Tainted Love (2 page)

“It's pretty cool. So … how's your aunt doing?” she asked, waiting for the drinks and tapas to come.

“Eighty years old and still works for
La Raza
every day.” He chuckled ruefully. “When I'm eighty, I want to be on the south coast of Spain, telling stories about my wild youth. You getting along any better with the colonel?”

Kiley groaned. The colonel was Platinum's brother-in-law.
After Platinum had been arrested for having drugs in her home, the colonel and his wife, Susan—Platinum's sister— had come to Los Angeles to save the three kids from even temporary foster care. He ran the household like marine boot camp. It was everything Kiley could do to keep the kids from executing a coup d'état with live ammunition.

“I say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ a lot; try to stay on schedule and out of his way,” Kiley replied, shaking her head. “The man probably showers in full combat gear.”

Jorge chuckled. “Doesn't exactly make you want to enlist, eh?”

“Do they even have marine biologists in the military?”

She considered that for a moment. She was definitely going to become a marine biologist, or choose another career that satisfied her great love for the ocean. She hadn't really considered it before, but the military would be one way to reach her goal. She had a cousin who'd joined the National Guard to help pay for college. Of course, he got sent to the Persian Gulf, and was still there.

“I don't think I'm military material.”

“I know, I know, you're going to Scripps,” Esme singsonged.

Kiley nodded emphatically. “Somehow, some way.”

“I like that about you,” Jorge acknowledged. “Determination. It gets you places.” He stood and held out his hand. “Dance?”

Kiley glanced at the dance floor, where a handful of couples were swaying to a low, seductive song.
What the hell.

“Sure.”

When one arm slid around her and the other took her hand, it was the first time Jorge had done more than touch her
lightly or offer a fraternal hug. To Kiley's surprise, his arms felt wonderful. He was only a couple inches taller than her, and he smelled clean, like soap. He wasn't tall and broad like Tom. Yet they fit just fine.

“So, the Latin Kings are doing a gig next weekend,” he said after they'd swayed together for a while. He was talking about his rap group. “That's the date we missed when I went to Texas. I thought you might want to come.”

“Let me check with the colonel. Call me.”

“Excellent.” He hummed as they danced. “I was wondering. How is it that you fell so in love with the ocean?”

“The one and only family trip we ever took,” Kiley explained. “To San Diego. I saw the ocean for the first time and … something just clicked for me. I can't explain it.”

“Maybe you were a mermaid in a former life,” Jorge teased.

“Maybe I was on the
Titanic
,” she shot back.

“Interesting. Tell me, if you were Rose, would you have fallen in love with poor-but-proud Jack?”

“Of course,” Kiley replied. “That is, after I got my degree and an excellent job so I wasn't dependent on poor-but-proud Jack.”

Jorge threw his head back and laughed. “Very practical. I thought all girls were romantic.”

Kiley knew herself to be ridiculously romantic, though it wasn't a quality she emphasized. If she wasn't so romantic, would she have fallen so hard for Tom, or been so hurt when he couldn't seem to decide just how serious he was about her? No. She would have simply jumped his bones and enjoyed it, no strings. That was certainly what Lydia would do. But though she was in Jorge's arms, she still thought about Tom.
He was probably right that second at a South Beach nightclub with some of the most beautiful girls in the world, partying after a photo shoot, probably—

“Kiley? Where did you go?” Jorge prompted.

“What?”

“You looked a million miles away.”

Yeah. South Florida. With a hot male model.

Not that she'd say that aloud. Or even admit the thought. In fact, she was about to suggest they go back to Esme and Jonathan when she found her mouth very occupied. Jorge was kissing it. She was startled. But just when she began to think that it was weird, that she really should explain about Tom, Kiley found herself kissing Jorge back.

Esme Castaneda

Twenty-two hours later, Esme and Jonathan were walking hand in hand along the Santa Monica Third Street Promenade. Teeming with shoppers, tourists, and street performers out to earn donated dollars from passersby, the promenade was one of the few places in all of Los Angeles where folks on a stroll didn't have to worry about a stray BMW or Jaguar mowing them down because the driver was busy repairing her MAC lip gloss or overly involved in a cell phone conversation.

Though the sun had set a half hour before, the evening was still warm; hot Santa Ana winds had been blowing from the east for the past two days. The Forest Service had closed all the wilderness areas outside the city to camping and vehicles, fearing that even a stray spark could touch off a brush fire that could spread quickly into a conflagration.

Here in Santa Monica, though, the night was idyllic. Esme and Jonathan had just eaten dinner at the famous Broadway Deli, sharing a pastrami sandwich and a plate of kasha varnishkes topped with the most delicious brown gravy she'd ever tasted. Dessert had been cheesecake with fresh strawberries.

She wasn't thinking about the six-year-old Goldhagen twins, Easton and Weston, adopted in June from Colombia. Diane Goldhagen and her TV producer husband Steven had taken them to their aunt's place in Pacific Palisades for a sleep-over. It meant that Esme had a rare night to herself. Her only orders were to pick the girls up in the morning, since Steven would be limoed to the set of one of his shows and Diane had an appointment at nine in Manhattan Beach.

“Great night, huh?” Jonathan asked. He stopped so that they could join a ragged circle of people around a chubby blues guitarist wearing dirty jeans and a faded Neville Brothers T-shirt. “I've seen this guy before. Check it out—his right hand.”

Esme peered at the portly and somewhat unkempt musician. He was perched on a battered black plastic milk crate, cradled an old electric guitar hooked up to a portable amp, and held a guitar pick between two fingers. No. They weren't fingers. The guitarist had stubs where fingers should have been.

“Birth defect,” Jonathan explained. “I've talked to him. He calls himself Ti-Ti Fingers. He's fantastic.”

Esme watched, fascinated, as Ti-Ti started to play. His stubs flew over the strings, the pick ringing out clear notes while the
fingers of his normal left hand danced on the frets. She couldn't imagine going through life that way. Then she thought of all the people she knew back in Echo Park who had been disfigured by industrial accidents, military service, car crashes, or just because they'd been on the wrong side of a turf war. The guy who lived three bungalows away had lost both his legs in Iraq. Over on Jorge's block, a guy who'd been in her class sophomore year had been shot in a drive-by and had a pair of scarred sockets where his eyes used to be. Yet he eschewed sunglasses, treating his wounds as twin badges of honor.

“You know anyone who went to Iraq?” Esme asked Jonathan. “Or who's there now?”

“No. Can't say I do.”

“I know lots. Joaquin Marcos. Estrella Gonzalves. Paco Guerra. They're all over there now. Correction. Paco's in Afghanistan.”

He looked puzzled. “Strange subject for a nice night. What's that about?”

She shrugged. “Just thinking about different worlds. Yours. And mine.”

“Hey, you live on my parents’ estate now,” Jonathan pointed out. “Not in the barrio.”

Esme prickled, even though she knew Jonathan hadn't meant to be the least bit offensive. It was true—she had her own guesthouse on the enormous Goldhagen estate high in the hills of Bel Air. But she felt guilty from time to time, too. It was as if she was abandoning her real people, her real life. She missed being surrounded by Spanish-speaking people; all the
sights and smells and tastes of her own culture. Working for the Goldhagens, caring for the twins, and living in Bel Air was the opportunity of a lifetime. In the fall, she'd be attending Bel Air High School, one of the best public schools in Southern California.

Esme knew all the pros of her situation. Her old life—her former gangbanger boyfriend, her business of creating tattoos for members of Los Locos while not working up to her full potential at Echo Park High School—seemed more like a lifetime ago than the two and a half months it had been.

Still, Jonathan wasn't exactly telling it like it was. In her new life, she was the hired help who had come perilously close to being fired on more than one occasion. She worked for the same people as her Mexican parents, who weren't even in America on valid visas. Esme cared for the kids, her mother cooked the food, her father landscaped and fixed things that needed fixing. The entire Castaneda family was dependent on the goodwill of the Goldhagens.

No. Jonathan hadn't told it like it was. That dependency— something he'd never felt in his whole overprivileged life—was the part of the equation that Esme hated most. To make matters worse, she had fallen head over heels for him. He was twenty, an up-and-coming young film actor who'd done his first major role the year before in an indie flick called
Tiger Eyes
. It was now showing on exactly two screens in New York and Los Angeles. While the reviews had been decidedly mixed, his performance as a young man on the psychological edge had been universally lauded.

She'd fought her attraction to him, suspecting his reciprocation
was of the wow-she's-poor-and-exotic type that would pass quickly. She was much too proud to go there. Eventually, though, Jonathan convinced her that his feelings for her were real. When he did, she'd opened her heart to him, consequences be damned. It had all nearly blown up in her face when Diane had caught Jonathan and Esme at her guesthouse in a very compromising position. In fact, Esme had nearly been fired. Finally, the decree had come. As Steven had put it, “What you do in the outside world is your own business. But I'd feel more comfortable if the two of you weren't alone on the property.” That had been almost five weeks ago. It had taken Jonathan two more weeks to find a vacant apartment in a five-thou-a-month high-rise overlooking the beach in Santa Monica. Esme had already spent two of her rare free nights there.

Ti-Ti finished the song to thunderous applause from the circle of passersby; many of them rushed forward to drop money into his guitar case. “Let's give him some money,” Esme urged, digging into her jeans pocket for some singles.

Jonathan stopped her and reached into his back pocket for his wallet. He extracted a crisp fifty-dollar bill and placed it in the guitar case. The musician saw the size of the bill and nodded gratefully.

Jonathan nodded back. “Thanks for the great music, man.”

He looped an arm around Esme's shoulders and they headed back down the promenade. It was so strange for Esme to be with a guy so wealthy that donating fifty bucks to a street musician was no big thing. She sighed. Jorge had warned her that she and Jonathan were from two different worlds. It
seemed as if every time she turned around, she got a reminder of how right her best friend was.

“Time to finish what we started,” Esme told Jonathan after they'd come through the front door of his place. His apartment was on the eleventh floor of a pristine white stone building at Ocean Avenue and Wilshire, easy walking distance to the promenade. With two thousand square feet, two bedrooms, and a huge balcony that looked out toward the Pacific, it was breathtaking. It was also nearly empty. Diane kept begging her stepson to let her ask her favorite designer to swoop in and do the apartment for him, but Jonathan wasn't interested. He'd ordered a top-of-the-line gunmetal king-sized bed and pillow-top Bella mattress over the phone, plus a Claymore billiards table. That was pretty much all he had by way of furnishings.

“That sounds promising.” He flicked a light switch. As track lighting illuminated the pool table, he immediately reached for her low-cut apricot T-shirt and started to tug it over her head.

“Brat!” Esme swatted his arm. “That's not what I was talking about.”

“Maybe I could change your mind.” He gave her a light kiss, which turned hotter when his right hand slid to her butt. “I can be very persuasive.”

No kidding
, Esme thought, since every inch of her skin screamed
touch me now
.

She loved and hated what he did to her. Loved it because being with him was like every romantic fantasy she'd ever had about how it would feel to be with the perfect boy. Hated it because it gave him power over her.

“Go out on the balcony and wait for me.”

“Sex on the balcony? I'm game if you are. Although we could end up on the front page of the
Star.”

“There's a floodlight out there, right? I have to be able to see.”

“See? Ooh. Very kinky.”

“Jonathan, think. You've been bugging me for three weeks. You want me to finish the tattoo, don't you?” She punched his bicep lightly where the half-finished tattoo peeked out from the bottom of his short-sleeved tennis shirt. She had been designing a Ferris wheel, because it was on the Ferris wheel at Santa Monica Pier that the two of them had begun to fall for each other. “That half-done thing looks stupid.”