Aztec Sun Read online

  Rafael turned to Sandra again. Despite the lack of food in her body, her emotions were knotted up enough to convince her she wasn’t in any shape to consume a full meal. “I’ll have a spinach salad,” she requested, folding her menu shut.

  Rafael frowned slightly, then turned to the waiter. “A spinach salad and the stuffed shrimp,” he murmured. “I’ll have the grilled salmon and mixed vegetables.” He handed over the menus and eyed Sandra expectantly.

  She considered chiding him for having ordered an entree for her. But then she felt a genuine stab of hunger and realized that a shrimp dinner might be just what she wanted.

  “I’m supposed to be taking care of you,” she said with a smile. “Why are you taking care of me?”

  He returned her smile. “You look like you could use some food right now. And some wine.” He lifted his glass, studied the ruby wine in the muted dusk light, then tapped his glass against hers. “To Melanie.”

  “To Melanie,” Sandra said, feeling her eyes sting with tears. Mostly they were for Melanie, but she also felt like crying because Rafael was taking care of her. His tenderness moved her.

  They sipped their wine and lowered their glasses. Rafael gazed pensively out at the sunset, and Sandra took advantage of the opportunity to scrutinize him. What she saw was not just an independent producer, not just the Chicano role model she was supposed to profile for the Post, but a bereaved friend. A brother. A believer who turned to his church for solace. A man who seemed as much at home in this elegant Santa Monica restaurant as he did in the working-class grunge of Cesar’s, a man who could easily afford the astronomical prices on this restaurant’s menu, who wasn’t fazed by the spectacular view or the exquisite silver and china place settings—but also a man who might have an Aztec sun tattooed on his arm, who might have committed acts not unlike those that had landed his brother in jail.

  He didn’t stop staring at the sunset until the waiter returned with their salads. The arrival of food broke whatever dismal spell he’d been under, and he studied Sandra with the same intensity as he had the sunset. “Is this like your parents’ restaurant?” he asked.

  He had to know it wasn’t. No Mexican restaurant, no matter where it was located, would bother with crystal wine glasses and porcelain dishes. He had asked only to get a conversation going. This, too, was a side of Rafael Sandra had never seen before. Usually she was the one posing the questions while he remained taciturn and evasive.

  She appreciated his effort more than she would ever let on. “It’s nothing at all like this. Alessandra’s is very down-to-earth. Terra-cotta tile on the floor, bright wall paintings, potted cacti and shellacked gourds hanging from the ceiling. It’s a folksy type of place.”

  “How did your parents feel when you told them you were going to be a reporter?”

  She realized the risk he was taking by raising the subject of her work, and she was careful to keep the discussion on safe ground. “My father was bummed out, I think,” she said. “He wanted me to be a lawyer. My mother didn’t care. She still gets excited whenever she sees my name in print. As for my grandmother...” Sandra shook her head and laughed. “She just wishes I’d get married. ‘Be a reporter if you must,’ she says, ‘but don’t scare any nice men away.’”

  Rafael grinned, although his eyes remained dark and enigmatic. “Have you scared many men away?”

  “A couple,” she confessed, surprised that she felt comfortable discussing this with Rafael. “One of them wanted me to leave California and move to Boston with him when he started law school. But this is my home, where my family is.”

  “And the others?”

  “One other,” she told him. “He didn’t like my ambition. I think he would have preferred if I’d quit my job and devoted myself fully to him. He was always talking about how he earned plenty enough and if we got married we wouldn’t need my income—as if income was the only reason I was a reporter.”

  “He sounds unworthy of you,” Rafael remarked before digging into his salad.

  Sandra had wanted to believe that herself. But when she’d passed her thirtieth birthday and found herself single and unattached, she’d entertained doubts. She’d smothered them and kept on, indulging her ambition because it had always been a part of her, and because nothing—not even a man with whom she’d had a several-year love affair—satisfied her in quite the same way. “I didn’t exactly set out to become a reporter. But at the Berkeley Girls School... The boarding students had a lot more flexibility in what extracurricular activities they could participate in. I was a day student and I had to be home by a certain time, to help out at the restaurant and do my homework and all that. The school newspaper fit into my schedule, so I started writing for it.”

  “And you loved it?”

  She smiled sheepishly. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  A deceptively simple question. Sandra considered her answer as she ate her salad. “The standard line is that I wanted to expose the bad guys and right wrongs. But that’s only part of it.” She poked at a spinach leaf with the tines of her fork, then forced herself to look Rafael squarely in the eye. “At the Berkeley School, my closest friends were the girls I worked with on the newspaper staff. I still keep in touch with them. Laurel—my best friend from high school—is a journalist, too. But all of them were stubborn and independent-minded. They followed the beat of their own drummers.:

  “So do you,” Rafael noted.

  Sandra wasn’t so sure of that. If she followed her own drummer, she would have told Flannagan where to get off long ago, and quit her job on principle.

  And then where would she be?

  “Sometimes,” she confessed, “I think I take after my mother. I love what I do, but I think the best part is seeing my name in print. Even now, after all these years... God, it’s great.” She fell silent when the waiter arrived to clear away their salads and deliver their entrees. Once she and Rafael were alone again, she asked, “Don’t you love seeing your name up there on the big screen? Produced by Rafael Perez.”

  An ironic smile crossed his lips. “You’ve never seen an Aztec Sun movie.”

  Sandra lowered her eyes, embarrassed by the truth. “I’m afraid not.”

  He forgave her with a wave of his hand. “I don’t like Aztec Sun movies much, either. Too graphic.” He sipped his wine, watching her over the rim of his glass. “Nowhere on my movies does it say Rafael Perez. I have no interest in seeing my name in print.”

  A spark of journalistic curiosity glimmered inside Sandra. Dozens of questions about his reticence took shape in her mind. But she quickly extinguished them. She wasn’t a reporter tonight. “If you could be successful making any other kind of movie,” she asked, “would you make less gory ones?”

  “I wouldn’t know how.” He sliced into his salmon. “I’m not an artist with a film-school degree. I started Aztec Sun to make money.”

  “Is making money that important a goal?”

  His hands grew still, gripping his fork and knife. He studied her carefully, his expression layered in skepticism. “Am I going to read this in tomorrow’s Post?”

  “No. I swear, Rafael.” She held her hand up as if taking a solemn oath.

  He stared at her for a moment longer, assessing, analyzing. Then he relented. “Yes,” he said. “Making money is important.”

  “You don’t seem like a materialistic kind of guy.”

  “I’m not materialistic. But money...” He took a bite, chewed slowly, swallowed. “You can’t understand. You grew up rich.”

  “We weren’t rich,” she argued. “We were just barely middle class.”

  “Middle class enough to go to a private school.”

  “On a scholarship. And my parents sacrificed a great deal—”

  “My mother sacrificed so I could wear shoes without holes in them.” There was no accusation in his voice. No attack. His low, even tone only made the inequity between their backgrounds seem that much more unfair. “I make movies to make money. It
has nothing to do with fame or creativity or righting wrongs. It’s about knowing that when I wear out a pair of shoes I can go into a store and buy a new pair without having to rob a bank first.”

  Or deal drugs, she thought, picturing Rafael’s brother in prison.

  “You’re a smart woman, Sandra,” he said, his eyes hypnotically dark. “But there are things you will never understand.”

  She wanted to object, to remind him that a person didn’t have to grow up in poverty to know how dreadful poverty was, that a person didn’t have to die of a drug overdose to know that drugs could kill. But she held her words. The last thing she wanted was to get into an argument with Rafael about whether one had to suffer to understand suffering.

  Rafael’s suffering had toughened him in a positive way. Ricardo’s had affected him negatively. But there was a third Perez, someone who had somehow managed to discover that the world offered more than two choices. “I like your sister,” said Sandra.

  Rafael shot Sandra a wary look.

  “Come on, Rafael—I’m not a reporter now, okay? Trust me.”

  “Rosa does not appear in your story.”

  “All I said was that I like her. I wish we could have spent more time with her.”

  “It wasn’t a social call.”

  His protectiveness toward his sister might have put Sandra off, but in fact she found it kind of amusing, given how little protection Rosa needed from Rafael or anyone else. “I thought she was delightful, full of life and optimism. I can see why Diego was sweet on her.”

  Rafael smiled grudgingly. “Everybody in our old neighborhood was sweet on her. But Diego more than the rest.”

  “I got the feeling he still hasn’t forgiven you for standing between him and Rosa.”

  “What he doesn’t forgive me for is beating the shit out of him.”

  “You really beat him up?”

  “He deserved every blow.” Rafael drained his wine glass with a certain finality. Sandra sensed that that particular subject was closed.

  The sun vanished below the horizon, dragging the last of the daylight behind it. The sky turned a lush blue, making the candle seem brighter in their private dining room.

  Sandra lowered her fork. She’d managed to eat only half her dinner, but she was full. She didn’t want to leave this haven, though. She didn’t want to leave the safe seclusion of it, the intimacy, the luxury. Once she and Rafael left, they would have to contend with Melanie’s death, Sandra’s job and Rafael’s future.

  But they couldn’t hide forever in the quiet room above the ocean. When the waiter returned and asked if they wanted coffee or dessert, Sandra declined. To hide was cowardly, and to delay saying good-bye to Rafael would only make her wish that things could be different between them, that they could always trust and rely on each other the way they had during the past few hours.

  Before leaving the room Rafael put on his sunglasses again. She would have found the sight of him wearing shades at this hour comical if he didn’t look so damned sexy in them.

  Once Rafael had signed the bill, he and Sandra ducked discreetly out of the restaurant. The air had cooled off during their dinner, and Sandra was reluctant to get into the car. Rafael seemed reluctant, too. As they ambled across the parking lot he took her hand. His clasp seemed less desperate than it had been that afternoon in the church, when his strong fingers had clenched around hers as if he were drowning and she were a lifeline.

  Now his grip was relaxed, but not casual. Sandra was coming to realize that nothing about Rafael, not his black denim jeans nor his sporty sunglasses nor the defiant length of his hair, was casual. Even in his loosest gestures he was intense, alert, the sleek, fierce puma she’d thought of the first time she’d laid eyes on him.

  He didn’t release her hand as he unlocked the passenger door of his Thunderbird. Instead of opening the door, he rotated her to face him, then pulled off his sunglasses so he could see her better in the evening shadows.

  At first she thought he was going to kiss her, but he didn’t. He only gazed down into her face, lingering for a moment on her mouth before he lifted his eyes to meet hers. “Thank you,” he murmured.

  She suspected he didn’t thank people often. In truth, she suspected that he didn’t often have a reason to give thanks. What he had he got for himself.

  She wasn’t sure what she might have done that deserved his thanks. Eat more food than she expected? Drink wine with him? Run at the mouth about her first taste of journalism as a teenager?

  She hadn’t taken care of him any more than he’d taken care of her. “Don’t thank me,” she said.

  He gave her a bittersweet smile. “You’ve been good to me. Don’t give me a hard time now.”

  She shared his smile. “All right, then,” she conceded, doing her best to look resigned. “You’re welcome.”

  He opened his mouth, but then shut it without speaking. His lips twisted once more in a wry, wistful smile, and he again seemed on the verge of kissing her. If he did she wouldn’t mind. It wouldn’t be a kiss of anger like the last time. It would be a kiss of caring.

  But he straightened up before the impulse could overtake him, and helped her into the seat. He remained silent when he joined her in the car. The engine roared to life and he steered out onto Route One, heading for the freeway that would take them back to Aztec Sun.

  She sat beside him, folding and unfolding her hands in her lap, crossing and uncrossing her ankles. For all the chatting they’d indulged in at the restaurant, she knew certain vital things had gone unsaid—but she wasn’t sure what they were. If she didn’t figure them out soon, and give voice to them, it would be too late. She and Rafael would be back at the studio, back at her car, and she would have to go home and leave him to face his sadness alone.

  Frustration built inside her. Was there a way to admit she wasn’t ready to say good-night to him? A way that wouldn’t imply more than she intended? Were there words to express the sorrow she felt not just at Melanie’s death but at the prospect of losing the rapport she and Rafael had established?

  If there were, she couldn’t find them. The drive to East L.A. was too short; suddenly there they were at the studio.

  A police officer had replaced the studio guard at the gate, but he let Rafael drive through without a hassle. The grounds looked pathetically vacant; a police cruiser, Sandra’s sedan and Melanie’s Range Rover were the only cars in the lot.

  Rafael pulled his Thunderbird into the space next to Sandra’s car and turned off the engine. Mercury lamps flooded the lot with an eerie pink light that etched the edges of his face in gold.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked.

  A short, unpersuasive laugh was his only response. And then: “Will you be all right?”

  “Of course,” she said too quickly. Her eyes suddenly blurred with tears again, tears for the giggly, bubbly actress who had died too young, for no good reason.

  Sandra averted her face, hoping Rafael wouldn’t notice her tears. He slid his thumb under her chin and steered her back to him. Seeing the streaks of moisture darting down her cheeks, he shook his head. “Life stinks, doesn’t it.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Sometimes.” The wobble in her voice mortified her. Her tears mortified her even more. When Rafael reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, she accepted it with gratitude, using it to hide behind as she dabbed at her eyes. “She had so much going for her, Rafael. Why would a woman like that do what she did?”

  “Why does anyone?”

  “Some people have nothing better in their lives,” she said, her words slightly muffled by the soft blue linen of his handkerchief. “She had everything. She was beautiful, she was talented—”

  “She was bored. She was spoiled. She was looking for excitement. She wanted her life to be the opposite of Kansas.”

  Sandra nodded, swabbed her cheeks once more and handed the handkerchief back to him.

  He must have seen doubt and confusion in her face, because he
spoke again, obviously understanding Melanie better than Sandra could ever hope to. “She was insecure. She never trusted herself. She thought that to have her heart pounding in her throat was the same thing as joy.” He reached across the gear stick and gently wiped a stray tear from the Sandra’s chin. “How talented she was we’ll never know. As far as her beauty... she was beautiful only to people who think a pale Anglo face with a tiny nose can be beautiful. She was never beautiful like you.”

  He traced his finger the along the edge of her jaw, a light, seductive stroke. The air inside the car grew unnaturally still, so still she could hear the faint whisper of his callused fingertip against her skin. If her heart was pounding in her throat, it wasn’t the same thing as joy—although joy was a part of it. Joy and alarm and expectation.

  She waited with a sense of inevitability as Rafael leaned across the console and brushed his lips over hers. “Sometimes,” he said, his voice a gentle rasp like the texture of his fingers on the sensitive underside of her chin, “I’m sure you’ll be my downfall. But tonight, Sandra Garcia, I believe you could save me.”

  He kissed her again, his mouth warm and yearning against hers. Then he withdrew and turned to stare at the windshield. “You don’t want this,” he muttered.

  She wasn’t sure whether he was announcing a fact or merely trying to convince himself. In either case, he hadn’t convinced her. “How do you know that?” she asked.

  He shot her a quick look. “You have tears rolling down your cheeks.”

  “For Melanie.”

  “So. Go home and cry.”

  “I’d rather see you cry, Rafael. You need to cry more than I do.”

  He snorted. Of course he would never cry. He was a tough hombre.

  “If you want me to go, I’ll go,” she said, deciding to goad some sort of reaction from him—even if he chose to push her away. The decision had to be his.

  He turned back to her, and if she were given to fantasy she would interpret the glistening in his eyes as tears, real hombre tears. “I want you to stay,” he said.