Emancipated (30 page)

“All right. But can we go to my room? Candace could walk in, here.”

Lucy followed him one floor down to his room. She could still hear Maya, Grace, and Candace talking in the kitchen. He closed the door behind them and turned the lock. Then, almost nervously, he took off his shirt. It wasn't the first time she'd seen Paolo shirtless. His smooth, undecorated skin struck Lucy as surprisingly vulnerable, not buff or macho.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“I already told you. Do I have to spell it out?”

Lucy reached out with the tips of her fingers, ran them over his shoulders and down across his solid pecs. His eyes closed a little in response.

“Lucy, if we start, I'm not going to want to stop. I mean it.” He gulped a little. This was obviously not easy for him to say. “So please don't tease me. I'm not that nice a guy.”

“Who says we'd have to stop,” Lucy whispered as she gently kissed the side of his neck.

She felt his skin turn to gooseflesh at her touch. When he spoke again, his voice was tight, husky. “You're really . . . I mean, would this really be your first time?”

“What?”

Paolo clasped her left hand. “Do you really want your first time to be like this?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“Because right now, I want to,” she said. “I never wanted to before. At least not when the right guy was available.” She looked up into his eyes.

“That's hard to believe.”

She tugged her hand away from his and wound her arms around his neck. “Is there always so much talking?”

“I just want to understand.”

“What's to understand?” She tried to kiss his lips, but he didn't respond.

“I guess . . .” He seemed uncomfortable talking about this. As though he were trying to push something out of his mind. “But why? It's not like you love me. I know you don't.”

“No . . .” She stared into his eyes. “But maybe you love me.”

He swallowed again. And he didn't deny it.

Resolve seemed to take ahold of him. He pushed her gently backward onto the bed. He moved a hand down to her jeans and undid the clasp of her belt, the fastening on her jeans, loosened them until he could slide his hand between the fabric and her skin. He moved his hand over her hip and around back until he was clasping her flesh. Then he sighed, an exaggerated, dramatic sigh.

“I have wanted to touch you since the day I met you.”

To Lucy's dismay, the sudden intimacy of his hand in her jeans did not have the effect she'd hoped for. If anything, the opposite. She could feel all her muscles stiffen. She closed her eyes for a second or two, tried to make herself relax. When he tried to move his hand back around to the front, she found her own hand stalling his.

Paolo paused, a quizzical expression on his face. He left his hand where it was, but didn't move it. Instead he kissed her. After a second she could feel his tongue trying to slide between her lips. Again she was stunned at how not into it she suddenly felt. The guy was beautiful. And he was crazy about her.
What the heck was wrong?

She tolerated it for a whole minute before she made a strategic withdrawal.

It took Paolo a little while longer to catch on to what was happening. After a couple of seconds of gentle struggle beneath the waist of her jeans, his fingers wrestling hers, Paolo stopped moving. Slowly, his eyes rose to meet hers. There was puzzlement there, as well as an undercurrent of hurt.

“Too fast?” Tentatively, he withdrew his hand.

Lucy could feel a sensation of pure, hideous embarrassment sweeping through her. It was almost enough to make her pull his hand back against her.

Almost. But not quite.

For a moment they remained in the same position on the bed, neither knowing what to do next. In the end, Lucy said the only words she could think of. “I'm sorry.”

He managed a wan smile. “I guess I did catch a vibe that you weren't totally into it.”

She risked a grin. “Jeez. Now I've done it, right? And after you warned me you're not that nice a guy.”

Paolo didn't answer. For all his calm demeanor, he seemed totally thrown.

“None of your ladies ever did this to you, I bet?”

“They didn't, no.” His reply seemed wrought with concealed regret.

Lucy pulled away, sat up on the edge of his bed. She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “I'm embarrassed.”

“You're not into it,” he replied softly. “It's okay, I get it.”

“Don't say that. It's more complicated.”

Paolo stood up and held out a hand to her. “Don't sweat it. Life is long, Lucy Long. Let's call this
deuce
.”

She tried to return his smile but it probably looked just as awkward as his.

After a few minutes, they got dressed and went back down to the living room together. The moment they stepped through the door, Grace's eyes were on them. She seemed faintly relieved, if anything. Candace turned away from the TV and threw a balled-up napkin in Paolo's direction.

“Check it: Mr. Bedroom Eyes.”

Paolo picked up the mustard-stained napkin from where it had fallen at his feet and tossed it into the wastepaper basket behind the lime-green futon.

“You're such a slob, Deering. And you're cranky as hell when you're tired. Good luck persuading any guy to live with you.”

“Drop dead,” she returned lazily, not even bothering to look up.

But Paolo wouldn't let it go. “How come when it's my turn to cook and yours to clean, you never really clean up the kitchen? Maya, Lucy, and I are the only ones who use the bleach spray. And John-Michael and I are the only ones who ever clean out the fridge.”

“Are you seriously going to whine about this right now?” Candace said. “My mom owns this house, okay? Why wouldn't I do my fair share? It's me she'll come after if we don't keep it clean.”

“You don't need to keep it clean,” he fired back. “Not when the rest of us are doing it for you.”

“Could we please just chill?” Lucy said. Maybe she should take Paolo aside and confront him directly. What had happened in the bedroom had been a blow to their relationship for sure. But she couldn't let it ruin the atmosphere in the whole house.

“Why don't you just go call Mommy, then?” Paolo spat at Candace. His eyes were damp now. Lucy
wished he'd just leave the room.

“
Me
call Mommy? What about you? You're never off the phone to her. Are you sure you like being emancipated? Maybe you should head over to Mexico, too.”

He shouted back, “Never off the phone? I called her once: one time you just happened to hear it. My mom is lonely, okay? You have any idea how boring her life is now, stuck in some lousy mining town in Sonora?”

Lucy shook her head helplessly. She crossed the room to sit next to Grace on the large gray sofa that faced the wall-mounted TV. “What a crock,” she said. “I feel like I've aged a bunch of years just in the few months we've been living here.”

Grace nodded in agreement. “I know.
This
is not what I signed up for. Sometimes I feel more like twenty-six than sixteen”

Lucy stretched her legs out until her knees bent over the cushions at the far end of the sofa and leaned back against the pillows. “Maybe so. But it still beats the pants off living with my folks.”

Grace shrugged, ambivalent, and turned back to the TV. Lucy couldn't help but notice that she seemed much happier than when Lucy had first walked in with Paolo.

Some kinds of disharmony, it seemed, weren't all bad.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

VENICE BEACH, SATURDAY, MAY 23

Maya had tried really, really hard to keep things together. But the day after John-Michael's arrest, it all began to unravel.

She'd begun the day doing errands with Marilu and making plans to hang out at the Amnesty International benefit at Hearst Academy, the school attended by Grace and Candace. It was late morning and Maya was on her way back to the house, riding in the white Cadillac with Marilu.

“Don't eat that burrito in the car,
mija
. The
inglesa
will smell the salsa. She'll freak.”

Maya rolled her eyes. Carefully, she wrapped her breakfast back into its napkin. “How is Lady Macbeth anyhow?” she growled.

“Still the boss of me,” was the terse reply. “And show some respect to Dana Alexander!”

“I am showing respect,” Maya said innocently. “Isn't Lady Macbeth her most famous role?”

Marilu Soto tapped smooth pink fingernails against the steering wheel to the beat of Selena Quintanilla singing “Baila esta cumbia.” “I don't want you to miss anything today, baby. Lady Macbeth, as you call her, is going to want the full report. Things are going to happen—you'll see. John-Michael getting arrested
is quite a thing. When emotions are running high, people can get to unburdening themselves.
Cuídate bien, mija
. Take care you don't get bitten by the truth bug. Might feel good at the time, like pulling a scab. But bad things can happen when you tell some truths.”

“‘Truth bug'?” Maya replied miserably. She shifted in her seat. “Mamá, how's that gonna happen? “I'm lying to everyone, every minute. Telling them that you're my aunt. Pretending my mother is in Mexico. I even made up a story that you were coming over, that we were going to Disneyland.”

Despite herself, Marilu smiled. “
Ay
, baby. You wanna go to Disneyland? I'll take you. But take care with calling me ‘Mamá.' Stick to ‘Ma'—it's safer that way. They'll assume you're using a nickname.”

“Will we ever be able to tell the truth?”

Her mother sighed. “The minute you decide you want to go back to Mexico, you can say whatever you like. But while the
inglesa
is my boss, we gotta do what she says.”

“But . . .” Maya held back for a second, then said, “Don't you ever wonder why Dana's watching the house? I mean—have you figured out her deal?” It almost felt like an accusation to ask.

Her mother seemed to take it that way, too. “Not in a million years,” she replied testily. “Who knows what her deal is? Like I always say, Hollywood people are crazy. I'm just focusing on keeping us both in this country,
mija
.”

Back at the house, everyone had drifted down to the ground floor. The housemates greeted Maya with a measure of relief. It seemed there'd been some tension the night before. “Shenanigans,” Lucy called it. Maya guessed that Candace was anxious about all the preparations for the Amnesty International benefit at their school that afternoon. Everyone in the house had promised to help.

Candace was preparing to go out for a shoot, only to get a call at the last minute saying that they'd rescheduled her scenes for the following week. As a consequence, she was still complaining about having dragged herself out of bed for nothing, after a night of hardly any sleep. Lucy had paused for a second, as if checking herself, and then went on to say, “That's one of the things I hated about doing TV. Weekend-morning shoots. Didn't take long for the novelty to wear off.”

It was the first time Lucy had volunteered any information about her former life as a TV actor. Maya wondered how many times Lucy had been forced to bite her tongue.

Maya realized she should probably make more of an effort to act as though Lucy being a former TV star was news. Had any housemate gone to bed that night wondering why Maya hadn't seemed surprised? Had one of them somehow discovered evidence of Maya's spying? The paranoia was like a cold steel claw raking at the base of her spine.

No. Maya cradled her hot chamomile tea, thinking. If any housemate were clued in on the secret reports, it would have erupted in an almighty argument. She was being cautious, password-protecting her reports and her computer. It wasn't like her housemates were FBI agents or anything.

No one knew about Maya's situation—she felt pretty certain of that. At least she did when she forced herself to be rational.

Maybe it wasn't too late to make a big deal of Lucy's TV role? Maya remembered that down on Venice Beach every Saturday a street vendor sold secondhand CDs and DVDs. Perhaps she could find an old DVD of
Jelly and Pie
?

“Hey, anyone wanna go get a latte down on the boardwalk?”

Candace glanced over from where she was perched at the kitchen table, apparently deep in thought, eating a piece of toast. Her eyes strayed to Lucy and Paolo, who were sitting on the sofa. They were
watching a cartoon show together, making cute little comments to each other. Maya noticed that they were trying not to sit too close. Not quite the picture of coupledom, but barely one degree removed.

“Yeah, let's go,” Candace said. There was a definite edge to her voice. She didn't even bother to dress. Plaid pajama bottoms, strappy tops, and flip-flops were ideal wear for Saturday morning on the Venice boardwalk.

They weren't out of the house for more than five seconds before Candace turned to Maya and asked, “You think those two hooked up last night?”

From her tone, it was pretty clear that Candace thought they had. Maya lowered her sunglasses and stared out at the thick line of gunmetal gray where the ocean met the horizon. It was going to be another blazing day. Eventually she replied, “Why, did they say something?”

“They were in his room for a while last night,” Candace said. “Afterward, there was a vibe.”

Maya shrugged. “What if they did?”

“I'm just concerned.”

“You're worried about the country club Casanova? Good luck with that.”

“I'm concerned about
Grace
,” Candace said.

“Oh,” Maya said. “Yeah. Good point. I mean, you can see why it happened. But still.”