As far as rebellions went, this one was pretty pathetic.
When she’d been in high school at an exclusive San Antonio boarding school, her friends had gotten tattoos. Or left school to follow a band. One girl invited the cast of an MTV reality show back to her home in the Malibu Hills during Christmas break and drank everything in her father’s wine cellar, including a century-old bottle of Château Lafite.
But here she was, eighteen years old and a college freshman, attempting to stick it to her father by staying out past curfew to stand in the line of a popular taco joint in Rice Village while trying to befriend some punk-rock locals. She took an occasional hit off a passed joint as Bartolo gave disapproving glares from the other end of the parking lot.
“Stop obsessing about the company,” her father had yelled earlier when all she’d done was call to ask if she could speak to one of his lead engineers about a summer internship. “Go be una niña.”
A niña normal was what was implied even if it wasn’t said, which in her father’s parlance meant engaging in the behaviors of a wealthy, young socialite while still remaining virginal, being home by midnight, and enduring the constant scrutiny of her security team.
“Give him time,” Bartolo had urged when her father refused to change her teenage security protocols even though she was an adult in college. “He’ll loosen up.”
She doubted that—getting his approval to live in the dorms had been an all-out war—and she was beginning to take all of her frustrations out on the bodyguard who she loved like a tío but now just reminded her of her dad.
“You look like an angel.” The boy standing in front of her surprised her and pulled her from her thoughts; he was tall, tall enough that a bright parking lot light created a corona around his head and all she could really see of him was that he was lean with shaggy light blond hair.
“Oh.” It was a sweet thing to say. “Thank you.”
“You’re a Rice student, right?”
Her smile faded as she squinted to see his features with the light shining in her eyes . “I...”
“I work in maintenance,” he said. He dropped his head, sending his shaggy hair into his face. “Sorry. Of course, you’ve never noticed me.”
“No, I...” Feeling classist, she reached out and touched his hand. “I just can’t see you. With the light.”
But he shook his head without lifting it. “Sorry. I’m bugging you. I hope you have a night that’s...that’s as beautiful as you are,” he mumbled before he walked away.
Cenobia would have followed him if Bartolo hadn’t been bearing down on her. Rather, bearing down on him. Very few boys got the opportunity to say sweet things to Mexican heiress Cenobia Trujillo. She felt awful she’d inadvertently hurt him.
The next day, she was thrilled when she saw him—she was sure it was him, the same long, lanky body, the same shaggy blond hair, and he was wearing a navy uniform shirt with a Rice patch—sitting at a table in her favorite Rice Village coffee shop. Her guards had taken their standard positions outside. Bartolo watched the entrance while another guard monitored back exits.
She walked up to him, introduced herself, and asked his name.
Tyler McKinney had a normal face that blended in, but nice, grey-blue eyes, broad shoulders, and strong arms. He was older than she thought, twenty-two. He didn’t plan on being a janitor forever, he told her shyly from under his blond hair. He was just saving money so he could finish his BS in mathematics before going on to graduate school.
He was sorry for approaching her, he said again. “You’re just so pretty, I couldn’t help it,” he’d said into his coffee cup.
With a foreign but fantastic flutter in her stomach and an awareness that the seconds until Bartolo came looking for her were counting down, Cenobia wrote a secret email address her father didn’t know about on a napkin and shoved it at Tyler, telling him with a shy smile that he could write her whenever he wanted.
By the time she got home and logged in, there already was an email from him waiting.
Tyler wrote her poetry.
He wrote her long emails about how smart she was, how capable, how beautiful and perfect. He wrote her about how she inspired him, how he was going to work harder to be worthy of her.
He told her she wasn’t like other girls.
When she saw him on campus, it was like fire racing through her veins. A smile, a long stare would send her heart pounding for the next hour. He was incredibly romantic, leaving her a chalk-drawn rose, a single line of adoration rolled up into a scroll, or a candy heart in places he knew she would see them. They never spoke at school, not wanting to alert her security or get him fired, not when—like Cenobia—he had so much he wanted to achieve and so much standing in his way. But she went more and more often to Rice Village, where she would duck into agreed upon places—coffee shops, bookstores, clothing stores—and get five, sometimes even ten and fifteen minutes with him while her security guarded the entrances and exits but otherwise left her alone. There were always nooks, crannies, bathrooms, and fitting rooms that would hide them from other’s gazes.
Tyler gave her her first kiss in the bathroom of the coffee shop. He was so slow and sweet, she’d had to beg him for it, had to touch her tongue to his lips before he returned the favor.
She first felt him hard against her in the dusty corner of an antiques store. He licked her nipple only when she’d pulled down her bra and tank top in a fitting room. She pushed his hand between her legs as they sat at a table pretending to read Russian poetry in a used bookstore, and she thought she was going to die.
For two months, they shared sips of time and endlessly passionate emails. Finally, Cenobia demanded that they had to find a way to be together, together for hours and not minutes. She couldn’t stand it any longer.
For the first time, Tyler didn’t immediately object. He said he thought he knew a way.
At Tyler’s instruction, Cenobia got up during the night for the next three weeks, put on a robe, and passed her security to go to the dorm bathroom with her hood up. She also told a friend in her dorm—a friend the same size as Cenobia—her deepest, darkest secret: she had a boyfriend.
The friend was happy to help for true love.
On the night she was finally going to be with Tyler, bad luck had her running into Bartolo during shift change. She cried honest tears of frustration.
“Please,” she begged, lying to him about a show she wanted to go to with her friends. “Papá says he wants me to be normal but what’s normal about being an eighteen-year-old woman who is constantly watched and judged and weighed. I deserve one night to be free.”
Bartolo cursed and fumed. But he let her go with a promise to be back by dawn and to call immediately at the first sign of trouble.
It was midnight by the time she finally met Tyler at the large pond in Hermann Park, across the street from campus. He wore sunglasses and a baseball cap, which was odd, but his huge, embracing hug burned away her nerves. He led her to a car.
She only discovered later that he’d slipped her phone out of her pocket during that hug and threw it into the pond. He’d parked in one of the few spots hidden from security cameras.
Cenobia didn’t know when it was dawn. She’d already been in the back of a van, her hands bound, her mouth gagged, and her eyes blindfolded.
The men pushed her, prodded her, and jeered at her in Spanish, all which Cenobia experienced through slow, shutter-click transitions between paralyzed shock, ear-cottoning terror, and out-of-body disbelief. She couldn’t believe he had done this to her.
But no one touched her. Not until, after what could have been days or only hours into her kidnapping, someone took off her blindfold.
The dim light was like twin spikes into her eyeballs. She cried out and shrunk back. Only when the light coming through her lids hurt less did she again try to open her eyes.
Tyler crouched in front of her. Behind him was a table set for two with candles on it, a towel and a bar of soap next to the barracks shower stall, and a freshly made pallet on the floor with a pillow.
When Cenobia saw the rose on the pillow, she started to cry.