Manny nods and the girls glance at him.
“He helped me clean up the booths. The chairs are up because he put them there.”
We all look around, knowing the man who put up these chairs, nearly died last night. I take a deep breath. “And voila. The universe proceeded to give me the biggest fucking-never-gonna-happen I could have ever imagined. Gunshot. Surgery. Girlfriend at his hospital bedside. The works.”
Taryn winces. “Girlfriend at his bedside? Oh no…how awkward.”
“I walked into the room and there she was holding his hand.”
Manny closes his eyes and the girls make sounds like the wind is knocked out of them.
“She’s gorgeous. Elegant. An older woman. Taller than me in every way. I felt like I was a barefoot redneck with no teeth, holding a dead chicken, next to her.” I wave my near-empty glass in the air. “So, yeah. If awkward means: heart dragged down to hell and stepped on by forty laughing demons… then yeah, it was awkward.”
Taryn is staring ahead. I can see her face in the mirror against the backbar wall trying to process what I’ve yet to understand, myself. “He just walked in… by accident?”
“There are no accidents,” Laura mumbles.
Ruefully, I smile. “I was thinking the same thing. But then we both almost died, so there’s that.”
Laura taps her pint glass with a single fingernail over and over. “That’s bullshit. Let’s go. Get up. Come on.” She jumps off the barstool and starts sliding on her bracelets; she means business.
Taryn follows and jerks her head to Manny.
“We’re not going to the hospital.” I watch them pick up their bags while Manny pulls his keys from his pocket.
Taryn grabs my recovered, money-filled bag from where it sits in front of me. The leather rubs against my arms. I watch it, but I stay put. Then she picks up his jacket. That gets my attention. “Perfect excuse to see him. We’re going to the hospital. He needs his phone, doesn’t he?”
I smooth down my hair. “What if he doesn’t want to see me? What if his girlfriend slaps my face? What if she’s really an alien and she’s trapped him in a pod?”
“Never know until you find out.” Laura throws up her arms, bracelets jangling. “Oh, I can’t wait to lay eyes on the guy who’s got Annie smoothing down her hair five times in a row when not a piece is out of place!”
Embarrassed, I smile. I shouldn’t go. I know I shouldn’t go. “I really don’t think this is a good idea.”
“You’ve just said the beginning of every great thing that ever happened.” Taryn throws both her palms up like she’s checking for rain.
I hop off the barstool, still smoothing my hair. “Can you hand me my bag so I can stop doing this?” Taryn swings it to me and I catch with a dip of my knees. “Yikes. Okay. Let’s go.” We start for the door.
Manny opens the register. “We should clear this out first.”
His voice turns me. I catch site of his face and stop walking. “No, don’t do it, Manny.”
With a handful of quarters weighing down one arm, he turns. “Do what?”
Tilting my head, I walk over, holding his eyes like I understand. He stares at me as I put my hands on the bar and get very still. “Don’t blame yourself. Please just don’t. This is all on me.”
His arm drops and a few quarters slide to freedom, tiny clinks hitting the ground below, bouncing through the rubber mat. “I had a bad feeling last night.”
“I know you did. I didn’t listen. This is not your fault. Do you hear me?” He nods. I push off the bar. “I should empty the safe, too.”
Laura calls out quickly. “Annie, it’ll be fine.”
Taryn’s worried, too. “Yeah, just leave it. Come on.”
I turn and walk backwards. “I’m going to the hospital, okay? Nothing could keep me away. Believe me.” With my hand on the doorknob, I add, “And I know he’s got a girlfriend. I’m just going to see if he’s okay. That’s it.”
They nod, but they both doubt the fates. It's like they think something's going to happen to stop me from going if we don't go right now.
“Stop it, you guys. I’m going to the hospital. I promise. Grab a chair. I’ll be right out.”
Reluctantly, they head over as my phone rings in my purse. Taryn mumbles, “Oh no.”
Laura yells out, nice and loud, “We’re so not going.”
Ignoring them, I pull out the phone. Christiano’s name and photo are there again. Him, beautiful, shirtless, and smiling with the spatula in his hand. I stare at it and realize he’s called twice. He never does that. Something must be wrong. I swipe to answer, scooting into the office as I call out, “I’ll just be a second. Hey. Everything okay?”
“Bella.” He’s been sleeping and his voice is sexy, low and hoarse. “I was dreaming about you.”
It’s way before dawn where he is. I’m still not used to the time difference. I walk to the safe, but my feet are moving slower. “Was it a good dream?”
Still half in it, he mumbles, “No. It was bad. Worried me. I miss you.”
I can hear the pillow crinkling under his shifting head, hear him stretching. I can picture it all as if he’s right in front of me. I want to lean over and kiss him. Tell him I’m scared. That I almost died. That I need a hug. That I made a huge mistake. How huge, I don’t know yet.
“I miss you, too.” Closing my eyes, I push my forehead into the door. “Christiano, something bad happened.” My voice catches because I know I can’t tell him everything and even saying this, feels wrong. But he’s been my best friend for years. How could I not tell him, and so I say on a reluctant whisper, “I was robbed last night.”
He wakes up fast. I can hear him sitting upright in our bed. “Cosa é successo? Are you hurt?”
Slinking down to the floor with my head in my hand, I go over some of the details, wrapping myself in a spider web of half-truths that I will never get out of.
“I can’t believe I wasn’t there,” he says when I’m done, his voice so worried it sounds angry.
“You couldn’t have done anything,” I say quietly.
“Did he break in?”
“No,” I pause, struggling for lies. “I guess I forgot to lock it. It was a mistake.” In so many ways.
“Bella, you need to be careful.”
I close my eyes and lightly pound the back of my head against the door, my toes turned in and my knees bent. “I know. I should go. My team is here helping me clean. They’re waiting for me.”
“Annie, this is all on me now and then you go?” The language barrier sometimes skews his words, but since I know him so well, I know what he means.
“I wish I was sleeping next to you. I wish none of this ever happened.” It feels good to say something honest. And really… what am I doing in this city?
“Come home, Bella.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please come back.”
I should go. I could close Le Barré and call it a learning experience. My employees will find other jobs. They’re not going to be making money while we’re closed anyway, and how long will it take to reopen? Why am I here? The universe obviously doesn’t want me here. I was about to go to the hospital and Christiano wakes up to call me at that exact moment? I finally see Brendan after all these years and we’re held up at gunpoint? He nearly dies? None of this is supposed to be happening.
It can’t be this hard.
I open my lips to tell him yes, feeling the weight of failure and defeat.
Christiano sighs. “Just let me help you.”
I freeze and close my mouth. Like a rubber band snapping, defensiveness rises. We’ve had this argument too many times for me to not feel the old familiar surge of pride. “I need to do something on my own.”
He’s exasperated, as he is every time we talk about this. “I know. But this is more than standing on your feet. When a ship is sinking, you abandon it.”
I straighten up on the floor, rise to standing. “At least I have my ow
n ship. I have to go. I have people who need me,”
“Annie, it is not bad being helped. Are your employees helping? How different is this?”
“It’s different!”
“How, Bella? How?”
“Because they’re helping me fix something I created. Your life, Christiano – you created it! I just fit myself into it. It was your house. Your furniture. Your friends.”
“You took them when it suited you.”
A pause hangs as wide as the miles between us. “Christiano, I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you by leaving things so ambiguous like this.”
“Ambiguous,” he asks with that tone he uses when he doesn’t understand a word.
“Leaving things up in the air, unsettled. Am I coming back or not…”
“You always say you are.”
I don’t speak. “I want to. I wish we’d stop fighting about this.”
His voice is filled with pain as he says on a tired whisper, almost to himself, “How can I hold onto a bird?”
Oh God, it kills me when he says things like that. He’s so poetic, my Christiano. Why don’t I run to him and forget all about this stupid need to stand on my own? I go to the safe to do what I came here to. “I feel like my heart is pulled in two directions, but my soul in only one. I have to try. I'm sorry. I so appreciate your giving me the space. And please, I know you’ve said you don’t want to, but…”
“Don’t,” he interrupts. “Don't say it, Bella,”
It takes me two times to get the code right, I’m so overwhelmed. “What?”
“Do not say for me to see other people again. I don’t want to hear it!”
My hand is shaking as I slip the bank’s canvas lock bag into my purse. “Okay.”
“I should come to San Francisco.”
“You can’t leave work, baby. Am I scared? Yes! Do I want your help? Yes! But don’t you see, that’s exactly why I can’t take it!”
“No. I don’t see.”
“I know. And that’s been our biggest problem.”
A long sigh comes through the phone. “I am going back to sleep.”
“Okay. I’ll call you later.” The phone goes dead. I stare at the calendar on the wall, thinking, that’s the first time we didn’t say, I love you. Staring back at me is a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, its base surrounded in fog. The fog makes me think of last night. I’m drowning in uneasiness. It takes too long to find the doorknob. The door feels heavier than it was. I want to rejoin them, but I’m walking slowly. The phone is hanging from my hand. My bag, filled with too much money for all the wrong reasons, is hanging off my limp shoulder.
“I’m not going to the hospital. I need to go home and make some calls to repair this window.” Standing in the center of the room, I’m staring at my phone, seeing me dialing 911 with it. Running to him. Scraping my knees as I slid to the floor. There’s Christiano’s face also and he’s yelling, a memory of a dozen arguments always over the same thing. “I need to call the insurance company,” I mumble, swaying to my right towards a table. Something. I need something solid to hold on to.
“Annie?” someone says.
I whisper, “Plus, I think I need to sleep.”
Color trails sweep in drug-like zigzags.
The room spins.
Finally… darkness. Sweet, forgiving, darkness.
For a flash of a moment, faces are above me. A mask is on my face. My body sways. The roof of an ambulance.
Darkness again.
Then there is nothing. Not even a dream.
3
Christiano
Dreaming of a better time when she was here and we were happy.
________
“Christiano, look!” Annie cries out, leaning forward in the gondola.
I turn my head, smiling as I put my arm around her and follow her pointed fingers. “It’s a bird, Bella.”
She shakes her head and leans into my shoulder. “Nothing is just a bird anymore. Everything is so beautiful here.”
A tugging at my chest pulls a kiss from me onto her head, the short light red waves of her hair blowing and tickling my lips. “You are as fresh as this breeze. You make me very happy,” I whisper into her ear, out of range of the gondolier hearing. What’s ours is ours, and not the world’s to know.
“You have no idea how strange it is for me to hear things like that.” She smiles against my neck and kisses it. Her arm slides around my neck and I bring her onto my lap. We ride like this with the sunlight warm, and the buildings drifting by us just like time.
“Christiano?” a voice says, calling me to consciousness.
Opening my eyes to the morning sunlight of present day, I roll over to look for her. “Annie?” The pillow beside mine is empty yet again. Looking to the clock I see it’s just after eight o’clock. I must have finally fallen back to sleep after our phone call. I never thought I would, tossing and turning for what seemed like a lifetime. Even as I stretch my limbs to rid myself of the dream, discontent will not leave me.
I stare at a ghostlike memory of her sleeping beside me with her mouth slightly open, a small space between her lips. The soft sounds of shallow breathing. The feeling of her hand on mine. Closing my eyes, I try to shut it out, and fail.
Naked, I trudge into the bathroom to wash my face with cold water. The pipes don’t disappoint; the fresh burst is icy, the shock so good that I splash myself many times. I don’t like having no choice in this. I want to go to her. I want her here.
None of this is right.
My face in the reflection is enough to make me want to break the mirror. Discouragement and frustration stare back at me, water dripping down the lines of a forty-six year old man. You don’t look a day past sixty-two, Annie would say, teasing me when I would bring up our difference in age. Staring at myself now, I feel I finally look that old. Missing someone takes away the light from your eyes.
I wipe the drops from my face with my hands, too impatient for a towel. Stopping in the doorframe, I stare at the bed, remembering the first morning she was here. I’d stood where I am now, unable to believe I had made such a grave error in judgment. She had been sleeping there, right there, on her stomach, her head faced away from me. She had one leg bent and the blanket only covered half of her bare skin. I'd taken her three times that first night. We’d been caught in the newness and excitement of a chemistry I had not expected when I walked up to find her asking for directions from Adolfo.
I had leaned against this very doorframe with my arms crossed across my body, wearing nothing, just like I am now. She’d stirred, turned her head, and her nose flattened for a moment against the pillow. Through a sliver of waking eyes, she spied me staring, and a slow smile spread her lips. Her hair, that wretched black mess that made her oddly adorable, was pointed in all directions. The paleness of her skin was so young, with freckles like lightly sprinkled cinnamon. The sight of it gave me great guilt. I felt sure I’d taken advantage of a child by bringing her into my bed.
I would have to let her go. But even the thought of it, made me unhappy.
“How old are you, Bella?”
Her smile grew into a sexy, sleepy grin and she said on a laugh, “Kinda too late to ask me that now, dontcha think?” She waited for a smile to be returned, and was disappointed. “I’m twenty-three. You?”
I shook my head wearily, afraid that confessing would be the moment she ran screaming, making up excuses why she must leave and never see me again. With a heavy conscience, I had to admit that I had opened the discussion. “Forty-one.”
“Forty-one?” She stretched her arms high above her head and pointed her toes, reaching far in both directions. “That won’t do. You see, in my Italian lovers, I need them at least seventy-three, seventy-two at the youngest. It’s over, I’m afraid. Call me in thirty-one years. And it was so fun. Pity that.” She sighed and peeked to see my reaction.
“Is that so?” I couldn’t help but smile.
When she saw, she was pleased. “It is very
so. That’s what I was looking up yesterday, in my language translation book. I was trying to say, Put that cigarette down and make love to me!”
I laughed. “Adolfo would have chosen the cigarette.”
She grinned playfully and laid her head on the pillow. “Adolfo? Well, I would have knocked it out of his hand and had my way with him by force! But then you came and stole me from him. He’s lucky to have escaped. You? Not so much.”
I knew I was the lucky one. I knew this, and I was drawn to her, because the look in her eyes was so different than the women I knew. Often from them I felt I was a prize to be won, not a man to be loved. But this young American girl looked at me without motive. Staring at her then, my mood changing with her reassuring words and languid body, I traced the lines of her breasts with my glance, still struggling for which direction to take.
“I am wondering if I made a mistake bringing you back here, young one.”
She frowned into the curve of pillow and touched the blanket, playing with the fabric between her finger and thumb. “Oh.” She bit her bottom lip. When her eyelashes swept back up, there was determination. “I don’t think it was a mistake. I don’t care how old you are. It feels good to be around you.” Her eyes flashed away, as though shyness suddenly took hold. Barely loud enough for me to hear, she muttered, “I can leave.”
I knew I didn’t want her to, but I stood my ground, a decision still not made.
Once more her eyelashes swept up to me. Her bright blue eyes sank me deeply and almost against my will, into her sweet vulnerability. Without words, she begged me to let her stay. The sight moved me. She bit her lip as she slowly pushed the blanket down, revealing her light, ginger-colored triangle, the curve of her hip, the soft crease where her legs met. The blanket hovered in her fingers at the middle of her thighs and she released it. I breathed in deeply as the need for her filled me. She held my eyes with an open invitation.
This can only end in heartbreak, I thought to myself as I climbed onto the bed and pulled her into my arms, taking her. Even as I pressed deeply inside, even as I saw her head fall back as her body opened to me in every way… I thought the heartbreak would be hers.
Hearts Series Bundle: Books 1-6 Page 17