Luna and the Lie

by Zapata, Mariana

  And I was pretty sure my dreams started up instantly too.

  Maybe it was the stress of getting burglarized. Maybe it was my worry and anger over Thea… Maybe it was the fury that speaking to my dad fueled me with. Or my beef with Kyra now too…

  But I fell into a dream that starred my dad in it. Again.

  Some part of me knew it wasn’t real, knew that it wasn’t actually happening, but despite all of that, my panic felt real. Too real as it started off with Kyra saying she was hungry while we all sat in my bedroom while we worked on our homework. I made my way into the kitchen from the back of the house, grabbing two boxes of macaroni and cheese from the secret hole I’d cut into the sheetrock in my closet. I could hear my dad and the girls’ mom arguing from the living room, and I tried to rush—to somehow make the water boil faster so I could go back to the room—but it hadn’t happened.

  Something broke in the living room, and I thought hurry up.

  But I hadn’t been fast enough. I was standing there when I heard, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  I tensed. Shook. Wanted to throw up.

  I don’t know what I responded with, but I was aware of what was going to happen before it did. I tried to wake up. Tried to force myself to wake up before… before… but I didn’t, and the metal was as cool as ever as it hit the base of my neck first, and—

  I woke up with a gasp in my dark room. Woke up on my back with my entire body strung tight. Woke up with goose bumps all over my arms and my hands instantly going to my face to rub it.

  It was just a dream.

  I knew it was. I was fine. I was safe.

  Something heavy landed on my stomach a moment before Rip’s voice pulled me even further back into the present with a rough, “Luna?”

  Crap.

  “I’m fine,” I whispered, hearing the lie in how my voice wobbled.

  The mattress moved as I figured he rolled. “Bad dream?”

  It was still so dark, we must have not been asleep too long, but I still felt guilty for waking him up. It was bad enough when it was just me. “Yeah.” I took a breath through my nose and rubbed my face again, my fingers trembling just a little but more than enough. “I’m okay. I’m sorry for waking you up.”

  The warm breath on my upper arm told me he was facing me. “What happened in it?” he asked unexpectedly.

  I held my breath, thinking over the details. It only kept the goose bumps on my arm for longer.

  “You’re not the only one who knows how to keep secrets,” his voice rumbled.

  I froze, staring blindly into the darkness. I had never told anyone about what happened the day before I left. Not even Lenny. Not Mr. Cooper. Nobody.

  I hadn’t been in the middle of making macaroni for the girls like in my dream, but…

  “Luna,” he said my name carefully.

  I sniffed and reached back to rub at the nape of my neck, touching the spot that had never felt the same after that day.

  “Baby, you cried out,” a sugar-sweet voice murmured a moment before what I knew were his fingers reached for my arm, sliding down it until his hand took mine and swallowed it whole. “Tell me what happened. It’s not real. You know it’s not.”

  I took a breath through my nose, my nape itching again. “It was real, Rip,” I sniffed, feeling him squeeze my shaking fingers.

  “Somebody do something?”

  I tried to rub my fingers over his rough ones.

  “Somebody hurt you?” the man beside me repeated himself.

  Every day for years. Hurt didn’t have to be physical, but I didn’t tell him that. He could keep secrets, he said, and I believed him. And maybe I shouldn’t tell him, maybe I shouldn’t say the words out loud and make them more real than they already were just living in my own head but…

  But I had to try.

  Isn’t that what I had tried to do with Lily and Kyra for years? Try to get them to talk about things so they wouldn’t bottle them up and explode from pressure later on?

  I was such a hypocrite sometimes.

  “I had a dream my dad…” Hell. How could I explain this? “He was always an asshole. Always, you know? When he was drunk or mad or because I was breathing too loud if the TV was on or if something had gone wrong and I happened to be nearby…”

  The fingers covering mine moved to linked us together. His palm warm, so much warmer than mine, it felt like it gave me strength. Or assurance. Or something. Something too nice and necessary. And not mine at all.

  But I kept going. “He caught me stealing money from him. My little sister Kyra had a fever, and when I asked her mom for money, she told me to fuck off. I told him I was just taking it to pay for the doctor, but he wouldn’t listen. He thought I was trying to steal his product or something, I don’t even know… but he got so mad, so much madder than ever before… and he said all kinds of things, and when I tried to leave the room, he grabbed me by the hair and he… he….”

  The soft spot at my nape itched, but I wasn’t about to let go of Rip’s hand to mess with it. I wasn’t. I wasn’t.

  “He put a gun up to my head and told me that if I ever did it again, he would fucking kill me,” I whispered, unable to hold back the shake… and trying to pick at the slice of anger of what that man had put me through, of what he had done to me. “Sometimes, I have dreams about it, but it’s really rare. But the back of my head starts to itch, and I feel like I’m back there again…”

  The silence between us stretched far and wide, and if it wouldn’t have been for how his fingers had jerked in mine as I told him the last part, I would have thought maybe he had fallen asleep.

  But I guessed he just didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t know what to say if our roles were reversed either.

  I hadn’t even been sure I could tell him.

  “I went to my grandma’s house that day afterward, you know. I told her what happened, and she told me to go. It wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned it. She said I would never be safe there, and I made her promise me that she would take care of my sisters as long as she could, and she said she would. And I told her… I told her I’d make sure she got them…” I squeezed his hand. “I couldn’t stay there after that, Rip. I couldn’t.

  “I called the cops the next day while the girls were in school—while I should have been in school too—and told them there were drugs at my house. I told them where to find it and how there were kids living there. And they came… they came and they arrested my dad and their mom. He screamed at me that he was going to fucking kill me… and I found out later on in the paper that they ended up arresting his brother too.” I had known from the moment I’d been little what my dad did. How the cops were always on his case, according to him. They had told me a thousand times that I better keep my trap shut or else.

  What I didn’t share was how I had warned my sisters I was leaving. How they were going to go live with Grandma for a while. How things were going to be so much better. How I told them I was sorry they couldn’t come with me, but I had only been seventeen.

  She had never offered to let me live with her for whatever reason she’d had, but she had volunteered for them.

  So I did it.

  “That was what I didn’t want to tell you. How I ratted him out. How he went to jail for three years because of me. Because I don’t feel bad for what I did. Not even a little bit. I wish he would have stayed in jail for longer. That’s why I went to go get my sisters. Because my grandmother called when she found out he was getting out, and she knew they wouldn’t be safe with her, not with him so close. And so, we made it work and I went to go get them…”

  I sniffed again, letting the anger fuel me, letting it remind me of what I’d done and would never look back on. “It’s okay if you think I’m disloyal or a piece of shit for turning my own dad in, you know.”

  His fingers jerked while tangled with mine again, and I had no preparation for how he replied. For the strength in his tone, for the assuredness. �
��I’d never fucking think that about you,” he said in that incredibly husky voice, full of… something. Something I wasn’t sure of. “You did the right thing. You did the only thing you could have. There’s nothing you got to feel bad about. You hear me?”

  Did I hear him? Was he serious? I couldn’t help how small my voice sounded, how small I freaking felt. “You still want to be my friend then?”

  “Christ,” he hissed before making a choking noise. “Goddamn, Luna.”

  I didn’t get a chance to think his words over before the hand holding mine left, and the next thing I knew, a hand snuck between my rib cage and the bed and another went to my hip, and he pulled me toward him. Onto him.

  Lucas Ripley pulled me halfway onto his body, or at least that’s how it felt when his bicep turned into my pillow and his hip and thigh a part of my mattress.

  “You kill me, girl,” he murmured in the roughest voice I’d ever heard. “I swear to God, you’re a fucking puzzle I thought was all in the box, but every damn day I find a piece or two hidden all over the place.”

  I had no clue what he meant by that. Maybe Rip was aware of that because I didn’t expect him to roll onto his side just a little, just enough so that he could look down at me with that face that I couldn’t help but stare at every chance I got. The angles of it were heavy and the room was so dark it made it hard to see little else.

  But I saw enough. Felt enough.

  It really was too late to think I could love him if I gave myself the chance, I thought, before shoving that idea away as far as possible. I wasn’t reckless enough to mess with that thought though. I wouldn’t be.

  My vision was just good enough to watch him as he propped himself up.

  “What is it?” I asked, hearing the nerves in my voice.

  He didn’t reply though. Rip just loomed there, on a hip and an elbow, looking and looking and looking for so long, I had to lick my lips. For so long I wondered if he thought there was something wrong with me. Until suddenly, he dipped his face down—and I held my breath—and he did the last thing I would have ever expected.

  Rip brushed his dry, warm lips over mine. Over the corner of my mouth. Over the length of my lips. Just the quickest, lightest, most feather-like kiss of my life.

  And just as quickly as it happened, it was over. He rolled back down to his back, leaving me….

  Just like that.

  Rip had kissed me. Me.

  Was it… was it for comfort? Did friends do that? Kiss each other sometimes to make the other person feel better?

  Yeah. Yeah, they did, I told myself as I heard him exhale. That’s what I was going to keep telling myself. He hadn’t slipped in any tongue, that wouldn’t have been friendly. And you wouldn’t have said no, my brain tried to whisper, but I ignored it, for now and forever, to cling onto the one and only thing hanging around in my head that made any sense. My one genuine worry in that moment that had nothing to do with this man maybe-yes-maybe-not kissing me. “You still want to be my friend though?” I asked him.

  I’d swear on my life he just scooted closer to me, and I wasn’t going to overthink it. I definitely wasn’t going to think about what had just happened either. “Luna, if you knew the things I’ve done…”

  “I would still want to be your friend,” I told him, breathing in through my nose that Irish Spring scent all over him. I licked my lips again and told myself I was only imagining that they tasted different. “Unless you like… hurt a kid or an animal or a woman.”

  I could hear the breath he took, feel the tension of his bicep under my arm.

  I was lying on Rip’s arm. I was lying on Rip’s arm. After his lips had met mine.

  He was comforting me, I told myself. That’s all.

  “No, I’ve never done any of that, but other men…” He trailed off, still speaking in that rough voice. “You don’t have a single idea the shit I’ve done, and I don’t wanna tell you.” I could feel the breath he took because it made the chest I knew from touch that was directly in front of my face expand and expand and expand.

  There. There. He was telling me a little. Just a little. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.”

  “I don’t want to, but you should know, you should know who you wanna be friends with.”

  “Tell me later,” I told him softly, taking in another big gulp of that clean male scent. But I thought. I thought about his words. I thought about all the different backstories I had come up with over the years.

  “But can I ask you one thing? One thing that won’t change at all regardless of what you say? Because I swear it won’t matter, but I’ve thought about it a lot and I just… I just want to know. We don’t have to talk about it anymore afterward. And you can count it as my favor. We’ll put it in our box of secrets.”

  I didn’t want to think that his “hmm” sounded worried, but I thought it did.

  I squeezed his hand again, letting my fingers linger over the two fingers I knew had an M and a C on them. “Were you in a gang before?”

  The arm beneath my head went hard again, and it took seconds for it to relax. Seconds that seemed like minutes as his body finally lost its defensiveness. And I couldn’t say I was totally surprised when he said, “Yeah, baby. You can say that.”

  Well. I couldn’t say I was surprised. I wasn’t, not even a little bit, but his response tickled at that part of me that had a dozen different questions. I was only going to choose one. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

  His “yeah” was a rumble.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  If the question surprised him, I would never know for sure. What I was aware of was the way he sighed and how I felt it before he answered, “I was mad after my mom died. Real fucking mad. I didn’t go out to join… it. I was raised here; I don’t think I ever told you that. Few months after Mom passed, I packed up my shit and left. Moved around a lot there for a while. I’d spend a couple days here and there, New Mexico, Colorado, California for about a year, then I headed back. I don’t got a whole lot of family, but back then I had an uncle in San Antonio—”

  Some part of me startled at the mention of the city I’d grown up in, but I didn’t make a peep.

  “He was into that life. My mom’s brother. I was mad as hell over life, and… they… took me in. It was kinda like having a new family, if your family was fucked up and everybody had lost their minds,” he kept explaining in a steady voice. “I spent eighteen years there.”

  I curled my toes under the blankets, thinking about what he’d just said. “Were you happy?”

  The sound that came out of Rip’s mouth was a twisted, sad, low laugh. “Nah, baby, you don’t really think about shit like that in that life, but sometimes you bury yourself so deep into something you don’t know how to get out until you wake up one day and know you can’t keep going a minute fucking longer.”

  His words slipped beneath my ribs and right into my chest. I knew exactly what that was like. Knowing you couldn’t keep doing something anymore without losing too much. I rubbed my fingers against Rip’s and felt his move right back, not holding mine but just there. There and there and there. Warm and strong and present.

  “I got tired of being pissed for almost twenty years. Finally thought of what my mom would’ve wanted for me and it wasn’t that. Wasn’t what I wanted for myself as a kid either and being fed up with everything and everybody seemed to be some kinda sign… so I left. That’s when I came back.”

  Rip’s knuckles brushed over the fine bones on the back of my hand, and I stared up at the ceiling before I asked the one last question I would let myself wonder over. “Are you glad you came back?”

  His chuckle was a puff, and those knuckles moved over me one more time before he said, “Some days, no… but, yeah. Yeah. Coming back was the best thing I ever did.”

  Chapter 23

  If I had thought that maybe I would have gotten a break from my Streak of Shit, I would have been mistaken.

  Big-time.

 
Thankfully, as much as I might have hoped things would be different and my luck might have turned around, I hadn’t expected for even a second that that would be the case. I knew how my luck worked, and in my life, when it rained… there was a hurricane coming. In this case, the thing with my sister had been the warning it was headed my way—I just hadn’t seen it for what it was soon enough. The break-in had gotten me to the eye of the storm, and now I had the other half to live through. So I was expecting not to have the best day, or days, of my life, the morning I woke up holding Rip’s hand.

  The morning following the evening in which he’d basically admitted that he had been in a gang, or something close to that, based on his words.

  But we weren’t going to talk about that, not until he was ready. If he ever was.

  If anyone knew how hard it was to admit intensely personal things, it would be me. After all, I had a handful of people in my life that I trusted very, very much, and I had never told them about my dad and the gun. I had never told them about calling the police on him. They just assumed I’d gotten fed up and ran away.

  So, I wasn’t going to think about it. I wasn’t going to bring it up again, and I didn’t when he woke up after I rolled out of bed, or when we rode to work together again, and when our lunches overlapped by thirty minutes and he sat next to me, quietly reading through his magazine, his elbow brushing mine often.

  The following morning, after he’d spent another night in my bed with me, neither one of us brought up any piece of our admissions… or commented about sharing the mattress again, except this time I had used my pillow instead of his shoulder like I had that first night.

  Unfortunately, in the days since the break-in, Jason forgot he was on strike two, or he’d decided he didn’t give a crap about his job and had taken being an obnoxious jerk to a totally different level. He’d been even more moody and snarky than before, and I could barely handle him when he simmered with it. He’d started disappearing for long periods of time during the day, and when I asked him about it, he’d claimed having diarrhea as to why he would disappear for twenty minutes at a time every hour.