Chapter One
I watched him leave but I didn't cry. He'd been working up to it for three months. Since spring break. He'd gone to the Florida Keys and I'd stay home and I was not really sure what had happened there, but he'd been distant since.
I don't know why he got pissed when he left. Like he needed it to be bad between us in order to really believe it was over. Like he wanted an ugly breakup so he couldn't change his mind later.
So he couldn't back out on Ashley Hampton. I wondered how many people knew she was pregnant. I wondered if anyone knew her baby was Jackson's and not Mitch Stadler's. Well, I knew. And I was so calm about it. As I stood there, knowing he'd ruined his life. He was eighteen a month ago. The baby was due in six. And he still…even as he drove away…had never told me he'd slept with Ashley. She had rung me the prior week and told me she was pregnant, by Jackson, that he wasn't going to tell me but that she couldn't live with it anymore.
Even then I'd been calm.
"Okay," I'd said. "Thanks for calling."
It didn't mean much. The way I looked at it was Mexico vs. France. I'd broken up with Jackson Gauthier. I would be spending the summer at the villa with my family rather than in Paris with his. My brothers were 25 and 29 that summer, one finishing law school, one in the middle of med school. So it would be my mother, who was a stranger to me, but…a nice stranger, and my father, who really didn't care for me at all. The only sentiment he wasted on me was a sort of impatient exasperation. I didn't really know him either. Our maid and nanny, Milagros, or Millie, had retired last month. I would be in Mexico for three months, virtually alone.
I think my mother must have had a steamy affair in Mexico when she was young, because before she left she dragged me to our family practitioner and got me on Depo-Provera. I knew refusal to go would look like guilt; argument with either of them was futile.
"I don't doubt your values, dear," she had said. "But just in case." So I got a pap and a shot and we went to Mexico.
"For your birthday, we should have a fiesta," my mother said quietly.
"Don't be ridiculous, Carolyn," my dad cut in. "She'd never want a birthday party with her mother there."
"I wouldn't mind," I said, but was, as usual, ignored.
"You're always forcing yourself on her," he said.
"Well, at least I acknowledge that she's alive."
I sighed and stared out across the clouds as they bickered. The gentle hum of the jet engines was making me drowsy but I was too nauseated to sleep. I closed my eyes, tried valiantly not to, but I couldn't help it…I thought of Jackson.
He was beautiful. And I hadn't slept with him. Not because I was afraid, or wanted to wait, or…He was Christian. Deeply so. 'Sex before marriage is evil' and the whole nine…And I know it wasn't fake. Wasn't a front. He'd opened up to me many times in the warm afternoon light of his bedroom, or the dark of the basement on the leather couch, in the nearly-three years we'd been together, about his faith, about the way he felt in church and the way it seemed the Bible had been written just for him.
Yet he wasn't on fire with the Lord, a tacky evangelist, a Jesus Freak. His faith was beautiful. He'd been deeply religious all his life, took it very seriously and had an unwavering belief unusual in one so young.
So we didn't have sex. We fooled around sometimes, kissing, touching…but it made him feel guilty. Toward the end, before spring break, I went down on him.
But that's it. The Keys with Ashley Hampton, a few beers, and now a baby. For what was probably 30 seconds he couldn't remember or wanted to forget, he had given up everything he believed in, his family's trust, and me…Although I'm not sure how sorry he was about giving me up. I think it was getting old. I felt that way. He did, too, obviously.
He was more beautiful than I was. I knew that and I never pretended not to. He was too good looking. But then he'd have been too good looking for almost anyone. He was captain of the baseball team, starting quarterback on the football team, point guard for our state-champ basketball team. All the girls wanted him and he wanted nothing to do with them. I was 'one of the guys'—always have been. And we grew together. I remember the first time he kissed me. I was 10 feet off the ground. We both were. Neither of us knew what was happening. We were fifteen.
He had curly chestnut/auburn hair cut short and highlighted in the front, giant shoulders, brown eyes, and beautiful, straight teeth, a blinding smile. And he was so, so smart. And shy around all but his closest friends. Everyone at Gaskill Prep wanted to get close to him—girls wanted to be with him, boys wanted to be like him. He was so quiet everyone thought he was conceited, too good to talk to them…But he wasn't. Just shy.
Jackson Pierre Gauthier. I remember I used to just stare at him forever, loving every part of him. I'd wanted to sleep with him but hadn't pressed the issue out of respect for him and now I wished I had. Because I was almost eighteen. Almost a woman. And I was a virgin. And Ashley Hampton was so…It just wasn't right. Our first time was supposed to have been together. To have been phenomenally important. It was supposed to have meant something. And I couldn't imagine ever being close enough to any other person to…Well, I just couldn't imagine it.
Mexico was hot. And it was hot. It was not dry heat, either…a ninety-nine degree blanket of sheer humidity smothered me the moment I stepped off the plane, and I had to throw up immediately.
My parents had arranged for a car from the Villa to fetch us, and our things, and the driver was not Mexican. As I looked around, I saw that almost no one was Mexican. Tourists, all of them. Rich Americans. Pigs, like my family.
This driver…he climbed out. He was no Mexican, and he was no chauffeur, either. His eyes were beautiful, strange…green…or blue….or both. His hair was probably curly, cut too short to tell, brown with sandy highlights from the unrelenting sun. I stared unabashedly as he bent to load our bags into the shiny silver Lexus. His boxers were white, peeking out with some golden skin between the hem of the shirt and the waist of his pants. He wore blue jeans, baggy-ish, and a white cotton shirt that buttoned up the front, saying "Hermosa Beach Villa" across the back in an arc. I could scarcely breathe looking at him, the way he moved, the way the muscles in his arms played against one another as he grunted and heaved all our shit into the trunk. As he turned to face us, to get the doors for us, I read an embroidered patch on his breast pocket: 'Leon.'
