“We’re ending this without blood.”
I heard the gunshots as I was about to get into the car. If I’d just gotten in and driven away, she would have been safer, but she was fast. She came out of the door with a wrecked kitchen drawer in her left hand and a smoking gun in her right. She put the gun in her waistband and yanked the handle off the drawer front. It clanked to the ground, and she looked at me expectantly.
“We should take the 210 to the 5. Should be clear at this hour. You can unlock the bracelets on the way.” She got into the backseat.
Zo stood by the driver’s door with his phone in his hand. “What should I do?”
I was supposed to know. I was supposed to control my woman. I was supposed to be the boss and bark orders that were obeyed. “Don’t call yet. Take us to Zia’s and have the crew meet us there.”
I’d have the whole car ride to think about how to do this as painlessly as possible.
twenty-one.
theresa
had a sense that something would happen, some idea that the culmination of my life was upon me. Anticipation overtook me on the way to San Pedro. My heart fluttered, and my skin felt the touch of my clothing. My fingertips felt kindled, as if I could touch inanimate objects and set them afire.
I looked at them to make sure they weren’t reddened from heat or crackling with the future, but I found that though they looked the same, my way of seeing them had changed. They were no longer just fingers but kinetic devices designed for a fate they leapt to fulfill. They wanted to quicken finally. They wanted to lock into the network of life and vitality they’d only gingerly caressed. Use me, they said. Take me. Make me an instrument for your heart’s purpose.
I was distant from the city around me. The lights of South Central, Compton, Torrance were a projected screen showing a fairy-tale reality of hell-on-earth that I was distanced from, yet intrinsically a part of. There was no middle ground, only the peaceful coexistence of extremes.
I was here. And not here. I was the breakneck pace between who I was and who I was to become. I couldn’t breathe from the force of my own velocity.
Even when we stopped in front of Zia’s, I was a vibrating buzz of connection and purpose, still in my seat, moving toward a new version of myself. Antonio opened the door for me, and I stepped out of the car as a new thing. An as-yet-unseen and undefined creature.
I felt, as I stepped into the parking lot, that the ground was fitted to me and carried me. When he held my hand, I gathered the power of all the stars in heaven and let him pull me to the earth.
Nothing could touch me. Not death, not hurt, not a fear that I was incomplete. Only he could get near me.
I was a wave form of potential, vibrating upward to suffocation and dissolution. I held his hand as tightly as I dared, because I didn’t want him to catch fire.
twenty-two.
antonio
rode in the front because I didn’t want to be next to her. I didn’t want to touch her or hear her. Not even her breathing. I didn’t want to catch her olive blossom scent. I wanted to be as far away from her as possible. Mostly because I wanted to fuck her and protect her, and she wanted neither.
Well, no. The fucking she wanted but refused. The protection, she needed.
I got angrier and angrier in that front seat. Up. Down. Sideways. I couldn’t move in any direction because of her. I couldn’t run, and I couldn’t attack. She was being impossible and unrealistic. A fool of a woman. Chaos. She was fucking chaos. From the minute she walked into my life with toilet paper on her shoe, she had been a wrecking ball.
I got out of the car intending to tell her to stop this. I needed to say it in a way she could hear. I needed to be more clear. I opened her door, thinking I’d get in and explain it in the backseat, maybe get my fingers inside her to make the point.