“How did I know?” he asks, as if to himself. “How did I know?”
He stops mid-pace and turns to me. “They knocked on my door late last night. Asked me questions for two hours. Why am I here? Where are my papers? Do I know you?”
He takes steps toward me, and I scramble onto the bed, ignoring the pain lancing through my ankle.
“Do you know what they do if I have a record?” Giancarlo demands, eyes widened and crazed, his normally near-perfect grammar disappearing into his accent. “I lose my visa! I go back to Buenos Aires! Back to my father, my family, all in shame!”
My chin trembles as I try to remain calm.
“You have to call them,” he continues. “You need to go to the police. Tell them it was a lie. They won’t do anything to you—you’re a citizen. Me, they might kick out of the country! Tell them it was a mistake, a lover’s quarrel went wrong, that you shouldn’t have called them.”
“B-but it wasn’t a lover’s quarrel,” I whisper. “You tried to choke me.”
Giancarlo’s eyes darken.
“You really want me to be angry, don’t you?” he asks, his voice tripping over itself, rippling with anger. “You are trying to make me lose control, eh?”
“I-I’m not trying to do anything,” I say. “And I’m–I was never going to press charges, okay? My roommates called the cops, Giancarlo. I just wanted to leave. That’s all.”
“You want to leave?” he asks, quirking his head, like the concept just occurred to him. “You want to leave me?”
I stare at him, dumbfounded. I don’t know if he’s on something again, or if this is just part of his personality, a part that might have been lurking there the whole time. He was always possessive, and at times I thought I liked it. But right now...he’s just acting unhinged. And it scares me even more.
“P-please,” I say, cowering against the wall at the back of the bed. “Just let me go, okay? You can keep whatever’s here. You can—I won’t bother you again. No police.”
“She wants to go,” Giancarlo mutters, more to himself than to me. He takes a step backward, then another until he’s halfway out the door. “She wants to go.”
When he’s out of sight, I slump against the wall, but my heart speeds up. His footsteps scramble erratically down the hall, and I listen with dread as a drawer opens and closes in the kitchen, and his footsteps track closer.
“Do you see?!” he cries as he rushes back in the room, knife in hand, maybe the same knife he used to corner me in the Square.
I stare at it, bug-eyed as I scrambled back on the bed. “W-what are you doing? Giancarlo, what are you doing with that?”
Arm trembling, he points the knife straight at me, then turns it back and cuts into the skin of his other wrist. A thick line of blood wells immediately, and when he pulls the knife away, it drips onto the carpet.
“This is what you do to me!” he shouts, arm shaking as blood seeps down his forearm. “You kill me! You rip me to shreds, just like this knife!”
“What—oh my God, stop!” I yelp, as he moves to pierce his skin again. “What are you doing?”
“We are for each other—you don’t run from me! If you try to leave, this is your fault. I will do it, I will! Because you are mine!”
“No, I’m NOT!” I’m crammed against the wall, ignoring the pain throbbing through my leg, terrified out of my wits, but the words escape regardless.
Giancarlo stares at me, like he can’t believe what he just heard. For a second I wonder if this is just a bad dream, if maybe I’m still back at my room, asleep in my bed, waiting for Nico to arrive. But then his long arm snakes across the mattress, grabs hold of my bad ankle, and yanks.
“Get OFF!” I shriek, writhing like an animal even as pain sears.
“Quiet!” he roars, as he tackles me back down.
Blood drips onto my clothes from his open wound, smears against the white of my t-shirt as I fight him off. But even with his arm cut open, he’s still much stronger than me as he wrenches my legs open and covers me with his body. I’m all too conscious of the knife pressing into the mattress by my head even while I twist under his weight.
His hands fumble over my body, looking for something to hold on to—skin, clothes, thighs, breasts. I don’t know what he wants; I’m not even sure he knows what he wants.
“Please!” I beg, my voice throttled by the sobs twisting my throat. I’ve never felt so many emotions at the same time—terror, rage, confusion. “Don’t do this, Giancarlo. Please don’t.”
“Why, so you can run to the cops again? Tell them I’m nothing but a dirty criminal, just like all the other putos around here?! Do you know what they’ll do to me? I’ll be finished, deported like a dirty criminal!”
His glasses slide down his long nose as he spits out the last words. I continue to struggle against him, pushing with all my might even as he reaches around my neck with his bloodied hand and wraps my hair around his fist. He yanks my head still, forcing me to look at him.
“Kiss me,” he orders. “Do it.”
“STOP!” I shriek as loudly as I can.
His palm hits my cheek with a loud crack, and the pain burns down my face.
“Shut up!” he roars.
But I don’t stay quiet. I can’t. I should be terrified into submission; my flight reflex would normally kick in by now. But something in me comes apart, like a spring door busted open. My anger flies like a spray of water from a broken hose—angry, loud, but ultimately useless.
“Stop!” I shout, again and again. But my cries only earn me harder and heavier blows. I don’t stop either. I just keep shouting, keep crying. It’s the only thing I can do.
* * *
Nico
“That one, right?” Shama says as the cab pulls down West 144th.
I nod. Yeah, this is the right building, the same place where Flaco’s lived for the last ten years. Jamie looks around with big eyes in a way that tells me the girl probably hasn’t ever ventured above Eighty-Fifth Street.
“Jesus,” she whispers. “She lives here?”
“No,” I snap as I hand some money to the cabbie. Jesus, between the cab from La Guardia and the one up here, I just dropped close to a hundred dollars today, but it’s honestly the last thing on my mind. “She lives with you, right?”
Jamie and Shama shrug, which tells me just how absent Layla has been from their lives lately. They’re hurt, and I get it. But it also tells me how abusive this asshole has really been. Isolation is one of the first things shitheads like this do. I’ve seen it with Maggie over and over again.
We pile onto the curb and find Gabe standing there, skinny arms crossed over his chest.
“Hey,” he says.
He gives Jamie a clear look up and down. She blushes. I roll my eyes. Looks like my little brother’s been learning some moves in college, but they’re not exactly subtle.
“Yo!” I snap my fingers in front of his face. “Not why we’re here, Casanova. Put it back in your pants.”
Gabe swallows. “Sorry, sorry. Yeah. Um. A guy coming out said he was in Apartment 3F. Says everyone knows where the Clark Kent-lookin’ motherfucker lives with Nico Soltero’s old girl.”
It’s not his fault, but the way he says that so matter-of-factly pisses me off even more. It must show all over my face, because Shama and Jamie both take a step back.
“Anyway...” Gabe says with a wide-eyed look as I swallow my anger. “Apparently the place used to get raided all the time because the old tenant dealt, but rumor has it the apartment is still on the same lease. It’s a front for something.”
I exhale roughly through my nose. I knew this dude was bad news. Ten to one the sketchy fuckin’ run to Hunt’s Point had something to do with the old tenant and whoever actually has their name on the lease. This is no place for Layla, as naive as she can be.
“Ev-everything okay?” Jamie asks.
I gulp down my anger. Save it for Evita.
“Fine,” I say as I walk up to the buzz
er and press Flaco’s button. The buzzer goes off, and the door clicks open. I turn to everyone else. “Let’s go.”
We’re quiet as we trudge up the two flights of stairs, even when we run into Flaco on the first floor, rubbing his hands together as I approach.
“You look way too excited,” I tell him.
“Man, you ain’t even know,” he says eagerly. “I been waiting months to kick this motherfucker’s ass.”
“You really think she’s here?” Gabe asks as he jogs behind us.
I shrug. I hope to God she is. I haven’t thought yet about what I’ll do if I don’t find her here. But I don’t have to answer, because as soon as we get to the third floor, I hear a scream through one of the doors. It’s muffled, but I’d know it anywhere.
“Layla,” I breathe and run the rest of the way to the apartment.
The door is actually unlocked. The stupid motherfucker must still be high, because he brought Layla here against her will and didn’t even think to lock the goddamn door.
Calling this place a shithole would be nice. The ugly stained carpet, the faded leather couch that looks like it’s seen its fair share of parties. The dinge that lines the crown molding, the popcorn texture of the walls, the rim of dust settled over the furniture. I barely have time to notice any of it, because I’m only one step in when Layla screams again.
“Get off me!”
I sprint down the short hallway to a closed bedroom door, which I hit with the full force of my shoulder, using my body like a battering ram. It flies open, and inside is Layla on her back on the bed, legs kicking wildly under the force of tall man who’s doing his fucking best to hold her down. The grayish, peach-colored sheets are tinged with blood—it’s everywhere, including all over my girl. Fear locks my muscles until I realize that the blood isn’t hers. It’s his, gushing from a nasty cut on his arm.
“What the fuck...” Gabe’s voice trails off behind me, and Flaco clicks his tongue, but I barely hear them. Layla screams again, and instinct takes over.
“GET THE FUCK OFF HER!” I roar, taking exactly three steps to where I can grab the man off Layla and spin him around.
It takes me two more steps to shove him against the window hard enough to crack the glass. A half-second more to get a good grip of his shirt and look at his snarling face. Then my hand pulls back, like it’s caught on a spring, and I let it all go.
My fist hits his face with a sickening, yet satisfying crunch as bone meets bone. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but my hands haven’t forgotten the feel. His face contorts, and blood gushes from his nose almost immediately. Good, I broke it. That knife-edge nose is going to have a nice crooked line from now on, and he’ll know it came from me.
I land another hard punch to his gut, and just as he’s keeling over, the breath knocked fully out of him, another uppercut to the bottom of his jaw. He slumps against the wall, but I don’t stop. The rage—that rage that almost ruined me when I was a kid, that tossed me in a youth jail for two years and probably would have landed me in a real one if it hadn’t been for some luck—is taking over.
But if it’s her frenzied shriek that awakens the monster inside, it’s her terrified whisper that calms me down.
“Nico?”
My fist hangs in mid-air, ready to take the next punch. To his kidney. His stomach. Maybe his face again, although I can’t afford to break my hand a week before I start the academy. But her voice—small, afraid, but still unbearably fucking sweet—holds me still. Maybe it saves me too.
Evita—because the fuck if he gets the dignity of a real name now—is only half-conscious as blood still pours out his nose and the rest of him wilts against the peeling paint. Most of the blood on Layla was, in fact, his. That cut on his arm is still seeping down his wrist and dripping on the carpet, adding to the mess from his nose. I release my hold on his collar, and he sinks down to the floor, gasping for breath. When I turn around, Layla is standing in the doorway, held up by Shama and Jamie, who is also staring at me with her mouth hanging open. Layla’s hurt. She limps on one foot, and I exhale, resisting the urge to finish the job. He hurt her. He hurt my—he hurt Layla.
“Nico,” she says again, pulling out of the wave that’s threatening to break all over again. She reaches a hand toward me. “Please. Please, I just want to go.”
“Nico,” Gabe says as he approaches. “We gotta get her out of here.”
Flaco sits down on the bed. “Don’t worry, mano. I’ll take care of this. Fuckface here ain’t goin’ nowhere ’til you get back.”
I nod, slowly back away from Evita’s slumped form. My entire body is vibrating. “Okay. Okay.”
“Hold on. They can’t leave like that.”
Shama leaves Layla and rummages around Jack Rabbit’s closet. He might be lying on the floor, but I’m still not going to call this motherfucker by his name.
She tosses me a t-shirt and throws another at Layla. It’s only then that I realize I’m pretty much covered in blood, and so I strip off my shirt and change into his. It’s too tight. He might be taller than me, but he’s thinner, and the cotton pulls across my chest. My nose wrinkles. It smells like him, like shitty cologne and cheap red wine and stale cigarettes. Fuck, I hate this guy so much.
“Let’s go, man,” Gabe says. “Let’s go.”
I stride to where Layla stands, and without asking, I sweep her up into my arms and tuck her into my shoulder.
“I got you, baby,” I tell her as I walk out of the apartment. “I got you.”
“Wait,” she murmurs, then calls back to Shama: “The book on the desk.”
She doesn’t say anything else as I carry her down to the street, where Jamie is waiting with a cab. She doesn’t argue as I keep her securely on my lap, hold her tight against me, unwilling to let go even a little. She doesn’t budge, doesn’t move, just shakes silently in my arms. And because she doesn’t fight what’s got to be a suffocating hold, that’s how I know my girl is really broken. And it breaks me too.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Nico
Somehow, we make it back to my old apartment on 139th. It’s only five blocks away, but it feels like five miles. I could have stayed in the back of that cab for hours, holding her, stroking her back, kissing her hair until those goddamn shakes disappear.
But they didn’t. If I hadn’t been holding her so close, I wouldn’t have known it, but because she’s burrowed into my chest, I can feel the faint vibrations persist after the cab stops outside the building, after I carry her out and hold her while Gabe unlocks the door, and all during the cramped elevator ride to the fourth floor.
Once we’re inside, Gabe walks Shama and Jamie to the train to make sure they get home safe. I keep reminding myself that Flaco is still at the apartment, making sure that motherfucker doesn’t leave before I can deal with him properly. I don’t know. Just the thought of him makes my head feel like it’s about to explode all over again. I can smell his fucking blood on Layla—blood from that cut on his arm. I hope she’s the one who gave it to him. I hope my baby fought like hell.
When I walk in, Layla still cradled in my arms, my mom, Maggie, and Allie are sitting on the old floral couch in what used to be the storage area, but has since been converted into a decent-looking living room. Allie is playing peacefully, but they stand up immediately when we walk in. Layla’s still frozen in my arms. I should feel an ache from holding her like this for so long, but I don’t. My chest hurts—it physically fucking hurts—when I realize that this was what I’d been training for all year. Fuck the FDNY. This was the only rescue that ever mattered.
My mom’s sharp eyes dart over Layla while Maggie raises a hand to her mouth and draws Allie to her side.
“Holy shit,” she murmurs. “What happened to her?”
I ignore her and look to my mom, who’s looking Layla over with perfect understanding.
“Gabriel’s room,” she says shortly, gesturing toward my old bedroom. “Take her in there.”
�
�Mami, what’s wrong with Layla...”
I hear the beginnings of some awkward questions from Allie, but don’t wait to hear the answers, just kick the door shut. The light is off, so the room stays dim, lit only by what filters through the window between buildings outside. The room is mostly the same, changed only by a few posters Gabe stuck to the wall.
I sit down on the bed, Layla still securely in my arms. And finally, finally, I exhale.
“Shhh,” I tell her, holding her against my chest as she shudders.
But she doesn’t hold on. For the first time since I met her, her fingers don’t curl into my shirt, don’t cling to my body, like she’s trying to memorize its shape. Instead, she sits in my arms, wooden and still fucking shaking. I focus on breathing. In. Out. Try to be something solid, give her a little of my strength. At least what bit of it I still feel.
“What do you need?” I ask her as I slowly rock her back and forth. That seems to work. The shaking dies, finally, though she’s just as still. “Tell me, baby. Just tell me what you need. I got you.”
The words seem to pull her out of whatever strange, silent place she’s been trapped in. She starts in my arms, and then, in an awkward motion that makes my chest physically hurt, she slides off my lap.
“I-I need...” Her voice is hoarse, like she’s out of breath. She scoots away. “I think I just need to lie down. If that’s all right with you.”
I hate that she even asks. I hate the way her voice sounds so small, so afraid. How tentative it is—so different from the bright-eyed, optimistic girl I know.
She doesn’t meet my eyes, just stares vacantly at the sheets gripped between her hands. She’s still in her clothes from earlier today—shorts and a white I Love New York t-shirt. The t-shirt was clean, but dried blood is smeared on her arms and her legs. There are even bits of it on her face, speckled over reddened skin. Where he hit her.
Reluctantly, I stand up. It goes against every instinct I have to leave her alone right now. If I hadn’t done that in the first place, she wouldn’t be here, bruised and broken, inside and out. She would still be herself. She’d still be Layla.
Bad Idea: The Complete Collection Page 66