Wind Therapy - A.J. Downey Page 0,4

tying them tight.

“No!” he cried and looked stricken.

“Mateo, you have to be brave for me, little brother. I have to go. It’s for the best.”

“But I don’t want you to!” he cried, and his little chest heaved as he took a great hiccupping sob. My own chest squeezed down painfully so, and I felt my own eyes prickle with tears. I reached for him and grabbed him, hugging him tight.

“It’s only for a little while,” I said. “I love you so much, and I have to do this, for us,” I said.

“No!” he said, clinging to me.

I could only imagine how my little brother was feeling. First Dad, just before he was born, then Mom when he was three. I was the only family he had left and now, I was leaving, too.

“I love you, so much, hermano. You must be good for me. Promise me, okay? Promise me you’ll be good.”

He pulled away, chest hitching, eyes streaming, and he wiped them with the back of his arm.

It was all happening so fast for him and my heart ached.

“I promise!” he wailed. “I’ll be good now, just please don’t go!”

I stood up, bag in my hand and fetched down my jean jacket from the hook on the wall by my door. I stuffed my pack between my knees and put it on, Mateo lunging, wrapping his little arms around my waist and clinging to me. I hugged him, kissed the top of his head, and tried not to cry too.

“I love you so much,” I said and did the hardest thing I had ever had to do. I tore myself away from his grasp and marched away from him toward a new destiny for us.

My abuela had met her match in Maverick. I skipped steps and strode for him and his motorcycle that he sat astride as he held out a helmet to me.

“That all you want to take?” he asked, eyeing my pack in my hands.

“That’s all,” I affirmed, steel in my spine and wrapping painfully around my heart.

He traded me, taking my pack, and holding it on his bike before him as I put on the helmet, working the strap to hold it onto my head. He took off his coat and handed it to me after peeling the vest off and putting it on over his tee, the arms of which had been taken off, the holes giving glimpses of his flank through them as he swung the vest behind him and slid his arms through the holes.

He handed me back my backpack as Mateo screamed at me from the front porch. “Marisol, don’t go!”

“Let her go, she doesn’t care about you!” our Abuela cried, her cruel streak a mile wide and twice as long, as I got onto the bike behind Maverick, their leader.

I unleashed hell on her, cursed her up and down, six ways to Sunday and told her what a puta perra she was.

“That’s not true, Mateo, and you know it! I love you, manito!” I cried, my own voice finally cracking as my throat grew thick with tears.

“You sure you want to do this?” Maverick asked me as he fired up his bike and I resolutely put my arms around him.

“Absolutely,” I said in his ear and he made some sort of signal with his hand, wheeled us around and away.

Still, I couldn’t breathe.

Not yet.

Chapter Three

Maverick…

It caught me off guard, but not enough for my brain to fail in doing the calculations. I had it. Enough to cover financially. There was just one thing.

“How old are you?” I demanded.

“Twenty,” she answered without any hesitation, with no hint of a lie… which immediately made me suspicious.

“Oh, yeah? Let’s see some ID,” I said.

“Mav?” I turned on the seat of my bike, looking over my shoulder at Fenris who’d spoken. He raised his eyebrows, holding out his hands in a ‘what gives’ gesture. I waved him off. The rest of my crew riding with me all looked surprised but didn’t say a word.

Marisol handed me over her identification, which she’d slid out of one of the back pockets of her jeans. It was real, printed vertically, but the dates said she wasn’t quite twenty yet. She was nineteen, but she’d hit twenty in a few short weeks.

I flicked my eyes to hers and the desperation in her gaze decided me right then and there.

“I could use an extra set of hands for something for the next month,” I said. “She wants to go; I can