Page 56 of Love Me Darkly
“I had to have a partial hysterectomy when I was nineteen,” she whispered.
Mateo stiffened, his entire body reacting to the weight of her words. He was pinned beneath them, incapable of moving or breathing as he digested what she’d just said.
“I contracted PID after a bad back-alley abortion. My first pimp, Darrell—D-Ray—he got me pregnant. Got mad at me, as if I had done it to myself.”
“Dick,” Mateo muttered.
“The biggest dick. He wouldn’t even take me to a decent clinic. I was terrified. I wasn’t ready to be a mother at nineteen, but I didn’t want an abortion. I don’t know what I was thinking … that maybe a baby could be my way out. Having a kid would make me a burden and diminish my worth. D-Ray would let me go. Other girls who’d had babies had disappeared, and I never knew for sure where they went. I convinced myself they had somehow escaped.”
Mateo’s chest squeezed and he winced. He’d been extensively trained on the methods of pimps, who knew how to target young, naïve girls with no safe place to turn. By the time the girls understood what was happening to them, it was almost always too late. The trap would have snared them.
“He forced you to go through with it,” he choked out.
“Yes. And afterward, I was in so much pain, and I got so sick. One day, I just collapsed and then woke up in the hospital. I had contracted an infection … the instruments used for my abortion likely weren’t properly sterilized. I almost died.”
Mateo’s hand slipped to her waist and held tight, his stomach giving a lurch at the thought of her dying.
“I had to undergo an aggressive round of antibiotics and ... I lost one ovary and both my fallopian tubes. So, you know … you can’t get me pregnant or anything. Still get a fucking period every month, even after all that. Ain’t that a bitch?”
Mateo squeezed his eyes shut, the roiling sensation in his gut worsening in its violence. Something within him fractured at the thought of what had been stolen from her. Even if she had decided to abort the first baby eventually, there might have been a chance in the future for another, when she was free enough and stable enough to care for it. But then, Mateo saw the thought for the fantasy it was. He knew very well that girls like Melody rarely made it out. It brought him no comfort to think it might have been for the best in the end. A woman in her position would be in constant fear of getting pregnant or contracting a disease.
“I’m not working anymore,” she said suddenly, as if reading his mind. “And I … I’m clean.”
Mateo raised his head to look at her. “I never doubted that. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
“Yes, I do. I lied to you.”
“You didn’t technically lie. You gave me enough hints that I should have understood. I usually have a keen sense for these things, but you’re different. In some ways, you’re incredibly easy to read, and in others you’re a mystery.”
He didn’t add that his burning attraction to her had clouded his judgment, and probably still did.
She snorted sarcastically. “You think you’re easy to read?”
“I imagine I’m not. But then, it’s all due to my training. It’s not just about reading people or understanding them. There’s a balancing act at play. You have to show people what you want them to see and hide the cards in your deck.”
“You’re good at that,” she remarked. “Now that I know what you are, it fits. But when I was trying to guess what job had brought you to town, I would never have guessed FBI. After seeing that tat on your arm, I assumed military.”
“I was an army ranger before I joined the bureau. Did four tours in Afghanistan.”
She stroked a finger down his arm, tracing over the battlefield cross tattooed on his bicep. “What was it like over there?”
Mateo hesitated before answering. Typically, when people asked about his past service and deployments, they were fishing for the gory details. The people he had killed and the things he had seen. They wanted to stick their fingers into his wounds and draw blood, amuse themselves at his expense. It had always made him feel like a circus attraction, and he hated it almost as much as being fawned over because he was a veteran. It was embarrassing and frankly degrading.
But he didn’t sense that sort of intention in her tone. His immediate reaction was to brush her off and change the subject. But after what she had just shared with him, and after she had trusted him with her body, he had no right to hold her at arm’s length. There might still be secrets between them, but Mateo had given her very little choice in the matter. He had pried into her life until exposing her, not thinking of how painful that might be. He owed her something in return.
“It wasn’t all blood and bullets, you know,” he said. “A lot of it was waiting. So much goddamn waiting, sitting around in the blistering fucking heat, drinking warm water that tastes like metal. And in some places, there was nothing but sand as far as the eye could see. It got everywhere and into everything no matter what we did—our boots, our ears, our fucking teeth. I swear I brought home buckets of sand after every tour, no matter how well I shook my stuff out before packing it. There were missions, of course, and sometimes they spanned for days. I’m talking melting like a candle under layers of Kevlar and polyester while watching off the sides of cliffs for approaching vehicles, or shivering with your balls in your throat while lurking in dark caves watching for hostile contact. But in between them, there was so much time to sit around, missing home. You came to learn real quick how precious word from home can be. A letter, an email, a rare phone call. You lived for those moments.”
“Sounds lonely. You must have missed your family.”
Mateo wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He hadn’t met Mari until after his final deployment. His career was winding down at the time, and he’d been looking forward to retirement and a life beyond the army. The only people he had missed during his deployment were his parents and grandparents, as well as his cousins, aunts, and uncles. He had definitely missed home, family dinners and parties. But that dull ache had been nothing like life without Mari and Angelica. His new career had taken him away from them enough to result in guilt and the ache of missing important life events. It wasn’t even close to being the same.
“You kind of form a new family over there,” he said. “Your brothers. You’re relying on each other to survive and we’re all only as strong as the weakest man. It makes for a unique sort of bond.”
He fell silent after that, growing pensive as the faces of his past haunted his memory. So many of them hadn’t come home, and it hurt to remember them, to feel in some way responsible for a few of those deaths.
Fortunately, Melody seemed to sense they were brushing up against dangerous territory. “So … you were off today? You looked like you had been shopping or something when you came in.”
“I took the day. Got tired of being couped up in the field office. Not much we can do until some red tape gets cleared.”
