Cecilia
18 years old
Itwastwoin the morning, and I was wide awake from the same nightmare again. The one where it’s dark and I can’t see my fingers in front of my own face. Everything is hot and I can hear machine guns all around me at a deafening volume. The trauma smorgasbord my lovely mind concocted would continue to haunt me until the day I died. Ronan mentioned therapy but there wasn’t much time anymore these days, and not much a professional could do if you weren’t exactly willing to tell them any of your life’s details.
Graduation was only four months away, so my senior exams weren’t too far off. When I wasn’t running jobs with Santo – Ronan’s roommate - I was working after school a few days a week at a diner to pay my Mamá’srent. I put her in a trailer away from town after the drive-by, she was just a shell of the person she used to be.
The only thing that remained was her disdain for me.
She hardly said a word and stayed mostly in bed since she was permanently bound to a wheelchair now. She’d scream at me anytime I stopped by and threw violent fits of rage about my Papá.She almost always ended up hurting herself in an attempt to hurt me. It used to make me sad, but I knew what she was doing. She pulled away so she could drink herself to death without feeling guilty for abandoning her last daughter.
I wouldn’t pity her, and I refused to watch it happen.
I thought I was doing the best I could, what my Papá and Carolina would have hoped that I’d be doing. Most days I was on autopilot though, as I went through the motions of normalcy.
The reality was that I probably checked out a long while back.
I was drenched in sweat from my dream and Ronan’s spot in the bed was empty. I walked to the en-suite bathroom and managed to look up at the mirror - the girl that looked back, she was just a stranger to me these days. My Papá’seyes stared back at me until I managed to turn my head to the side in defiance. My long, straight, inky black hair was sticking to my face from sweat; so I fashioned a braid down my back. I tossed on my robe over my pajama shorts and shirt then made my way to the living room in Ronan’s apartment. Our apartment technically, but nothing really felt like mine anymore. It was nothing fancy, just a two-bedroom with some outdated furnishings, but the three of us got by, we were happy, and we sure weren’t starving or anything. It was easy to make money on the West coast with college kids constantly hungry for drugs.
Santo was still up playing some zombie video game on his PS3, and he frowned when he looked at me and said, “you good, Morena?” as if he could see the nightmare still written on my face. He brushed his brown curly hair away from his hazel eyes where the tattoo of a small “X” decorated his left temple and handed me a beer from the cooler next to him. I took it, cracking it open and letting the coolness of it drown out the heat inside me.
Santo was the kind of handsome that left you scared to keep looking for too long. His entire look screamed “bad boy who was going nowhere fast”, and a small part of me simultaneously envied and felt sorry for whatever girl would end up lucky to have him. He was all laughs, lighthearted jokes and somehow a good listener to boot. I’d been wrapped up in this world long enough to know that the mark on his temple meant he had a body count under his belt and that was a whole mess I didn’t want to get sucked back into again. At this point though, he was my best friend. Not that I had attempted to get close to anyone else in the last few years. Santo and I spent a lot of time together making runs, selling weed and the occasional party drugs to rich kids. Almost always we were just waiting for Ronan, who was always trying to find something bigger, something better for us all.
It was the closest thing to family I had at this point, and I knew I was lucky to not be alone.
“Couldn’t sleep, bad dreams.” I replied, putting the beer on the coffee table as I sat on the other side of the couch and propped my feet on his lap. Sometimes it felt like Santo was more my friend than he was Ronan’s, we spent more time together than they did.
“Your family, right? You get a lot of dreams of the drive-by?” He looked my way and paused the game on his screen, to show me he had my attention.
I think he felt a kindred connection there. Santo came from gang life and he was Mexican too, but he was born in Ocean Valley. I was honestly not even sure if he knew how to speak Spanish aside from some curse words, and common sayings. I could tell by the look he was giving me though, that he was wondering if it was one of his cousins or older brothers who may have been responsible for my family’s death. It was a harsh reminder of the web of lies I had woven around myself when I told Ronan the police ruled it as gang initiation shooting. It wasn’t a complete lie, that technically was what they filed it away as, before they threw the file in the trash without bothering to investigate.
We were just another immigrant family people didn’t care enough about to bother disrupting their day over.
“Yeah, I got really lucky,” I shivered and pulled the blanket down from the back of the couch to wrap myself up in it.
After the shooting Ronan got this place and moved us all in immediately. Lucky for me social services doesn’t give a shit about vaguely legal immigrant kids, so no one had come looking for me after my family had been killed.
He nodded and we sat in silence for a few minutes, Santo eventually un-paused his game when he realized I had nothing more to say on the subject. The sounds of zombie hordes in the distance somehow soothed me back to sleep in the end.
I woke up to a dark and empty living room and Ronan scooping me off the couch as he carried me towards our bedroom.
“Did the job go smoothly?” I asked him, my voice scratchy and full of sleep.
“Perfect, ended up making more than we planned since Guillermo’s guy didn’t show up. West siders never cause us any trouble, so we didn’t need him. We ended up getting a fifty percent split on the product.” He nuzzled his cold nose into my neck and the smell of his bleu de Chanel cologne overwhelmed my senses in the best way as notes of cedar and sandalwood lit me up.
I looked up at him through hooded eyes as I brushed the sleepiness away and licked the dryness from my lips. The bedside clock read four in the morning but the hunger in his eyes told me I wouldn’t be going back to sleep just yet.
His thumb gently traced the raised-up scar on my rib, and it scorched beneath his touch. To him it was nothing more than a birthmark he liked to feel, but to me it was all I had of my past now.
The only thing that was left of who I was meant to be.
I ran my fingers through his sleek dirty blonde hair, it seemed darker every year now as he aged, and it suited him well. It fell long to one side past his ears, but the back and the sides were meticulously kept trimmed short. He pulled back from me and placed me on the large oak dresser across our queen-sized bed. Stepping between my legs, he pulled the robe off of me in one motion and pressed his lips to mine forcing his way through with his tongue.
I willingly welcomed him and tasted the cinnamon of the gum he’d been chewing.
He growled into my mouth and crushed me harder into him, letting me feel his excitement through his jeans.
I bit my lip in anticipation and looked into the eyes that always brought me home. They were a forest of green I could wander tirelessly, full of amber specks throughout them like burning rays of sunshine that would consume me if I let them.
“Were you waiting for me?” He breathed into my ear.
“Yes.” I hissed, my heartbeat quickening in response to him, and I palmed his thick hard length through his pants.
He slid his hand through the top of my shorts, eyes widening when he discovered my lack of panties and let out a satisfactory groan, “You were waiting, so wet for me already,” he dropped his forehead to my shoulder as his fingers made their way down and he unerringly found that magic spot with his thumb.
Heat flooded through me as he worked his way skillfully in a steady rhythm.
I tipped my head back and a soft moan escaped me as he replaced his thumb with the flat of his tongue.
He ran it over my center over and over again making circles and quick motions until my head was spinning.
I could feel a finger and then another making its way inside me, and he began driving them into me at a heady pace that was sure to send me into oblivion.
Ronan gazed up at me with a smirk and I knew the look on my face was giving away how close I was to losing it completely. He muffled my mouth shut with one hand for his roommate’s sake while continuing his torture until I was screaming into his palm and seeing stars.
“If I could bottle that sound,” he chuckled, and threw me onto the bed, his erection at full mast fighting the fabric of his jeans.
I instinctively licked my lips wanting a taste, but he shook his head and pulled his shirt over it revealing his defined abs.
“Not tonight, I need to be inside of you. Right now.”
I scrambled to follow and undress as well. I got up on my knees in the center of the bed as I waited for him to remove the last bit of his clothes that kept me from him.
He straightened and stood looking down at me from his six feet of height and every inch of my skin buzzed with need to be touched by him.
I turned around to show him how I wanted to play tonight, and he pulled me close against him, my back to his chest. My skin goose bumped as he tipped my head to the side and planted firm kisses on my neck as he trailed up to my jaw. He roughly pressed the top of my back until I was belly down on the mattress with my hips sticking up in the air. He slapped my ass and a guttural groan slipped out of my throat from the sharp contact.
“Please,” I said looking back at him knowing he could read my mind, but he liked this game too much, he loved the control and I loved giving it up to him.
I was too high from the last orgasm and all I could do was chase the feeling of the next one.
“Please what?” he asked with a half-smile knowing exactly what I wanted, but obviously wanting to make me work for it.
“More, please,” I begged, and his hand came down on my other cheek with a burning sting. I felt the rush of liquid in between my thighs, and I moaned into the mattress as I squeezed the sheets in anticipation, but the next strike didn’t come. Instead, I felt the hard steel of his length pushing into me and filling me up completely. Once he gave me a few seconds to adjust to him inside me, he grabbed a hold of both of my hips and began to drill in and out of me at a merciless pace. “Come for me little flower,” he said while hitting that perfect spot over and over again until I was left mumbling Spanish obscenities at him with no choice but to let go and unravel once again in an earth-shattering climax.
He flipped me over and placed each of my ankles over his shoulders, while propped up on his knees and made his way inside me again.
I moaned at the delicious sensation, and he picked up his pace slamming into me once again. “Beautiful,” he said as he slid a finger in the hot slick of my center and then used it to press into my clit once again and I almost lost it instantly.
“It’s too much,” I gasped for breath and clenched the sheets around me, but he chuckled darkly and closed his mouth around mine to swallow the sounds of my pleasure, never relenting on his pace until I was coming again, and this time taking him with me.
“Fuck, you’re perfect,” he exhaled and crashed down on the mattress next to me while we both panted and struggled to catch our breaths.
I said, and rested my head on his chest listening to the fast drumming of his heart.
“I want to get your mom out of that trailer Céci, I can use the money from that run to pay for a few months in an adult care facility that can handle her needs,” he said a few minutes later while staring at the ceiling.
“Really?” I perched up and then straddled his stomach to look down at him, “Are you sure?”
“Cecilia, no kid should be taking care of their parents the way you’ve had to do with your mom, I want you to focus on graduating and…whatever your plan is after that,” he said, awkwardly unsure of his own words.
pendejo,”I punched him in the shoulder, and he dramatically faked the injury.
He looked at me with a million questions and worry flooded his eyes.
I knew my Papá’s mind tricks were likely still playing in his head, probably on repeat – but my words were true. I knew I wasn’t on the path my Papá put me on anymore, and I was starting to think that life was never meant for me anyway.
A few days later we headed out to my Mamá’strailer on the edge of town. It was hidden away behind a grove of trees with no driveway, far from any mobile home community. It was the only way to stay hidden while I finished high school online, though I honestly wasn’t even sure why I was bothering with a diploma anymore. Even if Cártel Queen wasn’t in my future, it was obvious I couldn’t make money the straight and narrow way.
Crime was ingrained in my genetics.