"You look like a woman with a new man. Something in the eyes. My grandmother used to say a woman's eyes change when she's found the one who stays."
"Rosa, I came in for coffee."
"Coffee is a dollar twenty-five. The observation is free." She hands me the cup. "He better be good to you. If he's not, you send him to me. I'll sort him out."
"He's six-four and carries a knife."
"I have a rolling pin and seventy years of rage. He doesn't scare me."
I drink the coffee and leave the two dollars and walk to work. The restaurant is mine now, not officially, not yet, but Carmelo told me last night about buying it from Danny. The word "us" is still sitting in my chest where he put it. A restaurant. A base. A life built with someone instead of alone, built on purpose instead of whacked out on pills.
The lunch shift is easy because Devon is getting better in the kitchen. The new bartender is getting worse, but he's trying.
At two PM, I call Javi's mother and she invites me over. Says the police told her they found her son in a ditch and she hasn’t stopped crying since.
An hour later, Renzo drives me to her house in Cherry Hill. He waits in the car because I told him to, and I go to the door alone. She opens it and she's short and round with Javi's brown eyes, his grin buried somewhere in her face underneath the grief of the last three days. She invites me in, and we sit, drinking tea, dabbing at our eyes… just existing in the same space together, mourning the person we loved who was murdered without remorse.
I tell her. Not the details, not the network or the operatives or the trafficking. I tell her that her son was my best friend. That he walked me home every night because he wanted to. That he made me laugh when nothing else could. That he called the man I love The Rhino and refused to stop even when I told him to. That he died because he was standing near me and the wrong people came looking. That his death is the heaviest thing I've ever carried, and I will carry it for the rest of my life and I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.
She holds my hands while I talk, her grip strong the way Javi's hands were strong, and she doesn't ask questions I can't answer. We cry together on her couch for an hour while she shows me pictures of Javi as a kid, Javi at his communion, Javi behind his first bar. My chest splits open and heals and splits open again with every photograph.
When I leave, she hugs me hard. "He loved you," she says. "You know that, right? Not romantic. Not like that. He just loved you."
"I know. I loved him too."
“Please… come back soon. I have no other children and Javi meant everything to me. Please?”
I turn back and smile. “I will, I promise.”
I mean it. I don’t have a mother and she doesn’t have a son… maybe we can be there for each other.
Renzo drives me back without asking how it went. He puts his hand on my shoulder at a red light and squeezes once and that's enough.
At home, I shower again to wash the salt off my face, put on clean clothes, and sit on my bed thinking about Javi, about his mother, about the photographs, about The Rhino and the counting-is-math and the way he said "lock it twice" and meant "I love you."
Then I stop thinking about the dead and start thinking about the living.
I text Carmelo:Come over. Now.
He knocks at seven. I open the door and he's standing in the hallway in a black shirt and jeans with his knife on his belt andhis gray eyes on my face. He takes one step inside, I close the door behind him, and I lock it.
“Come.” I start walking towards the bedroom and smile when I hear his heavy footsteps behind me.
"Sit down," I say.
He sits on the edge of my bed, hands on his knees, eyes on me, waiting.
"I told you my rules tonight," I say. "So here they are. You don't move unless I tell you to move. You don't touch unless I tell you to touch. You don't speak unless I ask you a question. Your hands stay where I put them, your mouth stays where I put it, and you do what I say and take what I give you. If you need to stop, you say my name. My real name. That's the only word you get."
His jaw flexes as he tries to stifle a smirk. His hands tighten on his knees. I can see the pulse in his neck running fast and his chest expanding with a breath he's controlling, because he knows what's happening and his body is already there.
"Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good. Take off your shirt."