Sex with Pablo wasn’t romantic. It was good, but not romantic. He only kissed me before he bit my lips, he only ran his fingers through my hair before he pulled it, only caressed my skin before digging his fingers into my flesh, only stroked my face before he wrapped his hand around my neck.

It wasn’t romantic, but it wasn’t violent. Even in his unhinged passion, he was gentle. His bites were mere nibbles, the scratches were just lustful twitches darting up his fingers, and the choking only left me breathless in the best way possible.

The passionate fire burning within him felt more like a cloud of steam than an open flame, and if I ever let out a pained yelp in between two lascivious moans, he’d pause and ask if I was okay.

“Don’t stop,” I’d breathe.

Pablo still seemed to care about me, almost as much as he did when I still had clothes on. I did notice a shift in Pablo’s demeanor the very second he set his eyes on my naked body. As soon as I’d dropped my dress, blood had drained from his reddened cheeks and rushed down somewhere else. A smirk tugged at the corner of his eyes, the tip of his tongue brushed against his lips, and his lust turned into hunger.

But Pablo was still miles away from the sex-crazed freak Andrea had described to me a few days ago. I wondered if he was holding back, just because it was me. Maybe this was his idea of romance, and when you think of it, a slap on the ass must feel like a loving gesture when compared to snorting a line of coke off of a whore’s bikini.

To me, it didn’t feel like we were making love. This was just a quick fuck. That was fine with me, because in my mind, Pablo and I weren’t in love. We were in an arrangement, where we tolerated each other’s presence and happened to like each other’s bodies. The sex was just a bonus, a little distraction that helped us blow off some steam.

He blessed my neck with a hundred longing kisses. Pressing his chest against my bare breasts, he drew out my last breath. His left thumb dug into my flesh as he pinned me down to the bed, while his other hand slipped under the small of my back and brought our union to a heavenly angle.

My lustful breaths turned to moans, to screams, then back to shaky whimpers as he brought me to an orgasm and then a little further.

My knees buckled and spread apart. My back arched, my hips squirmed, my toes curled. My whole body moved like waves in the ocean, waves that came crashing on a shore of satin sheets.

“Oh my god,” I said, my voice hoarse and out of breath.

“Don’t flatter me,” he answered, and he winked. “I am just a simple mortal.”

He let out a low groan as he pulled out, and wiped his sticky hand on the curve of my hip.

“Fuck, that was good,” he panted as he sat on the edge of the bed, wiping sweat off his chest with a corner of my sheets. “Do you need anything? Paper towels? Morning-after pill?”

“How charming,” I muttered as I slipped my fingers between my still-throbbing thighs.

“I’m joking,” he chortled, dimples digging into his cheek. “I’ll get you some water.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, and sank a little into the soft mattress.

I scrunched my nose when Pablo walked out of the bathroom, wearing nothing but my last clean bath towel wrapped around his waist, and a pair of white tennis socks that had been banned from the books of good taste at some point back in the late eighties.

“Did you wear those while we had sex?” I winced.

“If you’re complaining about my socks, it’s because you’ve never seen my feet,” he shrugged.

“Ew, gross. You’re lucky I came,” I chuckled, while warm tingles and soft spasms still ran through my body.

It wasn’t love, but it was good enough.

•••

The higher you fly, the harder you fall, they say. The night had been idyllic, but the morning that followed was a whole other day.

Pablo shoved his phone in between my hands, and my heart dropped in my chest.

“Hold this,” he said.

I froze for a second, and stared at its dark screen. My fingers stayed open, as if they didn’t dare wrap any tighter around this cursed little object.

“Wh– what do you want me to do with it,” I stuttered.

“Open Google Maps or something,” he grunted as he hoisted himself into the driver’s seat of his ungodly large pick-up truck. “Juan wants us to meet him by some river and I have no idea how to get there.”

“What for?”

“To drink,” he sighed as he crammed the key into the ignition. “Duh.”

I barely had time to nod before Pablo slammed his foot down on the gas pedal and floored it down the driveway, spraying the courtyard with a rain of gravel. I hastily buckled my seatbelt, and held on tight to my seat.

“Pull up the map, Gordita,” he sighed. “Juan sent me the location on Whatsapp.”

I coughed and tried to clear my choked-up throat.

“How do I unlock it?” I asked.

“You don’t know the code? It’s 42069.”

“How mature,” I sighed and rolled my eyes.

“Wait until you find out the password to my email,” he said as he turned to me with a boyish grin. “It’s Jungle Jew with two capital J’s, dollar sign, 666.”

“Oh,” I mumbled.

“I think it’s funny,” he shrugged. “Why aren’t you laughing? Are you hungover or something?”

“Yeah,” I answered curtly, as I scrolled past a bunch of party-themed gifs he and Juan had been sending each other.

Pablo swerved down the road like he owned it, just like he owned the rest of the entire world. On the two occasions he had to brake to stop us from crashing head-on into a colorful school bus, I almost snapped my neck.

“Sorry, you should have turned right at the last one,” I stammered. “No, wait– left.”

“For God’s sake, Gordita,” groaned Pablo. “How hard is it to use a fucking SatNav?”

I gulped, and wiped the sweat from my brow. The only thing more unsettling than Pablo’s driving was the fact that I was holding his unlocked phone in my hand. Last time that happened, I’d almost died.

“What is wrong with you today, Gordita? Do you know how to use a phone? Is this about 5G waves?” he scowled.

“No, that’s...that was made up,” I said, and blinked.

“Right, yeah,” he mumbled. “I get confused sometimes.”

I felt dizzy, and sick. Like my stomach was in my throat, and I was going to throw it up over the dashboard any second. And somehow, the feeling only got worse when Pablo’s joyride stopped. He pulled into a gas station and got down from the car.

“Wait here,” he said. “I just need to pick up some beers.”

And that’s the story of how I found myself sitting alone in my kidnapper’s car, with his phone in my hands and his car keys still in the ignition, with a thousand ways out of the Hell he’d dragged me into, and no willpower to try out a single one.

Running away was the reasonable choice, the logical thing which any sane person would have done. And I did the exact opposite. I stayed put, and clenched my jaw. I locked the phone, settled it on my lap, and kept on staring at the screen even once it had turned pitch black.

Something inside me screamed ′Do it, do it now’. I could call 911. Lock the doors. Or I could steal the car, drive away. I could even send an email, for god’s sake.

But I didn’t, because it was too dangerous, and there’d be no reward. All I’d get to do is to go home to my mother, and bear with her hateful words and hoarding tendencies while I struggled to find a new job, a new flat, and build myself yet another pointless life. I’d probably die of boredom after a while, and Ana would have to grieve me again for a second time.

I took a deep breath, and flicked away the tear that had gathered at the corner of my eye. I couldn’t break down. Not here, not now, not because of something as stupid as a phone. I counted to four, and exhaled. My eyes were still riveted to the phone. Maybe I should have called someone, or even just sent an email to Ana. But Pablo could be back any second now, and it wasn’t worth the risk. It was best to let Sarah rest in peace.

Four seconds fell nothing short of eternity, and each of my shaky breaths turned the car into a pit of sweltering heat. Minutes passed and felt like hours, and my heart still thumped in my chest as if I was standing on the edge of a precipice.

“Sorry I took so long,” Pablo said as he jumped back into the car.

“Are you testing me?” I blurted out.

He slowly turned to me, and took a second to look into my reddened eyes, and down at the phone I held in my trembling hands.

“Why?” he asked calmly. “Do I need to?”

His tone was cold, calculating, and devoid of empathy. This wasn’t love, and it never would be.

The silence that ensued and followed us until the end of the trip was suffocating. If this was a test, I hadn’t failed it, but I hadn’t passed it either. I’d gotten a C-, at best. It was an overwhelming relief to finally get out of the car, and to give the phone back to Pablo.

The river was beautiful. Its water was clear, and an unbelievable shade of blue that turned mint green whenever the Sun hid behind a cloud. It was a quiet place, filled with bright swarms of butterflies and quiet waterfalls, coddled by sugarloaf-shaped mountains and the lush trees that rolled down their flanks. It would have felt like a taste of Heaven, had it not been populated by Hell’s most irritating demons.

We were greeted by Oscar and Gustavo, while Juan and Manée paddled in a shallow part of the river, and Andrea sat on the trunk of a sunken tree, admiring the large orange butterfly that had settled on the tip of her finger.

“I feel like a Disney Princess,” she gloated.

“Eat it!” Juan screeched, jumping up and down like an enraged chimp.

“No!” she protested, cupping her hand around the butterfly. “It’s so cute.”

“Are you kidding?” he answered. “It looks like a Dorito. Give me five bucks and I’ll eat it.”

I grabbed a cold beer from the ice-filled cargo bed of one of the pick-up trucks parked on the riverbank. I didn’t usually drink so early in the day, especially not in the middle of the week, because that was something my mother did. But thank God, I didn’t know what time it was, or which day, or even which month of the year.

Pablo seemed to care about the ethics of drinking just about as much as he cared about anything else. He chose to chug tequila straight from the bottle and washed it down by biting into a slice of lime.

“Aren’t you going for a swim?” Gustavo asked me.

“I didn’t bring a bathing suit,” I mumbled, as I looked for a flat rock to sit on.

“Why not?” said Pablo, who was already knee-deep in the water. “I told you we were going to the river.”

“Yeah, but I was already in the car.”

“You could go skinny dipping,” Juan shrugged.

“We can go back and get you one,” sighed Pablo. “It’s not that far. Are you coming?”

I watched him stumble out of the river, wiping leftover tequila that dribbled from the corner of his lips.

“It’s fine, Pablo, we’re already here,” I muttered.

He rolled his eyes, and made his way back to the car anyway. I hoped for his sake and anyone else he met that his drunken swerving would cancel out his reckless driving.

“Alright,” he groaned. “I’ll go on my own, I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Wow,” whistled Juan as he watched him drive away. “He really wants to see you in a bikini, Emily Smith.”

“Who doesn’t?” giggled Andrea. “I mean, with that ass–”

I nervously tugged on the bottom of my dress. Ever since I’d become Emilia Kovacs, I’d never felt this much like Sarah Kennedy. An anxious mess with shaky fingers, who didn’t know how to use a SatNav. A lonely girl trapped in a world she didn’t belong in, who worried about whether she was acting like her mother and how big her thighs looked when she sat down.

Emilia was a stranger. A sulfurous brunette with expensive clothes and fancy jewelry, who spent her days by the pool or with her friends Mafer and Big Puppy, and spent her nights at frivolous parties. A clever girl who held her head up high, pretended she was an international spy and could stand up to John Glade. The one and only woman who made Pablo happy.

In a desperate attempt to fit in and slip back into Emilia’s skin, I tried to make some small talk.

“So, isn’t Hernan coming?” I asked.

“Why, did you want him to?” sneered Manée.

No, not really. I kept my mouth shut and stared at my feet. I swirled around the last drops of beer left in my can, and gave up on the idea of a casual conversation.

I walked back to the pick-up truck to grab another beer. Oscar was leaning against the cargo bed, a drink in one hand and a joint in the other.

“Is everything okay with Pablo?” he asked quietly. “You guys seem kind of off today.”

“We’re fine,” I lied. “I just didn’t really want to get in the car. I don’t think he’s in shape to drive. Not that he should be allowed behind a wheel when sober anyway.”

“Don’t feel like gambling with your life today, eh?”

“Let’s just say I think I have better chances of survival here, with a bunch of people who want to murder me,” I muttered under my breath.

“Murder you?” he chuckled uncomfortably. “Why would anyone want to murder you?”

There was a tremble in his voice, a tension in his jaw and a thin crease across his forehead that told me something wasn’t right. Oscar stared at the floor, nervously rolling the joint between his fingers, aching for another puff.

“I don’t know, Oscar,” I murmured. “You tell me.”

He rubbed the palm of his hand down the side of his cheek, and looked up at me with sorry eyes. Nothing could have expressed his shame and regret any clearer than the blank look on his face.

“Fuck. I can’t lie to you,” he mumbled.

He glanced over at the others, to check if they were far enough, and then turned back to me. He offered me the joint, which I declined with a swift wave of the hand.

“Listen, Em, I don’t know what he’s told you,” he whispered. “But just know that I won’t do it. No one will. Not anymore.”

“Are you sure?” I muttered, and took a large gulp of beer.

“I can’t do this to Pablo,” he murmured. “I owe him too much. We all do. None of us would be here if not for him.”

“Would you kill me if he didn’t love me?”

“If he didn’t love you, he would have done it himself.”

In the silence that followed his words, I snatched the joint from between his fingers and brought it to my lips.

“I don’t want you to have to live in fear of us, Emilia,” he said softly. “I think the thing Pablo was referring to happened before we met you. And now that we know you, things have changed. You’re more– let’s say, cooperative than we thought you would be. You’re everything he said you were, basically, which was admittedly hard to believe. And you guys really like each other, so, you know, who are we to take that away from him.”

“Then, what happens if we’re... off?” I muttered.

“There’ll always be some ups and downs,” he shrugged. “Like in any relationship.”

“I just wish there was a bit of a middle ground between the ups and the downs,” I sighed. “Sometimes it’s my fault, and sometimes it’s his, but it’s like we’re on a rollercoaster, and not the fun kind. More like the Euthanasia kind. It gives me some serious whiplash.”

“Go easy on him, Em,” answered Oscar. “He’s had a hard life, you know.”

Faced with a wall of silence and a deadly glare, he continued.

“Pablo and I, we grew up about an hour away from the capital, in a small house with a tin roof. We had a sister, she died of pneumonia when she was four. Pablo remembers her, I don’t. And our Dad was a triple threat, he cheated, he drank and he gambled. Sometimes he cheated when he gambled while drunk, and when he’d get caught he’d get beat up. Then he’d crawl home and find someone to hit, usually my Mom, sometimes Pablo, when he got in the way.”

I took another puff from the joint. I could already feel the first hit, and once I exhaled a thick cloud of smoke, I could breathe a little better.

“One night, he was especially mad, and probably especially drunk,” he recalled. “He broke my Mom’s arm, then he turned to me, and I was just a kid. Maybe ten or eleven, with skinny arms, and skinny legs. Not very good at running. But I’d never been hit. Pablo never let him. He grabbed me by the neck, held me up against a wall. That’s when Pablo shot him. In the stomach, with the shotgun we used to scare the coyotes away. He called a neighbor to drive me and my Mom to the hospital, and he stayed with my Dad. When we got home the next morning they were both gone.”

“Did he kill him?”

Oscar stared in the distance, and nodded silently.

“They found bits of my Dad in a landfill,” he mumbled. “Chopped up and thrown in a bunch of trash bags. They couldn’t find all of them. We all knew it was Pablo. The cops didn’t bother to look for him, but the neighbors did. They never found him.”

I stood still, and looked at him. Dismembering a family member was an unexpected twist to this sob story, and I wondered for a second if Oscar was really trying to humanize his brother, or if this was a warning meant to scare me away.

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

“Money started showing up on our doorstep a few times a year, and that got me through high school. I knew it was from him, but my Mom was convinced they were gifts from God. She found this weird church that wound up her head, and I’m pretty certain she used to dig into my Dad’s stash of booze when I wasn’t looking. She blamed Pablo for everything, for killing our Dad and abandoning us. She said he’d crawled back to Hell, and the money was God’s apology for letting her give birth to a demon. She hated him. She still does. She calls him twice a year for Christmas and Easter to remind him.”

When I tried to picture Pablo’s mother, all I could see was my own. Pieces of her, like shards of a broken mirror I couldn’t put back together. A hollow cheek, two tired blue eyes, chapped lips twisted with anger. Her thin, bony hands, the deep line that dug in her forehead when she frowned, the pale lavender tone of her skin just beneath her eyes.

If I had known the last time I saw her would be the last time ever, perhaps I would have taken a better look at her face, and perhaps I would have still remembered it.

“Five years later Pablo turned up with a motorbike and designer clothes,” Oscar continued. “He said he got a job on a cattle farm and was making good money. My Mom told him to take me with him and get me a job and he said no.”

“Because he wasn’t working on a cattle farm,” I whispered.

“Yeah. I knew he was lying. My Mom didn’t. You get paid well enough on cattle farms, but it’s not ‘buy yourself a bunch of Gucci belts and pay for your brother’s college’ kind of money.”

“You went to college?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t interested but he insisted. I chose psychology because that’s where the girls were,” he chuckled. “He showed up for my graduation, bought me a bunch of drinks and ’fessed up about what he’d been doing. He was a hitman for one of Hernan’s men, at first, then he started working for the big guy himself. By the time we met again, he’d climbed up a few ranks already. He told me it messed him up, that he had to shoot people in front of their children as they walked them to school, that he had to kill young girls just because they were the wrong guy’s girlfriend, that he’d shot up entire restaurants without a care for collateral victims. He told me about all the horrible things he’d seen and done and how he’d stopped feeling anything about it a few months after he started. He’d started doing drugs to forget all about it, and he asked if I could help him.”

“Did you?”

“Emilia,” he sighed. “I mean, look at the guy. I was a student, not a fucking magician. Sometimes I think I let him down. I kinda wish I’d paid more attention in my courses rather than trying to sleep with my classmates, but I’ve always had this feeling he was past the point where anyone could help him. Until you turned up, that is.”

“I think you’re overestimating me,” I scoffed, albeit a little uncomfortably.

“He does love you, Em,” he said. “And for him to feel that way about someone is quite the feat already.”

I bit the inside of my cheek, strong enough to tear away a small chunk of my skin. I wished he could have been right. I wished Pablo did love me. And once again, my throat choked up, and my jaw clenched, and I took a deep breath to stop myself from crying.

A drop rolled down the side of my face, but it wasn’t a tear. I looked up at the sky, now blackened with storm clouds.

“Is it raining?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Oscar mumbled. “It doesn’t look good. Maybe we should go back.”

Soon the river seemed to be sizzling with raindrops. Manée was the first to get back in the car, and Andrea soon followed, sheltering her wet hair from the rain with a towel. Juan walked out of the water last, with an annoyed look on his face, but didn’t miss out on an occasion to flaunt his chiseled abs.

“We need to leave,” he said gravely. “You know, Emily Smith, whenever it rains here, terrible flash floods happen. It’s devastating. Thousands of people die every year.”

“Really?” I gulped.

Gustavo slapped him in the stomach with the back of his hand.

“Hey, Jungle Jew, put your shirt back on before you lose a nipple,” he tutted. “Don’t listen to him, Emillia. He’s just messing with you.”

“Em, should we give you a ride home?” shouted Andrea as she climbed into the back cabin of Oscar’s truck.

“No, Andrea, there’s no more space in the car,” huffed Manée.

“Oh, uh– it’s fine,” I stammered. “I’ll just go back with Gustavo.”

•••

When you compared it with Pablo’s, Gustavo’s driving felt like slow-motion, and we’d long lost sight of the other car. A calm cumbia played on the radio, at a volume so low that you could barely hear it over the thundering sound of heavy rain hitting the windshield.

“You’re awfully quiet,” muttered Gustavo.

I shrugged, and kept my eyes on the road, a winding tightrope stretched between crumbling mountains on one side, and tumbling ravines on the other.

“Something wrong with Pablo?” he inquired. “You can tell me anything, you know.”

“Given that the only reason you guys don’t kill me is that Pablo likes me, I don’t think I could tell you anything,” I spat. “But no, everything is fine. I’m just tired.”

“Emilia, if I wanted to kill you, I’d do it right now,” he scoffed.

“But you won’t,” I mumbled, both as a warning to Gustavo and a reassurance to myself. “Because there would be consequences.”

“I could make it look like an accident,” he shrugged. “Put a bullet through your head, a few more in the side of the car, call it a drive-by shooting. Shit happens. We lost a guy that way a few months ago.”

“You sound like you’ve thought this through,” I breathed.

Gustavo sighed and smacked his lips. I watched closely as his fingers tightened around the steering wheel, and his mood quickly shifted.

“Actually, I have. Time and time again,” he answered. “Because while you and Pablo run about living your little romance, I get to deal with all the bullshit, and get nothing in return. So don’t be surprised if I tell you that getting rid of you is right on top of my to-do list.”

I bit my lip, and sank into my car seat. I didn’t like how calm he looked, or where this conversation was going. Maybe I should have called for help when I could. Maybe I should have gone in that car with Pablo. Maybe I should have kept my words to myself.

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” he scowled. “Are you afraid of me or something?”

“Are you expecting me to apologize for being kidnapped?” I hissed.

“If you want to make it out of here alive, you should learn that sometimes it’s better to just keep your mouth shut. Do you want to make it out of here alive?”

My answer stayed stuck at the bottom of my throat. I wanted to make it out of here, alive or not. Emilia’s life wasn’t as pretty as it seemed. She’d be constantly threatened by fates worse than Death, and neither the money nor the handsome lover would ever make up for it. I didn’t want to be Emilia. I couldn’t stomach it. I had to get out of here.

“It’s a yes or no question, Emilia,” he growled.

“You just told me to keep my mouth shut.”

“Not when I’m asking the fucking questions,” he retorted.

My bottom lip began to quiver. I shut my eyes as tight as I could, hoping this was just a nightmare. I’d wake up in Goose Creek, call Ana, and tell her about this strange dream I’d had. She’d laugh and call me weird. Then I’d call my therapist.

“I don’t hate you, Emilia,” he continued. “It’s just– you know what they say. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

*** TW ***

I opened my eyes, and stared at Gustavo’s right hand, resting on my bare knee.

“I could do with a distraction, from time to time,” he whispered with a smile. “Maybe we could find an arrangement.”

My lips parted to protest.

“Pablo–”

“Pablo doesn’t have to know,” he cut me off.

His fingers made their way up my thigh, and I wrapped an arm around my stomach. I felt sick, and equal parts disgusted and disgusting. The feeling of his oily skin against mine spread up my leg, like a cancer that grew at the speed of light.

“It’s a win-win situation,” he murmured. “I’d get what I want, and you wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore. Plus, I’m sure you’d enjoy it.”

I dared to look him in the eye. I felt strangled by his gaze, or maybe my seatbelt was too tight. I discreetly unbuckled my seatbelt.

“You think I haven’t noticed?” he smirked. “A young girl like you, all messed up by your daddy issues. You love it, don’t you, putting on your tight little dresses and riling up older men. I know you do.”

He dug his short nails into the inside of my leg, and I inflicted the same mistreatment on the car’s leather upholstery.

***

“I think I’m going to puke,” I breathed.

Gustavo sighed, and settled his hands on the steering wheel and his piercing eyes back on the road. I kept a firm grip on the car door, as if that would help to stop my head from spinning.

“Listen Emilia, in the end, this is your choice,” he muttered, and I wrapped my index finger around the door’s handle. “You either do as I say or–”

I took a deep breath. Our eyes met as a gust of air burst into the truck, and we both wondered which one of us had just fucked up the most.

I hoped jumping out of a moving car was the last stupid decision I’d ever have to make.

Whiplash

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