I nod, not trusting my voice. Please, Lord, don’t let me start crying in front of her.
“Chi?” he calls back, and I barely resist cringing. “Marco? Digli fanculo.”
“È una sorpresa,” she responds.
It’s a surprise.
I cross my arms, swallowing down the bile chewing its way through my esophagus.
“So,” Chiara says cheerfully, crossing her own arms. It pushes her breasts up to the top of her dress’s low neckline, and I take a slow, deep breath, trying to control my jealous temper. Easier said than done when I’m staring down the woman living with my boyfriend. The roommate he lied to me about the first night we slept together. “How long will you be in Ravenna?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, attempting to keep my voice as light as possible. At least it doesn’t break. Not like my heart is doing right now. “It all kind of depends.”
She nods. “It must be difficult for you, traveling all the time.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I should say something else. Compliment her dress. Her English. Something.
My mouth is sealed with liquid cement.
Apparently, Chiara feels the need to break the awkward silence. “Lorelai, I do want you to know you are always welcome here with us.” My back stiffens. Us. “This can be, well, like a second home.” She shrugs innocently, and I’m just opening my mouth to give her the verbal bitch slap I can hardly contain when Massimo appears from around the corner.
My jaw clamps shut, my heart thundering as he stops dead in his tracks. His eyes are huge when they land on me, shocked with surprise that quickly fades to cold, blanching fear. My gaze travels over his jeans and bare feet, his shirt not yet fully buttoned, and I’m officially breaking up with his lying, cheating ass in four, three, two—
“Isn’t it fantastic?” Chiara squeals. “Lorelai is here!”
Both Massimo and I glance at her, and then he looks to me.
“Surprise,” I drawl darkly. He swallows, the last bit of color fading from his face.
Chiara clears her throat, shifting her weight more in my direction. “We were about to go out for a drink and maybe some dancing, Lorelai, if you would like to come?”
“No, thank you,” I tell her, still looking at him. I discreetly shake my head, then force a smile toward Chiara. “I’m really tired from traveling, so I’m probably going to go find a hotel and get some sleep.”
“Oh.” She pouts. “Maybe tomorrow, then?”
“Yes,” I repeat, nodding. Then I look at Massimo. “Not today. Maybe domani. Maybe tomorrow.”
His eyes close for just a second too long to be considered a blink, but Chiara doesn’t seem to notice, busy walking over to the table to grab her purse. She strides toward the door, grinning and flicking her long hair over her shoulder. “Guess I will go have fun by myself!”
I’m already back to burying Massimo with nothing more than the ice in my eyes when instead of leaving, Chiara stops in her tracks. She pivots and double kisses my cheeks, then actually freaking hugs me, Massimo wincing behind her back.
“I am so glad I got to meet you,” she whispers. “I hope we can talk again soon. When you have more time. There is something I’d like to give you.”
I nod, biting my trembling lip.
She pulls back, her heels clicking on the floor until the door shuts behind her, and I can’t even look at him.
Turning away, I breathe deeply in through my nose, doing everything I can to keep my eyes clear.
“Cara…”
The single word ignites a wave of fury through me. I whip around, pointing at him. “Don’t call me that. I am not your darling. Not anymore.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, and there’s nothing to do but let my own hands fall to my sides as I shake my head. “So this is why. She’s the roommate. You live with…her.”
He takes a deep breath, his words slow and calm when he speaks. “Lorina, Chiara and I have been friends since we were very little, and she has lived with and been a part of my family for many years now. Her home is not good. Her papà, he drinks. Then he gets very angry. I had enough of this. She is my friend, and she needed somewhere safe to be. But her and my mamma”—he shakes his head—“they only argue, argue, argue. So we moved in here. Appartamento. That is why I stay here, in a different room, because it makes her feel better when I help pay the bills.”
I drop my face into my hands, unsure whether I want to laugh or cry or both. I think I would’ve rather he just slept with her and that was it. What’s even more screwed up is I’m not even surprised something like this has happened.
Massimo has spent countless moments over the last ten years building me up, making me think things I’m embarrassed even now to admit. And then with one snap of his fingers, he pulls the rug out from under me—this one in particular being a geometric five-by-seven with competing shades of gray.
“Lorina…” Massimo’s voice is quiet and thin and more scared than I’ve ever heard from him. “Per favore, Lorina, say something. I do not know what you are thinking.”
He doesn’t know what I’m thinking? Where to freaking start?
I feel awful for Chiara, for the home she ran from.
My heart is asking me to let it melt over the fact that he took care of his friend, set her up with someplace safe to call home in the best way he could.
But my blood is running cold with the knowledge that their friendship has blurred into lovers more often than not and probably all over this damn apartment.
That she decorated. With his money. That he made by beating me.
God, I can’t…
“I’m so tired,” I breathe, chuckling dryly to cover the fact that I’m a second away from breaking down into really ugly sobs. “I can’t deal with this right now.”
He pulls my hands away from my face, cupping my jaw in his hands. There’s so much tension in his eyes, it feels like we’re back in my hospital room in Jerez—a massive unspoken truth between us, pressuring us apart. “What do you need?”
I need to know he didn’t screw her the second he walked in the door. That’s what I need.
Massimo drops his forehead to mine, engulfing me in clean soap and a fresh splash of the cologne my lungs have been aching for since he left me in Brno. “Ask me.” There’s no tremor in his voice anymore, his thumbs sweeping sweetly over my cheekbones. “I will not lie to you.”
Fear chills me to the core, and I don’t want to know anymore.
There won’t be any way to take it back.
“I can’t,” I whisper, my voice cracking.
He presses a kiss to my forehead, then pulls me into him. He hugs me not like I’m the one who needs to be comforted but like he is: his arms wound tightly around me, his lips against my shoulder. My body jolts under a single, silent sob, my hands clinging to his shoulders like some sort of anchor against the waves of reality threatening to drown me.
“Even if you will not ask… I did not,” he whispers. “I would not. I am with you, only you.”
Tucking my face into his neck, I nod, breathing him in. I believe him, and I want to trust him, but he just…he makes it so hard.
I’m not quite ready when he pulls back to look at me. His mouth falls into a pout when he wipes off my cheeks, then sweeps a knuckle under my eye. “When was the last time you slept?”
“Last night. I just…” I exhale, then tell him, “Long day. Delayed flights and missed trains, and I really need to go find a hotel and deal with all this”—I gesture to the apartment—“tomorrow.”
“No.”
My head jerks back. “No?”
“Stay here, with me.”
“Massimo,” I say slowly. “I am not staying here.”
He rolls his eyes, as though I’m not dead freaking serious. “Different rooms.”
I shake my head. “Don’
t care.”
His hands catch mine, then he ducks his head, his voice so private I barely hear him. “Never in my room. Never in my bed.”
The words are a punch straight to the gut, and I look away, blinking rapidly. What does that leave?
He tugs on my hands, adding, “I promise, Lorina.”
It’s the last part that totally screws me over. In ten years, I can count the promises he’s made to me on one hand. I’ve made so many, I can’t even count them all: you’ll never see me cry, never touch me, never, never, never. I’ve broken every single one, and yet he’s held to all of his.
I take a deep breath. “Just tonight. And only because it’s too late to figure out anything else.”
The corner of his mouth turns up, and he nods, letting me go so he can pick up my bags. “You are doing me a big favor,” he says, straightening. “I did not want to go out tonight anyway. I have been sad. Missed my girlfriend.”
My temper can’t resist popping off. “Kinda brought that on yourself by leaving, which you still have yet to explain.”
His eyebrow arches.
I sigh, trying to calm down before I say something I’ll regret. “Whatever. We’ll fight about it tomorrow.”
He holds his hand out to me, and I take it, my steps heavy as he starts walking toward what must be his bedroom, bringing me along with him.
I want to tell him I missed him too. That I wish this had all gone a different, better way.
It didn’t, though, and I don’t say anything.
***
I wake to deep warmth and slatted light from the shutters, my shoulder a little sore, though I only have myself to blame. Because even though I had sworn I wouldn’t start a fight I was too tired to finish, I picked one anyway when I refused to sleep in his bed.
I wasn’t going to just curl up next to him like he didn’t purposefully omit that he lived with Chiara when he said he had a roommate. I opted for a pallet on the floor. Massimo responded by throwing a pillow at me. Spiraling us into the most immature thing I’ve ever done in an adult relationship, but he wanted a pillow fight? He got a goddamn war.
I still slept on the floor.
Which I’m no longer on, somehow back in the bed I said I wouldn’t sleep in.
My hand extends out toward the other pillow, empty but still sunken in the middle. I shouldn’t be surprised that sometime after I fell asleep, he moved me. And I don’t know what took him from me so early, but I can guess.
I clutch the sheet a little closer to my chest, bare apart from my bra, and the foreign fabric names me as the intruder I feel like.
He didn’t want me here.
I throw back the covers, searching for the jeans and shirt I was wearing yesterday, but I have no clothes. Did he wash them? And where the hell is my suitcase?
I head toward his wardrobe, the only other thing in his room apart from his bed and single nightstand. I open the sliding door, looking over the shirts hanging up, but something red at the bottom catches my attention. My brow furrows, and after I pull aside the lazily draped blanket, my eyes widen in shock as I gingerly pick up my missing helmet.
It’s so much worse than I ever imagined.
The face shield is shattered like someone sledgehammered it. The American flag is cracked, all the way across the top and even down to the chin. Goose bumps streak across my skin at the straps dangling but still buckled because they were cut.
My eyes close. Of course he had it. Hidden where I couldn’t see just how close I had come to dying. Where he could control it like it didn’t happen and it wasn’t real.
Another secret.
I hug my broken helmet to my chest, trying to smother the sting of betrayal. From Massimo, from Frank. And it’s not that I don’t understand why they hid it—especially Frank, with how he is about that kind of stuff—but it wasn’t their decision. I deserved the choice, the opportunity to confront my fears.
But they didn’t think I could handle it. That I was strong enough.
A door bangs, and my eyes fly open. That was the fridge. I scramble to put my stolen helmet back in the closet and cover it up. I’m also still nearly naked, but I don’t want him to know I was in here. We are absolutely going to have to talk about my helmet and when it came into his possession, but there are too many other things that have to be argued first. I don’t have the energy to battle him on multiple fronts this morning when everything is already so shaky.
I shut the door and glance around once more. No laundry piled on furniture, no towels over a desk chair, because he doesn’t have a desk or a chair, nothing. The closest thing I find to wearable is Massimo’s shirt from last night. I slip my arms through the sleeves, but I’m too late.
The bedroom door opens. Closes. I snatch the cotton dress shirt closed over my chest.
Massimo’s eyes lock with mine, but there’s no trace of any tremble as he takes a sip from his coffee mug, then clears his throat. “Buongiorno, Lorina.”
My brow furrows as he heads over to the nightstand and sets down the mug. Oh right. I told him not to call me cara anymore. I swallow my guilt as he collapses onto the bed, crossing his ankles and lacing his hands behind his head, and I arch my eyebrow at his staunchly casual posture. “What are you doing?”
“I am waiting.”
I glance down at my unbuttoned shirt. My lack of pants. I peek back up at him. “Waiting for what?”
He shrugs. “You are Tigrotta. I have always known that one day, you would get too angry, and you would go. So I am waiting.”
It feels like I just got hit by my Dabria all over again—the dizzying knockback from out of nowhere, the pain bursting from my chest and rippling out atomically. Because this is that same “Don’t get attached; be prepared to lose it all” dogma he’s always spouting. Except now, he’s waiting for me to walk out, and he’s not even denying he deserves it.
“Is that what you want? For me to go?”
He reaches over to pick up his coffee mug. “No. But it does not matter what I think. You always do what you want, Lorina. So do what you want. I am not going to stop you.”
He takes a drink of coffee, not even looking at me, and there it was. The tremble. Just a tiny one, in his pinkie, where his hand is too big for all his fingers to fit in the handle.
I swear, he is such a hypocrite.
“Massimo,” I breathe, heading over to the bed and sitting on the edge, facing him. “Look, I know last night was a mess, and yeah, I am really, really mad that you didn’t tell me you lived with Chiara. But I’m not…I’m not leaving you.”
He sets down his mug. It takes him a long time before he looks at me. “No?”
I shake my head. “No.”
He reaches over and takes my hand, squeezing it so tight, it actually hurts a little. But it’s worth it when he nods, his jaw locked tight. “Okay.”
Everything in me melts even more, and I curl up on his chest, relief flooding through my body when his arms gather me to him, his lips pressing a hard kiss to my hair.
It doesn’t erase the anger still simmering in my stomach, and I know—I know—there’s something else he’s still not telling me. But for right now, I don’t need to know what it was that pulled him from Brno.
I know Massimo. And he might do messed-up stuff sometimes, but he would never, ever do anything to hurt me. He always puts me first.
Chapter 19
Massimo Vitolo—August; Ravenna, Italy
So much for studying Austria.
Lorina moans deeper as she kisses the hell out of me, straddling my lap on the sofa and speeding our make-out session into something that requires a little more privacy than my living room. At least Chiara’s at work. And Lorina was supposed to be reading in bed while I was learning these turns, but she came out here and ripped the telemetry map from my hands, now full of her curves as she grinds against my e
rection, begging to burst from my jeans.
She nips at my lip, then moves to my jaw, kissing her way down my neck as I thread my hand through her hair, and I lean hard to the right in my mind—turn one: Nikki Lauda Kurve. Lorina shifts on top of me, and I tug her hips down and thrust up against her. Fourth gear. Fifth. She bites the spot on my neck that makes my cock swell into steel, and I keep on it: touch left for turn two, hard tight right for turn three, the Remus.
She sits back, pulling off her red T-shirt before she tears off my black one, and God, I love it when she wears navy-blue lingerie—it matches my moto perfectly. Lorina crashes her mouth back to mine, her hands desperate on my jaw before she reaches for the buckle on my belt, and I can’t touch enough of her: smoothing my hands up her silky back, grasping at her shoulders, palming her breasts, and coming out of the turn in second gear, prepping for the sharp-as-hell Rauch to the right. Swing to the right for turn five, downshift for turn six, the Pirelli, and lean…right? No, left.
Damn it.
Lorina starts kissing her way down my chest, slipping down to the floor between my legs. My head falls back on the couch, my heart pounding as I weave my fist tight into her hair.
Back on the grid. Pole position. Red lights are out. Go.
Right for Lauda, touch left for two. Her teeth scrape my nipple, and I hiss, Lorina undoing the button on my jeans and lowering the zipper.
Right for Remus, right for Rauch. Her breath sweeps down my abs as her kisses dip lower, and I tighten my hand in her hair. Right for turn five, Pirelli left, Würth right—no. Würth is left.
Wait, was Pirelli left or right?
Fuck!
I grit out a sigh, laying my palm flat on the back of Lorina’s neck, my erection already waning because I’m the weak piece of crap who can’t get these turns down.
God, Angelo was right.
Lorina sits back on her heels, but her hands are sweet on my thighs, her voice infinitely patient. “You okay?”
I shake my head. “Cannot concentrate.”
She pouts, but it’s fake. Supposed to be cute. “Is it ’cause I interrupted your study session?” She pushes up on her knees, smoothing her hands up my legs and doing something with her shoulders so her breasts somehow look even more gorgeous than before. “Right-left-right, right-right-left, left-right-right, right.”
Wreckless Page 24