Chapter 2
CECILIA
It was two in the morning, and I was wide awake from the same nightmare again.
The one where all I saw was the darkness, not even my fingers right in front of my own face. Everything was hot and I could hear machine guns all around me at a deafening volume. The trauma smorgasbord my lovely mind concocted that promised to continue to haunt me until the day I died.
Ronan mentioned therapy but there wasn’t much time anymore these days, and not much a professional could do if you weren’t exactly willing to tell them any of your life’s details.
Graduation was only four months away, so my senior exams weren’t too far off.
When I wasn’t running jobs with Santos - Ronan’s roommate - I was working after school a few days a week at a diner to pay my mamá’s rent.
I put her in a trailer away from town after the drive-by, she was just a shell of the person she used to be.
The only thing that remained was her disdain for me.
She hardly said a word and stayed mostly in bed since she was permanently bound to a wheelchair now. She’d scream at me anytime I stopped by and threw violent fits of rage about my papá.
She almost always ended up hurting herself in an attempt to hurt me. It used to make me sad, but I knew what she was doing. She pulled away so she could drink herself to death without feeling guilty for abandoning her last daughter.
I wouldn’t pity her, and I refused to watch it happen.
I thought I was doing the best I could, what my papá and Carolina would have hoped that I’d be doing. Most days I was on autopilot though, as I went through the motions of normalcy.
The reality was, I probably checked out a long while back.
I was drenched in sweat from my dream and Ronan’s spot in the bed was empty.
I walked to the en-suite bathroom and managed to look up at the mirror - the girl that looked back, she was just a stranger to me these days.
My papá’s eyes stared back at me until I managed to turn my head to the side in defiance.
My long, straight, inky black hair was sticking to my face from sweat; so I fashioned a braid down my back.
Too much like her now.
My mamá.
I tossed on a robe over my pajama shorts and shirt then made my way to the living room in Ronan’s apartment.
Our apartment technically, but nothing really felt like mine anymore.
It wasn't fancy, just a two-bedroom with some outdated furnishings, but the three of us got by. We were happy, and we sure weren’t starving or anything.
It was easy to make money on the west coast with college kids constantly hungry for drugs.
Santos was still up playing some zombie video game on his PS3. He frowned when he looked at me and said, “you good, Morena?” as if he could see the nightmare still written on my face.
He brushed his brown, curly hair away from his hazel eyes where the tattoo of a small “X” decorated his left temple and handed me a beer from the cooler next to him. I took it, cracking it open and letting the coolness drown out the heat inside me as it washed its way down my throat.
Santos was the kind of handsome that left you scared to keep looking for too long.
His entire look screamed “bad boy who was going nowhere fast”, and a small part of me simultaneously envied and felt sorry for whatever girl would end up lucky to have him.
He was all laughs, lighthearted jokes and somehow a good listener to boot.
I’d been wrapped up in this world long enough to know that the mark on his temple meant he had a body count under his belt and that was a whole mess I didn’t want to get sucked back into again.
Aside from Ronan, he was my best friend.
Not that I had attempted to get close to anyone else in the last few years.
Being untrusting, was a lonely game.
Santos and I spent a lot of time together making runs, selling weed and the occasional party drugs to rich kids. In the end we were always just waiting for Ronan, who was trying to find something bigger, something better for us all.
It was the closest thing to family I had at this point, and I knew I was lucky to not be alone, or dead.
“Couldn’t sleep, bad dreams.” I replied, putting the beer on the coffee table as I sat on the other side of the couch and propped my feet on his lap.
Sometimes it felt like Santos was more my friend than he was Ronan’s, we spent more time together than they did.
“Your family, right? You get a lot of dreams of the drive-by?” He looked my way and paused the game on his screen, to show me he had my attention.
I think he felt a kindred connection there. Santos came from gang life and he was Mexican too, but he was born in Ocean Valley. I was honestly not even sure if he knew how to speak Spanish aside from some curse words, and common sayings.
I could tell by the look he was giving me though, that he was wondering if it was one of his cousins or older brothers who may have been responsible for my family’s death.
It was a harsh reminder of the web of lies I had woven around myself when I told Ronan the police ruled it as gang initiation shooting.
It wasn’t a complete lie, that technically was what they filed it away as, before they threw the file in the trash without bothering to investigate.
We were just another immigrant family people didn’t care enough about to bother disrupting their day over.
“Yeah, I got really lucky,” I shivered and pulled the blanket down from the back of the couch to wrap myself up in it.
After the shooting Ronan got this place and moved us all in immediately. Lucky for me, social services didn’t give a shit about vaguely legal brown kids, so no one had come looking for me after my family had been killed.
He nodded and we sat in silence for a few minutes, Santos eventually un-paused his game when he realized I had nothing more to say on the subject. The sounds of zombie hordes in the distance somehow soothed me back to sleep in the end.
I woke up to a dark and empty living room and Ronan scooping me off the couch as he carried me towards our bedroom.
“Did the job go smoothly?” I asked him, my voice scratchy and full of sleep.
“Perfect, ended up making more than we planned since Guillermo’s guy didn’t show up.
West siders never cause us any trouble, so we didn’t need him.
We ended up getting a fifty percent split on the product.
” He nuzzled his cold nose into my neck and the smell of his bleu de Chanel cologne overwhelmed my senses in the best way as notes of cedar and sandalwood lit me up.
I looked up at him through hooded eyes as I brushed the sleepiness away and licked the dryness from my lips. The bedside clock read four in the morning but the hunger in his eyes told me I wouldn’t be going back to sleep just yet.
His thumb gently traced the raised-up scar on my rib, and it scorched beneath his touch. To him it was nothing more than an old injury I'd constructed in a story to cover the truth, but to me it was all I had of my past now.
The only thing that was left of who I was meant to be.
I ran my fingers through his sleek dirty blonde hair, it seemed darker every year now as he aged, and it suited him well.
It fell long to one side past his ears, but the back and the sides were meticulously kept trimmed short.
He pulled back from me and placed me on the large oak dresser across our queen-sized bed.
Stepping between my legs, he pulled the robe off of me in one motion and pressed his lips to mine forcing his way through with his tongue.
I willingly welcomed him and tasted the cinnamon of the gum he’d been chewing.
He let out a low growl into my mouth and crushed me harder against him, letting me feel his excitement through his jeans.
I bit my lip in anticipation and looked into the eyes that always brought me home. They were a forest of green I could wander tirelessly, full of amber specks throughout them like burning rays of sunshine that could consume me, if I let them.
“Were you waiting for me?” He breathed into my ear.
“Yes.” I hissed, my heartbeat quickening in response to him, and I palmed his thick hard length through his pants.
He slid his hand through the top of my shorts, eyes widening when he discovered my lack of panties and let out a satisfactory groan, “You were waiting, so wet for me already,” he dropped his forehead to my shoulder as his fingers made their way down and he unerringly found that magic spot with his thumb.
Heat flooded through me while he worked his way skillfully in a steady rhythm.
I tipped my head back and a soft moan escaped me when he replaced his thumb with the flat of his tongue. He ran it over my clit, making circles and quick motions until my head was spinning from the sensation.
I could feel a finger and then another making its way inside me, stretching me open to prepare me for what was surely coming. He drove them into me at a heady pace, coaxing pitiful whines as I begged for my release.
Ronan gazed up at me with a smirk, I knew the look on my face was giving away how close I was to losing it completely. He muffled my mouth shut with one hand for his roommate’s sake while continuing his torture until I was screaming into his palm.
It was like seeing stars with him.
Every time.
“If I could bottle that sound,” he chuckled, and threw me onto the bed, his erection at full mast fighting the fabric of his jeans.
I instinctively licked my lips wanting a taste, but he shook his head and pulled his shirt over it revealing his well-defined abs.
“Not tonight, I need to be inside of you. Right now.”
I scrambled to follow and undress as well. I got up on my knees in the center of the bed as I waited for him to remove the last bit of his clothes that kept me from him.
He straightened as he stood looking down at me from his six feet of height and every inch of my skin buzzed with need to be touched by him.