by K. J. Dahlen
Gio’s words are hooked into my brain at the next day’s shift at Fun Freeze.
It doesn’t stop me from doing an above-average job, of course. The ice cream machines wait for no thoughts. The patterned thrum of the machine reminds me of Gio’s hips—and cock—rocking into me. I have to stop myself from swaying along with it.
What a dirty mind.
Are you happy?
I’m happy now, that’s for sure. I’ve never been this happy. I’ve never been this free.
But maybe he’s right. Maybe the freedom is an illusion.
“Where are you from, sweetheart?” The third man of the day watches my ass while I make him a medium vanilla cone with sprinkles.
“I’m just working for the summer,” I tell him with the world’s brightest smile. “How’s the weather out there? Looks hot.”
“Oh, it’s hot all right.”
“Good thing you stopped for an ice cream.” I’m wearing the regulation t-shirt with my shorts, same as the other servers, but his eyes linger on my chest as I hand him the cone.
Gio meant the tourist season would end. That’s what he was talking about. He was talking about summer turning to fall, and fall to winter, and the Fun Freeze getting boarded up against the snow and ice. That’s what he meant—but there’s more to it than that. I’m certain of it. The season of us being fine could end, too. The season where nobody knows we’re here could end. If my uncle, and god knows how, but if my uncle finds us again...
I make a guy with a nice smile a hot fudge malted and hand it over. Behind my smile are all the thoughts I can’t talk about with anyone else. Not Jennifer, the other girl working her shift at the same time.
“What did you say?” Jennifer yanks the handle on the soft-serve machine down. The girl standing at the window is getting more than the regulation amount of chocolate twist ice cream.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.” She blows a lock of red hair out of her face and cuts off the cone with a little flourish.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said how far.” Jennifer laughs on the way to the window to hand the girl her cone. “But you’ve got enough ice cream. You’re good!” She gives me a totally non-sarcastic thumbs up, and I remember that yes, I am indeed at work, and the teenager at my window is going to be thrilled with the enormous small chocolate cone he’s getting.
“Ha,” I say weakly. Jennifer is so enthusiastic that it keeps my attention on her for the rest of the shift.
As soon as the screen door at the back of Fun Freeze slams shut behind me, though, those nagging questions come back.
How far will we have to run?
Can I ever go back home?
Maybe it would be better to go back home.
Maybe it would be better to face the music.
Then again, the small-town life has its charms.
Gio said something the other day about winter in a town like this that makes me hesitate. It would be lonely work, digging ourselves out of the snow every day. At home, my uncle paid a man to plow the driveway when the snow got deep, and there were always buses to ride. God, I was lucky.
The Focus has been baking in the sun while I worked my shift, so I open the windows and let it cool down. There’s always Seattle. I’ve never been to the other side of the country. My mother wanted to run, but not so far that she’d have nobody. One of the guys in my college classes was from Seattle, and he couldn’t shut up about it. Gio might like it there. There’s plenty of city for a guy like him.
I cruise home intending to tell him about Seattle, but the words die on my lips when I see him.
He’s pacing the living room.
“What’s wrong?”
He raises his head and his face lights up. “Sia,” he says, as if he’s shocked that I’ve shown up at all. “You’re home.”
“Of course I’m home.” I drop my purse onto the floor and slip my arms around his waist, pulling him close. He smells like Old Spice body wash and sunshine. “Did you go to the beach?”
“I sat by the water,” he says into my hair. “How was work?”
I pull back to look at him. “I’m more interested in you.” I run a flirty finger down the front of his shirt, trying to make things playful. He doesn’t answer. “Work was fine.”
“Good. Good,” he says, his eyes settling on a distant point over my head. “Are you hungry? Should we start cooking?”
I take his face in both of my hands. “What is on your mind, husband?”
His dark eyes flame. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I need.”
I smile up at him, my heart easing up its frantic beating. “I know what you need.” I rise on my tiptoes and kiss him, softly at first. At first. It doesn’t stay soft for long. I slide my hand down and grasp the hardness of him beneath his shorts, and we’re off to the races. Gio can’t get my shirt off fast enough, but I’ve got a lock on his zipper and he springs out, so hard he twitches.
He was indecisive for a split second but in the bedroom he pushes me down onto my knees. This is a prelude—I won’t spend much time here before he has to have me, but I love the way his body reacts, pulling toward me as I swirl the tip of my tongue over his crown.
I love the way his hand tightens on my ponytail, possessive and strong.
And I love the way he growls, deep and low, “Yes. This is what I need.”
43
Gio
We have to leave.
I wake up in the night knowing it down to my bones.
I’ve been dreaming of my father. A night I remember from a long time ago. Him, waiting by the window. Me, creeping down the stairs. A little boy. I saw the gun in his hand. “Gio, get out of here,” he’d said, not turning his head. I hear his voice now and jerk straight up in bed, scaring the shit out of Sia.
“Get out of here,” I echo. She lets out a heavy breath next to me, and I force my eyes open. A dream. It was only a dream, with my father. But the dread is so heavy I could suffocate underneath it.
“What? Gio, no. We’re in Michigan,” she says, soothing, her fingers on my skin.
Fuck that. I won’t be soothed. I throw off the covers and reach for my backpack. It’s on a wicker chair next to the bed, in case of this exact situation.
“We have to go.”
She flops dramatically back on the pillows, her hair fanning out beneath her. The white tank top curving around her breasts should be immortalized in a painting, but I can’t spare the time to take in the view. Not for more than a moment, anyway. “We don’t. We’re fine here. We like it here. We’re on a honeymoon.”
“We’re not fine,” I snap at her. It’s a fact of the world, like the tides or the full moon—we have to go. I don’t know how to describe this certainty to her. I don’t have adequate words for how bone-shakingly obvious it is. “Get up. We have to go.”
I shove a few things into the backpack—shirts, underwear. We can buy new pants when we get where we’re going. It’s anybody’s guess where that’ll be, but I’m sure they’ll have some shitty clothing store I can patronize. I add the little folio with my birth certificate and some traveler’s checks. I didn’t bring any photos when I left my condo, so there’s none of that. I pull the certificate of marriage from our wedding out of the side table’s top drawer and fold it into the folio.
Sia sighs and steps out of bed with a huff.
“Pack,” I tell her, trying my damndest to ignore the ass-hugging shorts she’s wearing along with the white tank. They’re my favorite shorts, an obnoxious shade of pink that looks fucking amazing down at her ankles.
“Pack what?” She moves defiantly into the bathroom, two feet down the hall. “I don’t have anything I care about.” The water runs. She’s brushing her teeth. “I have my ring. That’s all.”
“Don’t be a brat.”
She pops out of the bathroom with her eyebrows halfway to her hairline. “I’m being a brat?” She scrubs at her teeth even through her rage. “You’re th
e one who’s making us leave in the middle of the night. Again.” She goes back into the bathroom. Water runs again. “This is supposed to be a honeymoon,” she calls, her voice echoing off the walls of the bathroom and down the hall to me.
She’s tired, I remind myself. It was a long shift this afternoon, the heat close to ninety, and the lines outside Fun Freeze never stopped. I follow her to the bathroom door and she turns to face me, arms crossed, hip cocked. “I know. I’m sorry.”
She frowns, her lip quivering. “We can’t keep doing this.”
“We won’t.”
“How do you know?”
I shrug. I don’t know, and I don’t have time to explain this. We have to go. “It won’t last forever,” I promise. I kiss her on the forehead and head for the stairs. Halfway down, I call back to her. “Get your stuff. We can vacation anywhere.”
“A vacation?”
It’s not Sia.
It’s another voice.
A man’s voice.
The voice is chillingly familiar. “Sounds like I’m interrupting.”
44
Sia
Is it even worth it, all this packing?
I mean, god. We can’t spend two weeks in a place without having to move on. I let out a harsh laugh and shove another tank into the little duffel bag Gio got me at a store just inside the Michigan border. “It’s ridiculous,” he said, standing in the aisle next to a truly stupid array of duffel bags. “Carrying all your things around in shopping bags. It has to stop.”
Two weeks? Most places, we don’t last two minutes.
I add more clothes, shoving them in tight. These clothes—they’re all I have.
I was being a bitch before, and I know it. Still, it’s true. My wedding ring is the most important thing I have.
I twist it around my finger with my thumb and scowl down into the dresser drawer. It’s hard to keep my feet on the ground when I think about Gio. I feel like I’m a thousand feet above the clouds, getting buffeted around in the air by warmth and light. That kiss on my forehead? Yes. It was more than enough to set me off. I want more of it. I want more of him.
And yet, I am also frustrated as fuck.
I don’t want to leave Torch Lake.
I especially don’t want to leave now, with my shoulders aching from work today. Sitting in the car for another frenzied trip to god knows where is the last thing on earth I want to be doing.
The first thing on earth that I want to be doing is sleeping peacefully next to my husband, but it looks like that’s off the table.
Or maybe...
Surely, we have enough time for one last rendezvous in our bed. It’s the most comfortable mattress I’ve ever slept on, and every time Gio comes to bed he lets out a satisfied sigh.
If we have to run away from this glorious bed, the least we can do is say a proper goodbye.
In the bathroom I drop my favorite toiletries one by one into the side pocket of the duffel bag. I leave the full-size shampoo and conditioner and body wash after the mildest of debates with myself. They’ll only be heavy. For some reason, the thought of being weighed down by too much extra convinces me to turn out the light and go. All of it can be replaced.
All of it except Gio.
It would be even nicer if he was surprising me with a middle-of-the-night jetset to an exotic location. “Think of it that way,” I command myself. It’s not the best work I’ve done, because I’ve talked to enough locals to know that north of here is mostly nothing. It is certainly not exotic.
One last look around the bedroom. I stopped sleeping with a teddy bear when my mother died, but I find myself scanning the sheets for Mr. Fluff. He’s not here. The room is nearly as empty as a hotel room packed up and ready for the final sweep.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
I even open the drawer to Gio’s side table and peer inside. I’m rewarded with....nothing. He reserved the drawer entirely for our certificate of marriage, apparently.
It’s cute, in a way.
But I wouldn’t describe Gio as cute. Ever.
Thinking of him like that, a body on display, muscles perfection, gives me a fucking hot flash. It’s so intense that I have to step outside onto our balcony. It overlooks the yard and road, where a couple is pressed hard against one another, so close they’re barely able to walk hand in hand. They’re pulling it off...a little. My mouth curves upward. I could tell Gio a pretty good story about this.
I’m not going to get sentimental.
Bigger and better things, Sia. Bigger and better things.
I hitch my duffel bag’s strap over my shoulder and go for the stairs.
Yeah. One last turn in this bed, and I’ll let Gio drive me anywhere he wants to go.
I hop off the last stair, my cheeks pink from my unbelievable imagination. “I know you’re in a rush, but don’t you think we have time for a once-over in the bed...”
My voice trails off as my brain registers the sight in front of me.
Gio’s not alone.
He’s not alone, because there are two people in the kitchen with him, one sitting at the table like he owns the property and the other leaning against the counter to the right of the stove, waiting. Waiting for what?
Oh, my god.
I want to walk back out.
I want to turn around drop my suitcase, and sprint back up the stairs. Going to the roof might do it, but they can climb as well as I can.
The urge to leave is overpowering. The urge to take the stairs two at a time and lock the door tightly behind me is overpowering. I want to run.
But it’s far too late for that now.
45
Gio
This is my worst nightmare.
My father, sitting in my kitchen at three in the morning. His expression is mild. In the kettle, water is heating up. I don’t know what the hell he wants with it. Tea? Coffee? He didn’t say. Only, “Gio, put some water on.”
He’s got company, too.
I will Sia to stay upstairs, to stay silent, with all of my soul.
She doesn’t hear me.
Now she’s frozen in the kitchen in the doorway.
My father takes a breath, ready to speak, but Sia beats him to the punch.
“David?”
Her uncle leans against the countertop by the sink, arms crossed, looking vaguely pale, a strange light in his eyes. “How are you, Sia?”
She’s the only one who’s willing to act like this is fucked up, even though it most definitely is. “What are you doing here?” Her little duffel bag slips down off her shoulder and she hikes it back up. “How did you find me?”
David meets her gaze steadily. “He doesn’t always lock the car.”
She shakes her head. “Yes, he does. And what?”
“Not every time. Your purse—” David nods to himself, as if confirming that he can’t see it on her person at this very moment. “I put a tracking device in your purse.”
Sia looks horrified. “When?”
“In Verona. You were having such a nice dinner that I couldn’t interrupt.” He shrugs one shoulder. “But then things got more complicated.”
Her face is the picture of betrayal. “David, why? Why?” Her chin quivers and she closes her teeth together tightly to get it to stop. I want to go to her, but my father told me to sit down with him, and all the distance I put between us doesn’t matter at all anymore. What the hell else was I going to do?
I sat.
And the worst part?
It felt normal. It felt right, to do my father’s bidding.
I hate myself for it.
God, it’s infuriating, the way my shoulders relaxed when my ass hit the hard surface of the chair.
“It was my job, Sia.” This is the one thing David seems to regret. “It was my job.”
“What job?” Her voice cracks and it splits my chest in two. My memory of her as a girl, barely into her teens, overlays itself on the Sia in front of me now. “Damn it, David, what is all this? Is this
about Europe? Are you tracking me down to put me on a plane?”
He sighs. “That was the plan. I was going to get you out of the country before anything could happen. But things did happen. And I got a call.”
“From who?”
“Me,” says my father, breaking in at last. Jesus, I hate how glad I am that he’s butting in. “I called your uncle.” He laughs out loud. “But if I’d known all along he was your uncle, I never would have hired him.”
“Bullshit,” says David, and I can’t tell what he means. There’s a strange smile on his lips. “You’ve always hired me for the most important jobs.”
“It’s because you always studied so hard.”
“It’s because you’re as lazy as they come.”
What is happening?
Am I hallucinating this bizarre banter between my father and Sia’s uncle? Sia’s face is equal parts disbelief and irritation. “Shut up,” she snaps. “If you’re going to talk, then tell me what this is about.”
David sobers up. “You were never supposed to know about that side of my life.”
Sia’s chin trembles again. “What side?”
“The side I’d rather leave in darkness,” says David, and Sia closes her eyes.
“You kill people?” It’s a tentative question, plenty of room to say no. To say anything, really. To offer any kind of explanation. He didn’t even have to describe it. I felt the darkness in the room when he began to speak.
David nods.
“For him?” She jerks a thumb at my dad.
My dad leans back in his seat. “Marco Moretto. You were friends with my son in school.”
“I was,” Sia says, chin up, disgust in her eyes. “But that still doesn’t explain why you’re in my kitchen in the middle of the night.”
It’s her uncle who answers her, who delivers the final blow. “We’re here to finish a job.”
46
Sia
I can’t understand what he’s saying.