Chapter Thirteen

Jaxon

“You need to take her back home”, Emilio tells me. “This place isn’t safe for her anymore.”

“I wish it were as easy as that”, I admit, feeling pretty helpless in my ability to change Ruby’s mind. “You know Ruby, she doesn’t like to be told what to do.”

“She’s her own worst enemy”, Rosa says. “She thinks she’s invincible but I know the truth. She’s just as vulnerable as everyone else, just as sad inside.”

It’s on add choice of word, but I can’t help thinking I agree with her. Of what I’ve seen, and it might not be a fair representation, she looks anything but happy. I wonder if the stubbornness to complete her work, to prove to everyone - her father, me, anyone else who might have told her she wasn’t good enough - that she can be independent and succeed at it. When I knew her five years ago, she was exactly the same. She had something to prove and would never admit it. Nothing was ever good enough for her, despite the fact she was constantly told otherwise.

The fact that she’s still here, against a crushing force of oppression, is just a continued extension of that. Ruby’s independence has always been something I’ve admired, it was what made me want to stay with her in the first place, but there’s a moment when that stubbornness becomes dangerous, and Ruby has long since crossed that line. The difficult thing is going to be making her realize it, before she fucks up one too many times and ends up getting herself killed in the process.

My job here was to rescue Ruby and now I know how deep she’s into this shit, and how dangerous this place is, I won’t consider that job complete until I get her and Jessica out of this country and back home, and even then, until I get what I’ve wanted for the last five years, I’ll still consider it falling short.

The memory of coming back home after Afghanistan to find the apartment empty of her belongings and a note to say she’s had enough will forever be embedded in my memory.

“Why are they after her?” I ask.

Emilio has swapped the pot of coffee for a bottle of tequila and pours a large shot into my glass.

“Ruby has a tendency to poke her nose into people’s business and then rub everyone up the wrong way. What she has exactly, only Ruby knows, but they don’t send a team of professionals after you for having an opinion. Ruby’s dug something up, she’s got proof of it, and it’s made whoever it threatens very scared indeed.”

The tequila warms my throat, exploding like fire in the pit of my stomach. “Will they come back?” I ask.

“They always come back”, Emilio says. “You can’t be a journalist in this country and get out of it alive. This isn’t America, there is no free press, no fair system, no do overs. And a lot of people are going to die before that ever changes.”

Emilio throws his tequila into his throat and fills his glass again. “Rosa and I learned that the hard way.”

“She has a choice”, Rosa says. “We’re old people, poor people, our lives are here. Ruby has a choice. She has to think of Jessica.”

“She’s like a daughter to us”, Emilio says. “And we love her dearly. We can cope with her moving away, what we can’t cope with is losing another child.”

We take to the living room, our glasses refreshed with tequila, the bottle on hand just in case we need it. While Ruby sleeps deeply, my head is filled with a handful of memories of her doing the same in my apartment, after we’d made love or when first light broke through the windows in the morning, and I thought life would never get better.

She’s curled into a foetal position in the sofa, Jessica tucked into the curve of her body, the pair of them asleep.

I sink into one of the armchairs, exhausted by the mission and desperately in need of sleep myself. Cartoons continue to stream in silence on the TV in front of us, while the room defines itself by the rhythmic breathing of its occupants, strangers brought together in the most unfortunate of circumstances.

I let my heavy eyes fall upon Jessica, trying to work out where she came from and what she might mean to the development of a relationship between Ruby and I. She’s brown eyed like her mother, with skin darkened by the Mexican heat, and a smile that could make entire icebergs melt.

She’s got my nose, though, my high cheekbones and my curly hair. My heart leaped when I saw her stood there staring at me, a miniature imprint of the both of us, and I knew right away she was mine. Either Ruby knew when she left or she found out after it was already too late to swallow her pride and turn back around. Maybe that’s why she wanted me to quit in the first place, only coming here and putting both of them in danger makes that argument completely hypocritical.

I just wonder when Ruby plans to tell me she’s mine, because I’m not going anywhere without getting to know her and making sure she really is safe.