I don’t have the balls to confess to him that there’s only one man alive who I’d have taken a risk like that for, but the tequila in my blood desperately wants him to give me a reason to come clean.
His dark eyebrows draw together and he scowls at his beer bottle, picking at the label. My heart is in my throat, and I force myself to take a swallow of mine. The mood in the room has shifted from lighthearted to serious as a heart attack. I should just make a joke. Laugh and yell “gotcha” or something. But I’m stuck to my chair, too terrified by his reaction to say or do a damn thing.
“You mean that, don’t you?” He doesn’t look at me, only squints at the peeling label on his beer, scrapes at it with his thumbnail until it tears away. I feel a little bit of my hope tear away too, and I know I’ve made a huge fucking mistake.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” I say, though I have no goddamn clue what he’s thinking, much less what “it” even is. Our friendship? This photo shoot? This conversation? I don’t fucking know.
He shakes his head, clears his throat, and gets to his feet. His movements are exaggerated and deliberate as he sets down the beer and retrieves his shirt. He’s still not looking at me after he slips into it.
I stand and reach into my back pocket for my wallet. “I owe you—”
Leo cuts me off with a sharp swipe of his hand through the air. “Some other time. I’ll, ah . . . see you later.”
As he climbs into the lift and turns to close the gate, his eyes catch mine, and what I see shatters me. I expected revulsion, disgust, the usual looks I see on the faces of homophobes who learn what I am—and even the odd gay man I’ve hooked up with who finds out I like fucking women too.
But all I see on Leo’s face as it disappears from view is the stricken look of confusion, pain, and betrayal, which is somehow ten times worse.
9
Celeste
It takes the entire drive home for me to stop shaking. How could I have been so stupid? Falling into his arms again felt as easy as breathing, but I know better now. I know how deadly being close to me can be.
After Papá made me quit dance class, I went through a rebellious stage. Toni was my partner in crime for a good bit of it, since she lived with us by then. Her mother, Elena, has been our housekeeper for as long as I can remember, and her dad died in my father’s service. After her father’s death, Papá invited the family to move into our garage apartment, to save Elena the time and money of trekking to Los Feliz from West LA every day. So Toni and I attended the same school and flirted with the same boys until we graduated.
After Maddox, I took the flirting up a notch at school, testing my father’s limits with every late-night phone call he caught me in the middle of. Our senior year, Toni and I were already inseparable, but the only real socializing we ever did occurred when my father threw parties for the rich black-market art collectors he dealt with. I’d known for a few years already that my father’s business wasn’t necessarily legal, but we never associated with anyone who didn’t look like they had money, and a lot of it. Only the men who worked for my father ever had that rough and hungry look—like they’d kill for the right price, and it wouldn’t take much.
To everyone looking in, my father looks like an art dealer. He has connections he still hasn’t divulged to me yet, people who bring priceless works of art to him to sell for an enormous cut of the profits. I assume they’re talented art thieves, but the provenances of the pieces are always painstakingly documented, and I’ve never once heard of a buyer contesting them.
At one party, when I was seventeen, two years after Maddox, I decided I needed to show my father I could be in control of my own life. I chose a rich, handsome man—one of the many collectors who came for my father’s annual auction at our home—and decided he would be the one who could have me if he pleased me enough.
I was even more stupid then. My reckless need to assert my autonomy only proved to my father how naive I was, but I didn’t expect him to punish me by killing the man who had dared to return my interest.
I know there was more to it than that. I’d chosen a man I thought would be an ally, with enough power to push back against my father. What I hadn’t seen then was how I’d unwittingly presented myself as an object he could use to manipulate my father to get what he wanted.
Of course, Papá saw through the man’s intentions better than I did at the time. Any man who would take advantage of a girl so young couldn’t be trusted. He wasn’t Maddox, who’d done nothing worse than love me and been beaten for it. He was a man who’d taken my need to rebel against an overbearing father and twisted it to his own ends. I’m only grateful that he never had a chance to hurt me. My father never gave him the opportunity.
Now I don’t know if my feelings for Maddox would be enough to protect him. After this afternoon, I have no doubt he still has feelings for me, but Papá made it clear a week ago he doesn’t approve of Maddox.
Still, Maddox’s argument that love is everything sticks with me. I know Papá isn’t blind to the power love can have. He may insist that it’s dangerous, a weakness that can
