Page 21 of Wild Heart
Yesterday’s clothes hung off my body in a disheveled heap. Ivan’s scent clung to the fabric. The potency was a drug I’d happily inhaled. My heart raced against it, my blood thrumming and already begging for more.
The curl he’d rolled between his fingers last night fell limp over my forehead while the rest of them stood from my scalp in a manic sort of way. One by one, they bounced against my skin as I ran my fingers through them. They were unwashed—matted with sleep and impossible to tame.
Abandoning the effort, my arms swayed listless at my sides, and my lungs forced out a half-hearted sigh. Sounds of the early morning tickled my ears, beckoning me to take off running toward a small cafe somewhere or the park where a man played the violin for money.
Seattle had so much life, and somehow I’d missed the best of it, holed up in the place it all came to die.
Bitter air met me as soon as I opened the door. I hated how thick it always felt on my skin and the way I never seemed clean of it. The stillness of the space wasn’t the kind I enjoyed but an eerie sort of lull that left dread on your spine and a lump in your throat.
An old coffee pot chugged, and the dark stream that flowed from it was the only thing I liked about this place. The counter it rested on was long, covered in peeling laminate. My butt was intimately familiar with the stool that sat parallel to it—metal and where my soul had first begun to die.
Shuffling against the frayed carpeting, the stool creaked when I folded my body on the hard surface and rested my elbows against the counter’s rounded edge. Eyes blurred with sleep, I pressed my face as close to the pot as I could get without burning myself and willed the scent of my mama’s coffee to drag a little life from me.
“You’re late,mijo.”
“Do I get a gold star if I act like I care?”
His exhale curved through the office, thickening the stale scent in a way that made me want to gag. Palms to the sky and eyes closed, my father mumbled to the ceiling in a grant-me-patience sort of way.
“You live downstairs. How is it possible to be late to a building you’re already in?”
Dragging the tip of my nose across the handle of the pot, I told it, “You’re my only friend here, Carl.”
“Marcos—”
“Shh.” I lifted a finger. “Carl is speaking.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
“Mind your tone, Luis. Carl gets nervous around aggression.”
Whirry, round-framed glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose, offering just enough space for him to pinch the spot between his eyes. Under his breath, my father mumbled something in Spanish and inhaled so deeply, I thought his feet might come off the floor.
“It was five minutes,” I finally said. “And I wasn’t home last night.”
“Is that why you look like you crawled from a grave?”
“Hey, fuck you. I finger-combed my hair and chewed a piece of gum. If Carl didn’t take so long to piss into his pot, I’d have color in my cheeks already.”
“You’re a mess,mijo,” he said, but his lips bowed into something of a smile.
It was a blink-and-you-miss-it sort of twitch, one that enhanced the wrinkles in the corners of his lips. Luis Cabrera didn’t have a smile. Not anymore. Life had stolen it—peeled it right off his face the day Manny died.
“Your mother is already in her office, working through the Richmond account. It’s going to take her all week to unfuck everything their last CPA did.”
“And what will you be doing this morning, Luis? Something shady, I’m sure.”
He pressed his lips together and forced a hard smile in my direction. “I will not keep having this conversation with you, Marcos. Everything I’ve done has been to save our family. Your distaste for my methods has been noted a thousand fucking times.”
“Hmm. Well. Perhaps, if you’d have listened to me the first couple hundred times, your mustache wouldn’t have so many gray hairs in it.”
“It was never that simple, and you know that.”
The heel of his palm struck the edge of the counter, and I watched him flatten his hand against the surface as though the disfigurement proved his point. Through the years, I’d learned to drown myself in a barrel of numbness, and it’s where I hid each time I caught a glimpse of his index finger.
A small stub and a dark memory was all that was left of it now.
“Nois not a word he comprehends. My work keeps him compliant enough to leave us all alone.”
