Darkest Fear

  When his shockingly warm hand moved over the cool, wet skin of my breast, I gasped. He drew me to him more firmly, kissed me more deeply, and I was borne away on a swelling wave of emotion and excitement and sensations I’d never imagined. His fingers kneaded and stroked and explored more urgently, and I felt like I was going to ignite. When his hand dropped to the front of my jeans, I made a sound and pushed my hips against him—and then I realized what I was doing and pulled back.

  He followed me, his hand moving expertly against the wet, heavy fabric, and most of me thought, yes, yes, and wanted him to keep going. But a small, insistent part of me was like, Whoa, Vivi, what the hell?

  With difficulty I stopped kissing him, almost delirious with desire and shock, and pulled my hands away from his chest.

  His hand stilled. His eyes, leaf green rimmed with gold, gazed at me steadily. He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling quickly.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  As he had done the first time we kissed, he dropped his forehead against mine, and we both panted into the rain-spattered darkness.

  “Take me home,” he said.

  It took a second for my brain to process the words. Did he mean he wanted a ride? ’Cause he was on his bike and it was raining?

  “Take me home to your bed. Or come home with me to mine.”

  Wide-eyed, I looked at him, saw the flush across his cheekbones, the intent on his face.

  “We haven’t even been on a date.” That was the first, and embarrassingly inane, thing that popped into my head and right out my mouth. But I had gone eighteen years without anyone trying to sleep with me, and today I’d had two offers. Both without the benefit of love or a relationship or anything, really.

  My words seemed to shock Rafael as much as his actions had shocked me.

  “Oh . . . right.”

  It was satisfying to see that he seemed to be having as much trouble putting words together as I was. I had done that to him.

  “I want you.” He seemed almost mystified by that, as if he had said it without meaning to or against his will. His hand on my back, he pulled me firmly against his hips, as if to prove his words.

  It was very dark here, but I could see the confusion on his face. He ran a hand through his wet hair, making it spiky, like a pelt. We were both sopping—the rain was still coming down.

  “I . . . can’t,” I said, wishing I could come up with something casual and knowing. “Not like this.”

  “In a bed.” Oh my gods, did he think it was just rain and mud and tree roots that were stopping me?

  “No. I mean with a stranger. Who doesn’t love me. Who I don’t love.”

  The muscles in his jaw tightened, highlighted by the dim streetlamp ten yards away.

  If he just turned and walked away, I would kill him. My teeth ached, and I remembered with horror that jaguars kill their prey by biting their skulls. I didn’t mean it! I thought quickly. Was that muscle in my neck clenching? No. No, I couldn’t feel it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last, while I was still scrambling to feel 100 percent human. “I didn’t mean to . . . hurt you this way. Again.”

  “I didn’t mean to ever let you.”

  We regarded each other warily.

  “What are we doing?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Hell if I know.” All of my energy was gone, my strength sapped by my run and then this emotional collision.

  “I want to kiss you, be with you, all the time.” He spoke fast. “Every day at work. When I’m home by myself. When I’m with other people. When I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing or who you’re doing it with . . .” His voice trailed off, and the desperation on his face took me aback.

  “But you don’t want to go out, like normal people?” I was just too confused.

  “No—it’s—”

  “Are you married?”

  “No. Of course not. It’s just . . . I don’t know. And you . . .” He sounded so angry.

  I shivered again, this time only with cold, and decided that this episode was over. “I’m going home now.”

  He drew in a shaky breath but didn’t try to stop me. I sloshed through the wet grass and leaves till I reached the path again, then headed toward the front of the park. Not once did I look back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  COCO’S VAN WAS IN THE yard when I got home. For once I wasn’t afraid when I got out of my car and went to the kitchen door. The mood I was in, I would have taken on any attacker with one paw tied behind my back. In the empty kitchen I grabbed some leftover Chinese food and nuked it, then ate as I walked upstairs. Coco’s light shone under her door, and I heard Charlotte’s soft laugh, so I didn’t knock. In my small bathroom I turned on the hot water, finished the Chinese food, then peeled out of my wet clothes. Then I sat on the shower floor, trying not to cry, while the hot water poured on my head and warmed me up.

  Why was I so drawn to Rafael? Besides his incredible good looks, patience, kindness, family loyalty, etc. Ugh. Again and again I thought of the portrait he’d done of me, the one he’d never hung up in Ro’s. I’d wanted to ask about it—if he didn’t want it, I did—but also didn’t want to let him know how much it had meant to me. There was someone in the world who saw me that way. I had looked that way to him, at least once. And was he a haguaro? The self-portrait as jaguar seemed so obvious, as did my overwhelming lust for him. Why couldn’t I tell? Did the fact that I couldn’t tell mean he wasn’t one? And if he was, could he tell that I was one too?

  Long after I turned pruney, the hot water started to cool, so I got out, wrapping my wet hair in one towel and drying off with another. It was infuriating to be this confused. In Sugar Beach I’d wanted things to stay nebulous, tenuous. I’d discouraged my parents from having real talks with me. I’d kept my nature hidden from Jennifer. I’d never shared the true depth of my dismay over being haguari with my parents. Every day I’d dodged questions, given half answers, lived in the future, when I’d had the naïve idea that being in Seattle would make me not myself.

  Now I anxiously wanted everything to be nailed down, definite. I wanted to know for sure whether Rafael was a haguaro or not. I wanted to decide once and for all if I was going home for Christmas, or at all. I had to decide what to tell Tia Juliana, because I was tired of living one more lie if I didn’t have to. Six months ago all I’d wanted was to be self-determining. Now that I was nothing but self-determining, I realized that it often sucked.

  In my room at the front of the house I rarely heard cars pulling into our backyard, but I felt the vibrations in the house when Matéo and the others came home. Quickly I turned off my reading light, pulled on my big T-shirt, and snuggled down in bed, pretending to be asleep. In reality I lay there, miserable and dry-eyed, for another three hours, reliving those incredible kisses with Rafael, my imagination running wild with everything else I had wanted to do to him. Looking up at my coral silk tester, I laughed wryly: I was eighteen years old, and someone had finally gotten to second base. Almost third base. Pushing my face deep in my pillow, I smothered my whimper. I’d really wanted him. Still wanted him. Really disliked him. Was really mad at him.

  My dreams were horrible and I woke up bizarrely late with a headache and in an awful mood. I pulled on some shorts, headed downstairs, and found Matéo leaning into the fridge.

  “You missed a great time at the river yesterday,” he said, taking out the orange juice.

  Automatically I fixed myself a bowl of coffee, then remembered I’d made croissants yesterday morning. There were still a few left and I grabbed one, then sat down at the kitchen table, trying to decide if I was ever going to go to work again.

  “The weather was great, until it started raining,” Matéo went on. “Did it rain here?”

  “Yep,” I said grimly.

  Straightening, Matéo looked over at me. “What are you eating?”

  “Croissant.” I waved it at him. “There’s more in the Tupperware thing on the coun
ter.”

  Matéo pounced on the container and popped it open. “Did you make these?”

  “Uh-huh. Listen, I need to talk to you.” Morosely I drank more coffee and buttered another hunk of croissant. Adding butter to a croissant was like adding more chocolate chips to chocolate-chip cookie dough: You could conceivably overdo it, but you could go pretty far before that happened.

  “What about?” he asked.

  Outside, the November midafternoon shadows were already growing long. I hadn’t slept this late in ages. The temperature had plummeted down to the midsixties, and between that and the autumn light, all I wanted to do was bake and make soup and sit in front of the fireplace in the front parlor, moping.

  “Does our fireplace work?” I asked Matéo, stalling.

  He nodded, chewing. “I need to clean it out so we can use it,” he said, his voice muffled. “Cold front coming through—it’s supposed to go down to like forty-five tonight.”

  “Ooh.” We grinned at each other, two southerners who were used to scraping coziness together at the slightest excuse. Then I just jumped in and told him about the killing in New York, the missing heart, her name, Margaret McCauley, and the fact that I had e-mailed the reporter to try to get more information.

  “Gods,” Matéo said.

  “Yeah. I want to know more about it. I tried a search on ‘missing hearts’ and all I got was a punk band in the eighties. The thing is, this person seems totally unrelated to us: Margaret McCauley. That’s not someone in your dad’s family, is it?”

  Matéo shook his head. “Not that I’ve heard of. And, I mean, we don’t even know if she was a haguara. Though it sounds really similar.”

  “I know. It could be some regular nutso killer,” I said. “Not someone targeting haguari.”

  “Okay. Maybe I’ll poke around on the Web, see if I can find anything else. Part of me hopes it’s just a nut job, so that we don’t feel so targeted, but part of me wants it to be a haguara killing, because then we could really be sure it isn’t just about us, our family. It would mean all haguari. Which . . . actually, never mind. Both scenarios suck. The whole thing sucks. Gods.” He shook his head, and we sat there for several minutes, each lost in our own dark thoughts. Finally, as if making himself reach for normalcy, he asked, “Got work today?”

  “I think so.” My shift started soon, and no one had called to say I didn’t need to come in. What had happened with Rafael last night was yet another layer of uncertainty and pain, on top of everything else. It was smoldering inside me and I had no idea what to do. Jennifer was at class. Aly was at work. I wouldn’t talk to Tia Juliana about this.

  “So, Aly said that she thought Alex might be bothering you.”

  Alex’s offer of being friends with benefits came back to me. My Gods, yesterday had been a weird, awful day.

  “Oh, no. He was just goofing around. We’re just friends.”

  “Okay, but you tell me if he gets ideas,” Matéo said. “He’s going to be my brother-in-law someday, and he’s not evil or anything, but I’ve never seen a bigger tail chaser.”

  “Oh, very nice!” I said, and threw my crumpled napkin at him.

  He held up both hands. “It’s true. I hate to say it, but it’s true.”

  “So all I am is a piece of tail?” After Rafael last night, that hit much too close, catching me off guard. Before I knew it, I had burst into tears.

  Eyebrows raised, Matéo looked horrified, and he glanced around as if hoping to see Aly or some other female come to my aid. Then he grabbed a paper towel and pushed it into my hands before awkwardly patting my back.

  “Vivi, I’m sorry—what did I say? You know you’re not just—I swear, if Alex was playing you, I’ll—”

  “It wasn’t Alex!” I blurted.

  “What?”

  The paper towel rasped the skin on my nose, but I didn’t care. Matéo was my cousin and I’d grown to love him, but he was still a guy and I would much rather have talked to Aly or Jennifer. But he was right here, kind of the brother I’d never had, and it all came pouring out, to our mutual horror.

  “It’s my boss, Rafael!” I said, and then told Matéo all about him, from watching him at work, the portrait, our first kiss, how nice he was to everyone even if he didn’t smile much, how gorgeous he was, how I thought about him all the time, how we’d avoided each other for the last couple of months, and then how last night I’d wanted to eat him alive. Almost literally.

  To his credit, Matéo tried to rise to the occasion, listening, making soothing noises, getting me another paper towel, but I was sure he wished Aly had been there instead, and I did too.

  “I don’t get it,” Matéo said when I’d finished. “Why can’t you go out, like normal people?”

  “That’s what I asked!” I said, slamming my fist on the table. The glasses rattled, and Matéo jumped slightly. “I said that exact same thing! He doesn’t have an answer! Just he can’t, it’s him, it’s me, he doesn’t know, blah blah blah!”

  “Do you think he’s just a player?”

  “I don’t think so. He said he never kisses anyone. He seemed as surprised as I was. Talia at work has never seen him date.”

  “And he’s not married?”

  “That’s what I asked!” I practically shouted, and saw Matéo wince. “He says no.”

  “Hm,” said Matéo. “So he’s just an asshole. Do you want a beer? I’m getting one.”

  “I will never drink again,” I reminded him, my stomach turning over at the thought. “But that’s the thing—he doesn’t seem like an asshole. He seems . . . tortured. Like he regrets it. Like he really wants to be with me and then remembers he can’t. But he’s not married. He’s twenty-one. And I don’t think he’s terminally ill.”

  Matéo popped the top on his beer bottle and sat down, looking thoughtful.

  “I’ve wondered if he’s a haguaro,” I went on. “But I can’t tell. Wouldn’t I be able to tell? I mean, he painted his own face onto a jaguar on his mural.”

  “What’s his name again?” Matéo asked.

  “Rafael Marquez.”

  “I don’t know him,” Matéo said. “Not that that means anything. I sure don’t know every haguaro in New Orleans.”

  “Talia told me his parents live in Mexico,” I said. “And his grandmother is French, I guess—Fontenot.”

  “Maybe he’s a haguaro, but from a different clan? And he has to be with someone from his own clan? Our grandparents rejected my father because he was from a different clan.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Assuming he’s haguaro.”

  “I can ask around, try to find out,” said Mateo. “See if anyone knows any Fontenots or Marquezes.”

  “Part of me hopes he is, and most of me hopes he isn’t,” I said, sniffling again.

  “Your mom never tried to fix you up?” Matéo asked. “You got off lucky.”

  Oh, my gosh—I remembered all the times my mom had in fact tried to set me up with her friends’ sons. “No, she did. Geez.”

  Car tires crunched on the shells in our parking area, and I recognized the engine as being Aly’s Camry. It pulled to a stop outside, and then we heard the car door slam and her footsteps approach the cement steps.

  “She’s home early,” I said, glancing at the clock.

  “Yeah. I got stuck with Aly back in high school,” Matéo said, raising his voice as Aly’s shadow covered the kitchen door. “Just because she’s the only female my age from the right clan within five hundred miles!”

  He had to be joking—his own parents were from different clans, so surely they would have been fine with his choice.

  Aly’s key clicked in the lock, and she opened the door, grinning. “Poor thing,” she said. “Too bad you had no choice.”

  Matéo grinned back at her. She dropped her purse on the table, kicked off her businesslike heels, and came to sit on Matéo’s lap. He made space for her, his hands going around her hips to pull her closer. I loved their relationship. I wished I could have somet
hing like that. Which would mean being with a haguaro, right?

  “After all,” Aly cooed, stroking Matéo’s face, the rough, auburn stubble on his unshaved cheeks. “I had several choices. There was Javier Olivado . . .”

  Matéo quit smiling.

  “Tomás Marián,” she went on. “He adored me. Marc Barella—his father owned that boat-building company. Enric—”

  “Okay, whatever,” Matéo said.

  “But I chose you,” Aly said, pulling his face to hers and kissing him. He kissed her back, starting to smile again. “Even though you were half Irish. Because I love you.”

  They gazed into each other’s eyes, and I was so jealous of what they had. And so happy because of what they had.

  “And . . . you’re saying I’m really lucky,” Matéo said.

  Aly got up and went to the fridge, pulling out the pitcher of iced tea. “Sugar, I’m saying you are incredibly lucky.”

  Matéo laughed. “You’re right,” he said, and they smiled at each other in a sexy, private way that was a little embarrassing.

  Suddenly Aly looked at the wall clock. “Vivi—don’t you have work? It’s ten after five.”

  “Oh, crap!” I jumped up, grabbed my car keys, and slid my feet into my high-top sneakers. “Get her caught up on the saga,” I instructed Matéo. “And the other thing too. We can all discuss later, over ice cream.”

  • • •

  I was half an hour late to work—the first time I’d been late. When I pushed through the back door, breathless, I dumped my bag in the employees’ room and raced up front, grabbing an apron on the way. A line of ten people had formed at the counter, and Talia was moving as fast as she could.

  “I’m so sorry!” I told her, darting behind the counter. “I can help the next person in line, please!”

  “I was getting worried,” Talia said. “I can set my clock by you.”

  “I just wasn’t paying attention.” I was putting a microwaved scone on a plate when Rafael came behind the counter, carrying a bin of clean dishes. My heart gave a flutter inside my chest, feeling like a hummingbird’s wings, and the look he gave me would have lit tinder.