THE BIG MOVE (Miami Hearts Book 2) (14 page)

              Several customers browsing the selection of beverages in the refrigerators gave Jennet a baleful look, but she ignored them completely.

              I perked up considerably. “You’d talk to the owner about hiring me?”

              “Damn straight,” she said, nodding. “Whenever you had the time, you could come in before your shift starts at the club and work here. We get tips sometimes. They’re probably nowhere near what you’re used to making while dancing, but they sweeten the hourly rate here.”

              “That would be amazing,” I gushed, grabbing Jennet’s hands. “Would you really do that for me?”

              “Sol, honestly, you’d be doing me a personal favor if you came to work here,” she confessed. “I get so bored in the morning. I’d probably relate better to the customers and be a better Corn Queen if I had someone here who motivated me.”

              I gulped. “You know, there is one thing.”

              “What’s that?”

              “I really don’t want to wear the corn costume,” I said. “No offense.”

              “None taken, and the corn suit shall never be yours.” Jennet grinned. “That offer was never on the table. I will always be the Corn Queen. It’s hot, stinky, and messy, but God, I love it.”

              And that was all it took to start spending my mornings at the snack shop with Jennet. It was good to be around a friend, and better to be earning more money toward Antonio’s ransom. I learned very quickly how to prepare the shop’s menu of snacks, and with Jennet’s support, was soon even earning tips for being friendly, fast, and accurate.

              “You can sling hot dogs and nachos and snow cones with the best of them, Sol!” Jennet would holler in through the open doorway from time to time. It was also perfectly acceptable — according to Jennet — for the snack shop’s employees to fill their bellies out of the larders. It might not have been all the nutrients I needed, but I was more likely to eat if I didn’t have to pay for it. I put a little bit of weight on, but I’d needed to. The costumes I’d been wearing at the club had been fitting more loosely than I’d liked.

              One big relief at the snack shop had been the fact that my tips and pay were done in cash only — under the table, so to speak. I didn’t fill out an application, didn’t show my nonexistent forms of ID, didn’t have to make up a social security number. Jennet vouched for me, and that was apparently good enough for our employer.

              I wasn’t making an embarrassment of riches at the snack shop, but it was helping me to save more money, to get past the bumps of my essential expenses in order to pick away at the ransom.

              I split my time between the snack shop and the club as best I could. Another unforeseen perk was that all the extra labor was making me sleep at night again. As soon as I would get home from the club at the end of the night, having helped clean tables and sweep and wipe down every surface in preparation for the next day’s business, I would fall on the couch and fall asleep almost immediately. Most of the time, I wouldn’t even get into my pajamas. Slumber came too quickly.

              What started out as a grind was swiftly becoming a rhythm — a hectic rhythm, but something I could dance to, nonetheless. I enjoyed being around Jennet’s near-constant exuberance in the morning, and I enjoyed having someplace to go for the afternoon and night. Like it or not, the club had become a community. Seeing Parker each day gave me a small degree of comfort amid everything. She was solid, like a rock, and if she could keep going after all these years, so could I.

              But everything was thrown for a loop the night that Xander came back.

              I wasn’t sure how he found me. Maybe he asked around inside. Maybe Parker herself had pointed him in the right direction. But I was out back, getting some air in the fenced-in area where the dancers usually took smoke breaks. I’d just finished a long set of private dances for an apparent bachelor party, and I was out there to recoup my strength and energy before I was called back up to the stage. I was feeling good, counting the bills in my head over and over again, adding that to my total, and subtracting that to the ransom. Little by little, I was shuttling away that amount I was sure I’d never earn. It seemed like a miracle — if I hadn’t been doing all of the hard work that was seeing this whole thing to its fruition.

              The heavy door back in to the club heaved open, and I turned, smiling, to greet whichever dancer was about to join me in the starry night — well, what you could see of the stars. The orange of the lights from Miami made all but the brightest disappear, but I took comfort in the fact that I knew they were there. In the darkest parts of my journey to America with Antonio, the stars had shown so furiously in the night sky that they were vaguely terrifying.

              But instead of a fellow dancer to come keep my lonely vigil, it was Xander.

              He was looking as fine as ever, as if he’d simply stepped out of my memories and back into my present life. He lacked the suit I’d first seen him in, and he looked good in jeans and a dark polo shirt. His arms bulged with the muscles that had pinned me to the bed, and I shuddered at the sight of them gleaming in the light of the night sky.

              “What are you doing here?” I blurted out, unable to wait for him to say whatever piece he’d come to feed me. I was so taken aback that I didn’t know what I should be saying, what would be the right things to say. I was simply shocked. Shocked … and delighted.

              “I tried to stay away,” he said, shrugging and shoving his hands in his pockets. He looked down at the pavement briefly, but his eyes dragged his face back upward, back to lock gazes with me. I was fiercely glad to see him, no matter what he had to say.

              “Why did you feel like you had to stay away?” I asked, wincing a little at his confession. That hurt, but not badly enough to dim my happiness at seeing him. He licked his lips and I shivered, oblivious to the heavy heat of the humid dark.

              “Things are enormously complicated, Sol,” Xander sighed, staring at me. “More complicated than you know.”

              I swallowed. “Did you get back with your wife?” If I couldn’t have him, he deserved happiness. I couldn’t just figure to put him on a shelf, away from any possibility of being with another woman. Still, I dreaded the answer to my question.

              “No,” he said. “That’s one thing that isn’t complicated. We’re in the middle of a divorce. It’s nasty, predictably, but it’ll be over someday. That’s the only good thing about it. It has to eventually be over.”

              “I’m sorry,” I offered, but he shook his head.

              “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” he said. “It was something between me and her. Something that had nothing to do with you. It still doesn’t.”

              Those words stung a lot.

              “I know that it had nothing to do with me,” I said quietly. “I am just concerned about you.”

              “Are you?” he countered. Where was this anger coming from? Each misplayed chord in the symphony I’d wanted this reunion to be jarred against my nerves.

              “I am,” I insisted. “I’ve been thinking about you … too much.”

              “The feeling’s mutual,” he said, kicking at a pebble. It skittered atop the pavement, and somehow found its way through the chain-link fencing surrounding us.

              “I’m glad to see you,” I tried, looking for some way to salvage the sweetness I felt for him, to save this encounter from spiraling further downward. “I did miss you. I wanted you to come back here.”

              “So you could earn some more money?” he asked, seeming to casually watch me for my reaction, and suddenly I understood where all of this was coming from.

              “You think I played you for the money,” I said, realization dawning over me. “You think that was all this was.”

              “I was honest with you about how I felt about you,” he said. “I cared for you — I still do. Can you honestly tell me that you cared about me? That it wasn’t about the money?”

              “Like everyone else in this world, I need money to live,” I said, drawing myself up. “This is my job, Xander. This is what I do. When you met me, you understood that. When you hired me to escort you that day, to take your mind off of everything that was happening, you understood that it was business.”

              “So it was about the money,” he said, looking sick.

              “I can’t say that it wasn’t,” I said. “But I’d also be lying if I didn’t say that there wasn’t something else there. Something real. You made me feel … whole again. Like I’d been missing some piece of me this whole time. Does that make sense?”

              He nodded, looking grave. “That makes perfect sense. I felt the same way. I still feel that.”

              “But things are just as complicated for me as they are for you,” I said. “I have things in my life that I couldn’t begin to explain to you. Everything’s so tangled it feels like it would take months to get the knots out.”

              “Why can’t love be easy?” Xander blurted out, and my face went cold. I couldn’t help but look back on what Jennet had said that morning I’d blundered into the snack shop. Love. I loved Xander, and Xander loved me.

              This couldn’t be. This could never be.

              “I don’t know about that,” I said slowly, “but friendship sure is easy. I work at this snack shop in the mornings, but maybe I could call in sick and we could finish that bike tour we started. I’ve been wondering what other landmarks we missed out on. Or you could even come by the club and we could go at night together, just like we first met, only I bet the city lights would be beautiful.”

              “That’s the thing, Sol,” Xander said. “I don’t want things to be like they were when we first met. I want something more.”

              “More?” I echoed faintly, my head swimming.

              “I can’t treat this like just some business transaction,” he explained. “Sol, I want to explore a relationship with you that isn’t based on commerce or money. We have feelings for each other that neither one of us has been able to ignore. What’s to keep us from just embracing them? Why would we fight something this real?”

              I should’ve been honest with Xander from the beginning, but how was it my responsibility to inform a customer that I was taken, that I could go no further than a friendly business transaction because my heart was taken? How did dancers manage escorts in the same breath as boyfriends? I just didn’t think it was possible to maintain a healthy relationship while working at the club.

              I should’ve told him the truth about Antonio that night, right after Xander had told me everything about his wife. I would’ve never had a better chance than then, but I’d disliked the idea of bringing up my boyfriend while in bed with another man.

              I took a deep breath and a step toward Xander. If I’d missed my chance then, I’d just have to seize the opportunity now. Maybe there was just no good time or way to say this kind of thing.

              “I have to tell you,” I began. “I have a boyfriend. He’s in Cuba right now, but I love him very much and we’re working to get him back to Miami.” That was as close to the truth as I could get right now.

              “You have a boyfriend,” Xander repeated, dubious. “And how does he feel about you … doing what you do?”

              I swallowed. Antonio had never been happy about what I was doing, but it had been a necessary evil, a way to earn money. I doubted that I would ever tell him just how far it had gone, what I’d had to do to secure his release.

              That I’d enjoyed it.

              “He knows I do what I must,” I said finally.

              “You have to whore yourself?” Xander asked bitterly. “There’s nothing else in this entire city you can do?”

              The words hit my like a physical slap. Maybe if I’d finished school, maybe if I had the proper documents to live and work here, maybe if I’d never been born in Honduras, but someplace else — anywhere else — then maybe I’d have a chance to do something different, to be someone different.

              But this was my life. This was my life, and it was still better than what it would have been had I remained in Honduras. I didn’t even know if I’d still be living if I hadn’t left.

              I wanted to tell Xander these things, but I didn’t want to make excuses. Maybe it would be better if he believed that I was irredeemable, that I did all of this because I wanted to. Then perhaps he wouldn’t torture himself about this and pine away after me. We couldn’t be together. This would be the kindest thing I could do for him.

              I opened my mouth to tell him all of this, to set him free, but something entirely different came out.

              “I don’t know if this would matter to you, but I’d never escorted before I went out with you,” I said. “You were the first customer I served outside of the club — the first and only.”

              Xander considered this for a few long moments. “If it was all about the money, why am I the only one you’ve escorted?”

              “It just didn’t feel right after you,” I told him. “I felt something for you that I didn’t want to share with anyone else. I don’t know. That sounds so stupid. I can’t have feelings for you. I have a —”