I pick up the photograph of Mother and Father that sits at the corner of his desk, with their names written at the bottom in their own hands. Hazel De Maggio’s script is elegant, curving.
My mother’s hair is long and deep black in the photo. Her smile is full and her body sturdy. She was a strong woman then, just as she is now. I wonder what she would say about all this. She has been in Italy for months with Grandmother, preparing for the opening of her new restaurant. I am sure Father misses her. Even in this picture, I can see how he keeps a protective arm around her shoulders, holding her close, looking straight into the lens with a slight furrow to brows as if he fears that even the person looking at the picture years after it was taken will try to take her from him.
I don’t like what it says. How important she is to him. How essential.
So I turn instead to the photo of me and Levi as five-year-olds.
Despite everything, it touches me that Father chooses to display this here. It’s our first day of school and I’ve got Levi in a headlock, shoving him in the head as he tries to lift me off the ground. Mother is in the background, a smile on her face.
I find my hands straying to the drawers since it’s not often I’m in here alone. The top drawer is locked. I pick up a paperclip and study it, wondering if I still have the knack. When Levi and I were teenagers, we learned the art of lockpicking together. We tried our hands at breaking into movie theaters and taking our girlfriends there, once hosting a five-course meal in one of Father’s upper-class restaurants—all after hours, of course.
After a few fumbling moments, I manage to pick the lock.
A notepad rests on top of a bunch of documents. I pick it up and the message stabs at what passes for my excuse of a heart. In Father’s writing—the same script as the photo signature—I read: What to do with Angelo??? He is a good boy, but I think loneliness is making him rash. It is underlined and dotted and scrawled as if he wrote it down just to see the thought reflected in physical reality and then sat to stare at it for hours, hoping he could coax some answer out of his own handwriting.
The thought of that scene—Father hunched over this pad, eyebrows knotted in concern, thinking of me—makes me feel faint and strange.
For one wild second, I weigh the question myself. Is he right? Is being alone weakening me in some immeasurable way?
But I have always been alone. I am who I am. I have never apologized for that. I do not intend to start doing so now.
My mind returns to Levi’s proposition. If Father really does believe that having a wife is what I need, then perhaps I should just play his game for the time being. Annoyingly, my mind tosses up Dani as candidate number one, two, and three. I push that aside.
I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from consuming her every chance I got, painting her body in tongue strokes until she was hot and squirming and aching for more. I would trace the pink curves of her pussy until I found the throbbing nub of her wanting clit, circling it, sucking it, feeling the quiver in her hip bones as she got tight and wet and—
I jump to my feet, laughing at myself, carefully ignoring the rush of blood between my legs.
I’m not about to start jacking off in Father’s office. No, Dani is a mistake. I need to forget she exists, as she is surely trying to do with me.
I need to do one thing and one thing only: Forget her. Now.
I call Levi. “Yes?” he answers. In the background, I hear giggling and muffled music. It seems Levi’s night is going better than mine.
“Arrange interviews for suitable candidates,” I tell him, knowing he’ll know what I’m talking about. “Bill it as an administrative position, but the interviewees should know what they’re getting themselves into. Nobody from the life, Levi. I want somebody who won’t get any ideas about blackmailing us. Somebody unschooled.”
“Sure, Angelo,” he says. “I’m glad you came around.”
I look at the note again, stomach tight with anger and something else. Perhaps it is regret that Father can’t voice these concerns aloud to me, that he chooses instead to ask the questions of himself, late at night while alone in his office.
“We’ll play his game until we don’t have to anymore. And then, mio fratello, we will run this fucking city.”
8
Dani
“People say video rental is dying, but you can’t beat a good old DVD, no sir—I mean, ma’am.” He winks, or tries to wink, but about halfway through, he loses confidence in the gesture and just sort flutters his eyes. “Well, anyway.”
So here’s the lowdown: Zora set me up on a blind date, which she has a nasty habit of doing, and which I comply with because she’s my friend and, shoot, it beats sitting around having nightmares about Wyatt slumped over with a needle stuck in his arm.
This particular effort, one of her worst yet, was arranged before I met Angelo … not that that matters, I remind myself. Still, I can’t help but compare the two.
Davey is a skinny man with beady eyes that have not stopped staring at my breasts—ensconced in a very conservative top—like they’re hiding the cure for cancer. Beady eyes and skinniness is not exactly a dealbreaker. But the fact that he lives at home at thirty and works in a video rental store? That’s red flag central. Zora called him a ‘filmmaker.’ Lord, that girl has a way with words.
“Goddamn you, Zora,” I mumble under my breath.
“What’s that? Bad hearing, you know,” Davey jabbers.
“Oh, nothing,” I say as sweetly as I can. I take a sip of wine. Glass #2 better be on its way already, because this date is testing me. “You were saying…?”
It’s been a day since the fate-fueled run-in with Angelo at the side of the road, and since then, I’ve expended a whole lot of willpower on thinking about anything but that. During the day, I do my job. When I’m in my apartment, I’m sleeping.
But when I’m sleeping, I dream. And those are out of my control.
Hot, shadowy dreams, full of teasing kisses and whispered filth, the kind that wake me up drenched in sweat and panting like I just ran the New York City Marathon. The kind I try to forget immediately.
It’s also hard not to let my mind wander as Davey starts telling me about his action figure collection. It wanders where it wants, and what it wants is Angelo. It wants the way the blood trickled down the bridge of his nose, forming a contrast of wild against perfectly groomed that stirred something weirdly primal between my legs…It wants that cocky grin, the whiplash strike of his retorts, his searching, hungry fingers…
Focus on the date, lady.
“That sounds interesting,” I say. “It must take some, uh, concentration to sit there for so long, painting.”
“Oh, hells yeah!” he grins.
He’s giving me a young-Wyatt vibe now, which does nothing positive for my level of attraction to him. I hope I don’t seem bitchy. He really does seem like a nice enough guy. But no one wants to get frisky with a guy who reminds them of their little brother.
“Another drink?” he asks, with a sort of hungry look in his eyes. Seedy, like he’d have no problem if I got blackout drunk just to get through this.
“No, thank you. I’m still halfway through this one.”