I made myself sit up and away from Luca’s chest. “I’m not strong enough to go back and forth with her the two hundred times that she requested,” I said. “After about fifty, I had to take a break from holding her up.”
“Maybe that’s something you and I could do,” he suggested to her. “Maybe we could go to the playground at Starhurst and try it. I seem to remember monkey bars there.” He looked at me. “If that’s ok with you. And what do you think about going somewhere with me for dinner, rather than having this delicious pasta off the floor?”
“I think I’ll just cook something else,” I said. I wasn’t going to spend money on going out to eat anytime soon. Maybe not again in my lifetime.
“An old teammate of mine just opened a new restaurant in Larkspur. He’s been telling me to come try it, on the house.” Luca looked at me. “Would that be ok?”
Leaving this apartment sounded wonderful. Every second I was there, I was on edge. And a free meal? “That sounds fun.” We all went out, after I shut and locked the door, and looked carefully around the hallway. I felt like there were eyes on my back as we went down the stairs.
Luca touched my arm and I jumped. “Everything all right?”
“Fine!” I wasn’t going to burden him with more of my crap, especially now, with what he had just told me about his father.
Right when we got to the restaurant, the owner, Matt, rushed up to meet him, and then meet us, and give us the best seats, and fill our tabletop with each item on the menu so we could taste everything. Nola tried risotto, white asparagus, polenta, prosciutto, and a whole bunch of other things that had never crossed her palate, and actually, I did as well.
Luca’s friend came and sat down with us to talk as I secretly unrolled the top of my too-long pants and undid the button. My full to bursting stomach needed a little more room. And I was totally going to run again tomorrow, ankle be damned.
“Did you enjoy everything?” Matt asked, and we all told him yes, definitely. We chatted about the restaurant while Nola colored and she and Luca played tic tac toe, then Matt stood to go back to check on the kitchen.
“It’s great to see you like this,” he told Luca, and smiled at me and Nola. “I’m happy that you’ve settled down.”
“No,” I answered Matt quickly. I didn’t want to have to see Luca leave blazing footprints behind himself as he ran out of the restaurant. “We’re friends. Just friends.”
“And Nola and I are friends, of course,” Luca added, when she looked up at him. “We’re swim buddies.”
“Thank you so much for this delicious meal,” I said to Matt. “It was way, way better than what I was going to make.” And way cleaner than the noodles stuck to my floor. Not too long later, we left to drive home.
“You’re very quiet tonight,” Luca said in the car. He had the seat back so far, he and Nola were practically next to each other.
“Am I? I guess the contrast must be nice,” I said. I pulled into the parking lot and checked around, looking at each car. I didn’t see anything unusual.
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“Nothing. Let’s go, Noles. Bedtime,” I said, and she invited him to read her a story. Luca came up to the apartment with us, which made me relieved.
I watched as he read to her, both of them laughing at the funny raccoon, then at the silly pigeon, the striking crayons. We had a new rotation of books from the library. I broke up the fun by saying we needed to turn out the light and Nola immediately put her face up for a kiss.
Luca got a very odd expression, but he bent and kissed her forehead. “Buona note, topolina.”
I got that feeling that I might cry again. Thinking back through her life, Nola hadn’t had attention and affection from any man. Not one. Not her father, not my brothers. Not Ron, for sure, who was the only grandfather figure she’d ever have. She’d never had a male teacher, I didn’t have any male friends besides…Luca. And that wasn’t fair to Nola to let her form a relationship with him if I was going to mess it up. I decided to fix it. Fast.
When we shut the door to the bedroom, I went to my purse and took out an envelope and a stack of green cards. “Here,” I said, and put it all in his hand when he held it out. “I was going to send it to you tomorrow.”
“The comment cards for the lunches.” He read what I had written on the top one and smiled.
“They were really good, mostly,” I assured him. I’d only had to spit things out into the included recycled paper, compostable napkins a few times.
“And what is this?” He held up the envelope.
“That’s half of the money I owe you. For the car repairs and for the cleaning service for my mom’s apartment. I’ll give you the rest as soon as I can.”
Luca opened it, looked at the cash, then back up at me. “How did you get all this money, all at once?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I took so much from you. I’m sure you must have been wondering if I’d ever pay you back.”
“I wasn’t wondering that at all. Where did all this come from?” he asked again.
I swallowed. It had come from the one pair of real gold earrings that I’d owned and the skimpy “promise ring” that Ty had given me years ago, all of which I had sold at lunch for their weight. It had also come from the day before, when I’d hocked the silver cup that had been my mom’s from her mother. Mostly, it represented the savings that I had finally decided were not actually savings, but ready cash. “I got some money. I’m just sorry I didn’t give it to you sooner.”
“Jolie, no. No.” He held it out to me, but I wouldn’t take it back.
“Yes, and Luca, I’m really, really sorry I dumped that crap about me and my family on you this weekend. Totally, totally not a fun thing, right?” I tried to smile. “I won’t do that again. Let’s just be friends and hang out, have a good time together.”
“Why in the hell are you talking like this? It doesn’t even sound like you at all.”
I lost my temper a little. “I’m trying to make things ok between us! You don’t need any more tales of woe, right? You don’t want to hear it, not when you have your own life going on.”
“Are you trying to say that you wouldn’t listen if I wanted to spend the rest of the night sitting on your couch, telling you about my dad?” he asked.
I immediately took his hand, the one without the envelope of money. “Let’s sit down. Tell me, of course I’ll listen.”
“Jolie.” He took the opportunity of holding my hand to pull me towards himself. “It’s a bit of a double standard then, isn’t it?”
I was so close to him now. It made me get, like, emotional. “No, not a double standard. I’m all good now, and I wanted to pay you back to even things out and to make sure that you’re not upset with me. I was worried because the last time we talked, you pretty much hung up on me. You suddenly said you were going to go, and then…goodbye.”
Luca didn’t answer.
“But as long as we’re back to being friends, then, great. I’m fine, totally good on my end.” I smiled to show him that everything was perfectly peachy for me.
And still he just looked at me, making me so nervous that I started to wiggle a little, like Nola did when she had to pee.
“Here! Have a seat,” I directed. “I don’t have any amaretto to offer you, but let’s see…” I pretty much shoved him in the direction of the couch and went back to my refrigerator. Let’s see, indeed. I could give him a glass of milk. Or look, here was a trial-sized bottle of hot sauce that I had gotten for free and figured I would use, some day.
“Is this where you usually keep these, in your cushions? Or was something else happening on the couch?” Luca asked me.
I looked over, and he was holding up one of my ancient, sexy-as-a-tourniquet bras. “Oh, fuck! Give that to me.” I rushed over to grab it out of his hand and hide it again, back behind the couch cushion. I had a vague memory of stuffing it there when I had quickly cleaned up the room when Eva had visited u
s from downstairs.
“So that’s just where you store them.”
“Ha. Laugh it up, Chuckles. You should see where I keep my thongs,” I told him.
“I wouldn’t mind that,” Luca said, and leaned over to me. He put his hand against my cheek for a second. “You’re saying that everything is fine, but you’re acting strangely. Like you’re nervous.”
“Nope.”
“You must have worried when I was MIA.”
“You had your reasons.” He had gotten freaked out by my freak-out, then the news about his dad’s health had kept him busy. He’d needed a little space from me and my own laundry list of problems. Ugh, laundry. I had just stuck up a note on my fridge to remind myself to do it. “Tell me what’s happening with your parents.”
He did. And it really didn’t sound good, about his dad. “I’m afraid about what’s going to happen to my mom. She never even finished college—they got married when she was twenty. She’s never held a job, any kind of job.”
I couldn’t imagine that. “It doesn’t seem like she’ll have to go get one though, right?” I wasn’t any judge of real estate, but with a house the size of Golden Gate Park, it felt like his parents were doing ok.
“No, she’ll be fine, financially,” Luca agreed. “I mean that I’m not sure how she’ll go day to day without him. Her whole life is my father.”
“And you, right? Like me, with Nola.”
“I know that she loves me, but my dad is everything to her.” Luca stared off into the distance.
“But she won’t be alone, because she’ll have you. And maybe she’ll surprise you. Maybe this will give her a moment in the sun, kind of.” I shrugged. “Maybe she’ll love the freedom.”
“Maybe. Funny that he’s dying, and I’m more worried about how it will affect her than caring that he’ll be gone.” He looked at the time on his phone. “I should probably drive back home.”
“You can stay a little while longer.” His eyes moved to look into mine, so blue, so tired. “Just a little while.”
“Tell me about your day, then. I don’t want to think about this anymore.”
I left off the part about the police, and the semen on the door, and that every noise I heard made me sure that someone was breaking in to hurt us to get back at Ty. “Ok, well, I’d love to hear your opinion about Lanie and Brooks. She’s acting totally moony over him, like she’s lost her marbles.” Marbles. Something else I wouldn’t mention to Luca. “I want to make sure it’s going to work out for her.”
This led to talking about other people he had gone to school with too, other stupid things, other funny things, and nothing at all serious or sad. It was exactly, precisely what I needed, and I thought that Luca did too. He lost the taut, worried look around his mouth and started to smile like he usually did, but very gradually, his head dropped further onto the cushion, and then, as I lowered my voice to almost a whisper, he fell asleep.
Carefully, slowly, I moved his legs up onto the couch, and Jesus, they must have been 100 pounds apiece. Muscle sure weighed a lot. He kind of snuffled a little as he got comfortable on the pillow. I stopped and smiled, looking down at him. I moved his hair off his forehead and traced my fingertips down his cheek. I really loved his face, not the just handsomeness (although I wasn’t sorry about that part, for sure). It was like you could see that he was a good guy, it just exuded from him, from how he looked at you and how he smiled. I pulled off his shoes, slowly and carefully so I wouldn’t wake him, then got the blanket off my bed to cover him up. I smoothed it down over his shoulder and chest, then I kept on touching him, his face, his hand, like a total weirdo. Not appropriate.
I sat down next to him instead. There wasn’t a lot of room on this couch—if he stretched out his legs, he was going to fall off it. I should have tried to get him into the bed and I could have slept on the couch, but he would have to lie diagonally across that, too. Damn, I was touching his hair again! I put my hands in my lap and crossed my fingers together so I would have to stop. But then I was still a weirdo, because I was watching him sleep. What the hell was the matter with me?
I checked the front door again and made myself leave Luca and go into the bedroom. I felt a lot better with him here, safer, but I also felt strange. Unsettled. It was a funny feeling, not just a sexual tension thing because I was wanting him naked. My eyes went wide. Oh, a naked Luca. Now my mouth watered, too. I started thinking about what he had said, his dream about me in the pool. In my mind, I put him in the water too, both of us touching, wet skin sliding against wet skin, his hands all over my body and mine on him.
I could hear my breathing in the room, fast and panting. Whatever odd, unidentified feeling I’d had before was gone, swept away on a wave of pure lust. Luca, naked. I closed my eyes.
When I finally fell asleep, I had the most vivid, sexual dreams I’d ever experienced, so that I woke up very early, flushed and hot even without my blanket. The sheet was twisted between my legs and I was pulsing down there, like a heartbeat of want. My mind was full of images of Luca, of the two of us doing things that I had never done or even considered doing in real life, with Ty or anyone else. I sat on the edge of the mattress, breathing deeply to calm myself down.
I looked at the bedroom door, which I’d left ajar. Was he still there? Maybe he had left. Very quietly, I tiptoed into the living room.
Luca was still curled on the couch, looking pretty cramped and uncomfortable, but wow, just so…I stopped myself from going over to touch him again. Instead, I got back in bed, and I tried to go to sleep. All I could think about was waking up every day with him beside me like he looked right now on my couch. Rumpled hair and blonde stubble, strong arms to hold me and a warm body to cuddle.
That thought was even better than the sex dreams.
Chapter 13
“I’m ready. I’m really ready.”
“Are you sure?” Luca asked me. “Could anyone be ready for this?”
I held out my hand and he took it. “Let’s do it. Stoney and the Nutrient Broth, here we come.”
It was Friday night, and once again, I was setting out to try to have a little fun. Not with Stoney, but watching him and his band play at a tiny, dirty bar not too far from where I lived. It had been a long, long week, full of phone calls and waiting on hold, writing emails and filling out forms, and talking, talking, talking. Getting help for my mom and Ron was an endless, thankless job—thankless because Ron was already complaining about strangers getting involved in his business, bothering him in his own house with his own family. I reminded him that if he didn’t let these strangers help him, he was going to lose the opportunity to be with his family. And then I made more calls and completed more forms, and sent more emails.
Luca was equally ready to get out. Beyond all medical expectations, his dad was improving. He wasn’t getting well, but he was getting better, to the point that they had moved him to a short-term care facility where he could still be medically supervised, and then, maybe, he could come home. Raffaella, Luca’s mom, was thrilled. Luca was cautiously happy for her, and already back to fighting with his dad about the details of everything as they both wrangled for control. He needed to have some fun.
“Not much of a crowd,” I noted, looking around. There were about five or six other people in the bar. And that included the bartender and a waitress.
“No, I guess Stoney doesn’t attract too many people. Besides you,” Luca clarified.
“That’s hilarious. Have you ever thought about standup? Maybe you could even attract a crowd yourself. Equal to or slightly smaller than this.”
Luca laughed. He looked better, more himself, than he had at the beginning of the week when he’d come by my apartment with the lunches. He had certainly not been in prime form after waking up after the night on my couch—his neck hadn’t unkinked for at least a few days. But now with his dad better, and his mom happier, he was relaxing. He had even invited Nola and me over to swim again at his parents’ pool after school one d
ay, which had led to another night of very hot, very detailed dreams for me. But the two of us hadn’t done any more touching, other than kissing cheeks and holding hands. Besides when Luca’s fingers had slid down off my back to squeeze my ass a little while he was walking us to my car after we left his parents’ pool. His face had stayed amazingly innocent while he did it, too.
“Drink?” he asked me, pointing at the bar, and I nodded.
“Surprise me,” I suggested, and he looked around.
“In this place, I think surprises are a bad idea. I’ll get beer and watch the caps come off.” I studied him as he walked to the bar in the murky darkness. I was so glad that we were friends again, that it almost felt like a physical relief. It kind of shocked me how much I had already come to rely on him and his presence in my life. Like now, when something funny happened at school, I didn’t reach for my phone at the end of the day to write to Maia—I told Luca. And then he usually called me, and we talked the whole time that I drove over to get Nola at her school, talked about everything.
Well, everything, except a few things. I had never told him what was going on at my apartment, how scared I still was, although nothing else had happened as of yet. Also, I didn’t really talk too much about Ron and my mom and Kayla, except that he knew I was trying to help them out some, and he kept offering to get involved in the effort. And I didn’t mention to him that I had gotten a second job doing deliveries at night. So maybe I had left out a few things, but it wasn’t like he was supposed to be my receptacle for 100% of all the terrible crap going on! He didn’t need to know that stuff.
Although, he had gotten a little suspicious when we had left Nola at Eva’s to stay for the evening. “I get to go see Mrs. Santa, again!” Nola had told him happily, perched on his arm as he carried her down the stairs from my apartment.
“Again?” he asked.
“I get to go every night!” Nola had explained. After dinner, we had been going downstairs so Eva could watch her while I delivered packages and take-out orders. Nola fell asleep on Eva’s bed and I carried her up to our apartment when I got home, up the stairs again.
Double Pop Page 20