Learning to Trust

by Lynne Connolly

  Hovering above him, she savored the moment, enjoyed the way he watched her, the light of—something—in his clear eyes. Something she didn’t want to define. They’d put on the bedside light, which cast a warm glow over them, not too bright that she could be mistaken. She wouldn’t analyze it, didn’t want to put any meaning on what they did tonight. It just existed; that was all.

  Then she sank down and he moved his hand to his cock so that when she took him completely, he touched her clit. He didn’t manipulate, he just left it there, where she could use it if she wished. She smiled, he smiled back, and she rode him.

  Slowly at first, she let the mood take her and tell her how to move. Every time she descended, his thumb nudged her clit, sending a sharp spike of sensation through. She could feel it right to the tips of her toes.

  Their movements built. He moved his hips up to meet her, caught his bottom lip between sharp teeth. An edge of passion turned into a slow deluge, subsuming them both. She watched him, kept staring into those fabulous eyes, watched them turn incandescent and envelop her. He gripped her hip, guided her until the tide took them. Then he moved his other hand to steady her so they could meet, their flesh slapping together in a regular rhythm. He stroked her deep inside, and when she was sure she was about to come, when the still point of their movements arrived, he came. His groan and final thrust up into her body proved the final stimulus. She cried out, her hands clutching for him, finally finding purchase on his chest.

  “Bella!”

  She didn’t correct him. She loved the way he cried her name, and she gave him his in return.

  He firmed his hands around her waist, then guided her off him to lie by his side. After a quick kiss he left her, slipping out of the room and returning a moment later when he’d disposed of the condom. They had to arrange their bodies carefully to fit on the narrow bed together. Although lithe, he was no lightweight. She rested her head on his chest, and the last thing she remembered was his hands sifting through her hair, soothing her to sleep.

  Chapter Six

  They found Byron the next day, at the second morgue they visited. At least there weren’t as many morgues as there were shelters.

  Dark rooms lined with drawers that went back for just over six feet and ran on noiseless runners, probably ball bearings, Lina thought, trying desperately to distract her mind. She’d seen one or two dead people. When you worked with drug addicts, had been one yourself, that went with the territory. But she’d never been in the presence of so many dead people at once before.

  Jon stood by her side, effectively dumb because of his lack of Italian. She spoke, asked the questions for him, showed the photograph, said thank you and led the way to the car. They sat in silence except for the electronic voice of the sat-nav directing them to the next place. Fatalism affected them today.

  The second morgue had the cold tiles and reeked of disinfectant, its tang clawing its way to the back of Lina’s throat. But she kept her voice steady and waited for the man who wasn’t too impressed by her photo to actually look at it. Eventually he did. His eyes narrowed and he crossed the room to his computer, ominously covered by a see-through plastic cover. Probably to protect it against spatter. He keyed in his password and found something on his screen, careful to keep his body between them and it. “Yes, we have him,” he said. “At least it looks like him. Would you like to do a formal identification now?”

  “Yes please.” Because the only way they’d get her back in this place was feet first and flat on her back.

  The man, a Signor Bertoli, signaled to his assistant. The woman rose from the bench where she’d been peering through a microscope and found a sheet of paper in a file cabinet. She clipped it to a board before she crossed the room to give it to him. Signor Bertoli found the right place by the number, then he opened it a little so a pair of feet came into view. Clean feet, marked with tracks and bruises where the owner had used needles. Bertoli checked the tag. “This is the one.”

  The drawer was about waist level. Her wandering mind wondered how they got to the ones higher up. She didn’t see a stepladder anywhere, and in any case, that wouldn’t be a great way to view the body of a loved one.

  Lina didn’t speak to Jon but glanced at him as he took his place at the other side, his face solemn but unreadable. Even to her. Bertoli pulled on the handle and the drawer slid out almost noiselessly.

  They’d covered Byron with a sheet, but they drew it back to his waist once they’d pulled him out. Jon and Lina stared, the air between them fragile with tension. If she said anything it might shatter like glass and shower its shards down on them all.

  It was nice to see him clean, at least, and at peace. He had some of the looks of the boy she’d first met, the boy she’d partied with so lightheartedly. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Someone had washed his long, unkempt hair and it shone midbrown, a similar color to his brother’s. She’d forgotten about that detail. His gaunt face showed signs of deprivation but none of the despair she’d seen when she’d said goodbye to him. The tracks and burned-out veins on his arms, his stomach, anywhere he could find a vein showed how he’d spent his last months. He hadn’t lost his taste for the drugs she’d moved cities to escape. But eventually they’d given him up.

  Jon stared without speaking, so in the end she identified him. “Yes, that’s Byron Brantley. And this is his brother, Jonathan. He doesn’t speak Italian so I came with him. I knew Byron. His family will be glad to have a body to bury.”

  While she just buried her youth. Some people knew when they could draw a line under their lives and move on to another phase. For her, that was now. She’d spent the last two years in limbo, recovering and discovering things about herself. Now the time had come for something new. She hadn’t the faintest idea what that might be. But she said goodbye to Byron now, waving at him the way she did every time she saw him, right until the end. Their special wave, two fingers extended in a semirude gesture. A laugh. Until the day they’d taken the plane to Rome most things had made them laugh.

  She didn’t cry but she saw Jon’s eyes as he lifted his gaze and met hers for a brief instant. Glossy with unshed tears, bleak with incomprehension. “It’s him. I have things to do.” And she saw him close off, cut his private feelings away from everyone else, even her. He turned to the official and made an impatient gesture with one hand. “Ask him where I sign.”

  Instead she asked him another question. “What did he die from?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Did you do tests?”

  The man grunted. “Of course. He’s not Chinese and he’s not a known person. I had to investigate further. An overdose.”

  Jon frowned. “Did he say Chinese?” He’d caught that, then.

  She explained to him in English. “A lot of the Chinese knockoffs and fakes that tourists buy come through Naples. That’s where most of the organized crime is these days. So they get quite a few unexplained deaths in that community.”

  He sighed and lifted his hand to run it through his hair. “I see. No, he’s not Chinese.”

  “He had barely anything in his stomach,” the man said.

  “How long has he been here?”

  Bertoli studied his notes and lifted the top sheet. “They brought him in on the twenty-first of July.”

  That meant Byron had died soon after he’d scored at the train station. It explained a few things, such as why they’d been unable to find anyone who’d seen him at the shelters. Only one question remained. One the morgue attendant couldn’t answer.

  She helped Jon with the forms necessary for him to reclaim his brother’s body. Jon chose to have Byron’s remains cremated. He’d arrange to take them home, he said. “I don’t think my parents should see him like this,” he murmured to her. He showed no sign of emotion but when he signed his name on the form, his hand retained a tiny tremor.

  Lina was coming to understand Jon better than she’d ever had before. Her feelings toward him were already too dangerously powerful
. She’d miss him when he left, but she feared she might miss him too much. It would hurt. How much she had yet to discover.

  They walked slowly back to the car and she drove this time. She pulled up by the garage, gave him the keys and watched him open the doors. No fancy electronics here.

  Even now, when she’d set her mind to making the events of the day as easy as possible for him, she couldn’t help noticing his butt. The curves just waited for her touch, for her to clutch them, drag him deeper inside her. Her hands tightened on the wheel and she forced a bland expression on her face as she drove forward into the small space. How perverted was she?

  They went upstairs in silence, and she put on the coffee machine. It was one she’d taken from the trash in the café after the jug had broken, but she’d replaced the jug with one she’d found in a thrift store. It was probably the only thing she was addicted to these days, her morning jolt of caffeine, and good coffee was her only indulgence.

  Her mind retained the image of Byron, pale and forever still on that metal slab. In that drawer. He’d always hated being shut in anywhere, always preferred to leave doors unlocked if he could. He gave up too easily. When his art career had stalled, he’d turned to drugs, claiming they inspired him. Then for solace, when the art world sneered at his efforts. “He should have fought.”

  “Sorry?”

  Shit, she’d spoken that aloud. She turned around to face him. “Byron. He should have fought harder.” She paused, bit her lip. “I shouldn’t have left him in Rome, should I?”

  He crossed the room in two strides and grasped her shoulders. “You’re never to think that. You saved yourself. It could have been two bodies I claimed today, not one. Lina, your survival is what’s keeping me going here.”

  “At least you did everything you could for him. You never stopped looking.”

  He sighed. “We did, in a way. Oh, at first, we pushed for finding you. But we couldn’t even discover what flights you’d taken. Not until you were long gone. It took a while to get through the red tape. You’d done nothing criminally wrong, so we had no grounds to see the passenger lists. Eventually we found where you’d gone and for a year we hunted, but you never surfaced.”

  She owed him something. To tell him how it had been. She guessed he needed to know before he could find closure. “We had enough money to lie low. We stayed in cheap rooms and I got a job as a waitress. It eked out what we had.” And they’d been happy, for a while. Until the habit got too expensive. Until she began to realize that Byron wasn’t the love of her life, nowhere near. He’d annoyed her at times, especially when he started to whine about nothing ever being his fault. But she wouldn’t remember that now. Only the fun-loving, good-looking boy whom she’d found a breath of fresh air after the fetid atmosphere in her own home.

  “We scaled down the search after the first year. Cut back. We should have kept looking. Fuck, we abandoned Byron. I even felt relieved that he’d gone and taken his problems with him. How do you think that makes me feel, Lina?”

  “Guilty?” she ventured, since he seemed to want that answer.

  “Sure as fuck I feel guilty. If we’d kept looking we’d have found him.”

  She pulled her chin free of his hand. “Then what? What would you have done, Jon? Byron never took responsibility for his own actions. He whined. A lot. He said they hadn’t understood his genius, that your mother always loved you best and ignored him, that the drugs were being cut with more filth than before. Not that our situations had changed, or that we couldn’t afford the good stuff. Or that if we hadn’t started on the junk in the first place, we wouldn’t have found ourselves there.”

  The coffee bubbled and she turned to pour them a mug each. “It’s not your fault, Jon. Nor is it mine. We’ll feel as if we’re guilty. That’s only normal, but we can’t let it take over.”

  “You sound like a therapist.” He accepted his coffee when she gave it to him and raised it to his lips. He must have an asbestos mouth.

  “What can I say? I picked up a lot of the jargon when I went through rehab.” She shrugged. “But it makes sense.”

  “So does this,” he said quietly. “Us. Put your therapy to work there. I know I’ll never stop feeling guilty about my brother. I could have done more, I should have noticed earlier, I should have made him go to rehab, not tried to persuade him. Maybe he’d be alive today.”

  “Or maybe not. Maybe that car that knocked me down would have killed me, maybe Byron would have killed me. Maybe I’d have killed him. Maybe we’d have gotten a bad score that killed us both. Maybe we’d have been on a plane that went down.”

  She told herself that mantra every day. Never had it sounded less convincing.

  Chapter Seven

  Almost domesticated now, Jon thought with a wry grin as he leaned against the wall of the college. It came as a surprise to Jon to discover that Lina had sorted out her life to this extent. She was so interested in the shelters, she was doing a night school course in social work.

  His patois had increased, but his sojourns in the café at nights had also made him aware of an atmosphere, a tension that had not been immediately apparent. It underlaid everything and while most people were willing to drink and chat, others watched him warily. Probably because he’d managed to do with Lina what they had not. He even managed to avoid calling her by the name the society belles and paparazzi knew her as in New York. But she’d always be Bella to him. He’d fobbed off several inquiries about his mythical knockoff T-shirts and handbags. He kept telling them he was expecting a consignment soon.

  He wanted to take her back home. He’d have to persuade her. What scared him was her ability to vanish. He’d gotten most of the details out of her, and he knew that what she’d done twice, she could do again. She had the nuns in Rome to help her, and he had no doubt she could do it on her own if she wanted to. He could wake up one morning and find her gone, with no trace left behind. Franco paid her in cash. That, plus her tips, probably went into a bank account under her own name, with a substantial amount secreted somewhere as an emergency stash. He knew too little about all this to be certain of following her again.

  Every time she went out of his sight he felt on edge, worried about if and when he’d see her again. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to lose sight of her, but his first reason, that she was the only link between him and Byron, had gone now.

  It wouldn’t be long before the coroner’s report was complete, the paperwork done and the cremation taken place. He’d informed his mother, who was arranging a memorial service for when they got home. Transporting a body, or the remains of one, took a great deal of paperwork, he’d discovered. And a fair bit of palm-greasing, too. Otherwise he’d still be here this time next year. But not in that little room. It was sauna-hot right now, and he’d bet in winter it could be bitterly cold, despite the heat from the café below. That she should come to this.

  Not for much longer. Neither would he allow her to face anything alone. He’d sat back and watched her destroy herself once, longing to take her in hand, knowing she wouldn’t accept it, would probably hate him for the rest of her life. And then, that terrible night when Byron had told him he wanted her for himself. What could he do except watch? Well no more, he thought with a surge of anger. Something had driven her in those years. Sure now that she didn’t have the addict’s personality, one writ large in Byron, he knew something else must have driven her to chase oblivion.

  She’d grown up. Time to face whatever it was but not alone. Not now.

  He straightened when he saw her exchange a smile with a fellow student and wave goodbye as she sighted him. Strolling toward him she smiled, a light sparkling in her eyes, and he loved knowing he’d put it there.

  What should have been a mournful journey of discovery had become a mutedly happy one instead. He’d said goodbye to Byron years ago, recognizing the downward spiral his brother would inevitably take. That hadn’t stopped him doing everything in his power to halt it, but after Byron
went to Italy, they’d lost him. For good. So this visit established the formality before they could put the unhappy soul to rest. So far he’d felt hollow, a curious absence of feeling where Byron was concerned. He had to assume that meant his emotions were wrung out, gone.

  Now he bent and gave her a kiss, which she responded to in a way that swept warm feelings through him. Not even sexual, not yet. He looked forward to sharing a meal with her, maybe treat them to a bottle of wine. Talk and laugh together.

  Shit, this was bad. Worse, it felt good, natural. That worried him most. He had to persuade her to come home with him, but he’d never known her so settled, so happy. He was seriously considering relocating.

  They walked hand in hand back through the narrow streets to the café, chatting about her classes and what they’d have to eat when they got back. She was on nights again this week. He enjoyed sitting at the tables with the locals, watching her as she worked, fended off advances, laughed with the regulars. He was even beginning to pick up a little Neapolitan.

  The dim streetlights and the light flooding from the windows made the run-down café look almost cheerful with its faded and peeling blue paint. The dusty and litter-strewn street was a chunk of the Old World. It could almost be romantic. In fact, Jon realized with a shock, probably the most romantic moment of his life. So far. Maybe there’d be more to come.

  Until a missile zipped past his ear and embedded itself in the plasterwork behind him with a ping.

  No cars were passing, no people nearby, but much as he’d like to ignore it, Jon knew exactly what it was. Without conscious thought, he bundled Lina to the ground and covered her with his body. She fought back, but he overwhelmed her and forced her back down. “Stay there.”