Page 204 of Five Brothers
Maybe it’s something else.
But I can’t sleep in his bed tonight.
“Aracely,” I call out over my shoulder. “Would you take me home?”
I leave, catching up to her. Both of us jump into her car, and I lock my door because I don’t trust myself if he tries to pry me back.
Trace was right. I need him to be gentle.
We take off, the radio playing music, and I almost tell her to stop a hundred times. He’s prideful. He won’t come for me. He would rather suffer for twenty years than admit he needs me with him. He won’t come to St. Carmen.
He would never cross the tracks for a woman.
Soon, we’re out of the Bay and climbing up into my neighborhood, the rain a steady but light fall.
Aracely hasn’t said anything.
I finally speak up. “You’re in love … with Army.” I look over at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
She holds the wheel with both hands, keeping her eyes trained out the front windshield. “You weren’t supposed to. He certainly doesn’t.”
“And you certainly don’t beat around the bush with me,” I muse. “So why have you with him? Why don’t you tell him?”
“I did,” she replies flatly. “When I was fifteen.”
Oh.
“He was nineteen at the time and laughed in my face. I told him again when I was eighteen and when I was twenty.”
“Didn’t you go out with Iron and Dallas during that time?”
She dated them both somewhere in there.
But she just plucks a cigarette out of her pack in the console. “Yeah, well … that was never about love. For them, either.”
I watch her, and I’m more and more curious about her as time goes on. She didn’t want to stay close to the family. She wanted to stay close to Army. Any way she could. Cleaning their house, working their restaurant, dating Iron and Dallas …
Maybe Army would find out he misses her if there came a time when she wasn’t around. She strikes me as the type who, unlike me, knows exactly what she wants to do with her life.
We pull onto my street, and she says, “I can do better anyway. Clay’s dad is single, right?”
I burst into a laugh. We swing up to my gate, and I see through the bars that the house is dark. Paisleigh and Mars are at my grandparents’, and if the gate is closed, my mom is still gone. “Five-five-eight-three-oh-two.” I tell Aracely the code.
She looks at me, lifting her eyebrows for a second like she didn’t expect me to tell her. All my friends have the code.
She punches in the numbers and waits for the gate to open before she speeds through. Winding around my driveway, she stops in front of my door.
I’m about to ask if she wants to come in and make margaritas, but she speaks before I do. “What was he like?” she asks, staring at the steering wheel. “Army?”
I drop my eyes. “Please don’t ask me that.”
But she argues, “You owe me. Was it good?”
I unfasten my seat belt, but I don’t leave.
“Is he big?” she whispers, sounding so small all of a sudden. “Where does he touch?”
My chest aches, not because of the questions, but her tone. She wants to know because she wants to know how he’d be with her.