by A. L. Woods
“I’ve never given it much thought before.” My voice came out meek. We had seldom gone out as a family when my father was alive, and even on my own, I had never indulged in anything of that ilk. Breakfast foods beyond eggs and bacon always seemed too sweet and frivolous, especially when you lived life like you could barely taste any food. When food was an inconvenient necessity, you rarely spent time on sustenance that would make a glutton palpitate.
Still, I didn’t like the gobsmacked expression Sean sported. He looked like I had reeled my fist back and punched him square in the jaw. His dark eyes rounded, mouth popping open, thick brows shooting north.
He was a man who had a hundred questions, and instead of throwing them all at me like I knew he was dying to do, he tossed me another one of those infamous boyish smiles that sent my heart aflutter and had my thighs clenching together.
“Have breakfast with me, Raquel.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Raquel and I were tucked into a booth against a window near the middle of the quiet diner. Save for a few other patrons, the place was as dead as a funeral home at midnight. She clutched the white mug that housed her coffee like it was her only saving grace, her profile turned toward the window, the soft strands of her hair curling around her chin, lips strained with concentration.
“Do you know what you want to eat?” I asked, eyeballing her from over the two-page menu.
She regarded me from the corner of her eye, her head shake just barely perceptible. While we had left the car on even ground, by the time we were seated, she’d become reticent once more.
“I’m probably good with just the coffee,” she said.
“I asked you out for breakfast, Hemingway—not coffee. Do you want something else?”
Her cheeks flushed, a satisfied smile curling the corners of my mouth at her response. An idea struck me, inspired by her obstinance.
Straightening in my seat, I broke eye contact with her to flash a thumbs-up at our waitress, Rhonda, who was leaning against the bar top of the counter, gossiping with an older woman. Both sported the signature sugarplum pink carhop uniform and off-white apron that were speckled with unidentifiable stains.
Rhonda’s once-white Keds squeaked against the checkered floors as she skittered over to us. Fishing her notepad and pen from her apron pocket, she held the pen flush against the notepad ready to collect our order.
“What’s it gonna be, Seany?” she wheezed, her lungs screaming at her to lay off the Camels.
For theatrical purposes, my eyes skimmed over the menu once more, Raquel’s chin tipping toward me with silent curiosity at what I would order. I made a sound of contentment that aroused Raquel’s attention, her eyes growing wary, like she knew what I was going to say before I said it.
Four Corners was practically known in the county for their breakfast fare, and if she wouldn’t specify what she wanted, I’d take the decision-making work out of it.
“We’ll take everything on the breakfast menu.” I punctuated the sentiment by flipping the menu closed.
Rhonda’s head jerked back, as if she hadn’t heard me correctly.
“Are you insane?” Raquel hissed at me on both her and Rhonda’s behalf, glancing at the closed menu in front of her. “There’s easily a dozen different items on that menu.”
“Cool,” I said with a noncommittal shrug, reaching for the untouched vinyl laminated menu in front of her and handing both hers and mine to Rhonda. “We’ll be here for a while, then.”
“Uh,” Rhonda hedged. “Do you…want it all at once?”
“Let’s prioritize with the waffles, French toast and pancakes, Ronnie. Eggs can be cooked any way, and hold the toast. We’re probably good on the carbs.”
“O-okay,” Rhonda stammered in response, nodding her head and turning on the soles of her sneakers, retreating to the kitchen.
“You’re out of your mind,” Raquel hissed.
She didn’t know the fucking half of it.
I sent a salacious smirk in her direction. “Next time when I ask you what you want to eat, give me an answer.”
“With that kind of attitude, there won’t be a next time, Slim.” she spat, narrowing her rapier-like eyes at me.
I pretended to be affronted, clutching the center of my chest like she had just stabbed me before a snicker escaped me that broke her fleeting frosty facade, the blush I liked so much hitting her cheeks. She settled against the banquette, lower teeth grazing against her upper lip like she wanted to say something, but was doubting herself.
“How was your day?” I asked, fiddling with the packets of sugar I wouldn’t use.
She looked up at me under her long lashes, curiosity setting her golden irises a glow at my ice breaker. I didn’t know why that was the question I chose to lead with, or what kind of response I was expecting in return. Her shrug was short, barely touching the midpoint of her neck.
“Before or after you showed up?” she quipped, though I heard the hint of humor in her sarcasm. “It was okay.” She paused, as if she wanted to say more but changed her mind, “how was yours?”
“Well,” I began, tapping my fingers against the blemished wood of the diner table, training my stare on her. “I spent the majority of my day working up the courage to go talk to this woman I like. She hasn’t really been interested in giving me the time of day.”
“Why’s that?” she asked, her voice steady, head lolling to the right.
“I got her to confirm she liked me a few days ago, but,” his tongue edged his lip, “I’ve got a theory that she might like me even more than she’s willing to let on.”
“What gives you that impression?” Nerves laced the question, the tremble evident.
I folded my hands together, bracing myself against the wave of heat radiating off her body, beckoning me toward her like the opposite end of a magnet. “When I kiss her, it feels like she’s coming alive for the first time.” I watched as her lips parted and her eyes grew hooded. “And when I touch her, she moves like she’s never been touched that way before.”
Her lids dropped for a moment, as she appeared to contemplate her next move.
With her eyes still shut, she spoke with a new set of conviction. “Does that really mean she likes you, though? Or does that mean she just likes the way you make her body feel?”
I reached for her hand, and her eyes shot open at the contact, her eyes tracking my moving thumb against the span of her slim knuckles.
“Aren’t they one and the same, Raquel?”
She shook her head, shrugging her shoulders again. “I don’t know,” she confessed, “I’ve never really done this before.”
My left brow cocked upward, a sigh leaving her at my reaction. “Done what?”
“Dated outside of my circle.” She bit her lower lip, another labored breath leaving her. “I’ve had one boyfriend in my life. And before yesterday,” she paused to look at the ceiling tiles, “I had only been with one other guy…that way.”
My head snapped back at her confession, awe setting off a buzz in my head. How had that happened? Why? I dragged an open palm over my face, suddenly feeling stupid for all the hypothetical theories I had spent time creating in my mind when she left with those guys. I swallowed the knot in my throat, my hand still on hers.
I didn’t want to rehash it, but the question left me before I knew what I was really doing. “So then, when you left with those guys…”
“One of them was my ex boyfriend, yes,” she confirmed, darting me a pointed look. “But we’re not together that way anymore.”
“But you still hang out?” I wasn’t sure if it was relief that flanked me at the knowledge I wasn’t competing with anyone else, or confusion as to why he wasn’t out of the picture entirely, either.
“It’s complicated.” One slender shoulder rose and fell as her eyes searched my face.
“Want to try to uncomplicate it for me?” I kept my voice gentle. Her unease had her rubbing her forehead with her free hand. As the silence st
retched on, I thought she was going to refuse my request, but then her cheeks puffed with another long exhale, her shoulders dropping an inch.
“I grew up in a really rough part of South Boston that hasn’t been gentrified yet. Cash was my neighbor and one of the few people not absolutely petrified of my dad,” she explained with a laugh that sounded pained, a ghost of wistfulness passing over her. “Reliable friends are surprisingly hard to come by when your dad is a known convict with a penchant for assault. So even though our relationship didn’t work, Cash has always been around in some capacity when I’ve needed him.”
I didn’t like the way “some capacity” sounded any more than the realization that some of this information wasn’t new to me, but I kept my face relaxed, refusing to give anything away.
Raquel tilted her head slightly toward the window, giving me her profile once more. “It was in my junior year of high school when Cash started coming around. He’s a couple of years older than me, so it was strange when he started waiting for me out front of my school. I was so confused by his sudden interest in me, but no matter how many threats my dad sent in his direction, he just kept showing up.” She blinked, as if she was watching a movie of her life play in the reflection of the window. “I spent my formative years preferring the solace of books and my younger sister Holly Jane’s company.”
My stomach sank, the acidity of my own coffee roiling at her mention of her sister.
“My sister and I were close,” Raquel continued, “but I had always taken on a maternal role with her. Which meant a lot of the time, I felt invisible…and with Cash, suddenly I felt noticed. My needs and wants were important for the first time. I felt a kind of warmth enveloping me that I had never experienced before.” She turned her head to glance at me, her eyes wide. “Cash made me feel like I mattered.”
A shiver shuddered through her before she continued speaking. “My father was in and out of Walpole a lot. He struggled to hold down a job after he was forced to retire from his boxing career a few years after I was born. Too many punches to the head; he was a liability.” She swallowed visibly. “My parents had gotten pregnant really young. My dad was an Irish expat who had been raised in a traditional Catholic family, so the right thing to do was to marry my ma, who had about as much interest in raising a family as most people do in paying their taxes.”
My jaw rocked together, hating that every word she said was laced with something poignant that made my insides ache.
“When you spend most of your life feeling like you don’t matter, and someone walks into your life and makes you feel…worthy…” she shook her head “…it was life-changing.” She licked her lips, wilting in her seat. “But it came at a cost.”
That vacancy from earlier was back in her expression. “As Cash and I got closer, my sister and I drifted further apart. My parents used to argue until dawn most nights, and Holly Jane would come and sleep with me, but when Cash and I started dating, she stopped.”
She squinted, her face tightening, likely fighting off the demons I knew were plaguing her. “I never questioned it, y’know?” She rolled her lips together. “I just figured this was normal. She was growing up, and I was focused on trying to study for the SATs, that it was easy for me to slip into this alternate universe where all that mattered was Cash and me, and that meant I ignored a lot of the signs that were right in front of me.”
“Like what?”
She lifted her eyes to me. “My sister was…” She paused before trying again. “She was getting mixed up with the wrong people. People she didn’t have any business being around. I was so angry for spending so many years of my life not feeling important that I didn’t care about anything once I got to college. I wanted to focus on myself, I didn’t want to worry about what kind of trouble my kid sister was getting into. That was for my ma and dad. I thought if I pulled back, that they would feel obligated to parent their child.” She looked at me, eyes haunted by what I knew was coming next. “Financially, things were always hard for my parents, and about ten years ago in a moment of pure desperation and stupidity, my father attempted to rob an armored truck in Revere…he was shot to death.” She swiped a quick hand under her eye, blinking hard.
A cold sweat broke out across my chest that I was grateful she couldn’t see. It was one thing to know what she was going to say and an entirely different thing to hear her say it. The headline of the first article came to life in my mind: “Attempted Robbery Thwarted in Revere.”
I knew he had died, but it was an entirely different thing to hear her say it.
Rhonda appeared with a plate at that moment and Raquel withdrew her hand, a coldness settling between us. Steam rose from the hot plate of Belgian waffles in front of us.
I wasn’t hungry anymore.
“The only thing I kept thinking about after he died was how angry I was that he had left us with her.” The last word was punctuated by venom toward her mother. “People don’t really care when a convict dies. They don’t bring you a tuna casserole or send you condolences. I spent that summer at Cash’s nan’s house, sneaking in and out and trying to make myself scarce until I got to move into my dorm.” She blinked, pulling herself out of her own mental detachment. “Cash and I had been together for a while by the time I started my freshman year at BU, but I had held out on sleeping with him. I didn’t want to be another notch on his belt until I was certain.”
My insides bristled at the idea that he had been the first man to touch her. It was stupid and primitive, but even with the knowledge that I was the only other man she had been with since, I hated that she had been with him in any capacity at all. That fucker wasn’t deserving of her. He didn’t even have the courtesy to fucking meet her at the bar door, even if he was barred from entering. He sent in that sociopath and his shadow to retrieve her like she was a piece of property. The memory had me gritting my teeth.
Raquel picked up her fork, using the flattened edge to cut off a corner of the waffle. She speared the waffle but didn’t put it in her mouth. “Holly Jane called me the day I was set to lose my virginity. She said she needed to talk and wanted to come see me.” She set the fork down, resting it against the plate. “And I, of course, told her no. I’d spent all morning cleaning up my dorm room. Clean sheets, a scented candle, a box of condoms. The plan was foolproof.”
Her eyes lidded, and I tracked the slow rise and fall of her chest, her breaths soft and shallow. “So, there I was, eighteen years old, the first one in my family to go to college, about to lose my virginity to my older boyfriend, and I’m completely oblivious—no, I’m ignorant to the fact that there is a crisis going on in my sister’s life.” She shook her head, a strained laugh that lacked any warmth leaving her. “About three hours later, Cash and I were in bed, half asleep, when the room was filled with bright red and blue lights pouring in from the window.
“Then someone knocked on the door. I was immobile.” She looked at me, tears settling in the corners of her eyes, her bottom lip trembled. “I couldn’t even get up. It was like I knew what they were going to tell me was going to change everything.” She squeezed her eyes together, the tears that had been puddling now coasting down her cheeks. My hand itched to wipe them away, but I remained in my seat and instead slid my hand across the table.
“Hey,” I said softly. She sniffled, her lids flipping open, her irises amber from her tears. She glanced at my outstretched hand and shook her head, as though she felt undeserving of human contact.
She was depriving herself of the one thing I realized she wanted more than anything.
Love.
“Give me your hand,” I demanded. Our eyes warred with each other, but she broke first. My hand crushed around hers, stilling the rattle in her apprehensive touch.
“Fuck,” she gasped, leaning forward against the table, resting her elbow on the edge, shielding her eyes from me with her other hand. I squeezed her palm tightly. I knew what came next in her story, but I wanted to give her the opportunity to collect herself.
She appeared to be fighting for her next breath.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “If you can’t finish the story, you don’t have to.”
“I want to.” She exhaled audibly and clarified, “I need to. If you and I stand any chance in hell of making whatever this is between us work, you need to understand what kind of person I am. What I did. Who my family is.” She swiped under her eyes with her free hand. “Because we’re not good people, Sean.”
My chest tightened with resistance at her observation. “I don’t think that’s true, Raquel.”
“It is, though.” She crushed her lips together, torment swimming in her eyes. “Ten years ago today, they couldn’t find my mother to tell her that her daughter had rolled her car on the Mass Pike. My mother was on a bender with our landlord at O’Malley’s, so they had to tell me because I was the only other immediate family member they could find.” She brushed the knuckles of her free hand under her eyes. “I had to confront that my sister was dead, and she was dead because of me.”
“No,” I objected, catching the jolt of dismay that flickered in her face as she met my eyes. “I’m so sorry about what happened to her, but you’re not responsible.”
Raquel flinched. “How can you say that? Did you even listen to what I said?”
“Every last word, Hemingway. That doesn’t change what I see.”
“It’s my fault that I wasn’t there for her,” she insisted. “If I had been, I wouldn’t have had to learn she was almost three months pregnant through an autopsy report.”
I was assailed by that detail, which hadn’t been reported. Somehow, that had been left out, probably for privacy reasons. Was that why Raquel felt responsible for what had happened to Holly Jane?
Raquel looked so small in that banquette, her eyes somber and distant as they locked with mine. Shame shattered the vitreous pane of her hardened exterior that had struggled to be vulnerable and real. What she projected to the world was a far cry from who and what she really was on the inside.