Page 12 of Texas Kissing

There.My little red Toyota, just about the dullest, least conspicuous car you can buy. Exactly what you want, when you’re trying to keep a low profile. And exactly the safe place I needed, right now. I needed to calm the fuck down, if I didn’t want all the memories to start welling up.

I slumped into the driver’s seat but didn’t start the engine. I sat there with my face in my hands, the hot tears filling my eyes.How could I have been so stupid?

I’d nearly kissed him. When he’d gathered me up into his arms, it had been like every teenage dream I’d ever had. A big strong man, ready to save me from whatever the world threw at me. It had felt sogood.

Except no one can save me. There’s no escape fromthe sort of prison I’m in and, if I got involved with him, I could get him killed. Just like—

No.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight, willing it not to happen. But the memories were already stirring, monsters awakening from their sleep.

Two Years Earlier

Other kids drew their mom and dad as stick figures with sunburst hair and big, happy smiles. My teachers used to ask me why mine were different each time I drew them: sometimes princesses and sometimes astronauts and sometimes with useful tentacles. I explained that I didn’t know what my mom and dad looked like because they’d gone to the angels when I was just a baby.

So they told me I should draw my Uncle Erico, instead. The man who’d raised me since they died.

You think you know where this story is going, but you don’t. Uncle Erico never touched me. His was a different sort of evil.

I understood from an early age that my family was Italian-American. But I didn’t understand, at first, the things people said about us. I heard the wordDonand didn’t know what it meant. I heardfamilyused a lot, and couldn’t comprehend why that would be a bad thing. Didn’t everyone have a family?

I especially didn’t understand the way people sometimes shied away, when they saw us coming, or the way mothers wouldn’t let other children play with me. I didn’t understand why our surname—Fiorentini—was spoken with such fear. I didn’t understand what they could possibly be scared of, because we seemed so normal.

There was Uncle Erico, who acted as my dad but who didn’t really seem like one of the caring dads I saw on TV. He never seemed to have time to drop me off at music lessons or pick me up after swimming. But he did have an endless supply of friends, some of them distantly related, who scurried to do his every bidding. And I didn’t have a mom, but my uncle did have a string of ladies who lived with us for a while. They were always blonde, with big, complicated hairstyles that needed a lot of preparation, and they thought I was cute and did my nails until Uncle Erico shouted that hedidn’t want Tessa growing up like you.

Oh—Tessa. That’s my real name.

I always wished the ladies would hang around because then maybe one of them would sort of morph into a mom who would teach me to bake and shop for prom dresses with me and do all that mom stuff. But inevitably, after a few months, the arguments would get louder and louder and then there’d be the sound of something shattering, suitcases would be hurled out of the front door and a tearful, cursing woman would stagger down the driveway to a cab.

I always used to side with Uncle Erico, of course. I mean, he was family and everyone was always telling me how important that was. He was the only family I had, and he’d kindly taken me in after the car crash that killed mom and dad. And he gave me so much—a nice room and a fancy house in New York with its own pool, and a cook who made all our meals. I owed him.

I heard plenty, growing up in that house. Peopleget used to kids—they forget they’re there and say things they shouldn’t. I heard about people who needed to be taught a lesson or take a holiday or simply disappear. I knew the real meaning of all those phrases by the time I was eight.

I heard the wordloyaltya lot, too. Especially when I started to leave the house by myself. But I didn’t really understand until, when I was sixteen, a female FBI agent befriended me in Starbucks. I didn’t know she was FBI, of course. I thought she was just a fellow artist, who’d seen my half-assed doodles in my sketchbook and thought they were cool. I only found out the fourth time we met, when she asked me if I had any idea what Uncle Erico did.

I went home that night and sought my uncle out in his study. He was practicing his golf putts, knocking balls into a can. When I told him about the woman—Lisa—he sat down and laid the putter across his lap, gripping it with both hands. He isn’t an especially tall man or especially wide but, somehow, facing up to him in that room, watching him grip that golf putter harder and harder, he seemed seventeen stories high.

When I’d finished, he threw down the putter and told me I’d done the right thing in telling him. I nodded, staring at the putter. He’d bent it so hard across his knee that it was twisted out of shape. I think that was the first time I was truly afraid of him.

Then he told me I would never leave the house alone again. And I never did. One of his most trusted men, a guy named Antonio—became largely responsible for me. He’d either drive me places or organize someone else to do it. He knew where I was at every second of every day. The other kids at the exclusive private school I attended thought I’d beengiven a bodyguard. The truth was, he was my jailer. I was too valuable, too dangerous for my uncle to ever let me go.

Antonio was about ten years older than me with blond hair and a sour face that only got sourer as the years passed. He resented the fact he had to “nursemaid the brat,” as he put it when he thought I couldn’t hear. I knew he’d hurt people. When he wasn’t watching me, he’d sometimes go off on an errand for my uncle and return with a satisfied smile, as if that was the sort of work he really enjoyed. Sometimes, there’d be tiny flecks of blood on his shirt collar, almost invisible unless you were looking for them.

When I turned eighteen, my plans of going to Caltech were scorned. I was told I’d go to New York State, dropped off each morning outside the doors and collected again outside the same doors when my last class finished. Study dates, revision meets—all fine, as long as I could persuade people to come to my house. I rarely could, so I studied alone.

By the time I was in my junior year, my eyes had fully opened. I saw that I was trapped in a gilded cage. I saw how it was going to be, how my uncle was lining up good, clean suitors for me, men who weren’t actually related but might as well have been—men who worked for him, men he could trust. The honors degree in computer science I was working so hard for would be irrelevant—a curiosity, just like my hobby of sketching. I’d be a trophy wife.

The first time I realized it, I was physically sick. I knew I had to escape.

I had a best friend, Annette, who I’d known ever since I was a kid. A pretty girl with long, dark frizzyhair and an infectious smile. We’d gone to school together and then, when I’d been forced to attend New York State, she’d applied there as well, claiming it just happened to be the best choice for her, too. She was too close to the family for Uncle Erico to suspect anything.

So we plotted.

I had money saved—Uncle Erico gave me a generous allowance and I didn’t see the point in spending money on fancy clothes when I wasn’t going to be allowed to go to parties anyway. My only indulgence was coding and hacking, chatting away to hackers in Beirut and London and LA long into the night. And that’s cheap, as hobbies go.

Annette had bought a car for me—an old, clapped-out thing most scrap yards would reject, but it would get me into the next state. I’d be dropped off at her house by Antonio, supposedly for an evening of giggling about boys.

We’d sneak out through the window above the garage, pick up the car from where she’d parked it down the street and I’d be gone. I’d been stashing clothes and possessions for months, smuggling a skirt or a top to college in my backpack each day and giving it to her to pack for me. We thought we were so fucking clever.