Chapter 3
354 Words
Chapter ThreeWhatever Hector was into, Alejandra wasn’t interested.
But she was.
They scrounged lunch in the deserted first floor café while the g*n battle finished dying off around them. They sat side by side in the cool darkness of the kitchen, their backs against the steel door of the walk-in refrigerator and good visibility of both approaches—each with their rifle across their lap. They’d found cold beer, but Hector had opted for water so she’d done the same.
“Where the hell did you go, Hector?”
“North.” The only thing north was the US.
“Why?”
His frown said he didn’t like that question. Not a bit.
She finished her empanada then nudged his ribs with the butt of her rifle.
“You told me to go. Said you’d kill me if you ever saw me again,” his face said that his second empanada tasted like bitter sand. He chucked it under the sink.
Alejandra thought back to the day he’d gone. She’d been furious with him for something, then he’d bugged out and she never had a chance to take it back. What was…
Marina! Her s**t of a sister had bragged about taking down Hector.
“You weren’t supposed f**k my sister while you were with me.”
“Didn’t.”
She opened her mouth, then shut it again. One thing about Hector, he never lied. He might keep his trap shut, but he never lied.
“Pissed her off some that I wouldn’t.”
Whereas her little sister lied about everything—and Alejandra always fell for it. Big sisters were supposed to trust their little sisters. But she’d described certain things about Hector that only a lover would know…or someone who’d spied on him making love. “s**t! I’m gonna strangle the little bitch.”
Again Hector’s indifferent shrug.
“So I tell you to go and you just do? No argument?”
“You had a .357 revolver aimed at my crotch. I’m not gonna argue with that. I know how good a shot you are.”
“And you don’t even try to come back?”
Hector looked over at her with those sad, puppy-dog eyes of his. She’d never been able to resist those. Six foot of tough hombre was not supposed to have window-to-his-soul kind of eyes, but he always had. “Without you, I had nothing here.”
And he hadn’t. His family made hers look like all the good bits of a Thalía telenovela.
“Five years.” Somehow they’d lost five years. “Five goddamn years.”
- Writer
