Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (58 page)

“Stay here,” I said, getting up. I was out the door and on the street in seconds.

I had crossed the border a different man. Had it been the border? It was only a line in the sand. Or had it been before, on the drive south? Or the moments when I let her think I was dead, and I couldn’t do it, couldn’t leave her with the corpse of my best friend and a warm gun. The thought of leaving her there seemed wrong. Against the laws of physics and logic. I had been trying to be
forte
and turn my back, find some other life to ruin. I couldn’t. I was a selfish brute. I was worse than my first wife’s accusations. An animal. A destructive force wherever I went.

I’d gotten got a tube of antibiotic cream, burn ointment, and white tape and gauze from the drug store, then I ran back. I was paranoid, convinced I saw enemies ducking around corners and behind doors. Would I always look for them? See them? When we got out of Los Angeles the second time, would I be able to live like a normal man? Ever?

When I’d gotten got back upstairs, she hadn’t moved. It might be the first time she’d actually obeyed me.
[→4]

The bed creaked and bent when I sat on the edge. “Let me see your hands.”

She held them out, and I bit the end off the burn ointment.

“I’m sorry about this. This is not how we start.” I gently coated her palms with the clear gel.

“We’re not exactly normal. Ow.” Her wrist twitched, but she didn’t pull away.

“Are you sure you want to marry me? You’re committing yourself to a man who gives you burned hands.”

“Oh,” was all she said.

I looked from her hand to her face. Her eyes were cast down, only slivers of blue visible from my angle, but her answer was in the shape and twitch of her mouth. Her lips were held tightly together, narrowed, straight across, and her cheeks dimpled. She was trying not to smile.

“I mean it,” I said, capping the tube. There wasn’t much I could do about the bump on her head besides clean it off. I pulled her hair away so I could see it. “You’ll have to learn to speak Italian so you can curse me like a good Neapolitan wife.”

The smile broke into a full crescent of teeth. “I’ll invent new words to curse you with. Promise.” She put her fingers on my shirt buttons and slipped them through the holes. “Now get this off. Your arm and your head need attention.”

I got out of my shirt. I thought she wanted to get us naked so I could take her, but the sleeve stuck to my bicep and hurt when I ripped it away. I looked at the raw wound, bordered in gunpowder
[→5]
and angry pink between the split skin.

“This is going to scar,” she said.

“More proof I lived.”

She spun on her bottom, hopped off the other side of the bed, and padded to the sink. She snapped a worn white towel from the rack and wet it, twisted it into a rope to get the last of the excess water out, then sat next to me.

“No crying now,” she said. “Be a big boy.”

She pressed the towel to the wound. It hurt enough to make me bite back a grunt, but I didn’t make a sound as she cleaned it off. She patted my head with the same cloth. The blood there had been wiped away on the drive down. We’d covered it with my hair so we could pass through customs.

“This already looks better,” she said about my head. “You have amazing healing powers. The arm though…” She dabbed my arm again.

“I guess you’ll clean the children’s knees with a wet cloth too? I can see it.”

“If the children have gunshot wounds, you’re the one who’s going to need first aid, Mister Spinelli.” She squirted my arm with antibiotic gel and ripped open the packet of gauze with her teeth. She didn’t remove the gauze from the envelope. Didn’t move.

“What?”

“I was so busy thinking about myself. I didn’t even think about children.”

I took her chin and pointed her face at me. Close up, I could see tiny pieces of grit inside her scrape. “We’re out.”

“I don’t feel out.”

With the other end of the white towel, I patted the bump on her head, cleaning it. “You’re out. I’m out. We go back to being civilians. We just have to get into LA without being seen and back out again. Should be easy.”

She plucked the gauze from the paper package and looked around for the tape. “I don’t want to be a burden to you.” She taped the square of gauze to my wound, swallowing her nerves. “I’m scared, Capo.”

I took the tape and put it to the side. “You’re not to be scared.”

I’d said it as if it were an instruction. I should have soothed her, but I didn’t know how. So I kissed her. I kissed her long and hard. To suck her fear out of her. To eat it alive and spit out the bones. I pushed her back onto the mattress and kissed her harder. Her hands stayed burn-side up, but the rest of her body arched up to meet mine.

I moved my hips against her, the clothing between us getting hot with friction. “Give yourself to me, and I’ll fuck the fear from you.”

Her eyes fluttered closed as I pushed myself against her, increasing the pressure until I thought I’d burst.

“Your answer, Contessa,” I whispered in her ear. “Your answer. Answer. Answer.” I was ready to get off her if she said no, but I knew she wouldn’t.

“Take me,” she breathed. “You crazy, beautiful bastard. Take me.”

I got up and peeled off her pants, yanking her legs open so I could see her pussy. She tried to close them, and I pulled her legs open again, bending the knees.

“Don’t move.” Standing over her, I got my pants off. I was going to fuck her so hard that we were one person, to touch that sameness between us so I could understand it.

Two fingers in her, and she was soaked. She bucked against the thin mattress, and when I ran my wet fingers over her clit, she cried out. I wanted to taste her, to tease her, to spend hours swimming in our heat. I wanted to fuck her hard and fast. Plant myself inside her and drive to the finish. I wanted to fuck her mouth, her ass, her cunt, her very being. I didn’t know how to do all the things I wanted to do to her.

I got on my knees quickly, pulled her seam apart until everything was exposed, and I ran my tongue over her. She dug her fingers into my hair as I fucked her with my tongue and hands. Two fingers in her ass. A thumb in her pussy. My mouth sucking her clit. Other hand squeezing her nipple tight to hold her still. When she came, all of Mexico heard.

I didn’t wait until she breathed. I had to have her. My spit had to be on her cunt when I fucked it, the last of my fingers in her ass still. She was so wet, so soft when I fucked her, and her mouth was open, unfucked. Unacceptable. I rolled her over so she was on top. I pressed her tongue down with three fingers and took her face too. I was everywhere inside her. Ass and mouth and pussy. All mine. All of it.

And still, a few hours later, in the dark of night, with her breathing next to me, touching every part of her as if committing to a sacrament, I didn’t know what we were. But I knew I’d have to leave her alone on the earth. One way or the other, they would get me. Going in or going out. I was a dead man and something else. I was the man who would prepare her for his death.

THE NEXT MORNING

theresa

onathan had tried to kill himself when he was sixteen. It had been over a girl, my friend Rachel. At the time, I’d thought it was because they split up, but it had been much, much more complicated. He’d suffered, and I hadn’t been there for him, not in the way I should have been. I was beating myself to a pulp over it in the hostel, brushing my thumb over Antonio’s arm. I would be there this time, and as stressful as it was to go back to Los Angeles, reestablishing that balance released a different source of tension.

“This has a texture,” I said, running my fingers over the volcano tattoo inside his left wrist.

He’d just brought me to orgasm twice, and I was on my stomach, getting my brain reorganized. Once I’d stopped screaming in ecstasy, he’d opened the windows. Children played in the street two stories down, and we spoke softly as if they could hear us.

“It’s not a tattoo. Not really.” He got up on his elbows and held out his wrists. “The shape is cut with a knife, and they rub ink from a pen on it.”

I looked closely. Every line was a bump. “Blue pen?”

“I asked for the blue. I liked it.”

“Did it hurt?” I stroked the lines of Vesuvius.

“Yes.”

“It’s dangerous to cut the inside of the wrist. Did it bleed a lot?”

“Are you going to ask me if I cried?”

“I know you did.”

He took me in his arms and kissed my face. “Like a baby.”

I looked at the ceiling for a second as his hand trailed up and down my body like a boat on still water, leaving widening wakes of sensation.

I rolled over. The window faced north, so the morning sun was cool and soft. “We have a few hours before the passports come.”

“I have plans for you.”

“More of the same?”

“No, I’m sorry to say,” he said, sitting straight up. “I’ve left you vulnerable. We are going back as civilians, but that doesn’t mean we go back stupid.”

He took the gun off the table and checked the ammunition. He pivoted on his ass then stood above me with it, naked, shoulders at an angle that balanced the pedestal of his neck. His waist, his hips, his tight stomach with a line of hair leading to the perfection of his half-erect cock, all were meant for me.

He snapped the gun closed, reminding me of everything hard and hot and dangerous. All the reasons we were going to hell. I felt two jolts. One between my legs. The other in my heart.

“I did it,” I said. “With Paulie. I shot him. I held the gun, and I pulled the trigger. That’s on me.”

“Because he was coming at me.”

I sat up. Paulie had been coming at Antonio, and if I was ever unsure whether or not I’d kill for him, I wasn’t anymore. But in the haze of thinking Antonio was dead, to needing to stay completely and utterly calm for the trip to TJ, to finding out about my brother and planning for our return, I hadn’t had a moment’s peace to think about what killing for him meant.

I looked away from Antonio at the foot of the bed. Past the wrought-iron footboard, the mirror stared back at me. I was naked, hair hanging over my shoulders in a post-coital nest. I looked as I always had, and him above me, dark hair contrasting with the whiteish walls, body lithe and tight and perfect, dark eyes with lashes longer than should be legal. The mirror couldn’t see Antonio’s taste in my mouth, his cum dripping from me, my aching pussy. It couldn’t see the change in my brain caused by the sex and the safety, the dam of avoidance dropping and the torrent of truth.

I held up my right hand to block my face in the mirror, and I saw something I shouldn’t. The little black stain was probably caused by the dirty mirror, because when I turned my palm around to look at it directly, it was red from a burn, not black with sin. Downstairs, a child’s scream turned to laughter. I pressed my lips between my teeth.

Antonio looked down at me. “Theresa?”

“I didn’t…” I pressed my finger to his lips. “I can’t accept that you forgive me.”

He sat down, twisting to face me. “You didn’t mean it.”

Mean it? What did that even mean? No one
means
to shoot anyone, except psychopaths and nihilists.

“I did mean it.”

He pulled my fingers away from his lips, but I shook my head violently and put both hands over my face. I couldn’t look at him, or anyone. Especially not myself. That mirror, it bothered me. It flattened everything into truth.

Antonio straightened like a shot, straddling me. He took my hands from my face and filled my vision. The eye of the storm: a place of peace and calm, and the most dangerous space to be in. The eye made you complacent and comfortable, and the next minute, while you were enjoying the cloudless sky, you’d be swept into a violent wind.

“Theresa,” he said, his accent like music, the concern on his face as real as his taste on my tongue. “Contessa.
Amore mio
.
Ascolta
. We are animals. You. Me. The kids playing outside. We wash ourselves. We cook our food. We speak in big words and have ideas. But we are animals. We fuck and we shit, and when we have to survive, we kill.”

We kill. Did that mean everyone, or just me? Just us? Just the family I’d forced my way into for reasons that even I couldn’t articulate?

“No. I don’t believe that,” I said, knowing he was right no matter how I let the light hit it.

He cupped my chin and held my head fast, as if keeping me still would ensure I heard him. “Your life will be easier if you accept it.”

What about me deserved an easy time of it? I’d never earned the ease I’d been given, and now that I’d done what I’d done, my worthiness was even more questionable. His eyes met mine, and I saw nothing but the depth of his troubles. Decades’ worth of weight. Would I add mine to his? Would I harp on my sin until he took responsibility for my corruption? I could break him. I knew that. If he thought I was destroyed beyond recognition, he’d take it all on himself.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just adjusting.”

“Don’t adjust too much. If something has to be done again, it’s for me to do.”

“I know.” I turned away, and he let my chin go. “Trust me.”