Which wasn’t easy. Javier had been right about the bar—no one suspected anything. Granted, after the incident happened, I didn’t work for another couple of days, but no one had called me saying they found evidence of a few murders, so I figured I was on the safe side.
It was hard being back at work though, being at the scene of the crime. I’d tried to deal with what happened, what was going to happen to me, but every time I saw those images—Javier with a gun, the half-naked body on the floor, Tom with the gunshot in his head—I nearly blacked out from panic. I found ways to push the thoughts aside, to shove the images deep down. I tricked myself into thinking it had all been a dream, that none of it had really happened. I pretended that I was falling in love with Javier and that was all to the story. I didn’t let myself dwell on who he really was.
And the fact is I still didn’t know who he really was. I knew he worked for Travis. I now knew people worked for him. He had power. He could kill people in cold blood. He was extremely skilled with a gun. He would do anything to protect me. The years leading up to this, I knew who I was going after and what I was getting involved with. I knew drug cartels were ruthless and violent, breeding people with no mercy. People like Javier. And yet now that I’d uncovered it, now that the blood was on my hands, I wanted to turn a blind eye. I wanted to sleepwalk through the bad and focus on the good.
Love was very good.
There was no point in denying it. I was in love with Javier. I just didn’t realize how bad I had it until Gus called me one day before my shift. I pulled over in the parking lot, eyeing the clock on the dash. I had five minutes and I hoped Gus wouldn’t talk my ear off. Not that it was his style to do so, but because I hadn’t talked to him in weeks.
“Hey, Gus,” I greeted hastily, hoping he’d catch the urgency in my voice. It was May now and the interior of my car was making me stick to the seats. I missed the dryness of California badly.
“Ellie,” he said, and for the first time ever, my own name sounded strange to me.
“Eden, please,” I said while attempting to put on mascara in the rearview mirror.
“Sorry, Eden.” He grew quiet. “Long time no talk. How ya been?”
“I’m good.”
“You sound good. You sound…busy.”
“I’m just about to start my shift.”
“You’re still working?” He sounded surprised.
“Of course.”
“I thought you’d be all wrapped up with, well, your mark by now. What’s his name again?”
I swallowed hard. “Javier.” My mark.
“Yeah, him. So how is that going? Did you get your revenge?”
I nearly jabbed the mascara wand in my eye. I needed to put the pointy objects away. I sat back in my seat, not wanting to talk about this, not wanting to face it. “Not yet.”
“It’s a long con,” he mused.
“This one might take longer than we thought…”
“Have you seen Travis yet?”
I hadn’t, actually. Aside from the night at the bar, I hadn’t seen anyone that Javier worked with. He was at home with me when I was there. We spent our days eating good food, jogging on the beach in the mornings, making crazy bunny love at night. I rarely saw him take any phone calls. In fact, it was so easy to pretend that he didn’t do anything at all; he just existed and purely for me.
“No. No Travis. Not much of his work, either.” I kept my voice low, paranoid of my surroundings. It was evening and a few patrons were heading into the bar. I only had a few minutes left before I’d have to serve them.
“Well, if this is still what you want, then you keep at it until you see him.”
My stomach turned in abrupt knots. “Why did you say that?”
“What?”
“If this is still what I want…”
“Well…people change their mind. They learn to let go of things.”
“They fall in love,” I blurted out.
Silence hugged the airwaves. Did I really say that out loud? I was about to say something else, anything else, when Gus beat me to it.
“Ellie,” he said, using my old name again. “Mistaking obsession for love is one of the greatest mistakes you’ll ever make.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that you’re obsessed with your revenge. You’re confusing that feeling for love. You don’t love this man. You couldn’t possibly. You know deep down you couldn’t love the man who’s responsible for what happened to you.”
I gasped, my heart thudding up my throat. “Javier is not responsible for what happened to me!” I hissed, indignation flaring up over my skin, my face turning hot.
“He is by association. And when you’ve been screwed so bad that can be enough. He works for the man you want to ruin. The man you say ruined you.”
“He did ruin me!” I yelled into the phone, shocked at the anger that was pouring out of me. So much for sliding everything under a rug. “He ruined me,” I said again, my voice lowered.
“Then you can’t possibly look at Javier and think he didn’t have a part in it.”
“He’s only three years older than me. He was in fucking Mexico at the time of the accident!”
“Look, I’m only telling you what you don’t want to hear. Javier might have never even known who Travis was at the time, but you can’t tell me that if Travis ordered him to do the same to someone else, some other little girl, that he wouldn’t. That’s the kind of person you think you’re in love with, Ellie. I want you to wake up and see the lie. Obsession is not love. He is a bad man.”
“Well maybe I’m a bad woman!” I yelled and promptly hung up the phone. I threw it down onto the seat, watching it bounce in the air. I tried to catch my breath, the truck feeling even hotter, and laid my head on the steering wheel, watching for the phone to ring, for Gus to call back. But he didn’t.
Suffice it to say, I had a lousy shift. I was short with the customers and even snippy with Julie. She assumed I had a bad go with Javier, which was almost the case. I couldn’t exactly tell her that I was questioning my own feelings for him, wondering if I was making the right choice, if I was making a huge mistake. I made up some story about us fighting because we were stressed out, and she invited us on a double date to the movies with her and Andrew the following week. Though I had a hard time picturing the new Javier having fun with another couple, I told her I’d ask.
When I got home later that night, I sat in the truck for a few moments, trying to figure out what was what. Gus had never called back and that was fine. I heard enough. I knew the point he was trying to make and damn if it didn’t make some sense. Had I actually been falling for Javier? Did I really love him or did I love the lust? Did I love the deception? Did I love the idea that I was getting closer to my goal, as much as I pretended it no longer existed?
For all my questions, I didn’t have any answers. I got out of the truck and trudged up the stairs to the porch. To my surprise, the table outside was aglow with candlelight and wine and cheese had been set out on a tablecloth which flapped quietly in the Gulf breeze.
Javier stood in front of me in his casual clothes: dark jeans and a white polo shirt. The wind messed up his shaggy hair and he smiled bigger than the moon. That’s when I saw the boy in him, the twenty-three year old from La Cruz, Mexico—the young man smiling adoringly at his young woman.
“What’s this?” I asked breathlessly, touched by the feelings that were being stirred up.
“I wanted to surprise you, figured you needed a nice break after work.” He came up to me and held me in a tight embrace, his lips pressed against my neck. I softened in his arms, losing my resolve, losing my dilemma.
“You shouldn’t have. It’s almost midnight,” I told him.
“I would do anything for you, at any time of the day.” I brought my head in front of his and searched for the sincerity in his eyes. It was there in spades.
Who do I love? I thought. Is it you? Javier, as if hearing my thoughts, brought me into the most tender, sweep-me-off-my-feet kiss. How could such a bad man make me feel so good? Maybe it was because I’d been right earlier. I was equally bad.
We sat on the chairs and he poured me a glass of wine. He was sitting across from me and lifted my feet out from under the table, took off my boots, and started massaging them.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asked, popping a piece of hard cheddar into his mouth with his free hand.
“Something with you?” I asked hopefully.
“A few buddies of mine…colleagues…are going sailing. One owns a boat I was thinking about buying.”
I straightened up in my seat at two things. One, the mention of colleagues. That was enough to get my heart racing. Two, the mention of a boat he was going to buy. Just how much money did Javier have?
“It’s not a huge boat,” he said, reading part of my expression properly. “About a 45-foot Jeanneau, from France.”
“Ooooh,” I said with a laugh. “Only a 45-foot yacht from France.”
He grinned and threw a piece of cheese at my face. I was lucky it was brie.
“Hey, I have had my eye on this boat for some time now.” He grew quiet, concentrating on my feet, being gentle on my scarring. “You know, I used to work on boats as a child. My father was a mechanic in La Cruz. It’s a popular bay for cruisers, people stopping by when Puerto and Nuevo Vallarta were too full. Now I think there’s a brand new marina. It isn’t a bad thing, I think it brought some money to the town. But when I was a little boy, things were more simple. My papa, he knew everyone and fixed everything, from boats to cars. I’d help out when I could. Sometimes I’d run in the water and tow the little boats to shore so the tourists could go for a walk in the village. Sometimes they’d give me a few pesos…sometimes they were fuckheads.”
I nearly spit out my wine over that swear, sounding so funny with his accent. I wanted to hear more about his past, eager for it, like a little puppy. But Javier quickly dropped the reminiscing. “So, tomorrow, you’ll come?”
I nodded slowly. “Your colleagues are going…from the consulting business?”
The corner of his mouth twitched and he quickly covered it up with a wine glass, as if we both knew there was no consulting business, like this was all an inside joke. “Yes. From that. My boss might be there too.”
Again, the wine almost made an appearance. I tried to swallow it down quickly but it caught in my throat and I started coughing violently.
“Are you okay?” he asked, placing my feet to the side and starting to get out of his chair.
I nodded frantically, one hand at my chest, the other telling him to stay put. “Yes, I’m fine. Wrong hole,” I said between breaths.
He sat back in his chair and winked at me. “You’ve never complained about the wrong hole before.”
This time the piece of cheese went flying back at him. This then led to an all-out food war as the entire tray of brie, cheddar, and blue cheese went soaring all over the place. Next thing we knew, we were throwing glasses of wine at each other, covering us in the red liquid, not caring if we were staining our clothes or each other.
