(I couldn’t.)
I tried pulling the T-shirt down lower – pointless – and settled for tucking my legs up against me, sinking down low in the beach chair and praying Ugly wouldn’t notice the back of my head if he happened to look through the French doors leading to the porch and backyard.
That sociopathically cheerful voice: ‘What happen, Hector, you not inviting us in?’
Us?
Heavy footsteps and the door slamming shut.
‘Now, now, Hector, no need for slamming doors. Best you remember to keep your cool. Román don’t have the same patience as me. He who slam the door in the wrong man’s face is he who get his hand chop off so he cannot slam any door again! That not how the saying does go, Román?’
Who the hell was Román? My neck twitched with how badly I wanted to look behind me, but I stayed put. If Ugly saw me in this T-shirt and panty, I’d have to burn them both. Something about the way he looked at you made you feel like his tongue had run over your body instead of his eyes.
‘What I can do for you, Ugly?’ sighed my father, not hiding his exasperation. You had to hand it to him, Papá had huevos.
‘I said to myself, why wait ’til lunchtime to come and talk to my new Palacios friends? I thought, why I don’t pay everybody a visit at they house with my right-hand man?’ He whistled. ‘Boy, Milagros nearly wet she-self she was so frighten when we gone to see she!’
‘Hijo de puta, you better not have fucking done anything to Milag—’
Papá sputtered, choked. Hearing him gasping for air, I leapt up instinctively from the chair – to do what, I have no idea, but you hear your father being choked, you fucking do something. A man, taller and much younger than Papá, had him lifted by the throat. The tips of my father’s toes grazed the tiles.
‘STOP!’
Ugly started at my scream and the younger man’s eyes flicked towards me as his hand instantly unclamped itself from around my father’s neck. Papá rubbed at his throat, gulping air, but the look he gave me could’ve razed whole cities to the ground.
‘Well, well, you should have tell us we have company, Hector!’
I stood there, hands over my crotch. What now? Ugly was making his way across the living room towards the porch doors, my father and the younger guy trailing him. Verga. I dropped back down into the beach chair and pulled the edges of my T-shirt down as far as I could, managing to at least cover my underwear. And then the three of them were standing over me: my father, livid and glowering. Ugly grinning with a demented malevolence. But this other man, he was looking me over like someone contemplating a painting, with a sort of curious appreciation. I felt the pink hit my cheeks the second my eyes connected with his – two live wires sparking as their tips touched. Now that he was standing directly in front of me, I could see that he was something. Rich olive skin, tousled dark hair – pretty-boy features – but on a lightweight boxer’s broad-shouldered, sinewy frame, with exceptionally vascular forearms that gave the effect of having been used to land many a jaw-cracking, nose-breaking blow in scrappy street fights. Other hints at a less than savoury past: the scars on his forearms and knuckles – a constellation of marks, all different sizes and shapes, some with the rippling sheen of old burns, others that looked like they’d been roughly carved into his skin with the tip of a blade, round pocks that could be souvenirs of chickenpox or the wrong end of a lit cigarette. There was a whole history of rough living etched into his arms and fists. He smiled at me, showing protruding canines that overrode otherwise flawless dentition. The scars, the fang-like teeth, the wiry strength – they gave him a predatory something, made my pulse quicken. I caught his eyes dart down the length of my legs, sending a current of cold air running from my chin to the tips of my toes and back up again. It was only at a wolf whistle from Ugly that we unlocked our eyes.
‘All you Palacios women really something special to see, boy. Román, you see this girl? I know she lanky, not like her cousins, but she have a nice ass on her, boy. Wait and see when she get up.’
Without taking his eyes off me, Roman stepped forward and extended a hand. ‘Encantado. Un placer, Yola, de veras.’
I was taken aback. He was Venezuelan. I took the hand, felt the rough calluses on his palm, the intentional lingering of his fingers as our hands slowly slid apart, the contact stirring something visceral and hungry in me.
‘Meet Román,’ said Ugly, clapping him on the back. ‘He handling you Palacios for me. Keeping all-you in line, making sure everything run nice and smooth.’
‘And this,’ said Román in lightly accented English, ‘is, of course, Yola. Yola Encarnación Palacios Suárez. English degree from La Universidad Central. Masters in technical translation. Amateur fiction writer. Shortlisted for the Concurso Latinoamericano de Cuento, the Fernández Lema Prize, the Honor de Miranda short story prize.’
My skin rippled with goosebumps. I was so private about my writing that I’d only talked to Aunt Celia about it. And I’d never even told her about those shortlists.
Román watched me evenly, but there was none of Ugly’s malice in his face. ‘You’re a very talented woman,’ he said. There was a smooth sense of control in the way he spoke that put me on edge.
Ugly whooped, took his gun out of its holster and twirled it deftly on his index finger. ‘Talented? But she never win a single one of them prizes you call out! Sound like a loser to me.’ He cackled and holstered the gun. ‘Don’t look so shock, Miss Yola. Román here know everything about everybody. You ain’t hear I tell you he my right hand? He have a file fat so …’ He gestured to show that the files were apparently two feet thick. ‘… on every one of all-you. He know everybody skeleton and which cupboard to look for it in. Don’t try no fuckery with Román – he know what you doing before you even think to do it.’
He shoved my father’s shoulder. ‘Come, Hector, enough niceties.’ Papá’s cheeks were flecked with red, the vein running along his forehead thick as a tree root, turgid with rage. ‘Important business to discuss!’
Ugly led my father away but Román lingered, staring at me with a glimmer of a smile. I stared right back, affronted at how entitled he was to just stand there and drink me in. Affronted but sort of flattered.
Now I know what you’re thinking – this guy’s a criminal who was just choking your father, you horny bitch! All I can say is: forbidden fruit is the original aphrodisiac.
And then there was the other thing. You hear about it all the time – cheesy clichés about thunderclaps and fireworks – but when it happens to you, you realize those clichés came about for a reason. During that sexually charged stare-down, I felt all those stale old clichés. I had the sensation of being incredibly alive and invigorated, like I’d just slipped beneath the cool ocean on a hot day, like I’d just jumped out of a plane with the clouds rushing up to meet me. I felt every delicious, sentient thing I’d ever seen, smelled, touched, tasted, like a syringe of adrenaline had been rammed into my chest. It was lust. Pure wet, messy, make-your-toes-curl lust. The kind that makes you do stupid things like sleep with dangerous men.