Page 46 of The Crush
My father switches his attention back to Daniel, looking at him as if he’s an enemy instead of practically family. To be fair, I can’t really tell the difference right now either.
“Someone better start talking,” my father states, still secure in the knowledge that someonewillbend to his request even if I haven’t yet.
“Aarón started it,” Gabe offers. “Daniel was only defending—”
“Daniel has been sneaking around with Isa,” Eli cuts in. “That’s where she was last weekend.”
“Jesus, Eli,” Gabe spits. “Would you remove your head from Aarón’s ass before you speak foronce? Are you going to just be his sidekick yourwholelife? What is even in it for you?”
Eli looks down. If he has an answer, he doesn’t offer it.
“Last weekend? When you went to San Antonio?” my father asks me, looking like he’s going to have a stroke as he waits for me to deny it. “You were withhim? He had you lie to us?”
“Austin, actually,” I say to him, a correction, but not the one he’s hoping for. “And he didn’ttellme to do anything. I wanted to go. It wasmydecision to lie.”
Daniel turns slightly to face me, and I can see how much he’s struggling with this. “Don’t—”
I press my head against his shoulder, and my voice when I respond is so low that if I hadn’t spent so much time whispering to him, I wouldn’t be so sure he could hear it. “It has to be me. They’ll never accept it otherwise. You have to let me do this.”
I don’t give him time to object again before I step a little farther out from behind him. He tenses as I do, his left hand closing over my right where it falls to my side.
“Daniel.” Each word my father utters next comes out like its own sentence. “Remove your hand from my daughter.”
Daniel glances at him then back at me, all the things he’d undoubtedly like to say to my father held back as he instead tightens his grip on my hand. He offers me a nearly imperceptible nod to show that he agrees to what I’m asking of him. Albeit reluctantly.
It makes me braver knowing that he would rather fight. For this. For me. I hope it stays that way.
You don’t fight for things you’d be okay with losing.
Thirty-Six
Daniel
When I first joined the DEA and started going on raids, thinking about the potential outcome to my life was unavoidable. A nagging thought in the back of my head that I could charge through a door and have to be carried back out, that I could be one of the ones who got themselves hurt, got themselves killed, got in too deep and never came back up.
I kept thinking it’d get easier the more nights I spent on a stakeout instead of asleep in my bed. That the sheer volume of close calls would scrape my nerves so raw that desensitization would set in, that fear would become as familiar a routine to me as almost dying in the dark.
Everything always seemed to become less black and white in the dark. Who was good and who was bad. Who meant you harm and who was simply in the wrong place at the right time. Never got much easier to figure out in the morning.
The truth is, I was often more afraid of who I’d end up killing than who might kill me. Of what would be left behind when the gunfire ended more than what would happen when it started.
This feels like that, even though I know it isn’t.
Calm down. Calm down.
Adrenaline is coursing through my system at a fevered pace as I meet her father’s eyes. My head is pounding, my senses so heightened that every sound is exaggerated, amplified by every set of eyes that’s on us.
There’s that weight at my hip again, but I know if I reach for it, it’ll be Isabel’s hand and not my gun. Part of me still wants to try.
“Enough.” Eva’s voice rings out, and her head turns to stare down first her husband and then her children, including me, before spreading it out to the rest of the congregation. Suddenly, people seem to have different places to be even if they’re all going to be talking about the same thing once they get there. There won’t be a phone on its hook in all of La Orilla, and anyone who wasn’t at mass today will be wishing they had been by Sunday supper.
“We can discuss this athome,” Eva directs, reminding me of the way my mamá used to call order to chaos. “Tadeo, Danny, you can come too—”
“Absolutelynot,” Isabel’s father seethes as he points a finger in my direction. “I am not lettinghiminto my house.”
Of all the ways for them to have found out about this, the current scenario has to be one of the worst. Though now I’m struggling to think of why I thought it could go any other way.
“Aarón, be reasonab—”
