Blue Collar Romeo

by Jenny Gardiner

  “Look,” she said as he entered the kitchen, a bag of groceries in his hand. “I don’t think that was very considerate of you to disappear and not come home last night.”

  “Disappear?” he said. “Forgive me for my confusion, but wasn’t it you who disappeared?”

  She furrowed her brow. He had a point there. “I was tired and not having fun. You were busy coming on to Sophie and grinding against her on the dance floor and quite frankly, I’d had enough.”

  Tomasso laughed. “Coming on to Sophie? You mean because she was nice to me and I spoke to her?”

  “Oh, I saw the way you looked at her. You practically drooled all over her plate when she was sitting here last night.”

  “I beg to differ with you, Gisele. If there was any drooling going on, it was when I saw you in those fuck-me boots. The minute I took a look at you in those things, all I could think about was how badly I wanted to bury my cock inside of you with those boot-clad legs wrapped around my hips.”

  Gisele’s eyes opened wide. “Come again?”

  “Exactly. I’d like nothing more than to come again, preferably at the same time as you while you’re wearing those amazing boots.” He looked down at her legs, currently clad in a pair of loose-fitting pajama bottoms with panda bears on them. “Though exotic Chinese animals would do in a pinch.” He grinned at her.

  “So you slept with her?” Gisele stared out the window at a cardinal picking a fight with a smaller bird near the bird feeder. She didn’t want to hear it but she needed to get it out of the way.

  “What do you think?”

  “Of course you did. She’s tall, thin, and beautiful. And you’re a man.”

  Tomasso shrugged. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Oh, really? That’s not the impression I got. It seems to me your friends know more about me than I do at this point. Including certain details that only you would have known.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gisele busied herself moving dishes from the dish drainer onto a towel for no apparent reason.

  “Well, after several more drinks, Justin told me he’d heard that I had a, oh, how did he phrase it, an ‘epic cock.’” Tomasso grinned. “It seems like he’d only have gleaned that kind of information from someone in the know.”

  Gisele looked down on the ground and dragged her toe across the floor. “Um...”

  “I’m honored that you were so impressed with my God-given attributes. Although I’d be more honored if only you were interested in testing them out a bit. I’m sure I could impress you even further with my God-given moves.”

  She looked at him, so cocky and handsome and so darned right. It made her crazy that he knew she wanted him as much as he wanted her to want him. Maybe she could, just this one time, and finally get him out of her system, once and for all. He would be going back to Italy anyhow, and there could be no future in a relationship with him. Why not carpe that diem while the carpe’ing was good?

  “I was just putting on a pot of chili,” she said, changing the subject. “They’re calling for a big snowstorm tonight. I thought it would be good to have something warm in case we get snowed in. Would you like to learn how to make some good old American chili?”

  Tomasso nodded, no doubt happy she wasn’t going to bury a cleaver in his back. Not that she’d ever do that. But still, the man made her so mad, and sometimes, she wasn’t even sure what triggered it.

  Yet now that she was warming up to the idea of warming up to Tomasso, how exactly would she go about doing so without it seeming awkward and forced?

  ~*~

  Tomasso couldn’t believe Gisele’s change in demeanor last night. Was she that susceptible to a plain old bout of jealousy? And did she actually think her good friend would do that to her? The only reason he didn’t come home last night was because Sophie persuaded him to stay out to make Gisele crazy. Sure he slept at Sophie’s, but alone, in her guest bedroom. Sure Sophie was a beautiful woman, but she wasn’t right for him. Besides, he wasn’t about to risk losing his bet over anyone other than the woman he’d started things with in Monaforte. They had unfinished business to attend to.

  They spent the afternoon cooking, of all things. Tomasso helped Gisele make her chili, and later, they decided to bake chocolate-chip cookies.

  “So there’s a great controversy surrounding this delicacy: to eat raw cookie dough and risk death by salmonella poisoning or to suffer the consequences of never knowing the joy of cookie dough,” Gisele said as she stuffed a wad of it in her mouth. She scooped up a blob of dough onto her fingers and offered it to Tomasso, who tentatively nipped at it at first, but then slowly and sensuously licked it from her fingers. After most of the dough was gone, he pulled her index finger into his mouth and sucked on it, savoring the last delectable taste.

  “I like these American baking traditions.” He scooped some more dough onto his finger and swiped it onto her nose.

  She tried to reach her tongue up to lick it off, to no avail. “Here, let me help you.” Tomasso leaned down and dragged his tongue across the tip of her nose, deftly cleaning up the dough. He wanted nothing more than to continue where he’d started, but he could feel Gisele tense, so he backed off. He was going to have to take this very slowly. Like three-toed tree sloth slowly. At this rate, he’d get back in her pants by the time they were fifty.

  Gisele turned to the cookie sheets in front of her. “We need to get these in the oven before, well, we just need to get these in the oven.”

  But taking it slowly was going to kill him, at this rate.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They spent much of the afternoon binge-watching TV shows in front of a roaring fire as a heavy snowfall descended. Eventually Gisele announced it would be fun to get out and experience the snow firsthand.

  “Let’s walk over to Central Park,” she said. “It’s only a few blocks away. It’ll be good exercise after sitting around all afternoon.”

  She lent Tomasso some ski gloves and snow pants from her brother’s clothing stockpile and stuffed some essential supplies in her pocket.

  The snow was already hard to navigate and was up to midcalf along the sidewalks, with much more in the forecast. They were veritable trailblazers in this stuff. Once at the park, she put Tomasso to work.

  “Time to test your snowman skills,” she said. “You start working on the base and I’ll get rolling the middle.”

  Little did Gisele know Tomasso had skills creating larger-than-life figures.

  The two rolled snow into ever-larger balls and finally stacked them; then Gisele rolled a snowman head. She reached into her pocket and stuck a carrot into his face for a nose and made a mouth from a trail of paper clips. “It was all I could think of spur of the moment,” she said. His eyes were two mismatched buttons she’d gathered from that random kitchen drawer that had always been the repository for things you didn’t know what to do with. They found some sticks that would have to be good enough for his arms.

  “So what’re we going to call our creation?” she asked. “I think Frankenstein’s already taken.” Perhaps Frankenstein is what she should call the sexual tension that had been coiling between them, sending off sparks in every direction. It had become an out-of-control monster.

  “How about Bianca? Though in that case, he is now a she.”

  “Bianca?”

  “It means white in Italian. And Bianca is feminine.”

  “Bianca... I like it. Bianca it is.”

  “And Bianca, it seems, has some balls,” Tomasso said as he scooped up a chunk of snow, rolled it into a tight circle, and threw it at Gisele’s back.

  “How dare you!” she said but leaned over and made an even larger snowball, lobbing it for a direct hit on his head.

  He retaliated with a giant armful of snow, which he dumped all over her head. As he ran from her, she reached out a leg and tripped him. He landed face-first onto the soft snowpack, and she stumbled on top of him, her legs straddling him.
He turned over and looked up at her, melted snow dripping down her face, her thick lashes sparkling with fresh flakes, making her bright blue eyes appear even larger. They stared at each other for a beat, both catching their breath. Gisele, her hands pressed to Tomasso’s chest, stared back at him, then shook the snow off her head and body, all over his face.

  She stood. “Come on, we best get back before it turns dark.”

  Tomasso stared after her before standing up. It took him a minute to adjust himself, what with the unexpected presence, even in this frigid weather, of a very warm Gisele pressed to his very lonely cock. But once he got it calmed down, he chased her the rest of the way home.

  ~*~

  It was dark by the time they returned, and after warming up in front of the fireplace, they dined on chili and cornbread and finished off the last of the IPAs in the fridge.

  Soon Gisele was yawning, not so much due to tiredness, but because she wasn’t sure where things were going and didn’t know how to handle it. She decided the best plan of action would be to run away from whatever might happen if she let it. She was nothing if not a world-class coward, it seemed.

  “Thanks for a surprisingly fun day,” she said as she stood up to go to bed. “I’d better get some shut-eye because tomorrow’s a workday.”

  Tomasso nodded outside the window, where snow was still blanketing the ground. “I’d be surprised if they expected you to work in this.”

  “It’s New York,” she said. “Barring unforeseen natural disasters, it’s business as usual.”

  “In that case, I guess you’d best get your beauty sleep.” He swatted her behind, which made her jump. “Sweet dreams, Gisele.”

  ~*~

  What in the hell was she doing? She kept going through things in her head again and again. Did she want to try to rekindle something between them? Or was that simply a fool’s errand? It made far more sense to protect her heart, which had had enough damage inflicted on it in her young life. But then again, she wasn’t a quitter—it made all the sense in the world to finish what she’d started. Or what he’d started. Or what they both seemed to need, like it or not.

  She finished washing her face and brushing her teeth and ran a brush through her hair, then settled in beneath her comforter. Temperatures were supposed to get near zero tonight. Her goal was to stay warm, one way or another.

  ~*~

  Nighttime is such a silent time. Only that quietude becomes deafening when the power goes out. Gisele woke to the noise of no noise at about half past two. Crap. No power meant no heat, which meant she was soon going to die of frostbite. Which could be a little melodramatic, but nevertheless, she hated shivering beneath blankets needlessly. A half hour after the power had stopped, she could feel the chill seeping beneath her comforter, even as she enveloped herself in the duvet for self-preservation’s sake.

  Ten minutes later, she had an even better idea of self-preservation: Parker’s room had a fireplace in it. She knew that Tomasso had been taking advantage of that opportunity almost nightly. Things would still be toasty and warm in there.

  She rose from the bed, draping her blanket around her like some sort of royal coronation robe, and grabbed her iPhone, turning on the flashlight on it so she could see as she walked down the darkened hallway, hoping for no chance encounters with strangers. She immediately thanked her brother for deciding she needed a companion in this raspy old house; she would have been terrified all alone in the place with no power, left to her vivid imagination when hearing the creaks and groans of a hundred-year-old townhouse in the pitch black. When she got to Tomasso’s door, she couldn’t decide whether to knock or perhaps slip in unnoticed. Maybe he wouldn’t even realize she was there. She could settle down on the carpet near the fireplace and he’d be none the wiser.

  After a few minutes of mental debate, she decided to quietly slip in and hope for the best. As she turned the doorknob, the screech was loud enough to wake the dead. So much for dodging the man’s radar.

  “Gisele? Is that you?”

  “Sorry to wake you, but my room is freezing cold. We lost power and I knew you’d have the fireplace going in here.”

  She glanced over at it and noticed there were still some embers smoldering, but it was hardly going to do the job as is.

  “Here, let me help you.” He climbed out of bed, tossed a few fire-starter sticks onto the embers, piled some wood on top, and using the bellows, forced air onto the pile to encourage the wood to catch fire. Within minutes the fireplace glowed orange with flames licking toward the flue.

  “Now, let’s get you back into bed.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’m fine right here in front of the fire. I have a blanket, I’m easy.”

  “What sort of gentleman would I be if I allowed you to sleep on the floor? If anything, I’ll take this spot, and you can sleep in the bed.”

  Gisele waved him away. “Absolutely not!”

  “Well in that case”—Tomasso pointed at the bed—“it’s a big enough bed that you can take one side and I’ll take the other. And never the twain shall meet.” He gave her a reassuring wink.

  Gisele hesitated. Somewhere in her mind, she had almost been prepared to beg for this very scenario, but now that it was presented to her, she felt a bit shy about it.

  Tomasso placed his arms over her shoulders and guided her to the far side of the bed. “I promise, I won’t bite.” A cloaked reference she, of course, remembered saying to him that first night in her palace apartment. Which seemed so very long ago. He tucked her in, even draped her blanket on top of his for added warmth. He returned to his side of the bed and climbed in. “I’m here if you need me.”

  She needed him, all right. More than she cared to admit. If only she knew how to let go and carpe that diem like she’d promised herself.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Gisele awoke with a loud shout not long after they had fallen asleep. Tomasso rolled over in bed toward her, immediately wrapping his arms around her to calm her.

  “What is it?” he said.

  Gisele shook her head. “Nothing. It was only a bad dream. I’m sorry to bother you again. Please, go back to sleep.”

  He pressed her head to his shoulder and whispered soothingly that everything would be okay. “You want to talk about it?”

  She breathed heavily. Clearly the dream had unnerved her.

  She sighed. “It’s a recurring dream I have every few months. I’m at my mother’s gravesite and my father and his new family show up and they just laugh at her. I get so angry but there’s nothing I can do about it and I start banging my arms and swinging them at him. That’s when I wake up.”

  “Man, he must have done quite a number on you.”

  “Let’s just say that when your father abandons you, yeah, it messes with your head.”

  “And then you lose your mamma—”

  “And a girl starts to realize it’s better not to rely on anyone else. Because sooner or later they leave.”

  “Does that count for big brothers as well?”

  She nodded, pressing her face to his shoulder. He could smell the clean coconut scent of her hair as he softly kissed the top of her head.

  “I’m guessing I did you no favors when I abruptly pulled back the way I did.”

  “Get in line.” She heaved a sigh. “I’m used to it.”

  “I’m sorry, sweet girl.” He crooned into her ear as he stroked her hair gently. “I didn’t mean to hurt you any further. I hope you understand that wasn’t my intention.”

  “Why did you do it, then?”

  It was his turn to heave a sigh. “I had a girlfriend awhile ago. Her name was Liliana. She made my life exhaustingly hard. I tried to break it off and she started to stalk me. She spread rumors about me—even posted on my Facebook wall that I had a dick the size of an inchworm.”

  Gisele laughed. “Clearly she was misinformed.”

  He smiled against her head. “I guess she thought she’d hit me where it hurts. After all, what guy li
kes to have his manhood publicly questioned? It took a long time to finally get her to leave me alone. By then I’d spent money on lawyers, I had to change my cell phone number and e-mail addresses, I had to practically go into the witness protection program to hide from her. So I made a vow of celibacy. At least for a while.”

  “Was that before or after Luca’s wedding?”

  He shook his head. “Before, believe it or not. You see, I hadn’t counted on meeting someone like you there. It rattled me to the core. We had such chemistry that very first night and we’d had so much fun. But then on top of it, I was planning to move to New York within a few weeks. It made no sense to start anything with anyone. Obviously I had no way of knowing this whole living arrangement was going to happen. I figured we were two ships passing in the night. And then I’d made a bet with my brother.”

  “A bet?”

  “With Lorenzo. He was so certain I couldn’t go without sex, we bet a thousand dollars that I could.”

  “But what about what happened between us in Monaforte?”

  He shrugged. “Might have been splitting hairs, but I decided that wasn’t officially sex, right? We didn’t have intercourse. It was all foreplay. In my eyes, that didn’t count.”

  She swatted at him. “It didn’t count?”

  “Not like that,” he said. “I mean it didn’t count toward the bet. But it did count as some of the best nonsex in my life. Although you did sort of leave me hanging.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Forgiven. But it was a moot point because then I resolved to be the responsible person I was trying to be and not lead you on or me on or anyone on.”

  “Hence you slinking away from me.”

  “I’d rather not view it as slinking away, but more like doing the right thing.”

  Tomasso put his finger to Gisele’s chin, lifting it toward his face, and settled his lips over hers, placing soft, gentle kisses on them. “I love the quiet right now. When all we can hear is the sound of each other breathing.” He pressed his tongue to her lips, encouraging her to open to him. Slowly she joined him, stroking her tongue along his, exploring his mouth.