THE BIG MOVE (Miami Hearts Book 2) (2 page)

              “Disgusting,” Jennet joked. “That’s how diseases get spread.”

              “Only if loving each other is a sickness,” I told her, wagging my finger at her. She took a good-humored snap at my digit, and I had to laugh.

              “So why isn’t your boyfriend in Miami with you?” Jennet asked. “Of course, if you don’t mind me asking. If you don’t want to talk about it, forget I asked. We’ll just go back to watching my roommate do disgusting things with her horribly perfect boyfriend … and try to get our appetites back so we can continue stuffing our faces.”

              I smiled. It was kind of nice to have someone to talk about Antonio with — even if I couldn’t be completely honest about everything.

              “He was here for a while,” I said. “He came to get our lives set up here in Miami. It’s hard in Cuba, hard for people to make a living. You struggle just to be able to support your family, and it’s impossible to get ahead. Once he got me settled, though, his mother got sick and he had to return to the island.”

              It was as close to the truth as I could get, but still a lie. Life where I actually came from was hard. It was nearly impossible to rise above the poverty and violence, to provide for your family while keeping them and yourself alive. And, of course, there was the small matter of the circumstances behind Antonio’s departure from Miami. It hadn’t been for family. And it hadn’t been his will to leave me, either.

              “I’m so sorry to hear that,” Jennet said, patting my hand and pouting a bit. “It must be incredibly hard for you to be here alone, without him.”

              I shrugged, even though she’d hit the nail on the head. It was incredibly hard. Some days, it felt impossible. But lately, ever since that horrible text message, and seeing my love savaged from the very thing we’d fled from in the first place, I had to draw the strength from somewhere to keep going. I had to keep going — for Antonio’s sake. It was through his love for me and my devotion to him that I found the ability to get up, to go to work, to try to have some semblance of a life here. He’d given everything to get me to Miami, leaving everything he knew behind. And now that he was the one who was in trouble, it was up to me to save him.

              “I know he wanted me to be successful here,” I said. “That’s what makes it easier.”

              “Well, if you ever need anything — and I mean anything, Sol, including a cup of a sugar, a shoulder to cry on, or anything else — you just tell me.”

              I frowned. “A cup of sugar?”

              “Anything,” Jennet emphasized, laughing. “It tickles me when you don’t understand an expression in English. You can call me an asshole. It just makes you even more charming.”

              “Well, thanks, I guess,” I said, shaking my head. Jennet was a strange one, but she seemed to be one of the good guys. I hadn’t had this much of a talk with anyone in a long time — maybe ever. Faith was my only other good friend, and we’d always been too busy at the club to hold much in the way of a conversation with each other.

              This was the kind of life I’d yearned for, coming to America. This was what I’d craved — relaxing in somebody’s yard, cooking good food, and talking about things that didn’t matter with people who did matter to you. This idea of leisure, good times, and a close-knit community was foreign. Sure, I’d had family and friends back home. But we couldn’t meet out in the open like this. Any show of wealth and the gangs would be on us like sharks sniffing out droplets of blood. Celebrations were low-key events, and even then, it was a strain on budgets and made you feel like it wasn’t worth it to go all out.               Back home, it was hard to be normal, to behave in a relaxed manner, to put your feet up and not worry about where the money was coming from to pay for all of this, or whether someone might suspect you had a little too much money to spend on yourself.

              If only Antonio were here. That was the imperfection in our relationship that I couldn’t bring myself to love. Being apart from him was killing me. It was keeping me from my American dream.

Faith and all of her friends sent me home with a full belly and a plastic container full of even more food. I’d protested, but deep down, I was grateful. I tightened my meager budget even further to accommodate ransom payments I’d never considered needing to afford.

              I was happy to be able to contribute to the barbecue. When Faith had invited me, after all, I’d volunteered to make homemade chips and salsa. Those items, however, weren’t normally included in my grocery budget, so I’d had to scrimp this week. The food everyone had sent me home with was what was going to fill my belly until next week.

              I popped the box into the fridge and looked around. An apartment was simple to clean when it was so small, so that was one benefit. To save more money, I’d downsized from a one-bedroom abode to a studio. Without Antonio there, it made much more sense. I didn’t need the extra space. I had a comfortable couch that I could make my bed of every night. In the day, those blankets got tucked away, and it became my seating area.

              I never entertained, so I was comfortable with my level of poverty. It was a necessity, living well within my needs. I’d practiced it in Honduras and when Antonio and I had first arrived in Miami.

              We didn’t have two coins to rub together when we finally arrived in the city, bedraggled, weary and thinner than when we’d left Tegucigalpa. We were in awe of Miami, and a little afraid of it, fighting a constant battle to fit in and look like we belonged.

              We watched the city’s very poor, homeless individuals to gauge what they did to survive, how their fellow citizens treated them, and what we would have to do to adapt here.

              This was how we discovered the blessing of shelters and soup kitchens — warm, wholesome meals and safe places to sleep that didn’t entail alleyways and encounters with the police.

              It was through one of these charitable organizations that Antonio was able to obtain a job — and that we found our first apartment, a subsidized property. We were happy, hopeful, and open to whatever the universe saw fit to bestow on us, lucky thus far and ready for luck to strike even more. We’d come all this way, out of dire situations. Luck had to change for people sometime, didn’t it?

              When I landed some work cleaning office buildings, we were able to buy the car — used, and on a payment plan, but the car set us free from the expense of taxi and bus fares. It was a clunker, and something of a gas guzzler, but loveable. We’d never dreamed of owning such a thing in our neighborhood. Being able to afford it now was both exciting and an affirmation that coming to the United States had been the right decision. There were opportunities here that would’ve never been available to us otherwise. Sure, it wasn’t my dream to vacuum carpets and scrub toilets of white collar Americans. But dreams started somewhere.

              At night, though, dreams turned into longing.

              “Antonio,” I said one such night while looking at the orange lights of the city, the humid air reminding me of home, “don’t you miss it? Just a little bit? Somewhere deep inside you?”

              We’d had valid reasons for fleeing our home country — valid and very mortal reasons — but on some nights, Tegucigalpa throbbed with an energy and a vitality that Miami lacked. If only things had been different, maybe we wouldn’t have had to uproot our entire identities just to survive.

              “Miss it?” He snorted as he joined me at the open window. The air conditioner was a luxury we weren’t used to, and we often joked about its prevalence. I shivered at my work, shivered at the grocery store, shivered any time I walked in off the shimmering, hot street and into an artificially chilled building. I was used to the heat, welcomed it. It was nice for the outside air to move through the apartment, and I loved to throw the windows open — we boasted a grand total of two — as soon as I got home from my work.

              “Don’t get me wrong,” I said quickly. We’d been to hell and back several times in our journey to this city. That was worth something, and I didn’t want to discount it or sound ungrateful for Antonio helping me through everything. “Miami is great. We’re doing well, aren’t we?”

              “But?” Antonio prompted, grinning and tickling me on the back of my neck. “Go on, you grand complainer. You can never be happy anywhere, can you?”

              “Stop that,” I said, slapping at his hand. “You know I can be happy anywhere as long as I’m with you. I’m just saying I kind of miss the idea of community. Miami’s much safer, and we’re doing much better, but we haven’t really met anyone, have we? We haven’t made any friends.”

              Both of our families had dwindled in numbers — age, disease, violence, and the desire to be elsewhere serving as scissors to cut ties between blood relatives. The few family members who remained — an uncle and cousin for me, and Antonio’s ancient and sweet grandmother — were more valuable than anything. We’d left them all in Honduras reluctantly and under great duress. I wished it could’ve happened another way, but I couldn’t picture taking Antonio’s
abuela
clear across two countries before even reaching the relative safety of the Texas-Mexico border. She wouldn’t have been able to make it. Antonio and I had barely been able to make it.

              “I know you’re lonely for family,
amor,
” he said, wrapping his arms around me and planting a kiss on my temple. “We’ll get there, you know. Right now we’re being careful. We’re getting a feel for things. Survival first, right?”

              I nodded. Of course he was right. We needed to establish ourselves here before we could think about something as silly as a social circle.

              “You’re all the family I need,” I told him, turning in his arms and kissing him. “I don’t need anyone else.”

              Antonio returned the kiss, his lips soft against mine, but he pulled away a little. “We need a support system here,” he said. “If anything should happen to either of us …”

              He trailed off and I shuddered. “Don’t,” I said, burying my face in his neck. “I forbid even thinking about something so morbid. Nothing is ever going to happen to us except for good things from here on out.”

              “That’s the idea,” Antonio said, amused. He forced me to look in his eyes, lifting my chin with his finger. “But community is something everyone needs, too. Once we get things figured out, once we start saving money, once we get a big enough house to actually entertain friends in …”

              He tickled me and I squirmed, giggling.

              “Is it selfish to want to have friends?” I asked him, only half joking. “Is it too greedy of me to want to thrive in Miami and be happy?”

              “If wanting to be happy is greedy, then may we all be pigs,” Antonio declared, snorting and rooting enthusiastically against my neck and collarbone. I shrieked, dreadfully ticklish, and cackled, twisting to escape his onslaught. My only option was the open door of the bedroom, bouncing across our mattress to conceal myself beneath the blankets.

              Unsurprisingly, Antonio found me with no trouble whatsoever, triumphantly peeling the covers back to reveal his prize. I cringed, afraid he was going to tickle me again, but instead, he dipped down and kissed me deeply on the lips.

              “I would do anything for you,” he said, looking me in the eyes, his own dark eyes burning in the dim room. “I’d get you a gaggle of friends tomorrow if it meant making you happy.”

              “I am happy,” I insisted, weaving my fingers together behind his neck and drawing him down for another kiss. They were sweet, like honey or blossoms. “You make me happy every second of every day.”

              “We just need to remember that there’s more to life than just survival,” Antonio told me, so close to me that the tips of our noses brushed. “If we’re only just surviving, we’re not truly living.”

              “Then show me how to truly live,” I told him, my voice soft and husky. I loved this man, loved his passion for everything, loved the pleasure I’d been spoiled often enough to expect — and sometimes demand.

Antonio smirked lightly at me, but he was either out of pithy comebacks or too eager to proceed with this new game to come up with one. Instead, he ran one of his hands down my stomach, slipping it beneath the boxer shorts of his I wore and cupping my sex. I exhaled sharply and thrust upward against his hand, eager to feel the warm spread of arousal emanating from between my legs throughout the rest of my body. He lovingly accommodated my desires, rolling his thumb against the most sensitive part of my body, making me keen and writhe beneath his deceptively simple movements. Antonio knew my body better than I knew it myself. He could get me to make the most bizarre and embarrassing sounds in the world, but I felt so good I didn’t care. He made all of my cares drop away.

              “I want you,” I moaned, wanting to grab at him but unable to unclench my hands that I’d fisted in the sheets.

              “You have me,
amor,
” he said, rolling the
r
at the end of the affectionate nickname more than he usually did. It made him sound like he was purring, a giant cat pleased with the prey that lay helpless beneath him. “You’ll always have me.”

              “I want you inside me,” I was forced to clarify. He knew good and well what I wanted. He just delighted in making me spell it out for him.

              I was already primed for him, and he slid inside me with zero resistance. There was something that was always so special about this moment, when I took him inside of my body and the two of us became one person. It never lost its luster for me, and I didn’t believe it ever would.

              He made me feel complete, then pushed me even harder with each one of his thrusts. Just when I thought I couldn’t feel any more pleasure, he eked out another pulse, another wave of ecstasy. I lived for this feeling, the closeness it brought us, the way his hot mouth felt on mine.

              I lived for it, and now it was gone.

              I missed that bed. I really did. Even when it became too large after Antonio was taken, I could still wrap myself up in the blankets, sleep on my side, pile pillows and maybe a shirt or two on Antonio’s side and pretend he was there beside me, snoring softly in his sleep. But I’d given the bed we shared up for this tiny apartment, selling it for the money I was going to use to bring Antonio back to Miami.

              Now it was the money I was going to use to save his life.

              I sighed and plopped down on the couch. I tried to stay positive. Life was too short to have a negative attitude about everything. But it was difficult when it seemed like life was completely against me.

              I’d been shocked when I received the text message demanding money from me, horrified at the accompanying picture of Antonio’s injured face after he’d apparently received a beating. The helplessness, rage, and fear all combined into a ball of useless energy. I was here in Miami, and he was in Honduras in terrible danger and fighting for his life. Even if I had been in our home country with him, I would’ve been of little use. I wasn’t some kind of woman warrior with superpowers. It was Antonio who’d had all the superpowers, the uncanny ability to know just what to do and when to get us out of dangerous situations.

              Even if I had been there with him, I probably would’ve been taken, too, or worse. So at least the kidnappers were reaching out to me. At least there was someone to reach out to. If they thought Antonio was useless to them, it would be pointless to keep him alive. As long as I was their contact, and I promised that I could get them the things that they asked for, Antonio was as safe as he was going to be.

              When they finally named a price, however, it would’ve been easier to sprout wings and fly, or suddenly develop the power to shoot fire from my fingertips. Either of those things would’ve helped.

              But there was no power I had in my arsenal of very limited abilities that could magically come up with $15,000 dollars.

              Fifteen grand sounded like a dream. It was a number that confounded me, made me weep in the shower and realize that everything was hopeless, but that was the number the kidnappers had quoted — the magical value that would save Antonio from certain death.

              It seemed so impossible that I found it necessary to get in touch with the kidnappers, well aware that angering them could very well make things even worse for Antonio than they already were.

              “I understand the ransom,” I typed back to Antonio’s cell phone number, the device they were using to stay in contact with me. It was strange, really. If I just scrolled up on the conversation displayed on the screen, the texts were simple, loving, wondering what we would have for dinner, what we were going to do with the rare day we shared when neither of us had to work, telling each other that we loved each other.

             
“It’s hard for me to save money, and I don’t have much to liquidate,”
I continued to type.
“I will get you your money, but it can either be in the future, or in installments, bit by bit.”

              I gnawed on my lip for a full five minutes before hitting send. The kidnappers needed to know this. I wouldn’t be sending them $15,000 this afternoon. There couldn’t be any surprises with this. I doubted they would appreciate surprises, and they might just be a little more lenient if I was honest with them up front.