Troubled…for a moment. Then there’s fury in his features. He’s clenching his jaw and fisting his hands, and his chest is rising on a deep and desperate breath.
“Are you going to deny it? That’s what mob guys do, right? Deny, deny, deny. When you deny something, then it frees you up and you just walk away.”
“I never meant to hurt you.” His soft voice sounds rough, and now his face is filled with everything I used to want—that desperate love that made me weak and stupid, unafraid and trusting. That’s how he looks right now.
My palm strikes his cheek so hard it echoes.
Luca
Calm moves through me as my lungs lock and my head goes light and dizzy. I hold my face, clinging onto everything I’ve learned from anyone I’ve sought out for help.
“What did you mean to do, Luca?”
The elevator feels too small, but I can’t move my body out of it. I can see and even sort of feel the rhythm of my fist smashing a man’s face. If anybody else had hit me, that’s what would be happening right now.
I blink at her. “Sorry,” I say, turning toward the doors.
“Are you, though?”
The elevator shudders as it stops on some floor. My shaking finger finds the stay-shut button.
Jesus…my heart’s racing. I can’t even speak. My whole body’s fucking shaking. I squeeze my eyes shut. “It was my fault.”
I see younger me in a wing-backed chair pulled into a hallway in this very building, watching as the others bustle about with towels, blankets, mops that drip red. I remember myself lying in a strange bed sometime later. A blonde girl stroked my hair, but I couldn’t see her because I had my eyes closed so I could pretend she was another girl—the one I thought I’d never see again.
“I know it was your fault,” she says sharply. “I deserved much better.”
“I know.” I swallow and flex my quads so my legs will stay steady. I have to clear the numb cloud out of my head to say this one thing. Count…and breathe, Luca. And say it. “You deserved another story.” The words catch in my throat. “Every day I hate it that I didn’t give you that one.”
I look back over my shoulder, and I watch as her eyes pop open wide.
“You’re bleeding.” Her jaw drops, and realization twists her features. “My ring.”
I give her a twitch of my cheek—an approximation of a smile…is what I mean for it to be. “’S fine.”
“Are you okay?” She moves closer.
“Doesn’t hurt.”
“Does that…thing still happen?” It’s the quietest whisper.
“It’s okay.” I let go of the button keeping the doors closed.
Her shoulder brushes mine as she slaps her palm down on the button. Then her eyes are on mine.
“Your hand’s shaking,” she says.
“No it’s not.” I hold it up, counting on myself to hide it by tensing my hand, as I have so many times before. But I watch tears well in her eyes—because it is, a little.
She looks aghast. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sometimes they just shake.”
She squeezes her eyes shut, and I drink her in—this new Elise, so fucking beautiful and regal I could fall to my knees. It feels like hours before she looks back at me.
“I hate you. For what you did.” Her lips tremble. “I hate that I ever met you. That I see you and I know who you are.”
Tears spill down her cheeks, and I want nothing more than to pull her up against me. I want it so much that I stand there frozen, imagining what it would look like to give in: to tell her, touch her. I could tell her but that’s not what I’m going to do.
Some small noise comes from me. Almost like a groan, but it sounds hoarse, as if it broke free from the prison of my throat.
Her face tightens as she steps back from me. “I don’t want to be near you. Don’t come near me on campus or in the store or anywhere! Don’t get near me at a party.” Her voice breaks—because she’s starting to cry. “I had hoped to see you here—in your…environment—so I can tell myself that you’re a monster. You’re not who I thought you were. You never were.”
My chest aches so badly I can’t inhale.
“And don’t think I don’t know. What you are now. Who you hang around with, what you people do. Soon I’m graduating, and I’m going into law.”
I swallow—somehow. “Good for you.”
“Luca?” Her hard voice is hoarse now. I can tell from her mouth that she’s trying not to cry. “Why did you do it that way?”
I look at my legs, at the black pants I wore to play poker. “I don’t think it matters.” Breathe in…and out. I can feel my body flickering, and distantly I wonder if I might pass out.
“No. It doesn’t, at all,” she says. “But I still want to know.”
Another long breath in and slow breath out so my head will stop spinning. “Doesn’t matter.” I bite my cheek hard enough that I can taste blood. The sting helps to ground me. I look at her. At her eyes, which look at me with kindness every time I shut my eyes to sleep. I take in how angry she is—this real, living person that I broke with my actions.
“Doesn’t matter,” I rasp. I step back against the doors, fixing my gaze on the wall over her shoulder. “You just said you know who I am. None of that stuff matters.”
“You’re not a nice guy,” she whispers.
I touch my jaw where it’s now dripping, feeling really float-y. “No,” I agree.
She sniffs. When she speaks again, I hear the tears I can’t see while looking at the reflective gold walls.
“Do you know how hard I tried to find you? I found out you were at her house. The next day,” she rasps. “I wanted to kill her. I thought…everyone…and it was Isa. She was always strange. So quiet. I thought she was…scary.” Some sound comes from her throat; it’s like a laugh mid-strangle. “I just didn’t get her. Dani—I could see that. Everybody was in love with Dani. I couldn’t see how you could fall for Isa. So fast. It made me think that you had never really cared about me.” Her voice breaks as she says, “And that made me crazy.” She hides her face behind her hands, and I can’t keep my eyes from sweeping up and down her again, reverent, almost starving for her. “That’s the part that really made me messed up,” she says into her palms. “Not that I wasn’t good enough to keep you. But the way it was all fake.”
She lifts her head, breathing deeply as tears stream down her cheeks. “I assumed I didn’t really matter. When you’re eighteen, you blame yourself for not knowing. I had wanted you so much. I said to myself that I must have misread it. I was so lonely at that time.” Her eyes squeeze shut, and she bows her head like she might lose it. But she doesn’t. She just stands there with her head down, and she covers her mouth like she’s afraid she might be sick. Then she moves her hand and she looks at me.
“I think you should know it absolutely ruined college. I played…a role…the whole first year. I played a role of someone who had never known you and who never knew of all the bullshit Shakespeare in the track field, all that stupid shit you used to tell me in Italian. I knew you couldn’t fake the way you came when I would bite your lip or how you would lay on me when we cuddled. Like, you’d shift your weight so I could feel you lying on me, like on top of me—so I would have to hold your body up with mine. Like you just…needed to be close to me. I told myself that didn’t happen because there was no way I could explain why you would just break things off. Deep down I knew something bad might have happened, so I came by one time when I heard where you were. And Isa’s people sent me away.