Chapter 10: Confessions in Motion
The only sound in the truck was the wet, rhythmic swipe of the windshield wipers and Catalina’s uneven breathing. She’d stopped crying, but her breaths hitched on the inhale, a dammed-up river threatening to break again. Dom’s calloused thumb traced slow, endless circles on the inside of her wrist, right over the frantic pulse there. A secret signal from when they were thirteen, hiding from the world in the back of their dad’s old C10. A Morse code for I’m here.
Jacob watched them in the rearview, his own reflection a ghost over theirs. He pretended to be focused on the rain-slicked roads, the yellow lines bleeding past. The silence was a minefield. He stepped on one when he cleared his throat.
“Mom’s probably… she’s been calling.”
No answer from the back. The thumb kept circling.
Catalina shifted, her head still against the window, but her other hand came up to cover Dom’s where it held her wrist. Her voice, when it came, was scraped raw and so quiet Jacob almost didn’t catch it. It wasn’t for him.
“I counted,” she murmured into the damp glass. “Back there. I counted seven seconds between the guard rails.”
Dom’s thumb stopped. His other arm, already around her shoulders, tightened convulsively. A muscle in his jaw bulged, then released. He didn’t ask seven seconds for what? They both knew. The time it would take to fall. The space between one breath and never taking another.
Jacob’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He felt like a voyeur, privy to a language so private it felt violent. He flipped the turn signal, the click-clack obnoxiously loud, just to break the spell.
They pulled onto their street. The house looked wrong. Every light was on, blazing against the night, a distress signal in suburbia. The driveway was empty except for their mom’s sedan. Mia’s car was gone.
“She’s not back,” Jacob said, stating the obvious as he killed the engine.
The sudden quiet was worse. Catalina pulled away from Dom’s touch, straightening her spine with a visible effort. She wiped her face with the sleeve of Letty’s jacket, a quick, desperate motion. The transformation was painful to watch. The shattered woman from the bridge receded, her features hardening into a mask of wary endurance. She was bracing for impact.
Dom opened his door. The interior light came on, harsh and revealing. He looked at Catalina. “Stay close,” he said, not a command, a plea.
They walked to the front door like a condemned patrol. Jacob led, shoulders tense. Dom’s hand hovered at the small of Catalina’s back, not touching, a guardian’s ghost.
The door was unlocked. The smell hit them first: Pine-Sol and burnt coffee. The house was surgically clean, the kind of clean that spoke of frantic, mindless energy. The living room carpet showed fresh vacuum lines. The photos on the mantel were perfectly aligned.
Their mother stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing an already spotless stainless-steel basin. Her back was to them. The water was running scalding hot, steam clouding the window above her.
“Mom,” Jacob said.
She didn’t turn. The scrubber, a green abrasive pad, sawed back and forth with a relentless, grating sound. Scritch-scritch-scritch.
“Maria.” Dom’s voice was softer.
The scrubbing stopped. She placed the pad neatly on the side of the sink. Turned off the water. Dried her hands on a towel, each finger meticulously patted. Then she turned around.
Her face was a void. The grief had been so total it had burned everything else out, leaving a terrifying calm. Her eyes, the same brown as her children’s, moved from Jacob to Dom, then settled on Catalina. They didn’t flare with anger. They just… absorbed.
“Mia is at Tia Rosa’s,” she said. Her voice was flat, unused. “She does not want to see you. Either of you. I told her to stay as long as she needs.”
Catalina flinched as if struck. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
“Where’s Dad?” Dom asked, the question thick.
“Garage. He hasn’t said a word since you left.” Her gaze never left Catalina. “He is packing his tools. He says he cannot work in a shop with your name on the sign. Not anymore.”
The foundation of their world, already cracked, gave another sickening lurch. The shop. Their father’s legacy. His pride.
“Mom…” Catalina finally whispered, the word breaking.
“Don’t.” Maria held up a hand. It trembled slightly. “Just… don’t. I have scrubbed this house. I have prayed. I have screamed into a pillow until my throat bled. I am empty now. So you will talk. You will explain to me how my twins, my babies who shared a crib… how this happened.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a verdict waiting for evidence.
Dom stepped forward, slightly placing himself between his mother and sister. “It’s not her fault.”
“I did not ask whose fault it was!” The void in Maria’s face filled, fast and terrifying, with a torrent of raw pain. Her composure shattered, leaving her trembling. “I asked how! Was it after your father’s funeral? Was it when? Was it some… some sickness that took you both?”
“It’s not a sickness,” Dom said, his own voice rising, defensive and ragged.
“Then what do you call it?!” Maria shouted, the sound raw in the sterile room. “What is the word for this? You have a child! A beautiful, innocent girl who now has to live knowing her parents are… are…” She couldn’t say it. The word choked her.
“We know what we are!” Catalina’s voice burst out, sharp and pained. She pushed past Dom’s arm. “You think we don’t feel it? Every day? The disgust is in here, Mom!” She pressed a fist to her own sternum. “It’s in us. We eat it for breakfast. We see it in Mia’s eyes now. We don’t need you to define it.”
The room throbbed with the confession. Maria staggered back a step, hitting the counter behind her.
“Then why?” Her question was a whisper now, crushed by the weight of it all. “For God’s sake, why?”
Dom looked at Catalina. A lifetime passed in that look. A silent conversation of shared battles, private victories, a universe built for two in a world that had no room for them. He turned back to his mother, his defiance gone, leaving only a bleak, exhausted honesty.
“Because when the world went quiet,” he said, his voice gravel, “hers was the only voice I understood. It just… was. It just is.”
Maria stared at him, searching for the lie, the excuse, the trick. She found none. Just the hollowed-out truth of it. Her shoulders slumped. The anger drained away, leaving something worse: a profound, helpless sorrow.
“You have to leave,” she said, her voice dead. “Tonight. You cannot stay under this roof.”
“Mom,” Jacob interjected, stepping forward. “It’s the middle of the night. It’s pouring.”
“Where would we go?” Catalina asked, not challenging, just pragmatic. The practicality of it was somehow more devastating than the tears.
“I don’t care.” Maria wrapped her arms around herself. “A motel. The shop. I don’t care. You cannot be here when Mia comes back. I will not have her walking into this… this atmosphere. You will give her space. You will give us all space.”
Dom nodded slowly, as if a expected sentence had finally been passed. He reached for Catalina’s hand. This time, he didn’t hide it. Their fingers laced together, a united front against the expulsion.
“We’ll get our things,” he said.
They moved past her, a funeral procession of two, down the hall to their old rooms. Jacob stood with his mother in the glaring, silent kitchen. He could hear the soft, hurried sounds of drawers opening and closing, zippers.
Maria was staring at the spot where the stain had been. “The peroxide worked,” she said, to no one. “The orange is gone. But the wood… it’s bleached now. A white patch. You can always see where it was.”
After a few minutes, they returned. Dom had a duffel bag. Catalina had a small backpack and was clutching Mia’s favorite stuffed rabbit, a worn blue thing named Bingo. She held it to her chest.
Without a word, they walked to the front door. Dom paused, looking back at his mother. “Tell Mia… tell her we love her. More than anything.”
Maria didn’t respond. She just stared at the bleached spot on the floor.
The door closed behind them with a soft, final click.
Jacob listened to their footsteps fade on the wet walkway, then to the sound of Dom’s Charger coughing to life. The headlights washed across the front window, then disappeared.
His mother finally moved. She walked to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat. She folded her hands in front of her, like she was waiting for something. The house was a museum of normalcy, vibrating with the aftershock of an earthquake.
Out on the street, the Charger idled. The rain fell in sheets.
Catalina held Bingo in a death grip, staring straight ahead through the windshield. “Where?” she asked, the word barely audible.
Dom put the car in drive. He had no answer. The shop was a tomb with their name on it. Letty’s was a temporary harbor, not a home. The motels would be filled with the hollow echo of their own breathing.
He drove. Aimless. The streets were a maze with no center. The clock on the dash glowed 2:17 AM.
After twenty minutes, Catalina spoke again, her voice thin and strained. “Pull over.”
“What?”
“Just pull over. Anywhere.”
He guided the car onto the shoulder of a quiet, tree-lined avenue, under the dripping canopy of an ancient oak. The engine ticked as it cooled. The rain drummed on the roof.
For a full minute, neither moved. Then Catalina unbuckled her seatbelt with a sharp snap. She turned to him, her face illuminated by the eerie green light of the dashboard. The mask was completely gone. What was left was pure, unguarded wreckage.
“I can’t do this,” she said, no louder than a breath. “I can’t go to some cold room and pretend we’ll sleep. I can’t breathe, Dom.”
He started to speak, to offer some frail reassurance, but she was already moving. She climbed across the center console, clumsy and desperate, and folded herself into his lap in the driver’s seat.
The Charger felt claustrophobic, a metal womb vibrating with unspent energy. Her weight on his legs was a solid, real pressure in a world that had lost all its edges. Dom’s hands came up, automatically, to steady her hips. The familiar curve of them through her jeans.
“Cat,” he breathed, a warning and a plea woven together.
She pressed her forehead to his, her breath hot against his lips. “Don’t talk. Just drive. Somewhere. Anywhere that isn’t here.”
He recognized the wild, fleeing look in her eyes. It was the same one from the bridge, but hotter, more dangerous. A silent scream turned inward, seeking combustion. He gently shifted her back to the passenger seat, his movements slow, as if handling live wiring.
His own heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He put the car in drive. The headlights carved a path through the rain.
He drove without conscious thought, muscle memory taking them toward the industrial fringe where the city shed its skin. Past the closed body shops and warehouses, to a stretch of road dotted with faded signs offering hourly rates. The Coral Sands Motel. The ‘S’ in Sands was dark.
He pulled into a parking spot facing a cracked sidewalk. The building was a single story of peeling pink stucco. The orange glow of a vacancy sign buzzed, reflecting in the oily puddles.
Neither moved for a long moment. The rain softened to a drizzle.
“Dom,” she said. Her voice was different now. Stripped. Not broken, but sharpened to a single, terrifying point.
He cut the engine. The silence was absolute. He looked at her. Her eyes were dry and blazing in the neon half-light. She unclipped her seatbelt, the click echoing in the still car.
She got out. He followed.
The air outside was cool and smelled of wet asphalt and diesel. She walked to the motel office, a small cubicle behind dirty glass. He watched her through the window as she spoke to the night clerk, an older man watching a small TV. She paid in cash from her pocket. She didn’t flinch, didn’t hesitate. She took the key—an actual, tarnished brass key on a plastic fob—and turned.
Room 14. At the far end, under a broken exterior light.
The walk across the asphalt felt like crossing a frontier. The key turned in the lock with a gritty, metallic shriek. The door swung inward to a wall of damp, cold air and the smell of old cigarettes and bleach.
She stepped inside. He followed, closing the door behind them. The latch sounded final.
The room was exactly as expected. A queen bed with a brown floral spread. A dark wood-grain table. A painting of a generic beach. The only light came from a sodium vapor lamp outside, casting a sickly yellow through the thin curtains.
Catalina stood in the center of the worn carpet, her back to him. She was so still. Then her shoulders dropped, a surrender. She turned.
The raw need on her face was a physical force. It sucked the air from the room. It wasn’t desire. It was annihilation.
“Fuck me, Dom,” she said, the words flat and hard, like stones dropped on the floor. “Just fuck me. Fuck me so I don’t feel anything. So I don’t think.”
He stood frozen, five feet away. The space between them was charged, like before a lightning strike.
“Cat, no,” he managed, his voice thick. “That’s not… that’s not what this is.”
“Isn’t it?” A brittle, horrible laugh escaped her. “What else is left? We’re monsters, remember? Monsters don’t get to make love. They just… take. They ruin.” She took a step toward him, her eyes holding his, challenging him to look away. “So ruin me. Again. Make it so dirty and so wrong that I can’t remember my own name. Breed me.”
His breath hitched. The word hung in the damp air. Breed. It was the most forbidden part of their sin, given voice. Their daughter’s existence, used as a weapon against them both.
“Breed your sister,” she whispered, closing the distance, her hand finding his, pressing his palm against the flat of her stomach. “Fill me up with more of our mistake so I have something else to hate besides myself. So I have a reason to stay.”
Her words were a targeted demolition. They tore down every frail wall of justification, every scrap of stolen tenderness. They reduced it all to biology, to a base, pathetic instinct.
He looked at her. He saw the bridge railing. He saw the bleached spot on the kitchen floor. He saw Mia’s absent chair. He saw the count of seven seconds between guard rails.
His other hand came up, cupping her jaw. His thumb brushed her cheek, tracing the path of earlier tears. The gesture was tender. His eyes were not.
“Don’t you dare,” he murmured, his voice low and rough. “Don’t you dare talk about her like that. Don’t you reduce her to a mistake.”
“Then what is she?” Catalina’s whisper was fierce, her body trembling against his. “What are we? Give me the word, Dom. Since you know so much.”
He didn’t have a word. He had nothing but the feeling of her skin under his hands, the rapid pulse in her neck, the devastating truth of her in his arms. The love and the shame were the same fire, burning them from the inside out.
He kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision. A battle for air and sense. Her hands fisted in his shirt, pulling him closer, erasing the last space. He walked her backward until her legs hit the edge of the bed.
They fell onto the scratchy bedspread in a tangle of limbs and desperate, clumsy hands. There were no more words. The only sounds were the rasp of zippers, the shush of fabric, their harsh, shared breathing. The outside world—the motel, the rain, their shattered family—ceased to exist.
This was not the hidden, careful joining of their past. This was a storm. A punishment. A confession written on skin with teeth and nails. She clung to him, her legs locking around his hips, her mouth on his shoulder to stifle a cry that was equal parts pain and a terrible, soaring release.
He moved in her, a frantic, driving rhythm, each thrust an attempt to obliterate the images, the voices, the future. To lose themselves in the raw, physical truth of connection so deep it felt like merging. To become one thing, one entity, so that the world’s judgment could not find a seam to pry apart.
Her plea echoed in the rhythm. So I don’t feel anything.
But she felt everything. It was written in the arch of her spine, the grip of her hands, the choked sob against his neck. It was in the way he buried his face in her hair, his own breath coming in ragged gasps, his movements shifting from fury to a deep, devastating ache.
The climax, when it broke over them, was not a relief. It was a cataclysm. A wave that dragged them under and left them wrecked on a foreign shore. It felt less like pleasure and more like a shared hemorrhage, a vital wound.
Afterward, the quiet was absolute. The buzzing sign outside provided the only hum. The sodium light painted a stripe across the bed, over their tangled, sweat-slicked bodies.
He collapsed beside her, spent. The room was cold. The smell of sex and despair filled the air.
She stared at the water-stained ceiling. A single tear escaped the corner of her eye, tracing a slow path into her hairline. He watched it, unable to move, unable to speak. The fury was gone. The hunger was gone. All that remained was a hollow, echoing vastness.
She finally turned her head on the pillow. Her eyes found his in the half-dark. They were empty.
“Did it work?” she asked, her voice a dry whisper.
He had no answer. He just pulled the rough sheet over them both, turning to spoon her trembling body against his chest. He held her as the motel room heater kicked on with a groan, blasting dry, tasteless air over them. He held her as her breathing slowly evened into the shallow rhythm of exhausted sleep.
He did not sleep. He stared at the painting of the generic beach, a paradise that didn’t exist. The word she’d used echoed in the hollows of his mind. Breed. He thought of Mia, asleep in a guest room at Tia Rosa’s, her blue rabbit missing from her arms. He thought of the white, bleached patch on the kitchen floor.
His arms tightened around Catalina. He listened to the drip of a faucet in the shower. He waited for the dawn, and whatever came next.
The gray light of dawn didn't arrive so much as it seeped into the room, dissolving the sodium-yellow dark into a cold, watery blue. Dom watched it trace the slope of Catalina’s shoulder above the sheet, her skin pale and goosebumped in the motel’s chill. Her breathing was deep now, the ragged edge of panic smoothed by exhausted sleep. He envied her escape.
His own mind was a locked room full of shattered glass. Every thought cut. Mia’s face. His father’s silent rage in the garage. The bleach-stained floor. The feeling of Cat’s hands gripping his back like she was drowning.
He carefully extracted his arm from under her, the muscles screaming from being locked in one position for hours. She murmured, turning into the warmth he left behind, but didn’t wake. He sat on the edge of the bed, the cheap springs groaning. The room smelled of them, of sex and despair and cheap soap.
He needed air that didn’t taste like last night.
Pulling on his jeans, he walked to the door, his bare feet silent on the gritty carpet. He slipped outside, closing the door with a soft click. The world was soaked and quiet. Rainwater dripped from the motel’s eaves onto a puddle oiled with rainbow hues. The Coral Sands sign buzzed a lonely tune.
He lit a cigarette, the first drag scratching his dry throat. The smoke hung in the damp air, not rising. He leaned against the stucco wall, the rough surface cold against his skin. From here, he could see the highway, a distant river of silent headlights. People going to work. Normal people with normal problems.
The door opened behind him. He didn’t turn. He heard her bare feet on the concrete, felt her come to stand beside him. She had wrapped the thin bedspread around her shoulders like a shawl. She took the cigarette from his fingers, took a drag, and handed it back.
“You didn’t sleep,” she said. Her voice was hoarse.
“Somebody had to keep watch.”
“For what?”
He finally looked at her. Her hair was tangled, mascara smudged under her eyes. She looked younger and older all at once. “For whatever comes next,” he said.
She nodded, accepting that. She stared at the highway. “I dreamt I was looking for Bingo. In a big white room. But the room kept getting bigger.” She pulled the spread tighter. “I woke up and my hand was empty.”
The mention of Mia’s rabbit was a fresh twist of the knife. He took a final drag and crushed the filter under his heel. “We need a plan, Cat.”
“A plan.” She repeated the word as if it were in a foreign language. “For what? Getting a new apartment? Picking out curtains? We have no jobs, Dom. Dad’s taking the shop. We have fifty-three dollars in cash and a tank of gas.”
“We have the Charger.”
She let out a short, sharp breath that wasn’t a laugh. “Right. The family car. Very subtle.”
“It’s all we have.” His tone was harder than he meant it to be. The practicalities were a cliff they were about to drive off. “We can’t stay here past eleven. They charge for another day.”
“So we drive. Then what?” She turned to him, her eyes searching his face. “We find another town, another shitty motel. We get jobs flipping burgers under fake names. We wait for them to find us?