Pushing her hair off her forehead, she bent down, retrieving her discarded, discount-quality metallic purse from the gravel at her feet. When she straightened, he was watching her, awaiting her decision. Feeling torn, she twisted the cheap fabric in her hands, wanting to tell him to go to hell.
“Take me to Dark Canyon,” she whispered instead, squaring her shoulders, meeting his eyes.
17
Dylan sat across from Angel, who was perched on the edge of his rumpled, unmade bed, and tried not to think about what they’d been doing the last time they were here together.
He was punchy from too little sleep and too much Mountain Dew, the muscles in his forearms ached from cleaning tools, and his brain was overloaded with the calc problems he would have to finish during lunch tomorrow. But his hormones were on full alert, proving he was never too tired to think about sex.
“My dad said you called.”
Oh. Right. Her reason for being here had nothing to do with jumping his bones. “Yeah,” he said, giving himself a mental shake. “It’s kind of important.”
“There’s no privacy at my house. I hope you don’t mind that I stopped by.”
“Of course not.” Clearing his throat, he told her about his interview with Luke Meza. Angel already knew about Yesenia Montes. Apparently, her dad had found the body.
“You told him I was there?” she asked, her eyes widening.
“No. Travis did.”
A crease formed between her brows. “That’s weird. You’d think he would want to keep that part quiet.”
Dylan shrugged. “I thought you should know, in case the sheriff came to question you.”
She studied him from beneath lowered lashes. “There’s another reason I came over.”
His heart rate kicked into overdrive. “Yeah?”
As she reached in her front pocket, he tried not to notice how snugly her jeans fit, or the way her tank top molded to her chest. Why was she wearing such figure-revealing clothes? Did she
“I was going to ask you something… and you can tell me to get lost, if you want to, but…” She let out a frustrated breath, running a hand through her hair. It was down around her shoulders tonight, a cascade of black silk. “Will you help me?”
He glanced down at the crumpled piece of paper in her other hand.
“If I ever summon up the nerve to send my song lyrics to a record label, no one will take me seriously.”
Dylan felt a stab of disappointment. He wanted to be her boyfriend, not her tutor. Although he’d looked up some information about learning disabilities at school today, he wasn’t all that interested in helping her. He was sick of being treated like a brain. Nor could he ignore the fact that she’d put him out like a wet dog last night, after moaning in his mouth and tangling her fingers through his hair.
“What about your brothers? Can’t they read?”
Her mouth thinned with hurt, which made him feel better and worse at the same time. “Juan Carlos used to help me out a lot,” she admitted, a faraway look on her face. “School was so easy for him.”
Dylan nodded, remembering her brother’s devious mind all too well. Juan Carlos had been almost too smart to get caught. Or perhaps getting caught had been his plan all along. He’d always wanted to leave Tenaja Falls. Right now he was probably running cons at juvenile hall, treating his counselors like marks.
“Daniel is a good student, but he’s only eight. And Ricardo can’t sit still to save his life. He’s almost as hopeless as I am.” When she ducked her head in embarrassment, her shame cut through him like a blade.
“Give it to me,” he said, holding out his hand.
Unable to meet his gaze, she shoved the paper at him. “I looked up some of the words in the dictionary, but I couldn’t find them all…”
Her handwriting was careful and deliberate, each letter painstakingly formed. She’d obviously put a lot of effort into refining her work, and although it was an improvement over the unintelligible jumble of symbols he’d seen last night, the lyrics still didn’t make sense. She’d switched some words and letters around, and omitted others altogether.
“Do you know what an article is?”
She frowned. “Like, in a newspaper?”
“No, like before a noun.” He pointed to the page. “Here you wrote ‘She took trip to no were.’ Do you mean ‘She took
Her lips trembled, but she nodded.
He couldn’t bear to go over every mistake. There were too many. “Just sing it to me,” he said, getting out a new sheet of paper. “I’ll rewrite it for you.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Fine.”
“Haven’t you ever been tested?”
“For what?”
“Learning disabilities. Dyslexia.”
Her shoulders stiffened. “You think I have that?”
“I don’t know.”
She deliberated for a moment, and said, “I started school late, and I was… very quiet. The teachers thought I was having trouble learning English as a second language. They kept me in ESL for five years.”
Dylan couldn’t hide his surprise, because he hadn’t known. They’d gone to the same elementary school, but she was a year ahead of him and they’d never had the same teachers.
“By the time I moved on to regular classes, Mama needed a lot of help at home. I was absent more and more, and able to follow along less and less. In high school, I couldn’t do anything without Juan Carlos. I never turned in my homework unless he rewrote it for me.”
He was floored by her admission. “That’s-crazy,” he sputtered. “You should have told someone. They could have helped you.”
Storm clouds gathered in her dark eyes. “Who could have helped me? The teachers who assumed I couldn’t speak English because of the way I look? The ones who kept passing me into the next grade even though I wasn’t ready? Or the ones who didn’t care if I got a good education because I’m just another poor Mexican girl, destined to end up barefoot and pregnant?”
He wasn’t indifferent to her plight, nor was he naive enough to think teachers treated all of their students equally. Tenaja Falls was no Mecca of enlightenment.
And yet, her willingness to play the martyr rankled.
“But you do speak English,” he countered, “and you could have said so. If you didn’t get a decent education, you have only yourself to blame.”
Glaring at him, she crossed her arms over her chest, which made her breasts swell enticingly above the neckline of her top. If she hadn’t continued, he might have forgotten what they were discussing altogether. “I made
He pulled his gaze up to her face, too pissed off now to be distracted. “Why not? Because I have such an awesome home life?”
“No, because you’re incapable of thinking about anyone besides yourself.”
His jaw dropped. “That’s not tr-”
“Yes it is,” she said, jumping to her feet. He stood also, not about to let a short girl tower over him on his own turf. “You’re so angry about your mother dying and your father leaving that you can’t appreciate what you have.”
“I have nothing!” he protested, throwing his arms out at his sides. She need only look around his disaster area of a room to see the proof.
“You have everything,” she said, startling him with her vehemence. “You have the potential to be anything. You can leave this town and go wherever you want, do whatever you want, become whoever you want.” Her voice softened once again, growing irresistibly husky.
