Touch (The Pagano Family Book 2)

by Susan Fanetti

  She pushed the faceplate up. “What’s funny?”

  “If we make a habit of this, you’re gonna need your own helmet.” His own words drew him up short, and he stopped laughing.

  “Who said we’d make a habit of this?”

  As direct as Luca generally was, he didn’t think he’d met anyone who came back at him so quickly. This girl didn’t let anything slide. “Nobody. You ready?”

  “Where’re we going?”

  “Place I know. You picky about food?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t eat, like, snails and shit, but that’s because those things are slimy bugs that shouldn’t be food.”

  He liked her unvarnished way of showing the world through her eyes. “No snails tonight. Hop on.” He held out his arm so she could use it as leverage. She was a tiny thing. She climbed on behind him, and, like it was nothing, wrapped her arms around him.

  To Luca, it wasn’t nothing.

  He didn’t know exactly what he was doing, why he was taking this girl out—on a date, for chrissakes—but she had his attention clenched in both of her little hands. He’d spent a lot of the night before lying in his bed, thinking about what her brother had told him. The thought of her as a baby, a little girl, sitting alone with no one to love or even notice her—it affected him. His family, despite all the ways they drove him nuts, were abundantly nurturing and warm. Not to have that, those early memories of being held snugly, being loved—the thought chilled him.

  He didn’t know if what he was feeling for her was mainly pity or worry or something like that, or if he was actually interested in her. She was not his type—she was, in fact, the opposite of his type. He favored chesty blondes. More important, he favored women with calm dispositions, not fiery little raven-haired sprites who ran around brandishing broken beer bottles when they got pissed.

  She was broken; of that there was no doubt. Broken women were dangerous. He needed look no farther back than the summer before, when Carlo’s bipolar ex-wife had nearly killed Joey and had run off with Trey, to find an object lesson about the dangers of involving oneself with mentally unstable women.

  And yet, here he was, wrapped in the slim arms of a girl whose childhood had been fucked up to an epic degree, her touch causing his heart to trip, his gut to clench, and his cock to fill out.

  He parked his bike at the end of the boardwalk and held his arm out to help her off. When he got off, she handed him his helmet. Her hair was sticking out in all directions, thanks to a little static electricity, but she simply tossed her head carelessly and ran her hands over it once, and it fell into a silken sheet down her back. She had long bangs, the ends of which moved a little every time she blinked. It didn’t seem to bother her to have her hair in her eyes like that. Luca liked it—it was like the bangs even more than the dark eye makeup drew attention right to those eyes of hers.

  He locked his helmet onto his bike, then nodded toward the boardwalk. He didn’t try to take her hand. His first impulse had been to reach out, but he curbed it, remembering. She smiled, and he thought there was some gratitude and relief in it. They walked side by side to the hot wiener stand. And there he stopped.

  Manny looked up at him. “Seriously? This is your idea of a date?”

  “What? You wanted wining and dining? I figure, it’s Friday night, and you don’t like crowds, or people just in general, right?”—after a beat, she nodded—“so we’ll load up a couple of wieners, get some sodas, and head down the beach. Find a place to sit and talk. Look.” He nodded past the bright glow of the boardwalk lights toward the quiet beach beyond.

  She turned and looked. Then she turned back. “That’s—that’s pretty cool.”

  “Good.”

  They stood quietly in line. When it was their turn at the window, the guy taking their order said, “Hey, Luca—what can I get ya?”

  “Hey, Wiley. Couple of hot wieners.” He turned to Manny. “How d’you like yours?”

  She stepped up to the window and rose up onto her tiptoes. “Works. Extra onions.”

  He laughed. “Should I take that as a statement about the rest of the night?”

  When she looked up at him, her brow was creased with confusion. “Why?”

  Luca felt like he was sailing new waters. Subtlety and innuendo seemed to be really lost on Manny. “Forget about it. Same for me, Wile. And two sodas.” He turned back to her. “You like Coke?”

  “Orange, please.”

  “Orange and a Dr. Pepper.”

  When they had their food, Luca gestured that they should head off the crowded boardwalk and onto the sand. They walked for a few minutes before they cleared the people and noise, and the beach became peaceful, the sound of the surf the loudest thing around.

  He led them to a fire pit. The pit was surrounded by big logs, and he motioned for her to sit on one. Then he sat next to her, giving her a couple of inches of space between them.

  They had the beach mostly to themselves—a few romantic couples strolling near the surf, a guy walking his dog, but otherwise, just a couple hundred yards from the bustle of the Friday night boardwalk, the coast was serene. The sand had lost its sundrenched heat and was cool to the touch. Balancing her dinner on her lap, Manny zipped up her jacket. Luca, used to the coastal evening cool and comfortable in his t-shirt, would have liked to put his arm around her.

  “You come to the beach a lot?” She spoke with her mouth full, putting the hand that held her soda in front of her face.

  He turned and looked out over the water. The night was still, and the ocean calm. “Yeah. We grew up about a mile up that hill back there. When I was a kid, we were here just about every day. I don’t get down here as much as I used to now. But as much as I can.” Looking back at her, he asked, “You surf?”

  “No way. I barely swim. I mean, I can. A little. Enough. But we never came to the coast much. My dad worked a lot.” She laughed. “I was an expensive kid, I guess.”

  That felt like an opening, and Luca wanted to ask. He argued with himself briefly and then decided, fuck it. She was direct. He preferred directness. So he asked. “Why?”

  Sucking cutely on her straw, she stared at him for what felt like a full minute. Then she set her drink on one knee and her wiener on the other. “Okay. Straight up. I was in ‘intensive’ therapy”—he heard the quotation marks—“for like fifteen years. Twice during that time I was in the actual loony bin. Once because my mom got in my way when I had a rage on, and I stabbed her with her big sewing scissors. Three times. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t even know I was doing it, not really. I was away more than a year that time.”

  She picked up her wiener, took a bite, chewed it. Luca processed the new information and tried to decide whether her story was over, but then she set her food down and looked him straight in the eye. “I don’t know why we’re sitting here. I don’t know if this is supposed to mean something. I’m not good at knowing things people don’t say. But whatever. I know Dimi told you where we came from. My circuits are all twisted up. I didn’t learn a lot of things normal kids learn—not till much later. I learned other things. Not good things. The way normal people behave, it’s like a foreign language to me. I have to work hard at things normal people don’t even have to think about. And I work hard at it all the time. I have, like, this set of mental flashcards that I flip through to try to understand. But I get tired, and sometimes I slip. I get wicked pissed sometimes. I tear everything down. And sometimes I hurt people. Usually, it’s people I care about, because they’re the ones who put themselves in my way.”

  She took her last bite of wiener. Luca’s was still in his hands, half uneaten. “In short, I suck. I’m nuts, I’m violent, and you should probably be running back to the safety of the boardwalk now.”

  She was right. That was exactly what he should be doing—well, at least he should finish his meal and take her back home to live her little, askew life. But that was not what he wanted to do. He kept thinking about her start, that image he had, maybe from some ep
isode of 60 Minutes or something he’d seen back in the day, of a grey baby crying alone in a grey crib, rocking herself, trying to give herself comfort that wasn’t available from any other source.

  Superimposed over that image was his view of this small, fierce young woman with the electric-blue eyes, laying herself out to him. A girl strong enough to learn to love despite a brain that didn’t understand it, who worked hard to interact with people, even though it wore her out, and got up and did it all over again every morning. A girl strong enough to tell him her story, flat out. He looked at her and saw real courage in that tiny frame.

  His childhood had been about as different as it could have been—a lively, loving, warm, colorful home full of children. An idyllic life near the ocean. A world bathed in sunlight and privilege. Maybe it was that, the contrast, that made his chest ache like this.

  As a rule, Luca was just not that deep a guy. So what was going on with him was more than a little disorienting.

  He could think of no words adequate to be uttered, and he wasn’t one who filled silence with garbage. So he just watched her watch him.

  Damn, she had beautiful eyes. Even in the dark, they caught the moonlight and seashine and seemed to glow. They were the kind of eyes a guy could get lost in. Luca was overtaken by a powerful urge to pull her to him and kiss her thoroughly, but he warred with that urge until he mastered it. He didn’t want to scare her.

  But fuck, he wanted to kiss her.

  Those gorgeous eyes suddenly dropped, and she focused on wadding up the paper from her meal. “Look. You know that thing they do in movies, where people look into each other’s eyes, and, like, violins start playing, and they don’t need to talk because they’re saying everything they need to say just by looking at each other?”

  He blinked and nodded, derailed, but interested.

  “Well, like I said, I don’t have that. I don’t hear violins. I just get static. I need people to say what they mean, what they’re thinking. Because as hard as I try to read people, I’m only hitting the mark about half the time. I need people to say what they want. I need you to say what you—”

  He talked over her to cut her off. “I want to kiss you, Manny. That’s what I’m thinking. That’s what I want.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe that was it.” She beamed at him “I got that one right.”

  “Yeah? Good for you. But you kinda ruined the moment, little bit.”

  “You think?” She took the soda and food out of his hands, wrapped his dinner back up in its paper, and set everything in the sand behind the log they were sitting on. Then, as she had the night before, she straddled him. When, out of habit and reflex, he moved to put his hands on her hips, she mumbled, “Don’t touch me.”

  He dropped his hands to grip the log, and she wrapped herself around him and kissed him, her small, pierced tongue pushing into his mouth.

  Her lips were firm and silken, her tongue lithe, and she kissed him without restraint, her arms snug around his head, holding him so that she could have her way. That stud in her tongue felt fantastic. He’d been with pierced women before, and he didn’t much like lip piercings, which mostly just poked. But this was the first time he’d kissed a woman with a stud in her tongue. He was suddenly a lifelong fan. He kissed her back with all the enthusiasm he felt, his hands gripping the log so hard he could feel the scant remnants of bark digging into his palms.

  He needed to fucking touch her. He groaned, loudly, a sound of need and frustration both, and she rocked in his lap, flexing against his swollen cock. Then she bit down on his bottom lip and pulled back, drawing his lip out with her teeth. Again, he groaned, this one more of a growl, and pulled his head back, freeing his lip.

  “I gotta touch you.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t touch me.” She leaned forward and kissed the corner of his mouth, her tongue playing at his beard. “Don’t touch me.”

  She nibbled along his jawline to his ear. “Don’t touch me.”

  She licked the length of his neck. “Don’t touch me.”

  Her hips were never still throughout this whispered assault, and Luca was going to come in his fucking jeans. He didn’t think he’d ever just let a girl have her way. It was hot as hell.

  “You’re making me crazy, little bit.”

  She’d been biting his shoulder through his shirt. Now, she sat up, looking him in the eyes. “No. Not crazy. I know crazy. I’m crazy.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  And then her hips were still, her slight weight heavy on his cock. “Yeah, I am. Don’t sugarcoat that. Managing crazy isn’t curing it. If you forget I’m crazy, then you’ll forget my limits. And then you’ll see the crazy.”

  She climbed off of him, and he grabbed the log with all his might, fighting against the need to keep her where she was.

  Reaching behind the log, she brought his food back. “Here. Finish your dinner.”

  Luca had only one appetite currently, and it wasn’t for a half-eaten, sandy hot wiener. He set that aside and took a long sip of his Dr. Pepper.

  “You want to go back to my place and fuck?”

  He about choked on his soda. “Please?”

  “You want to fuck? At my place?”

  “Girl, you are wicked confusing.”

  “What? Why? If you don’t want to, it’s cool. I just thought, since you were hard, you probably wanted it.”

  “I do, yeah. But…do you?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m asking you over.”

  He could only laugh. He laughed and dropped his head to his knees, trying to get his mind and body sorted out. This night was turning into a wild-ass ride.

  She was quiet for a few seconds, and then she said, her voice low and uncertain, “Luca, I don’t understand. Did I fuck something up?”

  He thought maybe that was the first time he’d heard her say his name. He liked it. He responded to everything about her in ways he just didn’t understand.

  “No, Manny. You definitely did not fuck anything up. I’d like to go back to your place with you—and fuck, if that’s what you want. I don’t want to push you, though.”

  “You’re not pushing. I want it. I’m horny for you.”

  He chuckled. “Damn. You bring straight talk to a whole ‘nother level. Come on, then.” Standing up, he held his hand out to her before he thought. But she handed him their trash and stood on her own.

  oOo

  “Whoa.” Luca stood just inside Manny’s front door, stunned. “Whoa.”

  She’d led him in, so now she turned around and put her hands on her hips. “There a problem?”

  “No. Just…whoa.”

  Her place looked like something out of that Hoarders show. Or probably not that bad, but holy CHRIST. Luca wasn’t so great with clutter. It didn’t rise to the level of an actual phobia with him, but he liked things spare and clean. Bare surfaces. Nice order.

  Apparently, Manny did not share his taste.

  Every surface, vertical or horizontal, was covered. On seemingly every wall, the colors—what he could see of them—were different, and not a damn one of them was a neutral. Sunshine yellow, grass green, vivid orange. One long wall was black and covered floor to ceiling with what looked like plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars and planets.

  There were posters and photographs and weird, unframed canvases hanging on the walls. Also clothes—antique dresses and scarves and shit, just nailed to the wall, like two-dimensional ghosts were dancing across the room.

  Trashy knickknacks and glass baubles covered the horizontal surfaces. A full-size female mannequin, naked and bald except for a pink boa around its neck and tie-dye swirls of paint all over its surface, stood in a corner near what he assumed was Manny’s kitchen. On a table, a wicker torso mannequin leaned awkwardly, covered in souvenir buttons. Weird lamps made of seashells or colored paper or swirly glass gave a wacked-out kind of glow to the space.

  The furniture was just as bizarre. A low, mid-century sofa draped with a flowered sheet and l
aden with mismatched throw pillows. Two papasan chairs, one with a multicolored striped pad, and the other with an orange pad. A rickety old rocker with a wicker seat, and about a dozen huge, square pillows in wildly embroidered patterns. And assorted tables and bookcases scattered around the room. The bookcases seemed to hold albums, CDs, and DVDs more than books. He looked around the room and found an old tube TV and DVD player on a low, cheap stand. A little Buddha sat on a little white lace doily on top of the TV, smack in the middle.

  Luca found that hilarious—a Buddha, amidst ten kinds of chaos—and he laughed.

  “What’s funny? You’re always laughing. I don’t get the joke. Am I the joke?” She was squinting at him suspiciously.