He ran his hand down my neck. “The Carlonis can’t find out we’re alive. I shamed Donna Maria by running from her granddaughter. She’ll want me dead and pay good money for someone to do the job. But these are the American mafia. They watch too many movies. The Italians I think I can make peace with. Once that’s done, I’m going to marry you.”
“Can’t be a big church wedding.” I bent my elbow until the gun pointed at nothing but the sky. “Not without family.”
“No. Maybe.” He ran his hand up my arm and over my body until he found my chin. I felt safe and loved when he looked at me like that, eyes shadowed by the sun but still intense enough to compete with its blaze. “I want something so badly, and I’m afraid to even say it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to tempt God.”
“Say it.” I felt more than heard the breath he took. “God can’t hear you out here.”
His glance toward the heavens was almost imperceptible. “I want to go home. I want to take you into my family. To make you a part of… we’ve always looked for a new life. Maybe that was the mistake. Maybe we need to make the best of the old life.”
“How? I don’t even know how.”
He leaned forward, and I leaned into him until I felt his stubble on my lips. “Me neither,” he said. “But come home with me and try. Come home with me.”
I wondered, not for the first time, when it had happened. When I’d fallen in love. When I’d committed myself so irrevocably. When the thought of a world without him hadn’t seemed grey and flat.
It wasn’t the sex. It wasn’t the way he fucked me as if he wanted to peel my skin off and enter my soul. It wasn’t the way his unreasonable demands made me wet rather than angry. It wasn’t the violence, or the knowledge that he would do anything he had to in order to get what he wanted. He’d murder, steal, hurt himself. Hurt me.
Nor was it the way he took on responsibility for my brother as if Jonathan was his own. Daniel would have asked me what I wanted to do then explained why he was too busy to be with me for it. Or we’d talk about what to tell the media. But my problems would be inconveniences, puzzles to be solved. He wouldn’t own them. Antonio owned me, meaning my body, my soul, and my family. I didn’t know how to own him with the same surety. I didn’t know how to want things for us.
But he was teaching me how to be his. When we’d arrived in Tijuana, I’d been under the influence of such momentum, I couldn’t imagine going in reverse, not even for my family, not even to see Jonathan one last time. Antonio had slowed me down, pushing against the inertia of movement from here, to there, to the goal that blinded me. Thank God for him, in that moment and every moment since. Thank God for his level head and his perspective.
Except now, behind a filthy hostel as we waited for our fake passports.
Now he seemed desperate as he whispered, “Come home with me. Be a part of me.”
I could have just said yes, but there was no lying between us, not even to make the other happy for a second’s breath. “They’ll never accept me.”
He nodded and stepped back, his hand dropping off me. His white shirt and linen pants clung to one side of his body when the desert breeze picked up, and they fell in a graceful drape when it died.
“You have one more bottle, and two bullets,” he said. “You’re a little to the left, so when you aim, you have to compensate.”
I aimed carefully, holding the gun at the sharpest point of the triangle of my arms. Squeezed. I had no idea how far off I was, but the bottle was unimpressed.
“Little right,” he said, putting his fingers together.
I tried again. Another fail. I shrugged.
“Missing bothers you,” Antonio said, taking the gun. “I see it in your face.”
“It’s not a big deal. I have you.”
“You do. And if you never destroy another bottle, you’re still perfect.” His eyes grazed my body, running over it in a zigzag, as if imprinting the details into his mind. I felt brazen and desired, the center of a vital universe.