furrowed her brows. “I mean, I don’t think it’s that simple. I get it. I asked Momma Cora once how she could let you near Carlito after what you’d done. I know Dante had a problem with that. She said that some things make sense when you’re angry, and you had a right to be angry back then. She said you had to watch Carlito have a really nice life when your life had always been too hard, even when you were a little kid.”
“It wasn’t—” He cut himself off with an exasperated noise, pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
“What?” Mina asked, tentatively reaching over and touching his arm.
He shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
She squeezed his shoulder with a gentle pressure. “You can tell me anything. It’s not going to scare me.”
For a long minute, he studied her, hating the way his heart ached. Each beat made his throat tighten. A voice in his head sneered with derision.
No one else has ever believed you. Why would she?
But then there were those eyes—the same eyes he’d first seen on the same little girl who’d always looked at him with trust that he would do right by her. It still rocked him that, after he’d let her down when she needed him most, he had her trust back. The rest of the world could believe he was rotten to the core, but not her. He had the strangest feeling, like he might die if she ever thought that little of him again.
“I didn’t do it,” he revealed, his voice barely audible.
“What?”
He took in a deep breath and let it out, fixing his gaze on the wall behind her head. No one knew this. No one. “I didn’t do it.” He let that rest a beat before the rest of the story came out. “Carlito was a pain-in-the-ass little snot, and yeah, I was always into some kind of trouble. I was an asshole. I was so angry all the time, and I did stupid, stupid things. Sometimes I did fucked up things to Carlito, but they were brother things, you know? Maybe I’d set him up to take a pratfall, but that’s it.” He took another breath, struggling around the old pain in his chest. “He’s my baby brother. He’s my family. I wouldn’t even let anyone else talk bad about him. You think I’d try to kill him?”
“Val—” Mina started, but he shook his head, needing to continue.
“My friends… If anything, they liked him even less than I did. He was so annoying. Here he was, barely more than a baby, and he was always trying to hang out with us. Even then, he was an insistent, bossy little fucker.” He let out a low, raw laugh. If adult Val had known baby Carlito, he might’ve been charmed. The little boy had often echoed the venom he’d heard his father spew about Val, but he’d also worshipped the ground he walked on. Adult Val knew baby Carlito had idolized his big brother.
He shook his head. “I was always telling that little brat to go the hell away. Why anyone would believe I’d taken him with me…” He brushed that off. “Dante was the one who came up with the story everyone believes. Not on purpose. It’s what he really thinks happened. He was supposed to be watching Carlito. And I’m not blaming him, okay? I think sometimes kids get away from their parents. Little bastards are good at that. I was. But Dante couldn’t let himself think that Carlito had wandered away from him, chasing after my friend and me. He knew I didn’t like the kid. The only thing that made sense to him was that I’d lured Carlito out of the house and put him behind the car. The truth is I never even saw him.” His heart was beating hard, and he stared down at his lap, swallowing convulsively. “I never saw him follow us. I think he was being sneaky, because he knew damn well I’d have told him to go away. I didn’t know he was there until I heard the thump and the scream.”
The silence that followed his confession was loud. It roared between his ears. Val couldn’t bring himself to look up. He didn’t think he could take it if he had to see the skepticism or derision in Mina’s eyes. Why would she believe him? Not even she had ever questioned he’d done it.
“Valentin,” she whispered after an age. “Why? Why wouldn’t you tell anyone that?”
He let out a breath with a whoosh. “I was born bad,” he said quietly. “Everyone knew that. ‘Valentin can never keep himself out of trouble.’” He closed his eyes. Even now, the memory of that day—he’d been freaking out so badly at the sight of his bloody, broken brother—just hurt. “Dante got there when all the cops and paramedics did. They dragged him away from Carlito, and all he could do was scream at me. ‘What did you do to my son?!’” He’d that so many times, making it clear just what kind of an asshole Val was. “At the time, I thought he meant the fact I hit him. Obviously, I was guilty of that. I didn’t mean to, but it was terrible. And we—my friend and I—had stolen the car, you know? We were just going to joyride, but regardless. Not like I was innocent.
“I don’t know. It was confusing, and I was scared shitless. I couldn’t think very well. It took me forever to figure out what they were actually accusing me of.” He shuddered, remembering the hate he’d seen in his mother’s eyes for the first time in his life. Not exasperation, not anger. Hate. Even if the hate didn’t stick, she’d believed he was capable of doing that to her baby, and that more than anything had broken him. “Maybe it was easier. I was always going to fuck up my life. It just felt so inevitable. And when I didn’t know if Carlito would live or die, it felt like I deserved it, so when they asked me if I was guilty, I just said yes.”
The grating sound of a chair scraping across the floor startled Val. He looked up as Mina came to stand in front of him. There was such hurt in her eyes, and it took him a minute to realize that hurt was for him.
She took his face in between her hands, stroking the backs of her knuckles down one cheek with such tenderness. She searched his eyes, her own shining with unshed tears. “I’m sorry, my beautiful, precious man. I’m so sorry no one ever told you your life is worth fighting for.”
He raised his hand to cover hers, stroking a thumb over her skin. “You believe me?”
“Of course I do.”
Never Enough Page 13
