Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
M y mother pulled a box of cigarettes out of one of the grocery bags, fishing around in her purse for a lighter before finding one. The scrape of the igniter was familiar, and I felt myself shrinking, as though she had her own magical artifact that pulled us both back in time to when I was the same age as Riley and had made a mistake that might cost her a mark.
The scent of cigarettes dragged me back to a past I’d never wanted to relive, and this was why I had never come home. This was why I’d spent twelve years running as fast and as far as I could away from Desert Flower.
When I didn’t respond, my mother said, “This is what I see: my son arrived in town, no luggage, no wallet, no phone. Something went wrong with whoever you work for, and you had to come home. You hitchhiked here?”
Give away nothing , I told myself, allowing no expression, no twitch.
“No,” my mother said. “Someone dropped you here. You didn’t choose to come. And somehow, that boy is tangled up in it. He’s the reason you’re in trouble.”
It wasn’t a question, not like a normal person would ask it. When I didn’t respond, she shook her head.
“No, but he was involved, and now you’re tied up together. You can’t let him go in case he can help you, and you feel guilty. Don’t.” My mother’s directive was sharp. “Like recognizes like, and that boy has been trained. Not just like you and your sister. He’s been trained to kill. He’s been trained to get people to do what he wants by manipulating and twisting and putting chess pieces on the board.”
“That’s exactly what we were trained to do,” I snapped. “That’s exactly who you made us.”
My mother glared at me, and I was five years old again, everything in my stomach curling at the idea of having disappointed the only god in the family: my mother.
“No, I trained you to do everything you could to survive. That boy? He was trained for some other reason.” She looked at me critically. “Mijo, are you losing your touch? You should know that.”
She wasn’t even wrong. I did know that. I knew that in my bones. I knew that every time I looked at him.
Cassander was hiding something.
But whatever it was, I wasn’t about to let him go, let him slip away, because if he was hiding something, then it was probably the only key to me returning to the SPA’s good graces.
I needed him. And he, penniless and in a new country, without a passport and with family trying to kill him, needed me.
“He’s staying with me,” I said firmly.
My mother narrowed her eyes, but I wasn’t five, or ten, or even eighteen and sneaking out in the middle of the night to get on the next bus to boot camp.
My mother lifted her chin. “All right. But he’s your responsibility. Don’t let him endanger your sister’s kids.”
“I won’t.” I picked up the grocery bags. “Ma, how did you know I was coming today?”
“I didn’t know it would be today.” My mother looked away, crushing her cigarette under her shoe. “But it’s been twelve years, Damian. You had to come home someday, didn’t you?”
The sun dyed the desert sky a bright orange, streaks of purple finger painted at the edges. My mother turned and walked back to the house. From behind, I could see the white in her hair, the arthritic hunch in her shoulders.
In the house, Riley pinned Junior, and he squirmed, squealing when she pinched at his neck.
“Lower,” Cassander directed.
Riley adjusted her grip, and Junior cried out in pain.
“All right!” My mother clapped her hands. Riley leapt off Junior, her face as cherubic as an angel sculpted by Precious Moments. “Teeth, pajamas, bed. If you hurry, I’ll let you watch some of my shows before bed.”
Junior and Riley turned without complaint and scampered down the hall. One did not question the will or the directions of Mamá Reyes.
“You too.” My mother pointed at me and Cassander.
“Ma—” I shook my head. We should leave. My mother was right. Cassander was bad news, and I couldn’t do that to kids. “We should go.”
Mom raised both eyebrows.
“Where?” she asked, not even needing a scalpel to shred the fiction that Cassander and I had anywhere to go.
“Uh—” I let out a breath.
“We’d be happy to accept your hospitality , Rosario,” Cassander said sweetly. And there was the man who’d charmed the hotel clerk into giving us the presidential suite. There was the man who’d convinced the metro employees to call for an ambulance.
My mother’s words were a burr in my side. He was trained to manipulate, to use his sweet words to coerce.
“Good.” My mother pointed down the hall. “Your room is just the way it was.”
Then she turned, putting away the groceries. Cassander watched her for a moment, and his head tilted just slightly, considering.
“This way,” I said.
Cassander followed me down the narrow hall. The carpet was the same; a stain in front of the bathroom marked the time that Candace had me bleach her hair to match the highlights of the other girls at school, and I’d knocked over the bottle in an argument about how to do it right.
The kids were pushing at each other, wrestling on the bunk beds that had replaced Candy’s daybed in her old room. When they saw us, they jumped up, looking innocent.
“Teeth,” I said, pointing back to the bathroom. Riley pulled her pajama top all the way on and climbed over her brother to get to the bathroom.
I opened the door to my old room and stared. Everything looked exactly the same as it had. The posters on the walls of Santana, Fall Out Boy, Linkin Park, they all screamed of the hysterical wanting I’d felt in this room. Wanting to be somewhere else, to be someone else.
The dressers and bedside table had been dusted, but nothing else touched. On the desk, my old computer sat dormant, the homework from my senior year in high school piled in a disorganized mess.
In the closet, my flannel shirts and white T-shirts were the obvious signs of me trying too hard to fit in, the white Vans that still looked store new next to a pair of Jordans I’d bought with the money from the first con I’d ever worked myself.
“Your mother doesn’t trust me,” Cassander observed. “Do you trust me?”
I looked at him, standing so incongruously in the room. “Who am I supposed to be trusting, Your Majesty, Shadow Prince, heir to the throne of Moonlight and Whispers? What country is that exactly?”
I wanted to mimic the word he’d said to me earlier, but I would only butcher it in a way that felt possibly xenophobic.
“It’s long since faded from memory,” Cassander said.
“Right.” I drew out the word. “But it still has a royal line? If you’re the heir, then who’s on the throne?”
Cassander inhaled. “My brother.”
“He’s the one who left you barefoot and missing a few buttons on a Paris street?” I could put together the pieces, like this was one of those wooden puzzles they give to toddlers. My mother was wrong; I hadn’t lost my touch.
“Yes.” His eyes caught mine, and I could see the anger in his gaze. “My brother stole what was mine.”
“And what’s yours?”
“The position. The power that comes with it.” Cassander turned away, and I could read that story as easily as if he’d written it on a piece of film and projected it on-screen before an Imperial Star Destroyer tried to take down Leia’s rebel ship.
Cassander and his brother were fighting over a throne that hadn’t existed in a while, but the power and money were still there. Maybe in the form of a corporation, maybe in the form of real estate or oil rights. Either way, he’d been taken by surprise. There’d been a kidnapping, an attempted assassination, and now he was here with me in Desert Flower.
“So I guess we both don’t have anything to go back to.” I watched his face as I said it.
His mouth fell, his eyes going to the ground. His shoulders slumped.
“No. I don’t have anything to go back to.” He looked around the room. “Your mother’s hospitality, freely offered without request for repayment… It’s the kindest anyone has been to me in some time.”
I felt my eyes soften. There was something truly sad about that, something pathetic in the honesty that I recognized on a visceral level. When you had nothing, you clung to every scrap of kindness, every kind word with tooth and nail.
“Of course, your mother’s kindness is tempered by… well, the accommodations provided.” Cassander gestured around us. “What is this? The bedroom of a child with no friends and fewer chances of ever meeting a partner he can enjoy intimately ?”
“Hey, I got plenty of action in high school,” I said defensively.
“From your right hand?” Cassander asked, glancing significantly at a poster of Pete Wentz, tattooed and shirtless.
“From plenty of guys!” I went to the drawers and pulled out a pair of pajama pants, finding an old shirt from the track team that I tossed in Cassander’s direction.
Cassander caught the pajamas, rubbing the worn fabric between his fingers. “And that’s your preference? Men?”
He began unbuttoning his shirt, the expensive fabric parting to reveal a toned chest, the skin a creamy bronze, with a distinct lack of tan lines. He looked up when I didn’t answer, and I caught sight of his golden eyes through his long lashes.
Bronze, gold, he was a man made of precious metals. I should have expected gemstones to fall out of his mouth when he spoke. Instead, he licked at his lower lip and said, “I suppose that answers my question.”
“And I suppose you were getting plenty in high school from both genders.” I found a pair of pajamas for myself, pulling them out of the drawer and putting them on quickly, avoiding the striptease that was Cassander removing his shirt and unbuckling his belt.
“Is that your way of asking which gender I prefer?”
I didn’t look over when he asked because I could hear the slide of his pants down his legs, and I could already imagine all that bronze skin revealed as he bent over to get the pants past his feet.
“Is it even a question?” The sweatpants still fit, although my body had changed in twelve years. I had actual muscle mass now, and they fit more snugly around the thigh, but my waist was the same. When I pulled on a T-shirt from gym class, it smelled freshly laundered.
Frowning, I opened one of the other drawers, drawing out a shirt and sniffing it. All of it smelled freshly washed.
“My preferences have rarely been important to what I was required to do.” Cassander’s voice was hard and small, and I looked up sharply, suddenly seeing his interactions with the hotel clerk in a new light. When he caught my gaze, he cocked his head, raising an eyebrow. “Not that I didn’t enjoy it, of course.”
“Why do I not believe that?” The words were out before I could stop them because like recognized like.
“I did enjoy it.” Cassander’s words were hard, the nugget of a diamond that had formed from all the pressure of convincing himself that whatever else had happened, he had liked it. He had meant for it to happen.
“Yeah, well…” I watched him.
He pulled on the sweatpants, and they fit him slightly long, the hems folding over on themselves, revealing bare feet, slender toes with fine bones. He hadn’t pulled on the shirt yet, and his chest was hairless, toned with muscles.
“Like you said, hospitality here was freely given. Nothing else required.” I kept the words easy, trying for a tease, even as I asked myself exactly how young he’d been and exactly what had happened.
“Nothing?” Cassander cocked his hip just slightly, his body now slightly angled.
I stepped forward, taking the T-shirt he’d crumpled in his hands. His eyes narrowed, a smirk twisting his lips. I adjusted the shirt, finding the neck hole, and shoved it over his head.
“Believe it or not, I prefer it when the men I have sex with want to be there and they’re not doing it to pay off their hotel bill.” When I stepped back, smirking, he glared at me.
“These accommodations can hardly be considered equal to the hotel room we just left.” Cassander struggled, finally finding the armholes of the shirt.
“Hey, are you knocking my mom’s hospitality?” I searched the drawers, finding two pairs of socks. “She fed you and everything.”
“She did. And I owe her my gratitude for the favor.” Cassander sat on the bed, leaning back on his hands and considering the walls once again. “But what does her hospitality cost you ?”
That was getting too close to what I had been asking myself all day. Why here? Why had some magical artifact torn me from my perfectly fine life as an SPA agent and dropped me back here, in my past, where I had to deal with the family I thought I would never see again?
“Come on. Let’s go watch Mom’s shows.”
My mom already had the TV on, and we watched reruns of TV classics— Happy Days, I Love Lucy, Bewitched —until the kids started fading. They went to bed without complaint, and I looked at the clock on the wall.
“Their dad is still working?”
My mom made a noncommittal noise and shooed me and Cassander back into my old bedroom.
Then, when Cassander sprawled out on the twin-sized bed, I realized we had a problem. There was one bed.
One very small bed.
Cassander eyed me. “I’m sure we can find a way to make it more comfortable for both of us.”
At his leer, I turned, unwilling to cross that bridge, even if he was clearly inviting.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said.
I shuffled out into the living room, my mother making space for me on the couch, the light of the television reflected on her face. After an episode of The Andy Griffith Show , she stood, leaning down and pressing a kiss to my hair before turning off the TV and heading down the hall.
The kiss was habitual, but I froze under the ministration.
Lying down on the couch, I shifted. The couch cushions were worn from use, poking me and giving too much in odd places. Groaning, I managed to adjust my position so that I was able to drift off into an uneasy sleep.
The exhaustion should have kept me out until morning.
Instead, I woke at midnight when somebody fumbled with the back door.