Shelter (5 page)

**

Carlos had a sagging twin mattress in his tiny little bedroom that groaned when Alma lowered herself onto its edge. The bed was unmade, sheets rumpled.
A glass ashtray full of crushed-out cigarette butts accompanied the beer cans on his nightstand. Clothes were stacked on the bureau and spilled out of the hamper in the corner. She felt a small flicker of sadness because though he lived paycheck to paycheck, Carlos had always been tidy. He took care of what was his. The sloppy housekeeping was evidence that, yes, he did know what she was going through, because he was going through something very much like it himself.

             
As she glanced around the room, a picture tucked into the corner of his hanging wall mirror caught her eye. She was tempted to investigate, but even from here, she knew the two figures, their arms around each others’ shoulders, were Sam and Carlos. Alma took a deep breath and let it out slowly, shakily. All she had done was
re
act, it was time to do some acting, even if it was just a small, timid step. There was no one better to start with than Carlos.

             
The water finally shut off, the pipes beneath the floorboards thumping. Steam billowed out like fog in a campy horror flick when the bathroom door opened and Carlos looked startled to see her, tightening his grip on the towel he’d tied around his waist. The light behind him slipped over the moisture that still clung to his shoulders, down over the muscled contours of his chest, and Alma was suddenly reminded that he was not just her husband’s cousin, but a very fit, sexy twenty-eight-year-old man. His skin looked the color of an iced latte in the shadow of the doorway, the same as Sam’s. Eyes deep and wide and chocolate. Scruff on his chin. Carved abdominals.

             
She glanced away and licked her suddenly-dry lips.

             
“I, um…” he stammered a bit, the badass from the living room gone again. Now obviously feeling the awkward tension of the moment that shouldn’t have been there. “I didn’t think you’d still be here.”

             
Alma studied her fingernails and shrugged. “I can leave if you want me to.”

             
“No. No…I just…” his bare feet scuffed across the floor, just a few steps.

             
“I’m sorry, Carlos.” Tears burned the backs of her eyes, her throat tightened. It was almost as hard talking to the living as it was thinking about the dead.

             
She heard him close the distance between them, was very aware of him sitting down next to her on the edge of the bed, as if the dipping of the mattress wasn’t enough of a giveaway.

             
“I shouldn’t have snapped at you out there. You’re right; I-I do need to…” but she couldn’t make herself say it. It felt so, so disrespectful to talk about moving on, “feeling better,” when Sam was rotting in a coffin. Alma covered her eyes with her hand, blinking desperately in hopes of maintaining her composure. But it didn’t work.

             
Carlos’s arm came around her shoulders and she was pulled in tight against his chest. He smelled like soap, his skin warm and smooth and just a little bit damp against her cheek. But the feel of a strong, solid body around her was a relief she didn’t dare hope for, one that made her feel guilty and thankful all at once. A relief she wasn’t ready to let go of.

             
Alma dabbed at her eyes and took a series of deep breaths that left her calmer. And Carlos was helping: the thump of his heart beneath her ear, the way she swore he nuzzled at her hair. One of his big, rough hands cupped her jaw ever-so-gently and tipped her head back. When she met his eyes, they were as warm and inviting as hot coffee, open, looking a little shiny like she knew hers did. Their faces were so close together, and as his hand moved so that his fingers slid into her hair at the nape of her neck, she had a startling mental image of where this moment was headed if she let it continue.

             
She had cried herself to sleep every night, had tossed and turned through nightmares, waking in a panicked sweat when she realized that she was alone. And why she was alone. And here was this person, this man, who she cared about so much, who was hurting just like she was. Who…

             
“I see the way he looks at you.”

             
He wasn’t her Sam. But Sam, she thought with a jolt that brought fresh tears to her eyes, was never coming home.

             
Carlos tilted his head, eyes flicking down a moment and then back up in silent question.

             
“Yes,” she whispered, and then closed her eyes as he pulled her into him and kissed her.

             
His lips, warm and soft, pressed against hers gently, not rushing, not pressuring her. But it was enough to stir all of her pent-up sexual frustration. She missed Sam the man, the person, her husband. But she missed Sam her lover too, the way he touched her, made her come alive, set her blood on fire. With her eyes closed, with Carlos’s strong arms around her, she let her hormones drown out her logic, and even some of her grief, and filled her mind up with the latent knowledge that here was a strong, virile man who wanted her.

             
She touched the seam of his lips with her tongue, leaned into him, let him know that this was what she wanted. In the immediate moment at least. And he didn’t need to be told twice. Alma felt his fingers spear through her hair. His mouth opened, tongue coming out to meet hers. The kiss deepened, became hot, intimate, almost obscene in a way she hadn’t expected. She sucked in a breath through her nose, heard herself whimper. His hands slid down over her shoulders, along her sides, latched onto her hips and he lifted her up into his lap like she was a doll. Then she had no doubt as to exactly how much he wanted her; she could feel it against her thigh.

             
Alma kneaded the thick bundles of muscle at the base of his neck and moved her hips in a slow little circle. He made a grunting noise deep in his throat that was muffled against the front of her sweater. And that was when his good manners failed him.

             
Alma felt his hand leave her hip, move beneath the hem of her sweater, and she glanced down between them, saw his arm slip under her clothes by the soft light of the bedside lamp.

             
Suddenly she was on her bed at home, straddling Sam’s lap in just her pink bra and panties, worrying her lip with her teeth while she watched him touch her through the thin barrier of silk. As rough-and-tumble a reputation as he’d always had, he’d been so gentle with her at times. Times like this…only it wasn’t Sam who now cupped her breast and thumbed down the lace of her bra, his finger brushing over her tight nipple.

             
Oh, God, what was she doing?

             
“Stop!” In a panicked flurry of limbs, she stood and moved away from him, tried to straighten her bra with fast, ineffective movements as she took a half a dozen steps away from the bed. “I…I,” tears pooled in her eyes, turned him into a fuzzy man-shaped object. “I’m sorry…I don’t…I didn’t think…” She closed her eyes and gulped in air, willing herself not to turn into the sad, sobbing wreck she couldn’t seem to be anything but these past few weeks.

             
She opened her eyes on a strangled cry and saw Carlos scrub a hand back across his buzzed hair. Heard him sigh. “It’s fine.” But his voice told her otherwise. This was all anything but fine.

             
“I’ll let myself out.”

             
He didn’t protest and didn’t follow her.

4

             
“Messing with your head.”
Those had been Sean’s words. And they were officially the biggest understatement since…well,
ever
as far as Carlos was concerned. Blue balls he could have taken care of. But Alma’s departure last night had left him rattled in a way he didn’t know how to cope with. More and more, it was less about grieving Sam, and more about grieving what he didn’t have, but wanted, with Sam’s widow. He was fucked up big time. And for a guy with two jobs – well, technically three – that didn’t bode well for productivity.

             
He made an effort to throw his clothes, clean and dirty, into the closet and forced the door shut. Which left him ten minutes to choke down breakfast before he headed off to his day job: a landscaper with Good & Green of North Metro-Atlanta.

             
But instead of grabbing a Pop-Tart and a Coke, he rooted the lockbox out from under his bed and opened it up, thinking he should probably go to the trouble of locking the thing sometime. The top tray lifted out, and beneath the old family photos and keepsakes, he found his Glock 9mm semi-auto and the product Sean had given to him the night before. It frightened him just looking at the baggies full of fine white powder. Getting busted with enough cocaine to qualify for possession with the intent to distribute would not only end both his careers, but his life. Unlike his cousin, he didn’t think he could survive lockup.

             
With a deep, shaky breath, he pocketed the baggies and put the box back under the bed. The address for the drop was written on a McDonald’s napkin and he slid it up the sleeve of the thermal knit he wore under his Good & Green shirt. He wondered, as he slapped on his hat and headed for the door, what Alma would think if she knew she’d almost slept with a bar tender/landscaper/part-time drug pusher.

**

“Brightside Publishing, this is Alma, how may I help you?”

             
Her boss had given her a generous three weeks off after Sam’s funeral, and then had cut her back to half days when it had become apparent that she wasn’t capable of handling much more than that. Her time away from work was spent napping, brooding, staring off into space, suffering her mother’s shopping trips, but she managed to pull herself together for the few hours she spent behind her desk four days a week. Though judging by the whispers and stares in the break room, she was becoming dead weight, and her coworkers didn’t figure she had a prayer of keeping her job.

             
Once upon a time, when she’d still been living under her parents’ roof, when she’d still believed anything was possible, she’d wanted to be a writer. And not just a magazine contributor or a blogger. She’d wanted to be a
novelist
. Just the word itself had rolled off the tongue so exquisitely when she’d said it aloud to her empty room, fingers poised over the keys of her laptop. She had a flare for the melodramatic, a love for all things steeped in detail and nuance. And she was a sucker for an unconventional love story. All qualities that had led her English professors to doodle little smiley faces in the corners of her papers.

             
But she’d married Sam two months after she’d graduated from Georgia State and had scrambled to find steady employment. Her writing dream had gone to live someplace where little girls stowed dreams once they grew up, and she’d been at Brightside for a year and a half, coordinating local book fairs.

             
“Alma Morales?” a woman asked on the other end of the line.

             
“Yes, ma’am, I’m - ”

             
“You were supposed to be at Red Oak Elementary this afternoon!”

             
Alma slapped a palm over her forehead.
Shit!
Mrs. Cartwright, she recognized the voice now, continued to ream her out while she added her own personal insults mentally. Of all the things she was supposed to have been worrying about, all she’d dwelled on that morning, staring blankly at her computer, was her almost-sex with Carlos.

             
She’d stared at herself in the mirror a long time that morning, a hand over her still-flat belly, wrestling with the notion that she’d almost allowed a man who wasn’t her child’s father to…be near that tiny life. That knowledge had left her shaking. It wasn’t just about her anymore. It was about protecting her child too.

             
But Carlos would care about her baby, wouldn’t he? Of course he would. They would be family after all, her little one and her almost-lover. And how strange would that have been?
Honey, before you were born, I almost fucked your cousin.

             
“Are you even still there?”

             
“What? Oh! Yes, I’m sorry, Mrs. Cartwright.” Her palms became damp. She hadn’t been listening to the woman’s tirade. “I can’t apologize enough for missing our meeting this morning. Please let me make it up to you in any way I can. How about - ”

             
“How about you patch me through to your supervisor?” the school administrator snapped. “I’m done with you.”

             
Alma sighed wearily. “Yes, ma’am.” She forwarded the call and then collapsed forward onto her desk, head in her hands once she’d hung up. Spacing out, being distant, those sins could be forgiven. But screwing up the Red Oak account? That was a firing offense for sure.

             
She peeked through her fingers at her computer monitor, wondering how many other agenda items she’d overlooked. Instead, her eyes went to the framed photo of her and Sam beside her keyboard. She shook her head. Why did life have to suck so badly?

             
Her phone rang and she prepared herself for a thorough ass-chewing. But it was her mother.

             
“Hi, sweetie!”

             
“Hi.”

             
“Everything alright?” Diane was just bursting with overdone perkiness, obviously content to ignore their disagreement the night before.

             
“Peachy.”

             
“Listen, your aunt is leaving in the morning, and I thought it might be nice if we could all go out tonight, the four of us. I thought we could go to Chili’s, grab some dinner. It’ll be a blast.”

             
“Sounds like it.”

             
By the time she had the receiver in the cradle again, she’d agreed to yet another family meal. Perhaps she was suicidal. As she glanced up over the top of her cubicle and saw her boss marching toward her, she wondered if Carlos was having a better day.

**

The Dolman property was twenty-six acres being converted from farmland to estate home lots of two to three acres each, topped off by five-hundred-thousand dollar mini mansions. Good & Green had been contracted for all of the landscaping and Carlos enjoyed this type of gig. Guaranteed money and a consistent few months of working on the same job site rather than running back and forth raking leaves. And because the subdivision was already prestigious – out-of-state buyers had already purchased homes sight unseen – it had gained attention, for Marietta, and for Good & Green. Everyone knew about Dolman Plantation. Which was why he rolled up his work shirt and left it stuffed behind the seat of one of the crew trucks when he took his lunch break. He might get his ass killed, but he wasn’t keen on getting his supervisors clued into his little side business.

At one-fifteen, he rode with the guys to Wendy’s, made a pretense of needing to buy more smokes, and walked across the street to the half-occupied shopping center and the liquor store down on the north end. Around the back, between the fire escape ladder and the dumpster, he put his back to the brick wall and waited, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up so that hopefully it, and the bill of his cap, would keep his identity a mystery to any onlookers. By the time his buyer showed up, his knees were quivering as he replayed Sam’s death over and over, wondering if this buy would be any different than
that
buy, the one that had left him putting pressure on his cousin’s gunshot wound.

The guy who approached him, checking over his shoulder for witnesses in a casual way, was Hispanic, clean-shaven with a cleft jaw and prominent nose. If not for the gelled black hair, thick brows and dark complexion, he might have passed for your average white guy. But Carlos could always spot a fellow Latino, especially those of indistinguishable heritage just like him. The buyer had on a dark long-sleeved shirt and puffy vest, jeans and boots. He might have been a total gang-banger, or just a regular dude out for a fix. Carlos didn’t care.

He nodded toward the customer. “Diego?” That was the fake name Sean had told him to use.

“Yeah.” The guy returned the nod, stuffed his hands in the slash pockets of his vest, and closed the gap between them. He never looked at Carlos, but at everything else around them. “You have it?”

“Yup.”

The transaction took all of four seconds. Carlos shook hands with him and in the process, lost the baggie he’d clenched between his fingers and came away with a wad of cash in his palm. He stowed the money with a relieved sigh and watched “Diego
,” or whatever the fuck his name was, walk away around the side of the building.

He had really nice shoes, Carlos couldn’t help but notice. Shiny. With those squared toes only the GQ set shopped for. He frowned, filed away the information as useless, and moved away from the dumpster. If he was lucky, he’d still have time to choke down a burger before he had
to be back on the job site.

**

Dinner had been such a bad idea. Alma had known it would be, but after she’d carried a cardboard box of photos and notepads to her car that afternoon, she’d wanted to believe that she could find some sort of comfort. She should have known that being twisted and hammered and warped into the Alma her family wanted to know would only make her heart hurt worse.

In a large, six-person booth, she sat with her parents, aunt, and cousin
Tanya. Tanya who was engaged to an entrepreneur who’d started his own marketing consulting firm. Tanya who was always so “put together” according to Diane.

Alma pulled a French fry through the ketchup puddle on her plate and tried unsuccessfully to tune out the chatter around her.

“That’s so exciting!” Diane said and leaned across Alma so she could better see her niece. “Where will you be looking? It’s a buyer’s market right now; you could pick up a really nice place for a steal.”

Tanya was pretty, but not beautiful. Made up for it by being a fashionista. Bubbly. Ex-cheerleader. Nice, but not always in the most sincere way. When she brushed her hair back and smiled at Diane, the move was so practiced it appeared automatic. “Well, since Rod works in Stone Mountain…”

No one had asked Alma, with delight shimmering in her eyes, where she and Sam had been shopping for a home. No one had hugged her with an excited squeal, demanding to know all the details of the wedding. Blank stares, startled congratulations…and those had been false. She had heard it in all their voices. She stared down at her plate and hated that she was so petty, that she was responding to the slights as a child would. What did it matter what her family had thought of her nuptials? She had known that Sam wouldn’t fit in. She’d made a choice. But that choice had been so much easier to defend when he’d been sitting next to her. Was it too much to ask to want someone to look at her and understand the magnitude of her pain? To want a heartfelt apology?

She didn’t think so.

And she’d had that. With Carlos.

Alma had lain awake the night before, staring at the ceiling, tears trickling from the corners of her eyes
, wondering why her body was betraying her. How could she feel so guilty for thinking about another man, and yet keep thinking about him? She’d tried to tell herself it was hormones; pregnancy was wreaking havoc on her emotions. But she knew it was deeper than that. Carlos was her connection to Sam. Carlos was the only one who felt the way she did. The only one who…wanted her.

“Alma.”

She shook herself out of the safe, warm little mental hideout she’d developed over the past several weeks, not sure who had spoken. But of course it was her mother. Diane’s silver hoop earrings caught the light as she swiveled her head around, dark hair swishing elegantly over her shoulders. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I said isn’t it wonderful that Rod and Tanya are thinking of having a baby right away?” Alma blinked. “I recommended our OB/Gyn. Don’t you think Dr. Laramie has the best bedside manner?”

“I hear you’re about ten weeks along,” Tanya added.

At another time, given different circumstances, Alma would have been appalled at her own reaction. A small part of her subconscious mourned the loss of her manners, grieved for the rational, polite girl she’d been before Sam’s death. But none of that stopped her from biting down hard on the tip of her tongue to hold in the remark she wanted
to scream.