And I’m willing to bet can’t be forgotten.
I pull back before the kiss is done, and it takes a monumental amount of determination to do that. But the look of shock and pure, urgent want on her face is worth it.
“I won’t forget a single damn thing,” I vow and leave before I can’t control it and yank her back into my arms.
Back where she belongs.
Benelli 3
I rush back into my aunt’s cozy kitchen, my lips still stung from Cormac’s kisses, my head spinning from his last words.
She barks at me in Hungarian before I make it to the stairs down the hall.
“Come back here!”
I swivel on my heel and stomp back, trying to keep everything in check. Respect for my elders, check. Temper, check. Open mind, check. Lust…no check there.
My woozy brain attempts to process her chattering, and I know she’s speaking quickly and with edgy excitement to trap me, seduce me, force me to listen to her while I juggle translations in my head.
“…my brother wants for you is all the bread and none of the roses, Benelli. He didn’t listen to his father, but that rebellion is tampered in you. I can see that. You want to do better, you want to make it right, but it isn’t your place or your responsibility to find your parents’ happiness. You deserve your own way, your own love—”
“Please!” I cry, palms over my ears to protect my ringing brain. “Please just stop. I can’t do this. I can’t listen to this.”
Abony jumps up, all swishing skirts, sparkling jewelry, and hand-flinging indignation. “No. You must listen. Playing the martyr is a recipe for disaster, my love. Disaster. You don’t know yourself yet, and you’re willing to trade your life, your freedom to be shackled to one of these arrogant idiots—”
“Stop,” I beg. “Please stop. You have no idea how hard Papa has been working. You have no idea how much Winch leaving and Remy falling apart broke him. I swear to you, I’m not being a martyr. I’m not. I’m trying, so hard, I’m trying like crazy to save this family.”
Abony’s scarlet lips flatten into a thin line. “I’m sorry for your father’s stresses. I truly am. But maybe it’s time this family lost a little of its power.”
I’m so damn sick of hearing this refrain. I hear it from my siblings enough, and I have no patience hearing it from my aunt, too.
“My father keeps this family running,” I snap. “His power puts a roof over all our heads and food in our stomachs, and that’s why I’m happy to sacrifice a little bit to help him when he needs it, so please stop trying to talk me out of what’s right and into something completely wrong and selfish!”
My words ring out and bounce off the low ceiling and my aunt, usually so happy and carefree, plunks down on a chair and pulls a long, elegant cigarette out of its pack. The look she throws my way isn’t aggravated or angry.
It’s pitying.
And I bristle at it.
I want to march upstairs and fall asleep, forget every single tangled snare this day tripped me with. I want to refocus, detail a new game plan, and eradicate distractions like Cormac Too Hot For His Own Damn Good Halstrom.
But something about Akos’s comment about my father jarred me, and that ripple of unease has tremored through me all day.
Abony blows rings of purple-grey smoke at the colored glass chandelier hanging over the table, one sandaled foot bouncing with an anxious rhythm.
“Your parents have always kept you protected, Benelli. That’s a wonderful thing for a girl. Childhood is all about that…” She waves her crimson-nailed hand in the air carelessly. “…that time in your life when you know, unfailingly, that you’ll be unconditionally cared for and kept safe. But your childhood is long over.” She puts the cigarette down and leans forward, her blue eyes intent on my face. “Isn’t it?”
“What’s this about?” My voice wobbles and a prickle of icy goosebumps dots along the back of my arms and fans over my neck.
“About?” She sighs and flicks a long column of ash into a glass tray. “Life. Love. Choices. Famil—”
“Stop it,” I bite out, the cut of my voice shocking us both. “Stop it,” I repeat, calmer. “And, please, tell me what you need to say.”
She trains her eyes on me for a few endless, rapid beats of my heart. “Maybe it’s the wine and the pot and the moonlight.” She takes another long drag and coughs it out gently. “That’s it. Just too much of everything I love and shouldn’t do. Forget my dramatics.” She stubs the remainder of her cigarette out and gets up, but I block her from exiting the kitchen.
“You were furious at me the summer I grew up. Remember that? But now, you clearly have something to say, but you won’t. Do you want to keep me a little girl in the dark, or do you want to talk to me, woman to woman? Which is it?” I’m so close my nostrils are full of the distinct aroma that defines my aunt; a pinch of cigarette smoke mixed with a heavy blend of French perfume and the sweet tang of marijuana.
She leans one narrow shoulder on the wall, her face lined with sudden exhaustion. “I was furious that they let you think you were a woman without treating you with the respect a woman deserves. They gave you all the shallow trappings, but didn’t fortify you with the foundation you needed.”
“No more women’s studies lectures.” I cross my arms and stand tall, though I’m still not nearly as tall as she is. “Tell me.”
“You love this family.” The cracks in her voice let pain and truth and upset seep all around us. “And I don’t want to take that from you. But, if you’re going to give them your complete devotion, you should know that they aren’t entirely what they seem.”
“Tell me.” My voice is barely audible because, maybe, I recognize that I may be prying at the hinges of a Pandora’s box I’m not remotely ready to have opened.
“Some of it isn’t my story to tell, so I can’t.” Her eyes, narcotic-glazed and weary, focus on a point just over my left shoulder. “But I’ll tell you my bit. My little contribution to the Youngblood family.” Her words fight their way out of her lips. “When I was young, I was in love with…everyone! Everything. I wanted to make love. I wanted to study. I wanted to travel. And I got to. But I needed to deposit my token first.” She kicks a heel against the doorframe. “Unlike you, I didn’t care too much about the family. My father was a domineering man. My brother selfishly ran off to America and left me behind. I was ready to start everything, but my father said college for a girl was a waste of time and money.”
“I thought my father paid for you to go to college.”
Her eyes have gone from glazed to a flat, glass-like sheen that sees images I’ll be forever blind to. She flicks a look in my direction, but she isn’t seeing me.
“Your father bartered for my college, though I’m sure his version of the story is different.” She shakes her head and grimaces. “I was no virgin, and I wasn’t ashamed of that, despite that fact that all of them, the whole damn family, acted like my little escapades were going to bring down the mighty Youngbloods. Your father threw over a girl with a very powerful father, and marrying for love wound up costing him dearly. But he was able to have his cake and eat it too. Because he had me.”
I put one hand on the wall, my sweaty palm sticking flat against the plaster. “Explain.”
She shrugs, a delicate bob of her shoulders that masks the fury I can see smashing through the glassy veil over her eyes. “I was the town slut anyway, according to my family. Why not one more roll in the sheets with one more man?” Her lips twist. “Your father had already refused marriage to the daughter of a very powerful man to marry your mother, and there wasn’t much anyone could do about that; the girl was lost to the family as a connection and there weren’t any available Youngblood sons at that time. But there was her father. And the man was…a man. A man who liked pretty young girls. A man who liked having the daughter of the family that shamed his daughter in bed with him for all the town to know.”
A tinge of bile creeps up the back of my throat and
threatens to choke me. “They made you sleep with him?”
Her eyes go tight and hard. “They gave me a choice, and I took it. One year as the mistress of a vile buffoon earned me a university degree. I had a choice, Benelli. It was just an ugly choice.” She reaches out, her ruby-tinted fingers clasping under my chin. “It was a choice I never expected my own family would force on me. But they did. And that’s one of the dozens of skeletons in the Youngblood closet.” She closes her eyes and a little of her shine, her light, her essence seems to ooze out and puddle darkly around her.
“I’m so sorry.” My body trembles, up my spine, down my arms, along my legs, making them weak and so unsupportive, I slide to the floor.
Abony’s hand reaches down and takes mine. Though she looks unbearably exhausted, she yanks me to my feet without straining.
“Don’t apologize for mistakes you had nothing to do with,” she says when our faces are close in the dark. “But don’t be stupid enough to make the same mistakes in a whole new way, either.”
She pulls my neck down and kisses me on the side of the mouth before she wanders to bed, the door closed tight behind her. The tiny band of glowing light that spills over the threshold is the only evidence that lets me know she isn’t sleeping.
The images my aunt transferred to my head spear at my brain and gnaw on my conscience as I strip down and wiggle under the covers. My skin is tired. My muscles and bones are tired. But my brain is whirring with a slideshow of negative images, specters of my family’s past and my life’s possible future that I can’t escape and don’t want to watch. The sheets tangle tight as ropes around my legs while I thrash on the mattress, silently begging for a sleep that finally, finally arrives.
I hoped that waking up would lead me to some resolution, that I’d have sifted through my problems in my dreams like a kid at the beach sifting through sand for some lost trinket. But I’m more confused now than I was before.
I pull on a pair of shorts, a clean tank, and sneakers, throw my hair in a ponytail, brush my teeth, and nab my hoodie on the way out the door too early the next morning.
The air is still cool and slightly damp from the night’s dew, and at first I’m walking with no destination in mind, walking just to force my blood to pump strong and hard through my body and flush out some of the clogged confusion in my head.
Because I don’t know what to think.
I believe my aunt. That isn’t the kind of story anyone would lie about. And I know the way Akos threw his words around, with such arrogance and general disregard, that he wasn’t saying them to elicit a reaction in me; he was just speaking a truth he assumed I embraced.
I tilt my head back and watch the sky wash from a deep, still purple to a brightening blue and know I should just ask my father.
But Abony’s words trip through my brain with an unignorable clatter; …they let you think you were a woman without treating you with the respect a woman deserves. They gave you all the shallow trappings, but didn’t fortify you with the foundation you needed.
I don’t know if they’ll tell me the truth. I don’t know if I want to know it. I don’t know what I want. Maybe I don’t want anything.
And then I find myself outside his apartment.
The morning sun is shining off his windows, blinding me when I try to squint up and see if he’s around. I stoop down and scoop up a handful of pebbles, but it’s hard to take aim when the sun is intent on singing my retinas.
I throw and hear the wild patter of rock on glass, then pick up another bunch and am about to throw when I hear his voice.
“I definitely deserve to have rocks thrown at me after how I acted yesterday. But then I’d need your nursing again. Which may be more fair punishment. Also, good morning.”
He’s leaned out the window, his hair mussed, his mouth, that perfect mouth, twisted in an unsure smile, one eye squinted shut, a purple ring around the outside of it.
And he’s not wearing a shirt.
I hate to be that kind of girl, who’s thinking of pecs and triceps and biceps and deltoids when what I’ve always known and trusted about my family might just be shattering in front of me. But…
There they are. And there he is. Half-naked, framed by the window, the morning sun warm on all that exposed skin, I realize Cormac only gives the impression of being skinny with his clothes on. Stipped down, he’s more a lean, lethal stretch of man, his muscles nicely curved and flattened in all the perfect places, and this realization registers a telltale heat between my legs.
“Good morning,” I say, my voice surprisingly calm considering my rioting, sexually crazed thoughts. But that’s the extent of my calm, reasonable conversation. After that greeting, I’m all out of comments.
“If I ignore the fact that you could, at any moment, pummel me with that entire handful of rocks, I might assume that you’re actually not completely pissed to see me?” His smile spreads wide across his face, dopey and pleading and…irresistible.
Smiling. It’s the antithesis of what I thought I’d be doing this morning, but here I am, smiling up at him as he gazes down at me like the world didn’t just spiral out of control last night.
“No even remotely pissed,” I assure him, and, to prove it, I hold out my fist and open it, letting all the rocks plummet to the ground below. “How are your hands?”
“They are swollen, painful reminders of my near-constant stupidity. How are yours?”
The smiling turns to laughter, and the sound of our laughs mingling makes the a warm heat radiate low in me.
“Fine. Then again, I didn’t slam them into some meathead’s jaw then have a friend douse them in wart remover, so, there’s that. Um, by the way…” I trail off and he raises one dark eyebrow expectantly. “In the middle of all that insanity yesterday, I don’t think I had a chance to say…well, to say thank you. I’m not saying you should have done what you did,” I rush to add when his smile morphs into a smirk. “You shouldn’t have. It was idiotic. But not unappreciated.”
“It was my absolute pleasure, Benelli.” I startle at how perfect my name sounds coming from his mouth. “Please let me take you somewhere today. Let’s get something to eat and actually finish our meal this time. Or hike all over hell and creation. Or you can help me translate thousands of pages of Greek epic poetry. Or I could assess graphs in your little notebook with you.”
I stick my hands deep in my hood pockets and curl my toes in my sneakers because I’ve suddenly decided to forget, at least for a little while, all that’s pressing so hard on me and just enjoy being here, now, with him.
“No work. No…” I shake my head and topple over the next words quickly, “No marriage stuff. But food sounds great. Can you get away? Do you have a ton to get done?”
“Nothing I can’t do some other, more boring time, when there isn’t a beautiful woman beckoning at my window.” He pulls his head in, then sticks it back out. “Um, please come in? Would you like to come in? I’ll warn you; it’s tiny and unimpressive up here, but I can’t make peace with the idea of you waiting on the curb for me.”
Alone in his tiny room with him, half-naked.
It feels like the nagging beginning of a bad idea. A wonderfully bad idea. And right now, I decide I just don’t care.
“I’d love to.”
He points to the wide wooden door next to the street and instructs me to wait and, while I do, I feel this swell of anticipation that I haven’t felt in a long time.
I can remember a time when excitement had to do with me and my girlfriend, Lala, getting ready for a night out, slipping into our highest heels, pouring ourselves into our sexiest dresses, and smudging on our smokiest makeup so we could entice and charm any and every guy we set our sights on.
Excitement was dancing until our feet blistered, giggling over never having to pay our own tab at a bar, and comparing notes on the guys we met: how fat their bank accounts were, how impressive their degrees were, their golden employment opportunities and gym-bound physiques.
&nbs
p; It was on one of those nights when I caught Damian watching me with dark, eager eyes that had a possessive, slightly arrogant quality. He caught my attention from across the entire dance floor.
“He’s no good for you,” Lala singsonged, swinging her long blond hair as she shook her hips in time to the music. She narrowed her eyes and puckered those shiny, pink lips, then threw an arm around my waist. “Or maybe he’s exactly what you need. I haven’t seen that look in your eyes…ever.”
And back then, with Damian, I felt wild and free, unsprung, unhinged, undone.
But then everything slowly tightened up and screwed down into some miserable, serious, boring routine that grated on both of us until all the romance fizzled and we were left with the flat, syrupy backwash of our initial love affair.
Cormac opens the door, and I yank the leash of my disappointment over the fact that he put a shirt on before he came down.
“You look like you’re a million miles away.” I watch his hand grip the door until his fingernails bleach white and bloodless.
“I was,” I say, sliding past him and into the cool, damp-smelling hallway. “But I’m here now. And I’m glad.”
I head up the stairs, Cormac close at my back and my nerves flick and pass series of fragmented, electric messages to my brain: “Yes, now, him, this, you.”
I ignore them because they’re nothing but gibberish.
Even if gibberish happens to be the language I’m currently most fluent in.
Cormac 3
I might need a dramamine after following the sway of her hips as she mounts the stairs in front of me. I’m so busy appreciating the careening beauty, I let her lead me down the right side of the hallway and straight to the door of the old man who hoards cats, rather than to my door on the left. I move one hand to her hip to redirect her, and my index finger and thumb skim over an inch of exposed skin.
She and I draw identically sharp breaths in and our eyes nail down twin looks of blatant want.
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