Page 8 of High

Manny

“I’m not dressed,” I said. My brain wouldn’t kick in. I’d been asleep, and then one of my father’s men was shaking me awake, telling me to hide. Now… now… was this real? I tried to hold in a sob, but it burst free from me anyway. I slapped a hand over my mouth as panic began to eat at me.

Thio hustled me forward in the dark room. My Superman boxers weren’t what I would have chosen to make my escape. The last time I’d tried to run, I’d been dressed for it, had even managed to sneak a gun out of the safe in the guardroom on the first floor near Papá’s study. I hadn’t gotten very far, mainly because I couldn’t bring myself to shoot any of the men. Papá had almost been more furious about my inability to pull the trigger than the fact I’d tried to escape. After that he’d removed most of my real clothes from my room. That was the first time he’d really given me a beating. Next to the day Mamá died, and the day Thio hadn’t come for me, the escape attempt was the worst.

“Faster,” Thio whispered. “Muévanse.”

Thio. My heart beat out a rhythm in my ears like rough surf on sand. He was here now. Clutching at his shirt with one hand and his arm with the other, I held my breath and stopped when my toes hit something wet and sticky on the floor, but Thio forced me forward through what I was almost certain was a pool of blood, toward the soft glow of the hallway beyond my open door. I refused to look down. I grasped Thio tighter, half convinced I was having an isolation-induced hallucination.

We rushed onward, and a sense of dislocation hit me as soon as we were in the corridor. The air out here seemed heavier than in my room, almost like being underwater, and my fingers and toes tingled.

“Thio, I haven’t been outside in a long time. I….” My legs shook and it was difficult to keep pushing forward. “I’m sorry.” I leaned more heavily on him. With a soft curse, he hoisted me upright. The corridor seemed to shimmer along the edges before they sharpened again, and the long, gauzy curtains billowing inward, driven by the ocean breeze pouring through the window, had my heart thudding faster. The dancing fabric seemed dangerous in a peculiar way. There were three bodies on the floor, and I tried not to look at them as Thio practically carried me in his arms in his effort to hustle me past them.

Thio glanced into my eyes, brows furrowed. His lips tilted down in a dangerous snarl. I was jolted as we moved under a brighter patch of light in the long corridor. His face was the one I loved and remembered—sincere blue eyes that reminded me of sundrenched Pacific waves, and full lips that seemed like they’d be the softest on earth. In the last several years, memories of him had, by turns, kept me sane—and enraged me. But he was also different from when I’d last seen him. His cheeks were carved out more than I remembered, and all traces of the boy I’d worshipped had been replaced with a rough man I didn’t really know. I cringed and his gaze softened. My Thio seemed to be in there, below the surface, and I caught a glimpse of him. I was able to drag in a deep breath.

“It’s okay, I promise, Manny. I won’t let anything happen to you. I’ll never leave you.” He gave me a quick kiss on the temple that woke me up a little, and I moved along faster with him. All at once excitement blitzed through me, both for an adventure after the endless tedium of my room, and for him. My old Thio crush wrapped around me like a suit of armor, and I could feel it locking into place. Once upon a time he’d been my world. I struggled against the sensation of old joys that had been ripped away from me, my heart pounding, panic spidering around in my chest until I could barely breathe. Then, he left.

“Not sure you should be saying things like that to him just yet.” A snide voice cut in on our conversation, from a man on my left with his head covered in a ski mask. I stumbled and Thio tightened his arm around me. The voice sounded familiar.

“Rafael?” I asked.

He laughed, the same old joking sound I remembered. “You grew. Look different. Not much like Méndez.”

“Don’t listen to him. You’re beautiful as ever,” Thio whispered to me, and a familiar shiver traveled down my spine. Panic and anger had me shoving out of his hold and firmly onto my own two feet, but I still allowed him and the huddle of his men to herd me forward.

The direction we were moving finally sank in as I blinked around at hallways I hadn’t traveled myself recently.

“You’re not taking me right out the front?” I asked, grabbing his sleeve. One of his men knocked over a potted tree sitting along the hall by accident and swore at the thump. Thio nearly dragged me to keep going, before he and his men stopped to stare at me with obvious frustration, squinting their eyes underneath their masks. “I don’t know where he is right now, but Felix has a spot on the roof.” That info got me more blank stares and my face flushed. “He’s a sniper. He’s supposed to sit up there and pick people off if something like this ever happens. Papá has been preparing for a war ever since….”

Everyone went corpse still, even the men who were farther along the hallway than us.

“How do you know that?” Thio asked quickly.

“Felix told me.” I shrugged and flushed under the heavy stare he leveled on me. His chest rose and fell sharply. “He’s the only person I’ve spent any time with lately. One of my guards,” I finished lamely as Thio’s mouth twisted down and to the side. His lips thinned, as much as they could, anyway, since they were very curvy.

“We don’t have time for this, Thiago. Do we change the plan or what?” Rafael asked. “Different exit?”

“You’re sure there will be a sniper out there?”

I stared up into his grim face, still not able to believe he was real. I reached for his cheek, and he clasped my hand in place there. His skin was so warm it seemed to burn my palm. The boldness of the move, something he never would have done quite so blatantly when we were younger, had me gasping.

“If Felix knows your men are in here, he will. He’ll be facing the front because that’s the only way out to the road.”

At that Thio smirked, but I couldn’t see what was so funny.

“Felix is my friend,” I whispered. “He listens to Papá, but I’m sure he’d think you were going to hurt me. That’s why he’d shoot you, no other reason. I hope he’s okay.”

“Joder! Let’s go out the back, then. Oceanside. This has become too risky. We’ll take the boats.” He repeated himself louder, and everyone in the group nodded.

Caught up in the adrenaline of it all, I ran with the men through the house, still feeling kind of freaked out after all the time locked up in my room. I hated my fear, but a real part of me wanted to go back to my room where I knew I wouldn’t get hurt—at least not for being outside.

The corridors had a surreal dreamlike quality to them, and the billowing curtains tickled against me as we pelted along through them. Everything was as I remembered, but I hadn’t seen these parts of the house in so long. Thio and his men only added to that fantasy feeling. They didn’t belong here, and really, neither did I.

Instead of going down the main staircase, I finally forced the part of my brain awake that I would use to scout the beach for rocks while surfing, the part of me that kept me alive, and urged Thio toward the hallway that took us to a set of side stairs that led to the back of the house, so we could go through the pool room and then onward to the beach. We hit the first floor and raced along an empty and undecorated entertaining area nearly as big as a ballroom. Finally, we broke into the pool room.

The aqua water glimmered a dreamy turquoise in the tear-shaped lap pool. At first I’d been allowed to come down here sometimes, so long as I had Felix with me. Then as the months passed, that had been taken away too, as Papá became more and more paranoid. I shuddered, and my eyes filled with tears we couldn’t afford right now, so I blinked them away.

The ruby glass double doors at the far end of the cavernous room were in sight. Thio smirked and took my hand, threading our fingers together, and we ran. The cool tile was amazing against my bare feet. I’d missed the world outside my room.