She reached down to pull up her shorts and panties, struggling to get them over her boots, as he took off the condom. He tied it off, but then looked around, nonplussed about where to put it. Realizing she was going to have to redo the cleaning and sanitizing of the tank anyway, she nodded at her bucket. “Allá. Put it in there.”
“Sorry,” Aish muttered, dropping it in.
“Where the fuck are you, man?” the guy yelled. “The girls are waiting...”
Sofia turned her back on him, picked up the brush, while he buttoned his jeans. “Just...one second...” he murmured before he crossed the tank. He grabbed the handle above the open porthole and swung his legs then his torso through.
“John,” she heard him call from outside the tank. “What do you need?”
“Dude. What’re you doing?” She’d heard of John, Aish’s best friend and constant companion. They’d obviously spent a lot of time together; from outside the tank their voices were eerily similar. “Jackie and Betty already have the sleeping bags—”
She heard Aish cut John off with a “Shh.”
“What? Wait—” John’s volume went down. But the open hatch of the tank magnified his voice. “Is she in there?”
Goose bumps erupted over Sofia’s skin.
“No way,” John said, an awed smirk in his voice. “You’re all sweaty. Did you already...”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Then there was a tussle outside of the tank before she heard a clang and a grunt and then another boy—an all-American boy about Aish’s age, good looking in that blond and bland way—stuck his head into the tank.
“Hey, Princesa,” he called, looking her over and grinning from ear to ear. “How’s it goin’?”
Cold encased her. Aish had known who she was the whole time.
The legendary Aish Salinger had stepped into this tank to add a little Spanish princess to his conquests.
With a lifetime of experience, she reacted to defend herself from the pain. “It’s going fabulous,” she drew out, smiling, making the word drip with pornographic pleasure. No one could accuse you of what you’d already admitted yourself.
“These tanks are a bitch to clean,” John drawled in a bastardization of Aish’s voice. She imagined his act got him lots of his best friend’s leftovers. “You need any help?”
With a yelp, his head and torso were tugged out of the hole.
“Don’t be a dick,” she heard Aish curse him. “I’ll meet you in the bunkhouse.” There were some angry murmurs, this time too quiet for her to hear, before there was silence. Numb, Sofia began to gather the cleaning equipment.
“Sorry ’bout him.” When Sofia didn’t respond, Aish said, “Here, let me help.”
She turned to see Aish with his hand on the handle, about to pull himself back inside.
“Why?” she asked.
He stilled. “You have to start over because we—”
“I was bored.” She cut him off. “I’m not bored anymore. So you can go.”
She knew from gossip that he was twenty-one, that he was almost done with his music degree at UCLA. But his perfect little life hadn’t exposed him to what Sofia had been exposed to, and his surprised naiveté showed in his face. “But, baby, I thought...”
She burst out a laugh. “Baby!” He must have been accustomed to so much more devotion from his hookups. She made a face. “Ah, cariño, you thought you’d get your dick wet again. Not tonight, mi amor. I’ll find you the next time I get bored.”
Her smile, the ease of her body, the surety in the knives she was throwing almost had her convinced that she was this steely woman.
When she said, “Buenas noches,” and added a meant-to-be-irritating wave, his face hardened and he jerked his head out of the tank. The concrete pad of the winery hid his steps as he walked away.
She refused to let herself think as she picked up the equipment and shoved it outside the hole. She’d have to wash down the tank again. She refused to let herself think when she picked up the empty condom wrapper and stuck it in her pocket. And she made herself numb when, late that night, the bunkhouse already murmuring with rumors about her and Aish, she opened a carved, two-hundred-year-old box hidden in the footlocker at the end of her bed and slipped the stupid, pathetic wrapper inside.
September 2
Aish had the multiple espressos the wardrobe assistant poured down his throat and the B6 shot from the dietician to thank for being upright and heading to a vineyard in an open-air Jeep the next morning. The last year’s insomnia had him out of practice with mornings.
And the we-will-cut-you hatred from Sofia’s brothers, bodyguard, billionaire sister-in-law and—oh yeah—Sofia had made him want to suffocate himself in the bed’s pillows.
People used to like him. His parents were successful business owners in LA and he was the only apple of their eye and he’d grown up anticipating smiling faces whenever he walked into a room. People liked his looks, his dumb jokes, his dependable hook shot, and the way he stayed in the curl on his board. They liked it when he opened his mouth and sang a pretty tune. It had all been so easy.
That was before John had looked into the fast-moving current of the Mississippi River and decided it offered a solution.
“She has proof Young Son stole songs?” Devonte asked, sitting in the seat next to him. His manager kept his voice low so that the wind swept his words away from the driver in the front seat. “What proof?”
Aish kept his eyes on the deep green vineyard rows that raced by and shrugged. Now, he could see those snow-tipped mountains Sofia talked about.
“I mean, you didn’t copy any songs, did you?”
Aish turned and glared through his sunglasses. “Fuck you.”
Devonte raised his dinner-plate hands in surrender. “No judgment. Whatever you say stays with me. But I can’t keep this ship from sinking unless I know where the
