Chapter 11 #2
“The boss man, Martín.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You work here?”
Sebastián pointed at the ceiling. “Live here, too.” He tugged her over to introduce her. “Martín, es Julia.”
Martín’s eyes traveled from Sebastián to Julia and back again, a look of comical confusion on his face. “?Ella es tu novia?”
Sebastián rolled his eyes. “No. Es la novia de Daniel.”
Julia’s tiny amount of Spanish was enough to deduce that Sebastián had just called her Daniel’s girlfriend. It wasn’t true, but the mere idea of her being that sent a stupid little thrill through her.
Martín’s reaction to that news was very different. He looked at Julia with a mixture of pity and horror, like he’d just been told she had some incurable, life-shortening disease.
Sebastián laughed at his response. Then he tugged Julia away, through a doorway curtained by long plastic strips.
It led to the kitchen, which was cramped and hot and loud, with servers and cooks bustling between the counters and speaking loudly in Spanish.
She pressed herself against a refrigerator door and made herself small.
Sebastián went over to one grill and spoke to the cook manning it.
A minute later, he came back with a plate containing two overstuffed fried sandwiches.
“Tortas,” he explained, handing her the plate.
She trailed him out of the kitchen and through the dining area to a small table near the door.
While they ate, she kept snatching glances of him across the table.
She tried to spot differences between him and Daniel.
Sebastián’s face was thinner, more sculpted.
None of Daniel’s scars or tattoos. More handsome, but less animated.
Daniel’s eyes contained all his thoughts, swimming right on the surface.
She sensed Sebastián kept his much deeper down.
He said, “So how’d you and my brother meet, anyway?”
She bit the inside of her cheek and said nothing.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It’s not that.”
She looked down at her plate. Every time she thought about telling anyone what had happened in Daniel’s trailer that night, she felt a stab of panic.
Her eyes flicked back to Sebastián. “It’s just a long and kind of awful story.”
He didn’t seem surprised that they hadn’t met in some adorable, romantic way like you see in a rom-com. Or maybe his guarded expression was just Sebastián’s standard reaction to everything.
She said, “How long have you worked here?”
“About a year and a half. Since we got here from LA.”
“Just you and Daniel?”
He nodded.
“Why’d you leave LA?”
He didn’t answer, just pushed his plate away. He sat forward, crossing his arms on the table. “Listen, Julia. I’m not trying to scare you away here. But there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know—”
Behind her, the restaurant door banged open. Sebastián fell silent.
She swiveled in her seat and saw Daniel standing in the doorway, wearing baggy jeans and a green checkered shirt over a white singlet. The color of his shirt seemed to make the hazel in his eyes even more striking.
His gaze went straight to Julia. And she instantly felt like there was no longer enough oxygen in the room.
She couldn’t seem to make her tongue work, so she just stared at him. Daniel’s eyes went to his brother, and something passed between them, deep and unspoken. Something like gratitude, only a hundred times stronger.
Sebastián stood and tossed him the car keys.
Daniel snatched them out of the air. He nodded at Julia, then turned and left the restaurant without a word.
She got up and pushed her chair in. Her hands were shaking, so she pressed them to her sides. “Thanks for dinner,” she said to Sebastián.
At the door, she paused and looked back. Martín was standing over by the counter, serving a customer. She gave him a little wave. He just shook his head and went back to punching buttons on the cash register.
* * *
Julia’s heart was thumping as she crossed the street to where Daniel was waiting for her in the ’Cuda. Outwardly though, she tried to appear calm as slid into the passenger seat.
He turned his head to look at her but said nothing. The orange cast of the streetlights illuminated his face. He didn’t smile or attempt any pleasantries. He just looked her right in the eye.
It didn’t feel awkward or weird. It just felt like they’d skipped a bunch of the usual steps in the getting-to-know-you part of a relationship.
The self-conscious small talk, the forced niceties, the bad jokes.
The parts where you figure out if you actually like this person or not. Where you decide if you have chemistry.
For her and Daniel, they’d figured that out a long time ago. All that other stuff felt redundant. It was like they’d skipped straight ahead to the staring into each other’s souls’ bit.
“Hi,” she whispered.
He gave a tiny smile. “Hey.”
He started the engine and pulled into the street. She stared straight ahead, hands clasped in her lap. The air between them seemed to shimmer, like it was suffused with gasoline fumes.
She had a million questions backing up in her throat. Questions about where he’d been and what he’d been doing there. Questions about his job and his family and why’d he’d moved to Chicago two years ago. Questions about these friends of his and why he felt the need to protect her from them.
She realized that all the questions boiled down to one.
Who are you?
But by the time he brought the car to a stop in the lane outside her house, she hadn’t worked up the courage to ask a single one.
Maybe they’d skipped too many steps. Because they didn’t really know a thing about each other.
The interior light of the car lit them both in a soft yellow glow. The silence stretched. Then, out of nowhere, they both spoke at once.
“Listen—”
“Daniel—”
A second silence followed, this time imbued with humor.
He looked down at the steering wheel and made a soft sound. Like Sebastián’s almost-laugh.
She swallowed and forced the words out of her mouth. “Why did you tell your brother to watch out for me while you were away?”
He lifted his gaze to meet hers and winced slightly, like he had something sharp stuck in his eye. And she saw it in his face. The fear.
He was scared. Of whom? Of her?
Or of someone else?
He exhaled and chewed his tongue for a moment.
“There’s a lot of complicated shit in my life, Julia,” he said, not looking at her.
His gaze was fixed on the windshield, his thumbs hooked around the steering wheel above his knees.
“Shit I don’t want you getting involved with.
” He glanced at her now, and that same haunted look was in his eyes. “Shit that could get you really hurt.”
His words settled with a heavy weight on her skin. She swallowed a lump in her throat. She knew that when he said ‘hurt’, he didn’t just mean her feelings.
He looked down at his hands on the steering wheel. “I keep Sebastián away from it. And I’m gonna keep you away from it, too.”
She said nothing, just bit her bottom lip, thinking. Then she looked at him and asked, “What are you saying?”
He swallowed, the column of his throat working. Then he looked at her, right in the eyes, and said in a low voice, “We shouldn’t do this.”
When she spoke, her voice was just as husky. “Do what?”
His eyes settled on her lips. And with that one look, every single one of her questions was incinerated in a blaze of need.
Their kiss was like a collision. His lips pressed against hers. His hands were everywhere. Gripping the back of her neck. Cupping her breast. Sliding around her waist to press against her lower back. Squeezing her butt. It was like he’d grown ten more hands in a very short space of time.
She didn’t even realize he’d pulled her over the console until she was sitting in his lap. He ran his hands up under her skirt, over the bare skin of her thighs, stopping to cup her ass. There was a burning sensation in her stomach, like she’d swallowed something hot.
His mouth had become the center of her universe. His tongue glided over hers, pressing deeper into her mouth.
Unseeing but feeling, she pushed his shirt down off his shoulders and traced the muscles of his chest with her hands. She could feel the thick ridge of his hard-on through his jeans.
She gave an experimental rock of her hips. He broke off the kiss with a sharp intake of breath. His fingers dug into the skin of her thighs, hard enough that she could feel the blunt edges of his fingernails. When he kissed her again, he nipped her bottom lip with his teeth.
She pressed down on him again, gentler this time, enjoying the way it made him gasp and the way it made his heart beat faster under her palm.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “Julia, I want you so bad.”
She froze. It dawned on her where this was leading. To him unbuttoning his jeans, pushing aside the fabric of her underwear and…
Her face must have shown her fear, because he reached up a hand to cup her cheek with his palm. “Hey,” he said, dragging a thumb across her cheekbone. “It’s okay. I’m not going to do anything you don’t want.”
She swallowed, then nodded. Then shook her head. Then, because her indecision was bordering on comical, she smiled. He smiled too and placed a hand on the back of her head, pressing her forehead to his.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He retreated, gazing into her eyes. He brushed a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Baby, the first time I have you, it’s not gonna be in my car.” A smile tugged at his lips, not quite enough to bring forth the dimple. “She gets very jealous.”
Smiling too, she pushed at his chest with both hands. She was trying to appear aloof and cool, but inside she was burning up.
The first time I have you. The way he said it, like it was a foregone conclusion, this having.
A matter of when, not if. It was like he’d set a timer for a bomb to explode between them, and she had no idea when it might go off.
And she knew that for every second until it went off, she’d be thinking of nothing else.
He was watching her, that little smile on his face, like he knew exactly the effect he had on her. At least now she knew she had the same effect on him. Physically, anyway.
She slid off his lap and climbed back over the center console. The gear stick jabbed her in the ass on the way, making her think that maybe the car really did have jealousy issues.
She settled back in her seat and stared straight ahead. They were both quiet. The only sounds were their breathing and the little thuds of bugs dive-bombing the glass.
She sat there, waiting for the alarm bells to ring. Warning her to get out of this car right now and walk away while she still could. End this before it went any further.
But the only fear she felt in that moment was the fear that he would drive away from her. Put her in his rearview and not look back.
We shouldn’t do this.
She looked across at him, his expression soft in the dim light.
Too late.
* * *
Martín Tostá shut the restaurant door and locked it, flipping the sign in the window to Closed.
His gaze went to the table where Sebastián and Julia had been sitting earlier, before Daniel had swaggered in and she’d followed him out. He’d seen how she’d stared up at him with cartoon hearts for eyes.
He shook his head. Stupid girl.
Martín had come to Chicago from Guadalajara two decades ago to escape gang warfare in his hometown.
He’d seen violence—real violence—up close.
His sister had been killed right in front of him.
His business burned to the ground. It had cost him everything to come to America and start again.
To make something of himself. To build a good life, in a city he was proud to call home.
So, to see young men like Daniel Castano strut around these streets with a pistol shoved down the back of his pants, with tattoos all over his face, made him sick to his stomach.
Guys like him played at violence. It was all a game to them, something they did for the attention and the cred and the power.
They flooded the streets with their drugs so they could buy more gold chains to hang around their necks and more fancy cars to roar up and down the streets of La Villita in.
They were corrosive, and they were eating away at this city from within.
But this time, Martín would not watch it happen and do nothing. He didn’t want to flee again and abandon another place to the gangs.
He buried his hand into the pocket of his apron and took out the crumpled card the DEA woman had given him. Then he picked up his cellphone, punched in her number, and hit CALL.