by Lea Santos
Madeira chose to ignore her grouchy sister’s well-placed barbs. Toro had never approved of her freewheeling lifestyle, not that Madeira gave a shit. “Just leave Mamá out of this. She won’t understand how this whole thing came about.”
“None of us really understand how it came about, Mosquito.” Toro rubbed her eyes. “All I know is what mi hermanita announces one day.” She spread her arms. “She has suddenly decided to become a paramedic so she can ‘help people.’” The corners of her mouth tipped down as her shoulders moved up in a shrug. “Okay. Whatever. The sister I know never so much as pondered a Band-Aid before, but who am I to question the impulses of a grown woman?”
“Good point,” Madeira almost growled. “It’s not your place to question.”
“Then, a year later, a woman comes forward looking for my sister. Of course, none of us ever heard mention of a woman.”
“What more is there to know, Toro? So I stopped to help on the accident. Later I decided to change careers. What’s so mysterious about that?”
Torien shrugged. “Only you and this Graciela can answer that question, Mosquito. Why don’t you take a few moments and enlighten us with the truth, for a change?”
Simon loped to the coffeepot, refilled, then nudged Madeira, his gaze knowing but confidential as well. “So, Madeira. Why are you called Mosquito?”
Grateful for the pointed subject change just when things were getting hairy, Madeira opened her mouth to answer, but Toro beat her to the punch.
“Because she’s a pest.” Toro smiled up at Simon, a conspiratorial expression that said the man would understand the nickname soon enough. “At times a bloodsucking pest.”
Madeira pulled an expression of false accusation and flipped her hand palm up toward her sister while staring at Simon as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?”
Simon grinned. “I like it. Mosquito. It fits somehow.”
Madeira loomed, as best she could, over the man who stood nearly a foot taller than her. “You start calling me that at work and I’ll come up with something worse for you, Fletch. Something emasculating.”
Simon and Toro laughed.
“This one makes it sound like you two are an item,” Iris said, ignoring the banter going on around her. She’d switched to an article in a suburban journal, concentrating on all the typeset lines and everything in between, all the baffling subtext only a woman like Iris could catch. “I thought you said you’d cleared up all the nonsense about you two being soul mates?”
“Cleared up, handled, same difference.” Iris’s toothcomb scrutiny of the articles was beginning to make Madeira squirm.
Iris peered up. “Care to elaborate?”
Madeira waved away Iris’s concerns with a careless flick of her hand. “Gracie and I decided we’d tell them what they wanted to hear so they’d leave us alone, but don’t worry. We aren’t an item. She’s no more into me than I’m into her.”
Simon, Iris, and Toro burst out laughing, but Madeira raised her voice and spoke over them. “We just handled things.”
“‘Gracie and I.’” Iris shared a dreamy gaze with Torien. “Isn’t it so awesome to hear her talking that way, sweetie?”
“Yes, Irisíta mía.” She stroked her hand through Iris’s long hair and kissed her cheek. “Listening to my little sister become totally…pussy-whipped is sweet stuff indeed.”
“Pussy-whipped?” Madeira tossed out a rapid string of insults in Spanish, cuffing the back of Toro’s head.
Toro countered with a whip-cracking gesture and the accompanying sound effects.
“Now stop.” Iris smacked Torien playfully, love dancing in her green eyes. “If you tease her all the time, she’ll never open up to us.” She wrapped Torien in a hug and pulled her face into the crook of her neck, winking at Madeira over her head. “Don’t listen to your sister. She’s just trying to pay you back for all the trouble you gave her when we met.”
“Trouble?” Madeira scoffed. “If it hadn’t been for me, Toro would’ve never come to her senses about you.”
“My woman’s arms are around me and it’s very early Sunday morning,” Toro announced to Simon and Madeira, her words muffled as she kissed Iris’s neck. “Don’t you two have a life to save somewhere in this city?” She nuzzled Iris, who laughed softly, her hair falling over her shoulder in a black cascade as she ducked her head into the love of her life.
Madeira resisted the needle prick of envy she felt watching Toro and Iris. Their love was a palpable presence in the room, the kind of connection singers sang about and poets waxed poetic about. The kind of connection most people looked for their entire lives. People like Toro and Iris were the only ones who actually found that kind of love, though. Worthy people.
A vision of Gracie drifted into her mind.
Gracie was worthy.
Madeira willed away the irrelevant notion. She didn’t even want something as intense as Toro had with Iris. Not in the long term, anyway. Still, it was difficult to watch them on an empty stomach. She hiked her chin toward the oven, feeling slighted. “We’re on a break from saving lives, remember?”
“Break’s over,” Toro said.
Madeira scowled. Her sister never used to blow her off before she fell in love. And Toro had the nerve to accuse her of being whipped. “What about the coffee cake?”
“What about the coffee cake?” Toro repeated derisively. She implored Simon with a disbelieving look. “You married to a woman you’re in love with, Simon?”
“Sure am. Lisa and I have fifteen years and counting.”
Toro went back to Iris’s neck. “Then get my pest of a sister the hell out of my house and explain to her why the coffee cake could burn black for all I care at this moment. Make her understand.”
“You betcha. Bye, Iris.”
“Bye,” she said, her tone distracted by Torien’s attentions.
Simon hustled Madeira out of the kitchen, but not before Madeira heard Iris tell Toro, “Mad will understand sooner than she thinks, babe. Trust me. I can sense these things. Your little sister is on the verge of something cataclysmic”—she laughed knowingly—“and she can’t do a damn thing to stop it.”
Madeira swallowed hard, shaken by the ominous prediction. Did Iris truly have some kind of insight? She’d long believed that women like Iris were a little bit bruja. They had the sixth sense. Madeira cast up a silent plea for protection to the patron saint of single women and only avoided crossing herself by clenching both fists.
*
Wide-eyed in the darkness, Grace heard the small station wagon revving unevenly as it moved up and down its delivery route, the teenage girl chucking papers from the back as her father zigzagged from house to house. Grace jolted up in bed, but waited until she heard the thunk of the Sunday paper hitting the stoop before pushing back the covers and slipping her robe around her shoulders. She tucked her feet into shearling slippers, her heart pounding both in anticipation of the article and in fear of waking up Lola or DoDo. This she needed to see alone.
She stealthed her way down the stairs in the darkness, moving far left to avoid the creaking board on stair four and to the far right on stair twelve for the same reason. Thank God her high school curfew-breaking days had taught her how to successfully navigate the noise traps in DoDo’s house to avoid getting busted.
At the bottom of the stairs white, bright moonlight reached in through the leaded glass panels in the door like the arms of a ghost. She cringed as the deadbolt snicked back, pausing to peer up the stairwell and listen for movement. Nothing. Her breath released, cold night air making her shiver. Or maybe it was nerves. Turning back to her task, she pulled the door open only far enough to allow her to squat down and ease the thick, rolled paper over the threshold. Carefully relocking the door, she retraced her steps, breathing shallowly until she was in her room, paper in hand, with the door locked behind her. She shed her robe and climbed back into bed.
Holding a penlight in her mouth for illumination, she turned the
pages cautiously so they wouldn’t crackle. She scanned headlines as she went and had moved through three sections with no luck before she finally saw it.
Holy fuck.
Her stomach contracted. She gasped and the penlight fell from her mouth, rolling across the covers, tossing its meager beam like a drunken searchlight as it toppled. She snatched it up and lit the page once more, her eyes fixed on the photograph next to the headline.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. She didn’t even need to read the words. That photograph said it all—she and Maddee were connected, now and forevermore, like it or not.
And she didn’t like it.
Not at all.
Her gaze traced the strong lines of Madeira’s jaw, the look of sheer joy on her own face as Maddee hugged her. Hugged her as if she truly mattered.
A pitiful sigh escaped Grace’s lips before she could squelch it, and she frowned at the absurdity. Enough of that. She didn’t have time to brood over something that could never be. She refocused on her most immediate problem, glancing at the green numbers on her alarm clock to calculate how much planning time she had before the household arose. She had to figure out how to get this blatant display of raw emotion past her meddlesome sister and perceptive abuelita. They’d never let up on her if they saw this picture, and she couldn’t bear the thought of the full-court press matchmaking that would follow. The whole thing creaked with tremendous burden.
Buckling under the weight of it, she rolled to the side and pulled open her nightstand drawer, extracting the half-pound bag of plain M&M’s she kept there as an emergency stress ration. Clicking off her penlight, she sat in the dark popping the candy-coated medicinal yumminess and running the problem through her mind like a badly edited film.
Facts were facts: her feelings showed in that photograph. Lola and DoDo would catch it for sure. She’d have to be firm with them, letting them know that, despite how it might look, she had no interest in Maddee Pacias. Well…shit.
That wasn’t exactly true, and Grace didn’t want to outright lie. She wished she could deny her feelings to the bitter end, but the falsehood would eat at her insides. Why’d she have to care so damn much about being honest these days? This was a self-preservation issue, after all. Being slightly left of honest was her only reasonable option. Then again, like DoDo said, she sucked at lying, so what good would it do? The M&M handfuls grew larger in direct correlation to her burgeoning worry.
One part of her yearned to call Madeira and ask how she planned to handle the repercussions…then Grace remembered who she was dealing with. Knowing Madeira, she wasn’t giving it a second thought. Too many women, too little time, after all. No sense wasting a minute of her time worrying about a woman she didn’t even want. Like Madeira had said, the women she usually dated didn’t care if she was considered “taken” or not. On the contrary, this perception of unattainability would probably bump Madeira’s sex life into overdrive, all those shameless whore-cats vying for her attention.
Grace’s shoulders dropped, and her face felt mulish.
Wait a minute—was she pouting? She snatched up the small hand mirror she’d left lying on the nightstand and scrutinized her reflection in the darkness. Good Lord, she was pouting. Over a love ’em and leave ’em woman, of all things. A woman in whom she herself claimed to have not a whit of interest.
Damn. She wasn’t a good liar, was she?
Thoroughly disgusted, she chucked the mirror aside. You’d have thought a smart woman like herself would learn from her mistakes.
Tipping back her head, Grace poured the remaining half-cup of M&M’s in her mouth, crunching the bounty like a squirrel with over-packed cheeks and an eating disorder. Despite her attempts to ignore her inner voice, it kept whispering the truth to her, challenging her to deny it. She liked Madeira. Genuinely. A lot. Madeira Pacias was a woman Grace could fall for. She was also a woman Grace desperately should not fall for if she wanted to see her life plans come to fruition.
And she did.
Lust or no lust, Grace was determined to create a future completely removed from her past, which meant Madeira was out. Sorry, Charlie. Draped with sadness and chocolate bloat, Grace glanced down at her crossed legs, bare beneath the Scooby-Doo boxer shorts she used for pajamas. Her gaze froze for a moment on the heart tattoo blighting the smooth skin of her inner thigh; she traced its outline with her pinky. UNBREAKABLE, it read, bold and brash.
She pondered the relative truth of that statement in relation to her current situation, and a picture of Madeira—flirty, charming, temporary Madeira—floated to the forefront of Grace’s mind. With a strange heaviness in her chest, she covered the tattoo with her palm and bit her lip. Maybe not so unbreakable after all. Not where this bad girl was concerned.
I won’t get hurt again.
Flouncing back against her pillows, Grace made a silent vow to herself that Madeira would never find out how Grace truly felt about her. What was the point? It would just scare Maddee off, and when she ran, she’d take Grace’s hard-won pride and self-respect with her.
No.
Better that Maddee never knew.
Grace knew she could fool her, though, and resisting her once Maddee had the emotional upper hand would be next to impossible. The only bright side was, now that she had her bear and the newspaper fiasco was finished, she never had to see her again.
Thank God for small favors.
Chapter Seven
Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho.
From saying to doing is a long way.
“Maddee! I mean, Madeira!” Gracie gaped out the front door of her house at her like Madeira was there to rob her. Despite Gracie’s horrified expression, she looked steal-your-breath adorable in old jeans, ripped seam-to-seam at the knees, and a faded-to-gray black CU Buffs sweatshirt that should have been put out of its misery years ago. The yellow logo was peeling, and a large, white bleach spot stood out like a squashed jellyfish near the frayed hem.
Gracie’s unbrushed hair had been pulled into a messy ponytail, more strands escaping the band than being held by it. Not a single sweep of makeup touched her skin, but lucky for Gracie, she didn’t need it.
“Hey, Gracie.” God, it was good to see her.
Gracie’s hand flew to her hair. Madeira wondered if she had any idea how telling the gesture was but figured Gracie didn’t even realize she’d done it. Madeira swallowed slowly, so incredibly drawn to this woman, in a way she’d never experienced before. And this unfroofy, weekend Gracie was the sexiest version yet.
“W-what are you doing here?”
Madeira smiled at Gracie’s unintentional lack of manners. She couldn’t blame her. Madeira probably should’ve called instead of just showing up, but the impulse to see Gracie had overpowered her. One minute, she’d been driving aimlessly. The next minute her truck found its way to Gracie’s house and parked. Kismet. Who was Madeira to argue?
Still, she needed an excuse for why she’d come or Gracie might get the wrong idea. Stiving for casual, Madeira cleared her throat and went for light. “What did you think? We were never going to see each other again?”
“Frankly, yes. That was the grand plan.”
A breeze tickled the loose hair against Gracie’s cheek, and she reached up to absentmindedly brush it away. Madeira’s stomach contracted painfully. Since when had she become attuned to Gracie’s—or any woman’s—every motion? When Madeira was around Gracie, she felt…aware.
Of her movements.
Of her ever-changing expressions.
Of her breaths.
Of her reactions, thoughts, desires.
Of their closeness…and their distance.
This level of awareness actually ached.
“You do remember that big talk we had at the newspaper offices, right?” Despite Gracie’s words, Madeira noticed high color in her cheeks and a bright excitement in her eyes. A glimmer of hope?
“Sure. Of course.” She stared down at her feet for a minute, head bobbing in a nod even th
ough she didn’t agree that their big talk had to be so damned iron-clad. How could Madeira be so aware, so thrown into a whirlwind by Gracie when she was so resistant to Madeira? “But I…I, well, the thing is”—think, Madeira—“I just have a question I hope you can answer.” Good one.
“Oh.” That knocked Gracie off balance. “Well…okay, I’ll try.” She crossed her arms. “What is it?”
Not so good one. Madeira hadn’t thought beyond the excuse. She shifted and racked her brain for a question that would sound time-sensitive or important enough to have brought her all the way across town on a Sunday afternoon without a proper invitation. Nothing inspired came to mind, so she cleared her throat and blurted the first thing that popped into her brain. “Why is the bear named Ms. Right? I-I always wondered what would make a woman name a bear…that.”
Gracie cocked her head to the side, her expression incredulous and amused. “You drove all the way over here to ask about my bear?”
Inside, Madeira cringed, but she struggled to keep her expression impassive. Lame was too mild a word to describe her impromptu question. So much for digging herself out. She shrugged, and dug in further. What did she have to lose? “Well, the bear sat on my dresser for a year. She and I have a history. Is it so unbelievable that I’d want to know her background?”
“Ah…” Gracie’s bare, full lips quivered up into a smile, which soon developed into a cautious laugh. She shrugged. “Yes. Wholeheartedly unbelievable.”
Madeira sniffed. Thought she knew everything, did Gracie? Madeira could be sensitive, interested in bears and so forth. The possibility existed. “Nevertheless, I’d like to know.”
“Apparently.” Gracie’s expression was wry. Smug, even. “And enough to make you drive half an hour to get the answer, no less. Ever heard of a telephone? It would’ve saved you the trip.”
“Are you saying you wish I hadn’t come?” A distinct lack of control feeling seized Madeira. She’d never been in the position where she wanted a woman more than the woman wanted her, but life had thrust her off in an unknown direction with the enigmatic Gracie. It sucked. Gracie was definitely driving the bus on this weird journey, and she didn’t even want Madeira on it. The sense of rejection, of being discounted, wasn’t fun, and Madeira wondered, with a stab of guilt, how many times she’d been the cause of such feelings in others. Unintentionally, perhaps, but what did that matter? She toyed with the idea of apologizing to all the women she might have hurt or disappointed in the past, but quickly realized the list loomed too long, the task too daunting.