by Ella James
I can see him. I can see him, and I want him to see me, too. I want him to know I’m here, to put his eyes on me and see me.
I want him to care. And if he doesn’t care, I want to make him care. I want to shove him up against a wall and bite his lip. I want to hurt him.
That’s not even true. I just need to be seen.
I can barely breathe, can barely coordinate my body’s movements, for the fear that grips me. If he doesn’t know me. If his eyes don’t flare with…something.
My heels clack against the hardwood floor. They sound so loud. I’m surprised he can’t hear them.
Someone I know catches my eye but I give her a smile and keep moving. He’s almost to the short hall that this one runs into. He’ll veer left, toward the elevators.
I watch as he disappears around the corner. I can feel the air move in the fabric of my gown as I rush, almost sprinting past some old men, talking in a semi-circle. I smell seafood and flowers as I turn into the small hall, aiming my gaze at the elevators.
I missed him.
I cover my mouth with my hand, my breath coming in these shallow little pants. I close my eyes as tears threaten.
Oh God.
It’s okay, though. This wasn’t a good idea.
My eyes burn, blurring out the elevator’s small, round buttons. My chest aches like someone’s tugging on my ribcage.
Why do you do this to yourself? You should have left the second that you saw him.
Twice, since that night, I’ve seen him. Both times, I thought maybe he had followed me. Was there because I was.
Two times you were crazy, Elise.
I hit the elevator’s up arrow as a sob swells in my throat and tears start spilling. I’ll ride it to any floor but this one, fall apart privately, and then go home. I take deep, slow breaths, finding my composure as the elevator opens for me.
And there he is.
For a too-long heartbeat, I stare. He’s frowning, his dark eyebrows drawn. I can see the moment he processes me. His blue eyes widen, and his lips part, just enough to draw a breath.
The door starts to shut. There’s a millisecond where I make the choice. If it’s a choice. But my arm knows the way. My hand pushes the door, which pauses mid-close, leaving just enough space for me to step in with him.
Luca, and his eyes are holding onto mine like he remembers. He looks dumbstruck.
Good.
I rip my gaze away from his and let it lap all up and down him. God but he’s so perfect. The tux is tailored—for sure—and he looks taller, broader, muscled in it. His cheekbones are marked with slight pink, like he’s warm or he’s been drinking. I inhale the elevator’s air and take in smells of cleaner, cologne, and…yes, I think he smells like liquor.
The elevator starts to move. I notice its light reflecting off one of his cufflinks. His arm is down at his side, his fist clenching and unclenching.
For a second, as my eyes search his face, the shutters open, all his feeling spilling out, and he looks unsure, almost afraid. Sorrowful. And in another blink, he locks it all up.
“Luca.” My whole body flushes, crown to sole, and I’m rewarded with a flare of his eyes.
His voice sounds an octave lower as he says, “Elise,” and all my fury and bravado fades into one raspy whisper. “Why are you here?”
It’s a lame question. A placeholder for real words. All the things I want to say, but I’ve got doors closed. I can’t seem to get them open.
I watch as he fists his hand at his side, fingers flexing and then curling again.
His whole face—the blessed hardness of it—remind me that I hate him. I feel my lips curl as new me—the actress who stars in my life every day—takes over, sounding derisive as I ask him, “Did you think you might run into me?”
He looks helpless—like he doesn’t know why I would ask—and my heart gives a hard throb, pumping black pain through me. His mouth does the little thing—it’s just this tiny tell I couldn’t describe to a stranger, but it’s like he’s wavering. He’s unsure.
“I know what you’re into now. And I saw you the other times. You were standing near the bushes outside of my residence hall. Last year. I knew it was you—” I fumble, swallowing so I don’t say because I’d recognize you anywhere. I drag air into my burning lungs. “I saw you at a restaurant, too. I was on a date and you came in. And then you left.”
Unhappy. That’s what his face says. Nothing more, though. He looks tense and closed off, maybe even angry. I’m breathing in desperate gulps; it’s all I can do. His hand stills, clenched in a fist.
“Oh, I know it’s inconvenient when you see an ex. Don’t worry. I’m another guy’s date tonight.”
Such a rush of satisfaction as his jaw tics, as those blue eyes narrow. He looks like he’d love to hunt the guy down. I square my shoulders, and his face twists in concern.
“Did someone hurt you?” Just his voice turns my limbs weak and heavy.
“What do you mean?” I blink twice, quickly, as if that will fix my ruined mascara.
He touches his cheek, frowning as if I’m a puzzle he can’t solve. I realize maybe my cheek is dark from the smeared makeup.
“I’m just fine.” I smile for him. “Heading upstairs.” I take a step back, into the corner opposite his, because he’s feeling way too close now. “Why are you here?”
I inhale deeply but discreetly, smelling liquor more strongly. His eyes on mine are hard, impassive, but I notice that his shoulders are rising and falling quickly, like he’s struggling with his breathing.
“You don’t want to tell me?” I lean in slightly, still keeping a careful distance. “Are you doing something scary?”
“What—does that mean?” He looks stricken. As if I’m the villain. His twisting mouth is so soft.
What would he do if I bit it?
I look at that perfect full lip, and I wish that I could grab him by the nape and bite his mouth so hard it bleeds. Instead, I laugh, playing my part. “Oh, I think you know exactly what it means.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re in the mafia, Luca. Everybody knows now. Everybody.”
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 kno
w.” 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.
“My parents took me to Southampton and I did cocaine and figured out how pot was better, and I went to college how I should have after that because you can’t be dead over a boy who never even loved you. That’s just crazy! I was crazy, and I knew you have to hide it if you’re crazy. That’s what people do, you know, they have to hide how much they’re crazy or they worry everybody else!” A little sob escapes her as she hugs herself. “It was like…a swimming pool that had this magic water in it. I just had to pave it over.”
She holds her forehead, breathing deep and slow, controlled, despite the tears that keep on sliding down her cheeks. Then she lifts her head and looks at me with eyes that flash. “I just wanted you to know that. And how I feel bad that you’re a mob guy, and I have to think about the downfall of you.”
My heart pounds. “So don’t.”
“I don’t want to. I hate you.”
Something cold and heavy shifts in my chest as her eyes hold onto mine. “So it doesn’t matter, does it then?” I ask her.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter what went down that week. Why I did it. I was right.”
“Yes, you were right,” she rasps. She steps closer, looking like she wants to slap me again. Slap or bite me, rake her nails down my cheek.
Do it, I think. Please, Elise.
Her upper lip curls. “Now get the hell out of my sight.”
3
Isa
I find him on the rooftop, in the moonlit garden Dad had someone build when I asked for it last year.
There’s this spot where a big tree leans over the rail. The tree is roped off, and there’s a sign that says no climbing. That’s because part of the rail is bending. I don’t know how Luca knows this, but that’s where he’s standing. He’s under the tree’s limbs, camouflaged unless you’re looking. As I walk closer to him, I see he’s got both of his hands around the bent rail and he’s leaning over.
“Hey…” I sprint through the raised flower bed, ducking under the tree’s limbs. He turns toward me slowly, and by then I’m close enough to touch his arm. “Ciao, Bello.”
I’m so worried that I wrap my arm around his hard waist. And I can feel him shaking. He’s shaking and breathing hard. I smell the liquor, feel his chest pump.
“Poverto tesoro…” I
hug him, and my heart rolls over as I feel his body tremble against mine. “Quello che è successo?” I rub his back with my palm, moving smooth and slow and firm, and then up to his upper back, so I can press him to me. “Dillo a tua sorella, tesoro.”
I can tell he can’t talk. How he’s shaking… Goddammit, he hasn’t been this way in so long!
“It was her, wasn’t it?” I knew she was here, knew she was going to be here. I’m so livid that my father asked him to come here tonight.
He quakes harder, sort of panting, like he might be on the way to hyperventilating. I stroke his nape.
“No, tesoro. Andrà bene.”
“Don’t say that.” His words are rough groans.
“You’re so good, and good and good. You’re going to be okay.”
He groans, and I urge him down into the dirt with me. He lets me hug him, maybe only because he can’t push me away. When I ask him to, he lies on his side, lets me hold his head in my lap. He’s so still and heavy as I run my fingers through his short hair.
“There’s nobody like you, Luca Galante. I need you. This world needs you. You’re going to be better. It won’t hurt like this forever.” I clench my jaw, wondering what that bitch did to him. “As time passes, you’ll find someone you want, and she’ll make you happy.”
He wraps an arm around my waist and takes a few deep, heavy breaths.
“Did you get drunk?”
“I’m fucking drunk,” he says, low.
“Being drunk sucks.” I run my hand along his spine. He’s bulked up in the last year—a lot—so all I really feel is ridges of firm muscle.
“I know, I shouldn’t have done it.” He sits up, looking blank-faced as he stares at the branches in front of us.
I lean up and kiss his jaw, because I can’t help myself.
“Ragazzo carino.” I put my palm over his chest, like I used to do in those first weeks after he came to live at my house. During all that time, he wanted her and had to settle for me. Wouldn’t even let me hold him, but he liked the anchor of my hand on his chest.