‘You have a perfect mouth.’
The heat of his thumb sent my dopamine levels skyrocketing, potent as a hit of Molly straight into my bloodstream.
Only the beep beep! of a nearby car alarm cracked that moment between us. I turned to see a sweaty man opening his car door as Román took a step back, shoving his hands into his pockets. My lip burned where his thumb had been. I ran my tongue over the spot, wishing he’d touch it again.
This was not good. I knew nothing about Román other than the fact that he’d assaulted my father and was implementing Ugly’s blackmail. And still, I was caving. I had to get outta there.
But as I rounded on my heel to walk away, he grabbed my arm. I twisted myself out of his grip, glaring. ‘¡Carajo! What are you, an animal?’
‘I told you I came here to have a word.’ The imperturbable tone of Al Pacino in The Godfather telling Diane Keaton to chill with her upper-middle-class moralist neuroses. ‘I don’t believe in beating around the bush, Yola. We’re intrigued by each other. I felt it the other day, so did you. And I feel it now. So do you. But I want to make it clear that I’m not in a position to give in to that intrigue. Ugly doesn’t believe in mixing business with pleasure, do you understand?’
I whipped my head back in disbelief. Who was that brazenly direct? Immediately I wanted to knock his ego down a few pegs. ‘You seriously came all the way here to tell me that? Well, let me make it clear: I am not intrigued by you. You’re just some scumbag working for Ugly. Trust me, we won’t have a problem.’
Infuriatingly, he dipped his head and smiled, flashing his canines. Something about their prominence made me want to feel them pressing into my skin.
‘Yola.’ He reached out to brush my cheek. I jerked my head away and he laughed. ‘You might not be intrigued by me.’ He turned to open the door of the jeep, then looked back. ‘But you do want me.’
He got in, started the engine, and peeled away, leaving me fuming at his arrogance and mortified by his accuracy. Motherfucker had seen right through me.
LESSONS IN PROMISCUITY
I learned from the little elves at Google, working tirelessly to bring us all the information we could ever need, regardless of factual accuracy, thanks to the advent of Search Engine Optimization, that insomnia can be due to myriad causes. Such as anxiety (at feeling a searing and highly inappropriate lust for a man whose living relies on the ability to intimidate people, specifically people comprising your family). Anger and resentment (at said man pinpointing your lust and calling you out on it). Or mental excitement (and we’re back to the lust). It therefore shouldn’t come as a shock that I couldn’t sleep for days after that encounter with Román. The guilt of feeling that shame-tinged longing metastasizing in me was the proverbial pea under my mattress. I mean, a bad report from Román could spell the difference between life and death for us, between busted kneecaps and intact kneecaps. Not even the Memory Foam mattresses advertised on four a.m. infomercials and supposedly invented by NASA-funded researchers (bet NASA was thrilled by the outcome of that investment) would be able to get me a night of untormented rest.
Right after Ugly told us random illegals would be invading our homes, there’d been a few nights when no one in my house had been able to sleep. Zulema and I had stayed up until three in the morning playing cards and waiting for exhaustion to kick in, while my parents spent their all-nighters watching cheesy Eighties movies till they eventually passed out on the couch. But those insomnolent nights were finito now that so much time had gone by without any illegals being delivered. Everyone’s nerves had steadied. We could almost pretend there wasn’t some crime lord holding a six-hundred-grand debt over us.
I was now the family’s lone insomniac. And while I lay there, enraged at my inability to sleep, I drew on Aunt Celia’s manuscript as my only source of counsel, reading on into the heyday of her twenties in Panama City and Miami, interpreting every salacious anecdote as Aunt Celia giving advice from the Great Promiscuous Beyond. If those chapters of the manuscript proved anything, it was that she would’ve told me to bed Román immediately, then write about it and get some goddamned sleep. When she was even younger than me, freshly released from the grips of my abuelos, she hadn’t cared who the hell she was sleeping with.
Twenty-one years old and my yellow-brick road has finally led me out of Venezuela to Oz: Panama City. Life is a beautiful thing here. Me and the girls, we go out on a couple modelling gigs, get easy cash to blow on sequinned everything – then nothing else to do but DANCE! And the men! We’re devouring them. We’re a fucking wolf pack in this Emerald City. They could be anything – drug barons, politicians, priests, princes, no nos importa, we could care less. If they’re cute, know the right lines and have a big polla, we’ll take them for a spin. Doesn’t hurt if they have a few bucks to spend on cocktails and cocaine either. I’ve never felt so free, wild and beautiful in my life.
Obviously I wasn’t going to follow her ‘advice’ to a T and start coke-bingeing and blowing a million different guys for the heck of it. But I did think to myself, lying there sleepless night after sleepless night, that it couldn’t hurt to take a leaf out of Aunt Celia’s book. I needed to slut it up a little, distract myself with another man who’d take my mind off Román. Someone who could stop me compulsively picking apart every moment of what had gone down in the parking lot, help me forget the warm spot on my lip where Román’s thumb had been.
So the next morning: ‘Zulema, what’re you doing tonight?’
My sister eyed me. ‘Why?’
It was early on a Friday. Zulema was touching up her red-carpet make-up with a pocket mirror before heading to work.
I shrugged, blew into my coffee mug. ‘I need a good night out, so if you’re doing anything …’
Zulema squealed. I jumped, sloshing coffee onto myself. ‘¿Qué carajo, Zulema?’ I pulled the hot, wet patch away from my skin, tenting the T-shirt.
‘You actually want to go out, Yola! Finally! I’m always like, “Yola, let’s go here” and “Yola, let’s go there”, and you’re always like, “oh, I’m busy” and “oh, I don’t feel like it.” And now you actually want to go out! Ohmygosh ohmygosh, can I do your make-up? Ooh! I can dress you too! You have to wear a dress, Yola. And heels! You can’t go out in jeans on a Friday night, bruja.’
I laughed, though already regretting the decision to socialize with my sister, thus committing myself to a makeover of Miss Congeniality proportions. ‘I’m not sold on the heels and the dress, but count me in for whatever you guys have planned for tonight.’
‘Ohmygosh, I’m soooooo excited!’
Later that night we were at Buzz Bar, on a nightlife strip built as part of a luxury condo complex. Very Miami. Very swank. With all the bougie condo residents living only an elevator ride away, the strip was a hot spot for well-to-do patrons. Here, there were none of the usual night-time sounds of frogs and crickets. Wildlife was drowned out by prosecco corks popping, ambient electro-house music, and the tinkling laughter of the financially secure.
The place was rammed, people swarming around the single bar like flies fighting for a spot on a turd. Zulema and I wove our way through the tightly packed bodies on our five-inch stilts (she’d won me over on the outfit), scanning the place for her Colour Me Beautiful work friends. Finally, we pushed our way through to a table ringed with girls I recognized from social media as Zulema’s friends: all honey-hued blondes and glossy brunettes. The only specks of brown skin at that table were the freckles spattering all their shoulders. (Here’s a tip: if you ever want to discern a white creole from a tourist, look for the freckles on the shoulders. You can’t grow up white in Trinidad without the sun leaving that mark of authenticity. Like the etching on wallets that says ‘genuine leather’ to show it’s the real deal.) At the centre of their table were two ice buckets bearing bottles of prosecco, smartphones laid out around the buckets, every girl keeping a beady eye on her phone to avoid the utter catastrophe of a missed call.