Playing Pretend Box Set

by Natasha L. Black

  "Yeah," Giovanni said. "Or if I'm just having a shitty day. There's nothing like going through a McDonald's drive-thru in a limo to stop you from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge after a particularly difficult day."

  "Isn't the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco?" I asked.

  "Yeah," Giovanni said. "I never said I've had a day so bad that I'd want to off myself on the spot. I need to give myself time to think it over. You know, take a plane, then a taxi. Have some time to mull it over."

  "Well that's a relief," I said. "You can't be too impulsive when it comes to killing yourself."

  We caught each other's eye and laughed.

  Yep, I guess we shared the same morbid sense of humor, too. Not that I hadn't known that already.

  Damn it, now even my thoughts were sounding stupid to me.

  As I settled my butt into the cool leather seat, Giovanni looked at me. "Is it all right if I run over some things about the party with you? I know how you feel about it."

  I considered this for a moment. "Sure. I'm not inviting my parents, though."

  "That's fine," Giovanni said. "It'll happen when it happens. For your own sake, though, I hope it happens within the year."

  "Why is that?"

  Giovanni just shook his head. "Lying gets to you after a while. It drains you. The longer you try to keep it up, the deeper you're in, the worse it is until you can hardly see the way out."

  He spoke like someone who'd had experience with this.

  At some point, his arm had wrapped around me and I settled into it.

  "About Gino," I said. I trailed off.

  Damn it, there was my journalist's curiosity going into overdrive. It was none of my freaking business why Gino was the way he was. Maybe he was just a party boy who had never learned the value of hard work. Somehow, though, I knew it was something more than that. Giovanni had indicated as much. That still didn't give me the right to go prying about it, or that Giovanni, in any shape or form, would want to share that with me.

  Giovanni gazed out the window, the city lights flickering in his eyes. "Gino saw something he wasn't supposed to. One night, he went into the kitchen. It was late. He was hungry or something, I don't know. He heard my dad on the phone with..." A muscle tensed in his jaw. "His mistress."

  I had to stop myself from blurting it out.

  His what? If there was one plot twist I would have never seen coming, it was this. Papa, Mr. Antonio Bruno, the devoted family man had, at one time... Not been.

  It was tearing Giovanni apart just to talk about it, too. I was about to tell him it was okay, that we didn't have to talk about it. He didn't have to do this, when—

  "I'm not excusing what he did, but it was a tough time for all of us," he continued. "The company was going through a series of legal disputes and sales weren't doing well, either. I wasn't doing well in school. Mama was in a bad place, too, since she'd just lost her parents in a car crash. But for Papa to do that..." He shook his head.

  "Gino was never the same after that," he said. "He seemed to regard everything, everyone, with bitterness and irony. He stopped believing in the family and in Papa, most of all. Papa had been his role model; he'd been a role model to all of us. Even though, after that night, Papa came clean to Mama and ended the affair, which had only been happening for just over a week, the damage had been done. At least Maria and I didn't find out until later."

  His shoulders tensed, turning inwards slightly, and a bitter laugh fell out of his lips.

  "Of course, it was so obvious after. Months later, I was going to the bar, celebrating my twenty-first birthday and I thought, what good were big brothers if they didn't introduce their little brothers to the good things in life? So, we got Gino a fake ID, we got him in the club, and we both had the time of our lives. I thought that was it, things were maybe going to get better. How wrong I was. That wasn't it, not by a long shot."

  The limo driver had pulled up to the gallery, but Giovanni hadn't noticed. His eyes were in another world. "The next few months, it was like dominoes. Everything in Gino's life fell apart. He got expelled from one high school after the next, until even private schools wouldn't take him. Then he ran away from home. One of his best friends died from drunk driving. Everything just went from bad to worse and one day, Gino just didn't come home anymore. Whenever he would run away, he’d come back to visit and ask for money. But after a couple more years of that, he wouldn't even show his face anymore. Papa had cut him off. He tried to put his foot down, reassert his authority. But Gino just laughed and said he was never going to listen to a pig like Papa, a hypocrite. Never again."

  There was nothing to say after that. His hand was slack, lifeless on his upper leg. I took it. "I'm sorry."

  "So am I," Giovanni said in a broken voice. "So am I. And the worst thing was, I was supposed to be his older brother. I was supposed to protect him. Not give him a taste for the things that would destroy him. Kandice, I did this to my brother."

  "Don't say that," I replied. "It's not true. It was his choice."

  "That's what Mama and the others say, but it is. If it wasn't for me, maybe Gino would have gone on to make honor roll, maybe he would have graduated, gotten drunk at a normal party with his friends for the first time. Maybe he would have had a chance."

  "Or maybe he would have ended up the same way," I argued. "You don't know if that would have changed anything. There was no way for you to know what the consequences would be."

  "I'll agree with you on that," Giovanni said softly. "Because if I had, I would have never gone to that bar. I would’ve never let Gino even look at a glass of alcohol."

  Giovanni's gaze shifted to the window again.

  "We're here," he said brusquely, regaining his composure. "We'd better get going."

  "Got it," I said.

  I wasn't offended or surprised. A lot of people were like that. They almost resented you after they told you their deepest, darkest thoughts and secrets. At any rate, we really were here. The fun was about to begin.

  One step inside and I knew it was going to be an interesting night. In the middle of the room, just visible amidst the throngs of people in conversation, were a long line of black, white, grey, and brown skulls, scattered across the floor.

  "You see this one?" Giovanni said, guiding my gaze to the left wall, toward a vibrant red and blue bull, charging. "He's Van Gogh's great, great nephew."

  "Whoa," I said. "How does he..."

  I should have known the answer, but the plaque that explained the piece was so full of jargon (I caught, "the magnificent non-space of the entity thus juxtaposed by the..." before my attention wavered).

  "You wouldn't think it," Giovanni said. "But he made that out of pencil crayons."

  I took a step back, then a few steps forward, peering close. I couldn't even see the pencil lines. "Pencil crayons," I repeated.

  The piece was the height and width of a large-sized window. What the…?

  "I know," Giovanni said. "That guy has a lot of time on his hands."

  Already though, my gaze was drawn to something a few feet away. It was an unassuming sketch and looked quickly done, although quite a few people were crowded around to admire it.

  I made my way there, though Giovanni tried to stop me.

  "Are you just going to speed past all of the other good stuff?"

  I hardly heard him, though I could note the edge in his voice.

  I now saw why. What was hanging in front of me, drawn on what looked like a basic sheet of paper, was a woman. She was labeled 'K,' but it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that it had been the picture Giovanni had ripped away from me days before. The beautiful, voluptuous woman that had to be me, but...

  Did I really look like that?

  Did my eyes have a tenderness like that? Did my hair look less wild, more extravagant? My curves, each lovingly shaded, as if every roll, every bulge was perfection itself.

  God, it was intimate, too. This was me, naked. Something people shouldn't
see. Something I hadn't given Giovanni the right to show.

  "Before you get mad," Giovanni said in a low voice. "My art gallery friend was breathing down my neck for me to submit something, I didn't have anything, so I just—"

  "Just sent in a sketch of me, that you didn't even ask my permission to do?"

  "A sketch that I didn't even intend to do," Giovanni said. "It just happened, and then—"

  "And then you tried to hide it from me," I replied angrily. "Back in the hotel room."

  "It was just instinct," Giovanni argued. "I was weirded out. I didn't know where it came from and... It's like you said, sketching people without asking them is shitty."

  "Yeah, but putting said sketch up in a gallery for the world to see, that's not?" I asked sarcastically.

  Giovanni's was enraptured by his sketch, but his gaze turned dark when he looked my way. "If you want, I can have it taken down."

  I considered the sketch again. It really was beautiful, a work of art. Something that did belong in a gallery.

  But... It was me. A portrait of me, showing that Giovanni saw me in a completely different way than I thought. This awareness tingled through me.

  When I'd first seen the sketch, I'd been able to tell that the naked woman was probably me, and that she was beautiful. But seeing it like this, with the stillness, the repose, in a position that I was pretty sure I had never assumed in my life, something lit up in me.

  Some switch that had been wavering between two extremes. I needed to make this a real, new start.

  "No," I said quietly. "You can leave it as it is."

  The rest of the night was a dream. There was no other word for it.

  I'd been to other swanky art galleries, sure, but they had always been filled with people trying their hardest to impress one another. "Oh yes, did you know that Titian is actually over credited for his work? That potentially more than half may actually be the work of Giorgione of Castelfranco?”

  "Is that so? Well, Mr. Salvador Dali was kicked out of two art schools, which is why he built his own museum.”

  But here, the art was more accessible. Less abstract. There were more portraits, figures, and people. They were still abstract pieces. There was nothing wrong with abstract, just… Pointless abstract, where you couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be, beyond a dot on canvas. I didn't know how to tell the difference. Maybe it was just preference, but there were only so many canvases, splotches, and random lines of color that I could go through before my response to each one just became a yawn.

  Anyway, we didn't just encounter gorgeous specimens of art. We encountered fascinating specimens of people as well. A couple of tall knobby ladies with chins like axes sipped at drinks thicker than their arms, while sporting matching polka-dot tops in different colors. A small, long-whiskered man with a beret did a sort of jig every time he stepped.

  Giovanni even spotted one of his business associates across the room, and just gave him a wave. That was it. We weren't here to impress anyone. In fact, Giovanni made a concerted effort to not initiate conversation with anybody. No, he wasn't here to network, to see how we did as a couple and judge accordingly.

  No, he was here to enjoy himself. And enjoy we did.

  From the first night I'd met him, I had known that Giovanni knew a lot about art. Since I was sober this time, I got to take in the full breadth of that knowledge. He told me about Monet, how he was mocked for having developed cataracts which limited his vision and ability to accurately distinguish between colors. He told me about Banksy, who started out freehand, but in the late 90s started using stencils.

  Last of all, he told me about his own art journey, about staying late at school to paint and sketch in whatever empty classroom he could find so Papa wouldn't get angry.

  "You can't blame him much," Giovanni said, just as my positive impression of Papa was diminishing. "His parents were artists, but the stereotypical ones. Starving artists. They lived in a shack with a leaky roof, which they had to drink the water from in order to survive. That was part of what gave Papa such drive, I think, coming from a background like that. Coming from nothing... He strove for everything.”

  A sad look had come over Giovanni's face. I took his hand and squeezed it. "In the end, he got everything. He got the business he wanted, the family he wanted."

  Technically, I couldn't climb into Giovanni's father's brain to know for sure, but if he was the man that Giovanni said, then yeah, he had made it.

  Giovanni nodded, the sadness replaced by a firm expression. "You're right. I just hope I do him proud."

  "And do yourself proud," I said. "I don't know about you. I mean, sure I worry about making my parents proud, but I worry about making myself happy more. These days, at least. When I tried doing what they wanted..."

  "Life sucked," Giovanni provided.

  "Took the words right out of my mouth," I said. "Literally. My parents wanted me to be an accountant. They were livid when I dropped out the first year. But when I was in class, I always thought to myself, either I get this degree and jump off the highest tower I can find, or I do something else. I chose the latter."

  Giovanni's arm slipped around my waist, his hot breath at my neck. "Seems we share that… among other things"

  A tingling of awareness swept over my body. Was he hinting at what I thought he was hinting at?

  Strange, too, how we'd gone from seeming like the best of friends to lovers in an instant.

  "Wanting to jump off tall buildings," he said with a broad smile.

  We were making our way toward the door. "You good to go?" Giovanni asked.

  I nodded. "But..."

  "After party is at my place," Giovanni said firmly. His already lowered brows were ready for a fight, but I just smiled at him. This time, I didn't need any alcohol to convince me.

  Whatever was going to happen next, if it was anything like tonight had been, I knew it would be good. Great, even.

  Back at Giovanni's place, the door to his balcony was already open.

  We didn’t move toward the awaiting door, though. Instead, we paused in the living room.

  "We do have a thing for balconies, don't we?" I teased, a smile curling on my lips, as I tried not to look outside. My heart was dropping into my stomach and pounding at my insides, the memories of the terrace in New York still vivid in my mind.

  Did I want this to lead where it was leading? If not, how could I resist?

  "Is that your way of saying you'd rather be in my bed?" Giovanni asked with a wolfish smile.

  "I was thinking bathtub," I said with a challenging smirk of my own. Our gazes met. A staring contest of sorts, that I won.

  Giovanni gave a shrug. "As you wish."

  With one elegant stride, he moved back to the door and clicked the lock shut. Turning, the light catching every handsome plane and detail on his face, he moved back to me and took my hand. My breath caught, his body a hands-breadth away. My skin tingled with the knowledge of what was coming.

  Without another word, Giovanni grasped my hand in his strong fingers and moved deeper into his penthouse and into his master suite.

  His pace was steady as he walked us into his bedroom, passing the California king bed, and heading straight into his giant ensuite. It didn’t feel scary, but he was almost predatory. There was no rush to his movement. He was sure of his success in this hunt. The thought thrilled me. The transition to the cool tile was an instant relief for my bare feet. The heat emanating from Giovanni’s hand was making my entire body flush, hot, wanton.

  He finally turned, the skylight not casting enough light for me to see his expression until he lurched forward. His hands grasped my jaw, pulling me to him, pressing our bodies together by pendulum force. I stood on tiptoe, accepting his lips, his tongue skillfully moving in quickly to explore my mouth as my hands squeezed his hips.

  A madness overtook us. Giovanni shoved me into the glass enclosure of the shower, the wall quickly coming up behind me, solid against my back. He pounced, press
ing me tight against the cool, blue tile and turned on the shower. Water droplets sprayed over us, warmly cascading down our faces, and I squealed.

  In his grasp, there was no escape.

  Not that I wanted to. God no, escape was the last thing on my mind. No. I wanted the escape of him. To escape into him. Into the total mind and body oblivion that happened every time our bodies came together. Like now… But with no clothes.

  I was already completely wet, and not from the spray. Giovanni’s frantic hands explored every inch of my body. He was becoming frustrated. My choice in dress, the high necked, white number, did not allow for easy entry. Realizing this at the same time, Giovanni looked at me and promptly spun me around. He pushed me against the tile again, his pelvis jutting forward to hold me in place as he unclasped the neck and peeled the dress over my arms. Though sleeveless, the combination of the water and fabric had me pinned, helpless between the wall and Giovanni’s hard body.

  Fuck. Fuck yes.

  One hand pinned both of my wrists behind my back as he bit and licked my exposed neck and shoulders. I was overwhelmed with sensations: the water, warm; Giovanni, hot and hard; the tile, cool and slick.

  I had never felt such desperation before, and my only thought was to clasp onto his enormous erection, stifled in his pants. I quickly worked his belt open, then his zipper. His fingers loosened to allow my movement, but as soon as the zipper was down, he removed his hand from my hip and shoved his pants down himself.

  His cock slid into my hands as his pelvis collided with my ass. Feeling Giovanni, this out of control, and being so completely helpless myself, was making me ache and throb for him. I yanked at him, letting him know what I needed, as he continued to rub against me.

  He understood. Without ceasing his grinding, he twisted me around, tearing off my dress and panties, too. I closed my eyes. Water pounded onto my breasts.

  The sound of more fabric being removed, falling into a sopping puddle, heavy, hit my ears.

  I was sure that nothing could compare to the sopping between my legs.

  He flipped me again. My face accepted the cool stability of the tile. His hand connected with the soft flesh of my ass. A resounding, wet smack.