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When I was alone, without fail, my mind went to Ramón while my heart ached.
Three weeks. Three long, long weeks he’s been gone, and every day that passed without word, I could feel myself shattering a little more inside. For the first week, he’d texted and called me regularly, but eight days after he left, all communication had stopped. I tried asking the Cordovas what was going on, but they just put me off with vague promises. They said he was okay, and he was in an area with no cell service. In a normal situation I would have believed them, but I know how the Cordovas work regarding anything they see as a threat to their family. It hurt me that they couldn’t trust me with the information about where Ramón really was.
After all his promises and sweet words, Ramón was long gone and evidently never contacting me again, but I still had the bodyguards he left me like some odd parting gift.
I still hadn’t really told Hannah anything about what happened between me and Ramón. She knew something went on, but she didn’t know the bastard made me fall in love with him. I’d given myself to Ramón, had opened up to him, and let myself believe we really had a future together. He obviously had gotten what he wanted from me, and I wondered if this was a game he played with all women. Maybe he was one of those guys that got off on breaking girl’s hearts.
‘Cause he’d certainly broken mine.
The loud shouts of teenage boys came from my left, and I jumped in my seat, my breath coming in shallow pants.
I wanted to laugh and cry. For over a year, I had no problem parking in this lot and going into the school, cloaked in my impenetrable layer of ignorant arrogance that nothing bad would ever happen to me. What a fool I’d been, so blind to the dangers around me. This part of the city was rough—and I do mean rough—driven by institutionalized poverty, generations of gangs, and politicians more interested in catering to the rich than caring for the poor. The school was surrounded by abandoned or falling down homes that the city needed to condemn, and the neighborhood around us was a constant battle ground between gangs. Yes, the school had security, but they were stretched thin by budget cuts and stuck mainly to protecting the school, not the parking lot. The only thing that stood between the school and the outside world was a massive chain-link fence with razor wire at the top.
God, this place resembled a prison.
I wondered if I was being stupid even coming here, or if I should have brought Tino with me. I thought Tino was my friend, that he’d give me some hint about Ramón, but he gave me the same standard answers the Cordovas did. Even though I was irritated with Tino, I really wished he was on campus with me as I tried to get up the courage to leave the safety of Mark’s SUV. I noticed a couple of the older, more mature looking teenagers were scoping out the Land Rover, which stuck out like a sore thumb in the parking lot filled with beaten-up older cars. I worried that someone might try to steal it while I was inside tutoring, but if they thought Mark’s car was an easy target, they were sadly mistaken.
Mark was a badass guy on all levels. Even when he wasn’t home, I felt safe in his house. He wasn’t around much, he worked a lot with Leo. When he was there, he was a major video game player. I’d spent many nights watching him play, glad for the company during my increasingly frequent bouts of insomnia. Mark was quiet, didn’t pry, and didn’t really answer any personal questions, but he wasn’t a bad guy. He was just one of those people that didn’t feel the need to fill silence with inane chatter. That’s not to say we never talked about ourselves, but he never mentioned his late wife. Still, I could see he carried a massive burden on his soul from her loss.
Part of me wanted to bug him about it, get him to talk about his pain, but I wasn’t going to push him. Lord knows, he respected my desire not to talk about my problems, and didn’t call me out on my increasingly odd middle of the night hobbies, thanks to my insomnia. See, when you only sleep four to five hours a night you find you have a lot of time to kill. In my case, I used it for canning fruits, vegetables, soups, dry mixes, etc. Thanks to Pintrest, I had a never-ending pool of inspiration for different canning projects. I know it sounds odd, but cooking soothed me.
