by Nicole Fox
“Evie—”
“Do you know how scary this is? Knowing that I can’t hide here forever? Knowing how much easier it would be to do what my father wants after this baby is born? It would be so much easier and probably so much better to pretend, but if you’d taken the time to come to me and discuss it with me instead of accusing me of being some fucking freeloading bitch, or something, then you would know that I actually have no fucking clue what I’m going to do after I have this baby. Do I go back to my normal life? Do I stay here? I can’t hide my whole life, so either situation is going to be very, very public and potentially damaging for myself and my child either way.
“But you don’t care about that, do you?” she went on. “What is it? Did my father make you feel inadequate or something because he staked a claim that’s yours, hm? It’s always the same with men, all the time—”
“Evie—”
“No!”
Evie was very red by now and her chest was rising and falling rapidly. I let her continue.
“You come here and you assume you know everything. Well, you know what, you don’t! You don’t, my father doesn’t, and your father doesn’t, either. None of you know what’s best for me, but you’ll sit here and act like you have all the answers. Well, you know what? I thought, at least with you, that I would have you by my side instead of going over me for these things. I thought we were in this together. I was stupid to think that, but I’m not going to be thinking that anymore. Fuck you, Tony.”
I was stunned as she gathered her things and walked away from me. I didn’t even try and follow her. What was I supposed to do? Say?
Shit.
I fucked up really bad.
I thought about running after her, but again, I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to say. I thought we were in this shit together. I was stupid to think that. That shit hurt. That hit me hard.
Was this what her father had wanted? Was this a part of him trying to push us away—was that what my father was trying to do when he set up this meeting to begin with? And what had he even promised Brown in exchange for reaching out to me?
I plopped down by the pool. I punched the water—not like it really did all that much good, in all honesty—and knew that I had to fix this somehow. I just wasn’t exactly sure how.
Chapter Fourteen
Evie
I slept in my own room that night. Tony didn’t bother to come and talk to me, and I assumed that he was mad at me, or on whatever ego trip that my father had set him on. Where had either of them gotten off thinking that they needed to have any sort of conversation about me, without me present? What’s more, all those accusations from Tony …I thought that he knew me better, though it was clear that he did not.
I thought back to all the time we had spent together. Dates. Trips out of town. Just lounging around the compound when there wasn’t anything else to do. We had learned about each other’s families, and about our likes and our dislikes. He was secretly a comic junkie, and he knew that I was mildly afraid of the dark.
I hadn’t told him about the deal that I had made with my father. It had slipped my mind in all the chaos, and by the time that I had begun to think about it again, it seemed like a moot point; whatever I ended up doing would be independent of the deal that I had made with my father. I had been honestly considering taking the leap and staying with Tony, but if this was what he thought about me …
I wasn’t sure that I wanted that.
# # #
The next day I had an ultrasound scheduled. I would have forgotten about it if it wasn’t for the fact that there was a reminder that went off on my phone. I groaned.
I would have to spend the day with Tony.
I got ready slowly as I could manage without making us late. We didn’t talk to each other on the way over and we didn’t talk to each other as we waited, either. He seemed like there was something on his mind; he kept looking at me, and a couple of times, it seemed like he was trying to speak. I didn’t ask him what was on his mind, however. If he was going to talk to me, then he could talk to me like a man or not at all. I wasn’t going to coddle him and I wasn’t going to hold his hand. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones. Whatever. I was still mad and hurt by what he had said to me yesterday.
When we were called, I stood up first, leaving him behind to catch up with me as I followed the doctor to the back. This person was apparently discrete; they had a lot of clients in organized and illegal practices, and the fact that I was coming in for prenatal care with Tony Esposito wouldn’t be getting out to the press anytime soon, if ever. After our conversation last night, it was obvious that that was a good thing. Or something. I wasn’t sure.
The doctor greeted us as we came in.
“Ah, Evie and Tony, good to see you in again. Doing well, I assume?”
“Well enough, Doctor Connors.”
The older doctor raised her brow, looked between Tony and me, and said nothing more on that subject. I was grateful for this, and I hopped myself up on the examination table, already pulling my shirt up over my belly.
“In a hurry today, I see. Excited?”
“Tired. I want to go home and sleep.”
“Understandable. Pregnancy can be tiring. Is the daddy helping out?”
“As much as he can, I suppose.”
Tony remained silent during this exchange, which was a surprise. He always had to and wanted to chime in with his opinions, after all. The doctor chuckled, shooting a look over at Tony.
“You must be in the dog house. You would think men would learn not to do that …especially not with the pregnant.”
I snorted and glanced over at Tony. I was surprised to see that there was somewhat of a guilty look on his face. Rather than feel satisfied about that, however, I felt a small pang of guilt.
“Let’s just get this over with,” I said. “I really do want to just get home.”
The doctor nodded. She put the jelly all over my stomach, making me shrink back a little at the cold. That was always the worst part of this thing; that stuff was freezing!
“You can’t warm that stuff up, doc?” I said, taking the opportunity to try and lighten the mood.
She laughed.
“I try to remember to do so, but you know. You get busy and warm lube isn’t always a priority.”
I shook my head and watched the monitor as the little device that would show me my baby slid over my stomach. The image was all black and white and grey—it looked like a whole mass of nothing, to be honest.
“Hm …” the doctor hummed. Then she smiled. “Here, there we go. Your little nugget.”
She always called it a little nugget every time we came in here. I thought it was cute and my heart fluttered a little as she pointed to the mass in the middle of the screen.
“There it is. The little guy or girl. The two of you have said you’d like to stay surprised on that, yes?”
“Yeah,” Tony and I said in unison. My eyes caught his and I looked away from him quickly, not certain if I was ready to share this moment with him or not.
“Well, good news—everything is looking good and healthy. You’ll come back in in a few weeks and, luck willing, you’ll have the same good news about your little nugget. Now. You been taking your prenatal vitamins as usual?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Good to hear. Well, there isn’t anything else. You two are free to go.”
Quick and painless, which is what I liked. It felt odd that this wasn’t a happier moment, though, and I realized that was because Tony and I weren’t in a happy place.
Our ride home, however, was silent. Whatever Tony might have wanted to talk about, he certainly didn’t want to talk about it right now. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to talk to him right now. When we got home, we lingered in the hallway a little outside his room.
“I’m glad everything’s good. You know. With the baby.”
“Me too.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
&
nbsp; That’s how Tony and I parted ways that night. It’s how we greeted and parted ways the next few days as well and it was just on the wrong side of way too damn maddening. It even got to the point that Tony’s father noticed. He talked to me about it one night, while Tony was doing a money run with Allan and I was dining with Geno alone.
“I’ve noticed that the honeymoon phase has eased on out,” he commented. He sat at the other end of the impossibly long dining table in the dining room. My face reddened a little; I didn’t dislike Geno, but it was still odd having one-on-one conversations with him, especially when it concerned Tony; Geno Esposito was …an odd man. But I supposed that he was still trying to be a helpful, active part of his son’s life, so I couldn’t really fault him for that one, could I?
“We just got into an argument,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Hm, well,” he said, his lips twitching beneath his mustache, like he knew something that I didn’t know. “These things happen, you know. Couples squabble. They fight. They hate each other for a while, then they go back to loving each other, and the cycle continues. Especially for you younger ones. You’re always so full of excitement that you don’t know what to do with yourselves.”
I wasn’t sure if he was trying to get details out of me, but I just smiled.
“I’m sure that we’ll work through it.”
“I’m certain sure that you will.”
# # #
Actually, talking through our problems didn’t come for a couple more days, and it was Tony who came to me—which would have surprised the living daylights out of me if I hadn’t felt like this was coming all day.
He knocked on my door in the evening. I was already lying down, about ready to go to sleep. I still hadn’t gone back into his room to sleep, but I was starting to miss him nonetheless. When he knocked, I knew it was him. I had felt the tension in the air all day and had been preparing myself.
“Come in,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I sounded particularly sure of myself, but I sat up on my bed, my legs crossed. Tony came in, looking very dead-set on something. I wondered if this time was him bucking up the nerve to tell me it was time to leave.
“Hey. Can we talk?”
Ah. The dreaded ‘can we talk’ line.
“Yeah. Sure. What do you need to say?”
I braced myself. My father had gotten rid of me when I had messed up, at least in his perception. It would make sense that Tony would, too. I didn’t know what I was thinking when I had decided that this was a good idea.
“I wanted to apologize.”
Okay. I stared at him, openly shocked. That …that was not what I was expecting.
“What?”
“I said, I wanted to apologize. For the other day. Honestly, actually, just for everything.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I should have come to you and asked you what you planned. Honestly …your father was baiting me. It was obvious. So fucking obvious, and I totally should have just trusted you and trusted what we’ve been building over what your father was telling me, trying to get a rise out of me. That wasn’t fair to you, and it wasn’t fair to us or the baby, either.”
I was quiet for a moment. I didn’t know what to say. I stared at him, and he rocked on his feet, as though the silence was making him uncomfortable.
“Anyway …that’s all I wanted to say. You don’t have to say anything. I understand I kind of fucked up; we’re supposed to be making this work, in whatever way it’s gonna end up working.”
“How do you want it to work out?”
He tilted his head.
“Huh?”
“I said, how do you want this to work out? What do you see us being …I don’t know. What’s the end game here?”
He thought about it for a little, and while I suppose that should have worried me, it didn’t worry me half as much. He was taking the time to think it through—I could appreciate that.
“I want you to stay here,” he said. “With us. Openly. I don’t know if we’re going to be a thing. You know. A traditional mother and father and the whole picket fence shebang—that kind of idyllic scene isn’t something I can promise. But I would help take care of our child and I would help take care of you.”
“What if I don’t want to be taken care of, though?” I asked. “What if I wanted to be an equal in all of this? In being a parent? Beside—you?”
“You want to be with me?”
“If I were to be with you, it’d be in the sense that I wouldn’t be the kind of woman that my father expected me to be every time that he set me up with another one of his golf buddies’ sons. I would be included in things …to an extent. I still want to go to school. I want to do something with my life while also being a mother and a lover and just …a person.”
“I see.”
“Is that a problem?”
He shook his head.
“You being your own person? No. But you’re not ready to be with me—really with me—yet, are you?”
Ah. That was the hard question.
“I think I could.”
“But not right now.”
“I think that there’s still a lot we need to work out and a lot that’s obviously working in the shadows with this entire pregnancy,” I said. “But. I’m willing to work toward it. It’s why I’m here. It’s why I chose to stay here. I do like you, Tony. I want this to work out.”
It was then that he walked over to me. I let him reach out and touch me, then caress the side of my face. I leaned into his touch, welcoming it. I hadn’t realized how much I had actually craved feeling that until that moment—how much I had missed something as simple as him putting his hand on my face and comforting me, even when it seemed silly to need such a comfort. When had things gotten like this, I wondered.
“I’m not gonna rush you on this one, Evie,” he said. “God knows I want to. I want to make you mine in every way conceivable. I want to fuck you and kiss you and keep you here. You and that baby, and Goddamn your father and anyone who tries to take you away from me.” He sighed. “But you have to want it. I can’t make you want it. I won’t. So I’ll give it time and I won’t …do that shit that I did the other day. Okay? We gotta work together on this.”
I smiled and turned my head into his palm. I kissed him there.
“You don’t know how much I appreciate that. I just want to do what’s right. I’m trying. I’ve never had to go through anything like this before. It’s—” I choked up a little. “It’s scary, you know? All of this? Sometimes it dawns on me so suddenly that I’m going to be a mother and I want it so bad that it scares me. Then I remember everything that’s happening outside of being a mother. My father is still telling people I’m doing some charity bullshit that any discerning reporter can see is just a lie. He still expects me to come home to him eventually, like a dutiful, little daughter wanting to kiss his boots. And then there’s all of this. And I shouldn’t be okay with it. I shouldn’t even like it, but I …do. I like being here. I like being a part of all of this. It seems like it should be wrong and I don’t know how to reconcile it feeling right.”
Tony laughed.
“It’s the allure of the life, isn’t it? You know, there’s dangerous shit. And you know that a lot of it is bad …but you can’t stop.”
I bit my lip.
“What?”
“It’s nothing.”
“It must be something.”
I worried my lip a little more. Tony sat beside me.
“What is it?”
“How much will they be involved?” I placed my hand on my stomach. “This little one. This is a family thing, isn’t it? So …they …”
“If you want me to be truthful with you, there’s a lot that I don’t want my children involved in. This one …ones in the future.” Tony took my hands. “I have a lot of plans. A lot of plans that I can’t finish up right now. But in the future, this isn’t something that I want my kids having to do just to be where we are. That’s something
that I can promise you as far as all this goes. I thought I would have more time before I really thought that I was going to need to start …moving on my own. But what can you do? Sometimes little miracles come and sometimes you gotta rearrange your time tables.”
I looked at him with a raised brow.
“You mean you’d give all this up just to a raise a kid normally.”
Tony laughed.
“Don’t get me wrong …I don’t mind keeping the clubs …the strip joints. The cars, too. The ones we deal on the side. But I wanna cut out fucking around with the heavy shit. It’s good for cred on the street and not a hell of a lot much else. You see the problems it’s brought us with your father—the police coming here because of the reputation. I know this isn’t what my great-grandparents wanted for my generation when they started to build the Esposito line from the ground up.”