Guardian (11 page)

“Why?” he cut in, taking a step forward.

In the silence that followed, I suddenly realized that Rafael was here, in my home, and I was all alone. I still had not decided if he was dangerous. What if he tried to hurt me too? My blood began to run cold. Was I safe with him? More importantly,
how
had he gotten past that locked door?

“You… you shouldn’t be here,” I said as he took another step closer.

“Why not?”

You’re too big,
I wanted to say. Rafael seemed to fill up the small, modest kitchen. This man was never meant to be kept indoors. His presence was just so magnified, so all encompassing, that I felt as though I couldn’t even breathe without feeling him, without smelling him. It was overwhelming. He towered over me, took up every corner of the room without effort. I felt as though I was drowning in Rafael. All of my senses went into hyper drive.

“We, we only m-meet at the park,” I stuttered. For the first time in awhile, Rafael was making me nervous again. Just as I was starting to become more comfortable with him, he made a move that caught me totally off guard.

He looked frustrated, but also… nervous. His eyes kept darting around the room, looking uneasily at the walls, the plain, worn furniture. As though whatever he saw there unsettled his usual permanent calmness. “We can’t meet if you don’t come to the park.”

“I would have told you I wasn’t coming, I just didn’t have a way to get hold of you,” I protested softly.

Rafael looked at the books stacked on the table around me, creating a wall of sorts that in no way made me feel safe from him. “You weren’t going to come today.” It wasn’t a question.

I stared down at the table, tracing a crack in the wood. “No,” I whispered, so quietly anyone else wouldn’t have been able to hear. But Rafael did. He wasn’t like anyone else. I had known that the instant I met him.

“
Why
?”

“I just couldn’t make it,” I mumbled, still not looking up at him. “I have a lot of homework and-”

“Lyla.”

“Hm?” I pretended to focus once again on the biology textbook before me.

“Look at me.”

I jumped and looked up at Rafael. He had moved to stand right next to me without my even noticing. Catching a glimpse of his face, I was afraid of how mad he looked.

“Why didn’t you come to the park yesterday?”

I looked down at my book. “Because.” Pathetic as it was, it was all I could come up with. I was just
tired
all of the sudden. Tired of the half-truths, tired of trying to keep secrets and a façade of being normal.

I started once again in shock when Rafael slid incredibly warm fingers underneath my chin and tilted my battered cheek toward him. I knew it was useless to resist him. Now that he had come all this way, he would find out eventually. Why not now? Ashamed and embarrassed, I looked away as he took in my large bruise and split lip. Never had I felt so weak and defenseless. I didn’t want Rafael to see me like this.

“Who did this?” I detected a tremor in his voice. “Your mother or your father?”

I looked up and what I saw scared me. Rafael was livid. It was the only word to describe him. The look of fury on his dark face was cold enough to cause me to tremble all the way down to my toes. I pulled away, hiding my cheek once again, as if that would just make it all disappear.

“What makes you so sure it was them?” I asked sharply. I knew it was easier to deflect the questions. Maybe then he would forget about getting the answers from me.

“Do
not
attempt to lie to me, Lyla Evans.” Rafael spoke so sharply that I jumped in my chair. “This is not the time. Now, I will give you one more chance. What happened?”

I didn’t want to tell him. I never told anyone, not anymore. Hadn’t I learned years ago that no one wanted to listen? That no one cared enough to help? And telling it meant reliving the whole nightmare. It was bad enough to go through it once. I wouldn’t do it twice if I had a choice.

So instead, I lifted my eyes to meet Rafael’s own piercing ones. “I think we both know what happened,” I whispered.

Moving with supernatural speed, Rafael suddenly had my arm in his hands and was pushing up the sleeve of my shirt before I even realized he had moved. I blinked and he was touching me, just that fast.

“Wait, don’t-” but I wasn’t fast enough. Rafael revealed the dark handprint bruise on my forearm.

His face became totally still. In fact, his whole body grew so still that I thought he was in a trance or something. I was too scared to speak, too scared of what would happen next, that I just sat there, waiting to see what he would do. But all that happened was Rafael laying my arm gently back down on the table, turning sharply on his heel, and stalking out of my house, the door clicking closed behind him. He didn’t even slam it, which, given his rage, I was expecting. But then, Rafael rarely did what I expected.

In fact, he never did.

For a long while, I stared at the short hallway that led from the kitchen to the entryway with the front door, wondering what had just happened. Then I shuddered as I looked around the room. It still felt as though Rafael were present. I could still smell his curiously clean, completely unique scent, the scent of the outdoors. The powerful aura that surrounded him seemed to linger in the room, and it unnerved me.

Where had he gone? He had looked so angry… For a moment I had the single, terrifying thought that he had gone to find my father and attack him as he had with Austin. But I banished the thought as soon as it came. Rafael didn’t know where my father was.
I
didn’t even know where he was.

But then… hadn’t Rafael found me? Found my house? Hadn’t he followed me for days on end without my even noticing? Wouldn’t it be just as easy for him to find my father?
No, no, no
. I repeated the litany to myself, trying to force myself to believe it. I tried and failed to refocus on my homework as I worried. But in the end, Rafael returned after just an hour, walking back through the front door as if he belonged in my house. This time, I stood when he entered, narrowing my eyes at him.

“All right, I locked the door after you left,” I said, ready to stand my ground. “How did you get in? I triple checked it.”

Rafael got that slightly disdainful look. “Locks can’t stop me, Lyla.”

I crossed my arms and shivered a little, scared by the matter-of-fact-ness with which he informed me of this. Could Rafael really enter my house, enter my
bedroom
, at any time he wished? I was distracted by how nervous this made me when Rafael stepped forward, reaching into the large plastic bag I hadn’t noticed he’d been holding. It was from Verizon, the cell phone company. My jaw dropped when he pulled out a brand new iPhone, handing it me.

“What’s that for?” I asked, sure that he couldn’t mean what I thought he meant.

“It’s for you,” Rafael said, as though I was an idiot. “I got one for myself as well. The saleswoman programmed my number in already.”

I stared at the sleek, slim cell phone in his large hand. A cell phone. It was a luxury that I had never allowed myself to fantasize about. After all, why did I need one? I never needed to call my parents to tell them where I was, or to come pick me up. Sure, it’d be nice to call Natalie on my own line, to
text
my friends like everyone else in the world, but that was play. I didn’t play. I couldn’t afford to. That was why I pushed Rafael’s hand back toward him, even though I really, really didn’t want to.

“Rafael,” I said, summoning conviction into my voice. “I can’t take this.”

“Why not?” Rafael asked, starting to look irritated once again.

I wouldn’t let his anger scare me on this battlefront. “Because,” I said, steeling myself, “I can’t repay you for it. I can’t afford to pay a cell phone bill every month.”

Just that fast, Rafael’s green eyes were snapping in fury. “Sit down,” he commanded through clenched teeth.

I began to protest but Rafael pointed to my chair, index finger trembling. “
Sit
.”

I sat.

Rafael began pacing the kitchen. The way he ran his hands through his dark hair and how sharply he executed his turns at the end of each line of pacing made me grateful for the distance between us. I could never figure out how I always seemed to unconsciously know just what to say to send Rafael flying into a rage.

“I have watched you being beaten by your mother and father several times,” Rafael began, and my breath caught in my throat. “Before, we were not speaking; there was nothing I could do at the time. We still didn’t know each other. I’m sorry about that, Lyla. So very sorry. But now, much as I would like to keep a set of eyes on you every second of the day, it’s impractical, not to mention quite impossible, as proved by yesterday. Thus,” he turned toward me and moved with that supersonic speed I’d noticed earlier, and was standing directly across the table from me, with the iPhone held up before him, “the cell phone. This is not something I think you need that I went and fetched for you. It’s something I am
demanding
that you have. Something that I bought and will continue to pay for. You will call me the next time your father or mother attempts to attack you or Colton or Grace. You will call me, and I will come for you.”

I looked between Rafael and the phone he held in front of him, tears stinging at my eyes and trying to spill down my face. I held them back. I wanted to believe Rafael. I really, really did. Except… so many people had said the same thing. True, none of them had gone to such lengths as buying me a brand new cell phone, but hadn’t I heard the “call me and I’ll come help you” line so many times? I knew it wasn’t right of me, but I was cynical of the whole idea. Even with Rafael. Even with him.

“Rafael, it’s not your job to keep Colton and Grace safe,” I said quietly. “It’s not your job to keep
me
safe.”

Rafael leaned forward across the table, setting the phone in front of me. “I am
making
it my job,” he whispered back, just as quietly. He pulled out two identical cell phones from the bag, one blue, one pink. They were simple models, ones that only slid up and down to reveal the keypad, nowhere near as glamorous as the iPhone. “These are for Colton and Grace, so they can call you when it starts, should you be gone like last time.”

I stared up at Rafael, unable to keep my mouth closed. Though I was still doubtful of how long his good intentions would last, it was the two phones for Colton and Grace that finally convinced me to pick up the iPhone from the table. Rafael nodded once as I did so, looking relieved that I had finally given in.

He pulled a phone identical to mine from his pocket and looked at it. “Now,” he said gruffly, “how do you work these things?”

I laughed loudly, the tension finally gone from the room. Rafael and I spent the rest of the day getting the cell phones into working order, though I insisted on going to the park to do it. It was just too strange to have Rafael in my sagging little house. I wasn’t proud of it, but I also felt safer in the park, with more people around, just in case. We had fun picking out ringtones, laughing over the ridiculous ones and making sure that Colton’s and Grace’s phones were easy enough to use and programming my number in them first thing.

I quickly learned that Rafael was sparing no expense where these phones were concerned. When I balked at the idea of buying the ringtone of the newest song that I liked, he grabbed the phone from me and ordered it for me. This phone, he informed me, was mine to do with whatever I liked. I was positive Rafael didn’t have a real job, so how he got the money to afford such an expensive phone, four phones all at once, was a mystery, but I decided just this once to not even try asking.

And that night, when I gave Colton and Grace their phones, the excitement and awe in their faces made it all worthwhile. We never got presents, and this was ten times better than Christmas. I felt somewhat guilty that we were getting so worked up over such a material item, but there were so few presents and gifts like these in our lives that I was willing to take it where I could find it. Besides, it was for our safety. Even if Rafael didn’t come to help us next time my father or mother had been drinking, at least Colton and Grace could get a hold of me if all else failed. We had a great time that night, running all over the house and calling each other from different rooms. We even played hide and seek, texting hints to where we were hiding if whoever was ‘It’ had trouble finding us. I collapsed into bed that night, smiling to myself for the first time in a long while.

But in the end, it wasn’t long at all before Rafael’s cell phone idea came into play, and his word came to the test. And he passed with flying colors, dispelling any lingering doubts I might have had, forever.

A week later was one of the rare nights when my dad had a few friends over. It was always in the name of playing cards, but usually just resulted in a lot of drinking around the table and the house filling up with cigar and cigarette smoke. Normally, I tried to flee to Natalie’s house on an evening like this, but today she was gone for the weekend with her family. I was stuck. The instant I heard all the raucous laughter outside I whisked Colton and Grace to our bedroom, our sanctuary, and locked the door. Nights like
this
were why I had four locks on my door, dead bolting it closed. Because even though no one had succeeded in the past, I was absolutely terrified they would in the future. And fear of all fears, that they would get to Gracie first, not me.