Tainted Love Read online

  Esme knew all the pros of her situation. Her old life—her former gangbanger boyfriend, her business of creating tattoos for members of Los Locos while not working up to her full potential at Echo Park High School—seemed more like a lifetime ago than the two and a half months it had been.

  Still, Jonathan wasn't exactly telling it like it was. In her new life, she was the hired help who had come perilously close to being fired on more than one occasion. She worked for the same people as her Mexican parents, who weren't even in America on valid visas. Esme cared for the kids, her mother cooked the food, her father landscaped and fixed things that needed fixing. The entire Castaneda family was dependent on the goodwill of the Goldhagens.

  No. Jonathan hadn't told it like it was. That dependency— something he'd never felt in his whole overprivileged life—was the part of the equation that Esme hated most. To make matters worse, she had fallen head over heels for him. He was twenty, an up-and-coming young film actor who'd done his first major role the year before in an indie flick called Tiger Eyes. It was now showing on exactly two screens in New York and Los Angeles. While the reviews had been decidedly mixed, his performance as a young man on the psychological edge had been universally lauded.

  She'd fought her attraction to him, suspecting his reciprocation was of the wow-she's-poor-and-exotic type that would pass quickly. She was much too proud to go there. Eventually, though, Jonathan convinced her that his feelings for her were real. When he did, she'd opened her heart to him, consequences be damned. It had all nearly blown up in her face when Diane had caught Jonathan and Esme at her guesthouse in a very compromising position. In fact, Esme had nearly been fired. Finally, the decree had come. As Steven had put it, “What you do in the outside world is your own business. But I'd feel more comfortable if the two of you weren't alone on the property.” That had been almost five weeks ago. It had taken Jonathan two more weeks to find a vacant apartment in a five-thou-a-month high-rise overlooking the beach in Santa Monica. Esme had already spent two of her rare free nights there.

  Ti-Ti finished the song to thunderous applause from the circle of passersby; many of them rushed forward to drop money into his guitar case. “Let's give him some money,” Esme urged, digging into her jeans pocket for some singles.

  Jonathan stopped her and reached into his back pocket for his wallet. He extracted a crisp fifty-dollar bill and placed it in the guitar case. The musician saw the size of the bill and nodded gratefully.

  Jonathan nodded back. “Thanks for the great music, man.”

  He looped an arm around Esme's shoulders and they headed back down the promenade. It was so strange for Esme to be with a guy so wealthy that donating fifty bucks to a street musician was no big thing. She sighed. Jorge had warned her that she and Jonathan were from two different worlds. It seemed as if every time she turned around, she got a reminder of how right her best friend was.

  “Time to finish what we started,” Esme told Jonathan after they'd come through the front door of his place. His apartment was on the eleventh floor of a pristine white stone building at Ocean Avenue and Wilshire, easy walking distance to the promenade. With two thousand square feet, two bedrooms, and a huge balcony that looked out toward the Pacific, it was breathtaking. It was also nearly empty. Diane kept begging her stepson to let her ask her favorite designer to swoop in and do the apartment for him, but Jonathan wasn't interested. He'd ordered a top-of-the-line gunmetal king-sized bed and pillow-top Bella mattress over the phone, plus a Claymore billiards table. That was pretty much all he had by way of furnishings.

  “That sounds promising.” He flicked a light switch. As track lighting illuminated the pool table, he immediately reached for her low-cut apricot T-shirt and started to tug it over her head.

  “Brat!” Esme swatted his arm. “That's not what I was talking about.”

  “Maybe I could change your mind.” He gave her a light kiss, which turned hotter when his right hand slid to her butt. “I can be very persuasive.”

  No kidding, Esme thought, since every inch of her skin screamed touch me now.

  She loved and hated what he did to her. Loved it because being with him was like every romantic fantasy she'd ever had about how it would feel to be with the perfect boy. Hated it because it gave him power over her.

  “Go out on the balcony and wait for me.”

  “Sex on the balcony? I'm game if you are. Although we could end up on the front page of the Star.”

  “There's a floodlight out there, right? I have to be able to see.”

  “See? Ooh. Very kinky.”

  “Jonathan, think. You've been bugging me for three weeks. You want me to finish the tattoo, don't you?” She punched his bicep lightly where the half-finished tattoo peeked out from the bottom of his short-sleeved tennis shirt. She had been designing a Ferris wheel, because it was on the Ferris wheel at Santa Monica Pier that the two of them had begun to fall for each other. “That half-done thing looks stupid.”

  His response was to pull off his shirt and throw it onto the pool table. “Finally. Even better than sex!”

  “Funny.” She also couldn't help but appreciate his naked torso. He was built like the tennis player he was; sculpted muscles, taut washboard abs. “I'll meet you on the balcony. I'm gonna get my stuff.” She'd left her tattoo equipment in his kitchen, since the last time she had been there she'd also intended to finish the tattoo. However, passion won out over art. Atop the pool table, in fact.

  “Hold on.” Jonathan noticed the message light on his phone was blinking. “I've been playing tag with my agent all day. Let me check this.”

  Esme wandered toward the kitchen as Jonathan pushed a few buttons on his landline and put the whole thing on speaker. “See, no secrets.”

  “You can have secrets if you want,” Esme said, reaching under the sink for the tattooing equipment box that she'd stowed there a couple of days before. Though she would never admit it, she was glad he felt the way he felt. It had to mean, for example, that he wasn't expecting a call from his ex-girlfriend Mackenzie, who was very blond, very rich, and very much on Esme's shit list.

  “You have one message,” the mechanical voice intoned. “Eight-twenty-three p.m.”

  A moment later, a harried male voice came on. “Jonathan? Jeff Benson at Paradigm. Sorry to call so late but I was having dinner with Peter Engel. Listen. There've been some interesting developments on Montgomery. It's written by the same guys who wrote Broken Bridges. The director saw you in Tiger Eyes. Anyway, he wants to offer you the role of Josh Parker, no audition, which says a lot about how much he wants you. The money sucks but Laszlo is brilliant and I think you oughta take it. They start shooting in three days, though. Typical last-minute bull, but at least it's local. Anyway, they're messengering over the latest script around three in the morning. Call me when you've read it. First thing.”

  Jonathan punched the air with excitement, making his muscles ripple again.

  “Something good?”

  “Something great. I read an early draft. It's amazing—about this town in Alabama and all the eccentric people who live there. Laszlo Cohn is a genius. He had a short nominated for an Oscar. Hot damn!”

  “Well, then, congratulations. I hope it's okay if your character has a tattoo.”

  He took three long strides into the kitchen and lifted her off her feet in a passionate kiss that took her breath away. “Actually, how about if before you finish the tattoo …” He nodded toward the billiards table. Oh God. The things he did to her. The way he made her feel.

  “Do you ever actually play pool on that thing?” she asked as he kissed her neck.

  “I believe in multitasking.” His hand gently cupped her right breast.

  It took all of Esme's willpower to push him away. Not this time. This time the tattoo would come first, or he'd have a half-finished Ferris wheel on his bicep forever. Besides, he needed to know that she could resist him. She needed to know it even more.

  She wriggled out of his emb
race and pushed him toward the balcony. “Go.”

  He complied with a long-suffering sigh. When he was gone, Esme bustled around the kitchen, sterilizing her equipment. Then she ran an extension cord for her tattoo machine from a living room outlet to the exterior before joining him on the balcony. When he was ensconced in a retro redwood lawn chair that his stepmother had delivered as a surprise, she went through the same step-by-step pre-tattoo routine that she did with all her clients: a sterilization procedure involving a massive amount of antiseptic cleanser, the closest shave imaginable to mankind, and then more cleanser. There would be no infection from an Esme Castaneda tattoo.

  “Your ex's boys— cholos, right?—aren't going to interrupt us?” Jonathan joshed.

  Esme grimaced. She'd been in the middle of doing this very tattoo when two of Junior's gangbanger friends had burst through the door of the guesthouse to threaten her and beat up Jonathan. After that incident, it was amazing that he even wanted to be with her. But she wasn't about to admit it.

  “Hey, if you get out of line with me, I'll kick your ass myself,” she said.

  “Tough girl.” He smiled up at her.

  “Don't try me. I'm the one with the deadly weapons here.” She put on her rubber gloves, filled her cups with red, black, and blue ink, and scrutinized the design she'd started on Jonathan's arm more than two months before. She was famous in the barrio for her freehand designs. “Hold still. In case you forgot, this is going to hurt.”

  The needle bit into his flesh.

  “Ouch. Damn!”

  “Don't be such a baby,” she teased, carefully adding blue ink to the Ferris wheel's spikes. When she stopped to take a break, she realized that she could see the actual Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier out in the distance. It was bathed in yellow light, not more than a half mile from Jonathan's building.

  “How's it going?” he asked. “ 'Cause my arm is killing me.”

  “Ten minutes more.” She went back to work, crisscrossing lines in red, then black.

  It didn't take ten minutes. It took twenty. Finally, though, she was done, and dabbed at the bleeding with bandages and an astringent to cut the blood flow to a bare minimum.

  “Okay. That's it.” She put down her equipment and stretched, knowing she wasn't done. She still had to wrap his wound, and repeat the instructions about aftercare. Bacitracin, not Neosporin.

  He spun around. “Can I see it?”

  “Uh-huh. But it'll look a lot better in a few days. And I still have to wrap it.” She reached for a small hand mirror that she carried with the rest of her equipment and held it a few feet away from his arm. “Can you see?”

  “It's …”

  “You like it?”

  “It's art,” he declared. “Art I'll wear forever. It's beautiful, Esme.”

  She knew that she shouldn't let his words have such an effect on her, but she couldn't help it. It wasn't that she needed a guy's approval to make her feel okay. It was more that he was so sincere. She'd given tattoos to many members of Junior's old gang, Los Locos. They'd all paid her for her work, they'd all been appreciative, but none of them had ever called a tattoo of hers “art.”

  “Sit back,” she told him. “There's more to do. You want a white bandage or cellophane?”

  “Cellophane?”

  “So your rich friends at the country club can see your Picasso.”

  His eyes held hers. “Definitely cellophane.”

  “You might want to wear long sleeves when you go for that film thing.”

  “Short,” he insisted.

  The fierceness of his faith in her touched her deeply. She got out her cellophane bandaging and neatly wrapped his upper arm with an airtight barrier.

  “So who else is in this new movie?” she asked.

  “I think I read something in the Hollywood Reporter about Jessica Biel or Mischa Barton as the love interest.”

  Esme kept her face impassive as she wrapped his bicep. Those were two very hot, very rich, very white actresses. She wondered if he'd invite her to come visit him on the set. She wondered how she'd feel if she had to watch him do love scenes with Mischa Barton. Most of all, she wondered when she'd be confident enough in her relationship with him to stop all this stupid wondering.

  Lydia Chandler

  Lydia swerved into the driveway of the small house on Twenty-fourth Street in Santa Monica, clicked off KSCR—the closest thing Los Angeles had to an alt station—and turned the key to the green Triumph Spitfire to the Off position. The engine shut down with the peculiar whiz-whiz-whir sound it had developed in the last few days, yet another reason for her to return it to the guy who'd loaned it to her.

  It was a shame. Returning the Spitfire would leave her carfree, which in Los Angeles was a fate perhaps worse than death. Certainly her measly income as the nanny to Martina and Jimmy—the artificial-insemination offspring of her aunt Kat Carpenter and her Russian wife, Anya Kuriakova—wasn't going to put her behind the wheel of anything besides a used bike any time soon. Yet she had to do what she had to do to assuage her own guilt: Give up the car, and get the guy who had loaned it to her, Luis Amador, out of her life. Even if she had to pay the price in decreased mobility.

  Luis was an assistant golf pro at the Brentwood Hills Country Club, the exclusive facility to which the moms—her pet name for her aunt and Anya—belonged. Lydia seemed to spend at least three out of every seven afternoons in their vaunted “Nanny and Me” program, which had been created because so many of the country club members were either working, out on the golf course, or engaging in beauty maintenance at their favorite spas in Beverly Hills (conventional) or Topanga Canyon (alt-type rich).

  Lydia and Luis had met one afternoon at the country club. She needed wheels and he had a car that he was willing to lend, but that was not the problem. The problem was that the car transfer evening had turned into a drunken romp up to Malibu, which turned into her awakening the next morning in his bed with both a splitting headache and the loss of her virginity.

  When she'd disclosed this little lapse in judgment to her two best friends, Kiley and Esme, they had gone off on her. Not because she'd had sex, but that she couldn't remember if he'd used a condom. Esme had actually accused her of a temporary lapse in sanity. That had been followed by a visit to Planned Parenthood in Echo Park, where she'd been tested for STDs, HIV, and pregnancy. All the tests came back negative, thankfully. She'd need another HIV test in six months, but it seemed as if one night of temporary insanity wasn't going to have lifelong implications.

  Still, it irritated Lydia that she'd done something so dumb. It wasn't the virginity thing. Hell, she'd been looking for the perfect male specimen to do the deed ever since she'd arrived in Los Angeles. A red-blooded American girl who had grown up in Amazonia surrounded by naked five-foot-nothing men with rotting teeth who considered it a fashion plus to tie their appendages to their stomachs with twine had to make up for lost time.

  This being Los Angeles, it wasn't as if she'd been hard up for candidates. There were plenty of cute guys in Beverly Hills, and she seemed to attract a decent amount of male attention. She was on the tall side, slender, with huge eyes the color of celery and long, choppy, naturally blond hair bleached nearly white by the Amazonian sun. Other girls might fantasize about love, but Lydia fantasized about sex with pretty much everyone she met. She was certain that she'd love sex even more than she loved shopping. All she needed was the right guy.

  Then she met Billy Martin. Billy changed everything, and not just because he was six-two, hot, and bore a strong resemblance to Tom Welling from Smallville. It was more than that. They got each other. Billy had even lived overseas for many years. He was a design student with an interest in film set design.

  As far as Lydia was concerned, all this added up to “Let's Do the Wild Thing Now.” But to her great frustration, she had evidently fallen for the most romantic boy on the planet. Lydia's “Let's Do the Wild Thing Now” was Billy's “Let's Really Get to Know Each Other First
.”

  So yes, while she could chalk up her “oops” with Luis to sexual frustration, she somehow doubted that Billy would see things the same way. Which was exactly why she was not going to tell him.

  Luis's battered wooden front door swung open before she could push the white doorbell. “Car trouble? Or was it just that you missed me?”

  The front porch light shone on the twinkle in his eyes. Costa Rican by birth, in America on a golf scholarship to Pepperdine, he wore a college golf team shirt and cutoffs not all that different from Lydia's, though hers were by Bebe and originally priced at more than a hundred dollars. She'd found them on sale mismarked a size twelve. With them she wore a lacy silver Anat B. camisole that bared two inches of taut, tanned stomach. Digging up designer wear on a budget was her passion, a passion she was ready to give up as soon as she could banish the B word—“budget”—from her vocabulary. For now, it meant she prowled the boutiques on Melrose and chatted up the sales staff. Sometimes they'd help her with an employee discount.

  “It was just so sweet for you to lend me the car,” she told him with a trace of her former Texas drawl, and offered him the key on its chain. “But since I don't have a license yet, I don't really think I can use it anymore.”

  Luis laughed. “That didn't stop you when I offered it to you.”

  True. She needed a different angle.

  “My aunt found out I was driving it and made me bring it back. I have a learner's permit now, but it turns out my driving just sucks,” she lied smoothly. “I don't want to wreck it.”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Wouldn't bother me.” He held the door open. “Want to come in?” He held up a bottle of Guinness beer, half empty. “I've got more of these.”