by Anna Zaires, Pepper Winters, Skye Warren, Lynda Chance, Pam Godwin, Amber Lin
“Really? Really, Theresa? Where did you pick him up?”
I put my hands on my hips. I had to bite my lips to keep in all the pointless recrimination. We didn’t need more of it. Daniel knew things.
“Do you want to take it easy and talk to me?” I said.
“No,” he said, taking my shoulders. “I don’t.” He kissed me, pushing me back against my desk.
I kept my mouth closed not out of anger, but confusion. By the time he pulled back, we’d both calmed down.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sit down.” I indicated the chair across from my desk, and I sat next to it.
He pulled his chair close to mine as if he was still entitled to breathe my air, as if I’d agreed to the newspaper’s reconciliation in real life. “I need you to tell me everything,” he said, gathering my hands.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“How did he approach you?”
I pulled my hands away. “This is not fair. You’re not exactly entitled to any information about me or my love life anymore. If I tell you it’s nothing, you’re going to think I’m lying. If I tell you it’s something, it’s like I’m trying to hurt you. I’m just trying to live my life, okay? I’m just trying to get through my days and nights.”
“You’re stumbling into a place where you can get hurt.”
“All roads lead to hurt, trust me.”
“I deserved that.”
“It wasn’t directed at you.” I threw his hands off me. “Can I just talk to you without all the baggage?”
“No, because you’ve forgotten who you are.”
“I’m not yours anymore.”
“You’re an heiress. A socialite. You run one of the biggest accounting departments in Hollywood. You funnel millions of dollars a day. You have access to the district attorney.”
“This is about you?”
“No! Fuck!” The curse was pure exclamation. Not a lead in or a modifier.
He paused for half of a microsecond, but I caught it. When he and I were together, I hadn’t liked cursing. I thought he didn’t do it until I found his texts to Clarice, and I found out just how well he used the word fuck.
He put his elbows on his knees and put his face in his hands. “He’s the capo of the Giraldi crime family, Tinkerbell.”
If I’d had a muscle in my body that wasn’t tensed to pain, they caught up. Even my toes curled. “You’re making that up.”
His face was red and sweaty. He looked more like a man and less like a mayor than he had since the morning I discovered his infidelity. “I wish I was. I wish I was only jealous.”
My ex-fiancé didn’t get jealous often, but when he did, he burned white hot. I’d never betrayed him or any of my boyfriends. My relationships had ended because of educational choices (Randolph went to Berkeley, and I went to MIT) or because the other party strayed or because there was nothing worth bothering with, as was the case with Sam Traulich. He was a nice guy, just completely incompatible with me.
Sam and I stayed friends, and when he’d called to ask if I had any contacts at Northwestern Films, I agreed to a lunch. It had gone long. At three thirty p.m., Sam and I were laughing over some crumb of nostalgia when Daniel stormed into the little diner. At first, he was thrilled to see me alive. He’d apparently been calling the office for hours about our dinner plans, and no one knew where I was. My cell battery had died, so he tracked me down by having his friends on First Street look into my credit card transactions for the previous two hours.
For some reason, that didn’t bother me.
Once he’d gotten over his initial delight, he got a good look at Sam, who was burnished brown from the sun, joyful as always, laid-back, and in good humor. Daniel put on his politician game, apologized, and appeared to forget about it. We made it to dinner on time. Life moved on.
But not for Daniel. I was shocked to find out years later, through a mutual friend, what had followed. As an extraordinarily popular young prosecutor, Daniel had arranged for Sam to be picked up by the police, brought in, roughed up, and detained. Daniel visited the detainee and mentioned that if he ever kept his girlfriend too long again, Sam would be joined in his cell by at least three gang members who owed him favors.
I had been livid. I slept on the couch for three weeks and barely spoke to him. That was the last intolerably stupid thing Daniel ever did on my behalf.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening. Antonio is what… in the mafia?”
“Yes.”
“You mean there’s still a mafia?”
“Yes, Virginia, there is a mafia.”
I paused for a long time. On the one hand, he might as well have told me Antonio was a leprechaun. On the other, I couldn’t say I was surprised.
Chapter Thirteen
I texted Antonio.
—I have my one question—
—I want you to ask it in person—
—Agreed—
The address was in Hollywood Heights, overlooking the Bowl, on a hairpin turn that looked like a sheer drop on the right and a fortress wall on the left. A thirty-foot long, fifteen-foot high dumpster was visible over the hedge, and crashing and banging drowned out the scrape of cricket wings. I edged past a pickup truck that looked as though it had survived a demolition derby and parked next to a low sports car covered by a grey tarp.
The house was Spanish with a red tile roof, leaded stained glass accents, and thick adobe walls. Tarps swung from rafters, and every wall’s plaster had been cracked down to the lathe. I followed the banging and crashing, nodding at the rough men pushing a wheelbarrow of broken house detritus.
“Is Antonio here?” I asked.
I couldn’t imagine him hanging around a scraped-to-the-beams structure, but one of the guys thumbed toward the back of the house. I thanked him and headed in that direction. The pounding, thumping sounds were followed by the tickle of pebbles hitting the floor. The air got dusty, and the smell of pine hit me as I saw him.
I’d always been attracted to clean cut, educated men, men who had people to change their flat tires, drive them around, break down their walls. They exerted themselves mightily in gyms and squash courts. But none of them had ever looked like Antonio. He hoisted a sledgehammer and brought it down. The wall crumbled under the weight, and he wedged the head behind the wall and yanked it out, sending a shot of plaster and shredded lathe toward him. He didn’t stop, though. Didn’t even pause. His wiry muscles shifted and pulsed. The satin sheen of sweat on his olive skin brought out every muscle and tendon.
I knew women who liked that sort of thing: a sweaty man doing physical labor. I had never understood the appeal until that moment. He brought the sledgehammer down with a coil of force, like a righteous god smiting an errant creation off the face of his earth. The movement was so dramatic the gold pendant around his neck swung around to his shoulder.
“I know you’re there, Contessa.” He brought the hammer down again.
“Don’t you have people to do this for you?”
He tossed the hammer down as if he was done with the day’s violence. “It’s my house, and demo’s too much fun to delegate.” His face was covered in dust, sweat, and a smile.
“You should hire yourself,” I said.
“Like it?”
“It’ll be nice once you mop. Dust. You know, maybe a few pictures on the wall.” I swept my hand to the view of the city, the busted everything, the sheer potential.
“Let me show you.” He headed out an archway, indicating I should follow.
He led me onto a balcony on the west side of the house. The terra-cotta floor looked to be in good shape, and the cast-iron railing curled in on itself, making a floral design I’d never seen.
“I love this view,” I said, understating the grandeur of the ocean of lights. “I could look out on this all night.”
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and poked one out. I refused his offer, and he took out a big metal lighter.
“Sit here at night, have a glass of wine. Or in the morning, a cup of coffee, just look over the city.” He lit his cigarette with a click clack, his profile something out of an art history class. He put his fingertips to the back of my neck, his stroke so delicate I didn’t lean into it, just stayed as still as I could.
“You had a question?” he asked, tracing the line where my shirt met my skin.
“Are you a leprechaun?” I asked.
“Only when St. Patrick’s Day lands on a full moon.” He was smiling, but I could see the question had confused him.
“I’m sorry. I had a real question, but I forgot which one I picked.”
Because they were all ridiculous, of course. If he was some cartoon capo, he’d have a dozen guys around him all the time. He’d wear pinstripes and a fedora. He’d carry a gun. He’d say capisce a lot.
“Do I get any questions?” he asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“I’m an open book.”
He laughed softly, smoke trailing behind him. “Right. Open, but in a different language.”
He gave me an idea.
“I’m not going to ask you a question,” I said. “I’m going to tell you what happened to me today.”
“Let me make you coffee.”
* * *
The kitchen was in bad but useable shape. The beige marbled tiles with little mirrored squares every few feet, dark wood cabinets, and avocado appliances told me the place hadn’t been redone since the seventies.
Antonio sat me in a folding chair at a beat up pine table. “Best I have for now.”
“You living here during all this mess?”
“No. I have another place.” He gave no more information. “Do you like espresso? I have some hot still.”
“Sure.”
He poured from a chrome double brewer into two small blue cups. “Does it keep you up?”
“Nope.”
“Good. A real woman.” He brought the cups and a lemon to the table and set a cup before me. I reached for the handle, but he made a little tch tch noise. “Not yet.” He cradled the lemon in one palm and a little knife in the other. “What happened to you today?”
“Today, my assistant found a picture of us in the paper.”
“Saw that,” he said, cutting a strip of lemon peel. “You looked sexy as hell. I wanted to fuck you all over again.”
If he was trying to get my body to turn into a puddle of desire, it was working. “Everyone saw it.”
“Everyone want to fuck you as bad as I did?”
“My ex-fiancé showed up.”
“The Candidate…” He dropped a yellow curlicue into my saucer. “Bet he regrets what he did, no?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
I reached for the espresso, but he stopped me again, plucking the rind from my saucer and rubbing it on the edge of my cup.
“Do you want Sambuca?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He reached back, plucked a bottle from a line of them, and unscrewed the top. “In Napoli, the men point their pinkies up when they drink espresso to show their refinement. Once they’ve been here long enough, they drink like Americans.” He poured a little Sambuca into our cups.
“How do the women drink?”
“Quickly, before the children pull on their skirts.”
I sipped the drink. It was good, thick, rich. I took a bigger mouthful but didn’t gulp.
“So there’s a picture in the paper of us, and let’s not play tricks with each other,” he said. “It looked like we’re intimate.”
“It did.”
“Next to a picture of you and him.” He picked up his cup.
I followed suit. “Yes.”
“And he runs to your office, how many hours later? One? A half? Or are we measuring in minutes?”
We looked at each other over our cups.
“I don’t see that it matters.” I blew on the black liquid, the ripples releasing the licorice scent of the Sambuca.
He smirked. “Maybe it doesn’t. What did it take him one to sixty minutes to tell you?”
“That you run an organized crime empire.”
He said nothing at first, just put his espresso to his lips and drank. He kept his pinky down, holding the demitasse with his curled fist. “I’m very impressed with me.” He clicked the cup to saucer. “Less so with him. I might have to vote Drummond.”
“I looked into it after he left, once I knew what I was looking for. You’re being investigated for all kinds of fraud. Insurance. Real estate. And you don’t want me to ask questions, so what am I supposed to think?”
“Is that your question?” he asked. “What are you supposed to think? I have an answer for that one.”
“I don’t have an actual question. I know you haven’t been convicted of anything, and I know what we had was just a casual screw.”
“It wasn’t casual.”
“We can’t make any commitments to each other. And that’s fine. But I don’t sleep with strangers. If you’re going to continue to be a stranger, then I can’t do this.”
He closed his eyes and cocked his head left, then right, as if stretching before a boxing match. “I have a history, and it followed me here.”
I sat back. “Go on.”
“My father didn’t exist to me. My mother shooed off the idea of him. Like she made me herself, out of nothing. I didn’t know who my father was until I was eleven. I had some business, and he was the man one went to with business.”
“At eleven? What business did you have at that age?”
“It’s a different world over there. Things need to be taken care of. If the trash wasn’t getting picked up, you went to Benito Racossi. If the delivery boy was stealing from your mother, you went to Racossi. My mother rarely left the apartment, and my sister… Well, I’d never send her to a man like that. But once I met him, I saw it.” He made a quick oval around his face. “Like looking in a mirror, but older.”
“He was your father?”
“He didn’t deny it. Took me under his wing. Gave me work. Legal work. Anything he had to keep me out of trouble. My mother? It nearly killed her. She didn’t want me in the life. She never believed I didn’t do anything illegal. Neither did the polizia. Neither did Interpol. Neither does Daniel Brower, who’s going to make my life hell if he’s mayor. But as God is my witness, every business I have runs because I watched how my father did it, but I’ve never imitated what he did. So I’ll tell you this once and swear to it, I’ve beaten every charge against me and I’ll beat everything they put on my back because I’m clean.”
“I believe you.”
“Don’t put me in a position where I have to defend myself against this again.”
He was so definite, so stern, so parental that I didn’t think I could spend another second in his presence. I stood. “If asking you questions turns you into an ass, I’ll be sure to only make declarative statements on the infinitely small chance I ever see you again. Thanks for the coffee.”
I spun on my heel and walked out of the kitchen, winding up in a room I hadn’t come through. Then I found another with a broken stone staircase. I didn’t feel him following me until a second before he grabbed me and pushed me toward a leaded glass window.
“Let go of me.”
“No.”
I clawed at his hands as they fondled me, going under my shirt and bra without prelude or hesitation. The flood of arousal was painful.
“Stop,” I said, trying to get his arms off me.
“Next time you say stop will be the last.” He placed my hands on either side of the window. The stone was cold, and the pressure of him on my back was harder than the wall. “What do you want to say?” He shifted behind me, unmistakably getting his dick out. I heard the tick of a condom wrapper hitting the tiles. Was he wrapping it up again? God, I hoped so.
I wanted to say stop. No. Don’t. But I needed him to relieve my ache, and I knew he meant that my next objection would send him away. “Do it.”
“I’m going to fuck you so fucking hard.” He tightened the grip of both hands.
I’d made him angry. That was clear in every vowel. I shouldn’t like that. It shouldn’t turn me on. But as I stood with my ass jutting out, my bra and shirt pulled up until my breasts swung, and a man’s dick at my opening, I could only wonder how to make him angrier.
“You’d better make it worthwhile,” I said. “I have no time for sweet talk.”
“You’re such a rich little princess.” He pressed my neck down and pulled my hips toward him with the fingers he had inserted in me.
“Fuck you,” I whispered. “You’re a worthless street punk.”
I thought he would put his dick back in his pants and walk away. Instead, he jammed it in me with animal brutality. I cried out not because it hurt, but because the way he did it, plus the raw physical pleasure it created, pushed the wind out of me.
“You like this?” he said, thrusting with every word. “You like this. Worthless. Street. Punk. Fucking. You?”
His arms constricted around me. His right squeezed a breast, his left had four fingers on my clit, shifting like tectonic plates with every thrust. I grunted. I didn’t think I’d ever grunted during sex, but that wasn’t sex. That was two animals mating under a bush.
He pulled out and yanked me up. I saw us in the reflection in the window.
“Look at you. That face. I want to see you when you come.” He growled it. “Since the minute I saw you, I’ve wanted you. I’ve wanted to open your legs and take you.” As if his words were fingers, they drifted down my body, fondling me, arousing me. “I’ve seen women come. They forget to look beautiful. They forget who they are. I want to see you when you lose yourself and all you know is my name.”
He sat on the windowsill, holding his hand out for me. I straddled him, lowering myself onto him. He guided me by the hips.
“This is good?” he asked as if he already knew the answer.
“So good. Fucking you is so good.”