Exploration

by Quinn Ward

  “One. And we’re not going clubbing,” I warned him. Leaving a club sweaty and gross was one thing, entering one in that condition was totally different.

  “I was sort of thinking we could hit that bar you like.” I stumbled over my feet, and Tony ran into my back.

  “You do realize it’s a gay bar, right?” The logo that resembled one guy plowing into another guy’s ass should’ve been a clue, but sometimes Tony wasn’t the most observant.

  “What? You think you’re the only one in this family who’s at least a little interested in taking a walk on the wild side?” Tony reached around me to open the office door and shoved me inside.

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?” Why was it so hard for me to ask if my brother was gay, too? I knew what he was doing. Other than the one time he’d confronted me about where I was going after work, I hadn’t said the words ‘I’m gay’ to anyone other than Calvin.

  “You’re happier than I’ve ever seen you, Frankie. If you can’t tell me you’re gay without freaking out, how in the hell do you expect to tell Mama?” We both stripped out of our work clothes and started changing into jeans and T-shirts.

  “I know you’re right,” I grumbled as I shimmied into my jeans.

  “Yeah, I am. And after tonight, you know damn well she’s gonna corner you and ask about Calvin.” I hated when Tony was right. I hated even more when he was right and I had to come clean to Mama. “Tonight might be a good opportunity for you to open up to Enzo.”

  “We’ll see.” As soon as I’d pulled my T-shirt over my head, Tony smacked me upside my head. “Fucker! That hurt!”

  “It was supposed to,” Tony deadpanned. “Why in the hell do you feel like you can’t show your family who you really are? No one is going to judge you for being authentic, but the longer you wait, the more pissed they’ll be that you didn’t trust them with this sooner.”

  “Fine. I’ll tell Enzo tonight. Where is he, anyway?”

  “He’s already at the bar saving seats for us.” Nice to see my opinion was being taken into consideration tonight. “Don’t give me that look. It was getting late and I don’t feel like standing all night unless it’s on the dance floor with someone grinding against my cock.”

  “TMI, man.”

  “Yeah, well I didn’t want to hear you sucking off your boyfriend last week, but we don’t always get what we want. Come on.”

  Friday morning was a great reminder of why Thursday night had been a horrible idea. Okay, so Tony and Enzo had been right that I needed to unwind and not think about missing Calvin, but I might’ve gone overboard a bit. My head felt like it was caught in a vice, my mouth made me wonder if I’d fallen asleep with a small rodent in my mouth, and every muscle in my body ached. I much preferred when I hurt because Calvin had thoroughly fucked me the night before.

  “Wake up, lazy bones.” Oh yeah, and there was the other reason Friday morning sucked. Enzo, also known as Mr. Sunshine because he wasn’t happy unless he was up before dawn. I cracked one eye open and hoped he understood I was glaring at him. “Your phone’s been going off for a while now. Seems like someone misses you as much as you miss him.”

  “Shut up and give that here,” I growled as I lurched for the phone. I realized my mistake as the contents in my stomach sloshed around and the room started to spin. It was probable that I was still drunk. God, I hoped not, because I couldn’t take this hangover getting much worse.

  Rather than trying to make sense of the strings of letters filling my phone screen, I pressed Calvin’s speed dial, holding the phone away from my ear as it rang.

  “You’re alive,” he answered on third ring. “I was starting to think I’d have to call your brother to have him check on you.”

  “Jury’s still out, but I think I’ll survive.” Enzo reappeared with a bottle of water and some ibuprofen, moving him to the top of my list of favorite brothers. “Sorry I didn’t call you last night.”

  Calvin chuckled. “Babe, do you not remember texting me last night?”

  Oh shit. I put Calvin on speakerphone and started reading through the messages, groaning at how sloppy drunk I’d been. “I’m so sorry, Cal. I hope I didn’t wake you up; I know you had a long drive last night.”

  “Luckily, we were still on the road. But you did give me some fascinating reading material,” Calvin teased. “But don’t worry, I won’t hold anything you said against you.”

  Fuck. What had I said? I scrolled back, seeing some very creative ideas of kinks drunk me wanted Calvin to help me try out. I gagged when I read drunk-me telling sober Cal that I wanted him to pee on me so I could try and figure out what that was all about. Hell to the no. Some people might get off on that shit, but sober me knew I wasn’t one of them.

  “We’re just about to the rink for Ryan’s first game but I wanted to make sure you were awake.” Cal’s voice softened. “You’re okay, yeah?”

  “I’m fine.” At this rate, the reason I wouldn’t be at some point would be him obsessively asking if I was okay. “I might die before the end of the night, but mentally, I’m fine.”

  “You’re not going to die.” Cal laughed again. The asshole seemed amused by my pain. And I could call him that because he wasn’t here to see whatever look I supposedly get on my face when I mentally call him an ass. “Drink more water and get something greasy for breakfast. When you think you’ve had enough water, drink more. And ask Enzo to grab you a sports drink.”

  “How’d you know Enzo was already up and hovering?”

  “He seems the sort. Plus, I’m pretty sure you and Tony left the bar so plastered neither of you will be coherent before noon.”

  “How in the hell do you know that?”

  “Eli called and let me know he’d poured you into a cab,” Calvin responded as if it was totally normal for his buddy to call and rat me out. I was a grown ass man and didn’t need Eli babysitting me. “Boy, you need to calm down. Now.”

  The commanding tone in Cal’s voice had me closing my eyes and taking deep, steadying breaths. I wasn’t sure I’d ever understand why that worked but I was glad it did.

  “Before you get upset, no, I didn’t ask Eli to keep tabs on you.” Of course Cal knew what I’d been thinking. Sometimes, it seemed he knew before I did. “He texted me when you came up for a fourth round and asked if something had happened between us.”

  “Fourth? There was only supposed to be one round. I’m going to kill Tony when he wakes up. He swore he wasn’t going to get me drunk.”

  “You were the instigator,” Enzo hollered from the other room. “And pipe down before you wake up Tony. You know he’s going to be a bigger bear than you.”

  “I’m sorry, Cal. I guess I should thank Eli for looking out for me if I was so hammered I didn’t realize how many rounds I’d apparently bought for everyone.”

  “Not me,” Enzo responded. Eavesdropping little shit. “I’m resistant to your powers of persuasion.”

  “Now you are,” I yelled back, not mentioning the time Tony and I convinced Enzo to climb the entertainment center after Papa hid the remote from us.

  “Focus, brat,” Cal commanded. Great, now my dick was waking up and I didn’t have the energy to rub one out. “Yes, I think thanking him would be a good idea. We’re here so I’m going to let you go. I’ll call you after the first game to check that you’re still upright.”

  “Thank you, Cal. I love you.”

  “Love you too, brat.”

  I wound up missing Calvin’s call after the first game of the day because I was up to my elbows in shrimp. Literally. Freddie was still dealing with the Angela drama and swore he’d be in before the lunch rush started. I hoped his way of “dealing with things” meant calling a lawyer but I wasn’t holding my breath. Out of all of us, he was the one who still acted like a good Catholic martyr. He’d be miserable until the end of time, because that was better than being divorced and going to hell. If you asked m
e, he was already there.

  “Have you heard from Freddie?” Mama asked as she looked over the prep list to see what else had to be finished.

  “No, he called Tony this morning and asked if we could help him out. Said he needs to make some calls about Sophia,” I told her. I wasn’t sure how many of the details Mama knew and us boys had always done our best to not worry her.

  To the best of my knowledge, she didn’t know how bad things were with Angela forgetting to pick up their only child from the sitter, who was now threatening to quit because it was taking a toll on her own family.

  “Maybe it’s time for you to find an assistant kitchen manager for him so he can be home with his family,” she suggested. No way would he go for that. This was his kitchen. In his eyes, he’d already been screwed out of running the restaurant; if I cut his hours so he could get shit at home sorted, he’d accuse me of trying to push him out when that was something I’d never consider. She waved her hand in the air. “Don’t mind me, I know it’s a silly thought.”

  “No Mama, it’d be a perfect solution if we were talking about anyone other than Freddie,” I told her. As much as I loved Papa, I hated the way he’d always blown off anything Mama had to say about the restaurant. They were from a different time and he’d explicitly told her that she ran the house so he could be in charge of providing for the family. He was probably rolling over at his grave knowing his son’s wife was such a miserable piece of work.

  “Frankie, I need you in the storage room. The delivery guy is here and there’s a bunch of shit we never order.” Tony rushed back out of the kitchen as quickly as he’d appeared. I dried off my hands and leaned against the counter for a moment. My head was still aching and my stomach still churned at the thought of food. Why couldn’t today have gone smoothly?

  The liquor delivery issue wound up being nothing more than an incompetent driver who didn’t check the contents of the boxes before unloading them. It was easy enough to sort out, and I didn’t hold back when giving Tony a hard time for pulling me away from the wonderful world of yanking shit out of shrimp. He didn’t need to know I was grateful for a reason to pass deveining on to someone else.

  Freddie texted me around ten, asking if everything was ready for lunch and apologizing that he wasn’t there. I promised him we had everything under control and strongly suggested he focus on what he needed to do. That resulted in a series of text messages filled with orders for me to pass on to the cooks if he wasn’t there and a warning that he was holding me responsible for making sure they didn’t totally fuck things up. I promised him I could handle it and told him to leave me alone so I could finish getting set up.

  We almost made it through lunch without a catastrophe. Matteo seemed to be finding his groove on the serving floor and hadn’t dropped a tray in weeks. Occasionally, he still entered a ticket under the wrong table number, but Mama was always there to help him fix it. Today seemed like a bad day for him, too, and after the third ticket he had to fix, he started banging his head against the wall, muttering about how stupid he was.

  Instead of teasing him or snapping on him the way I would have before Calvin, I asked Luis to cover the grill for me and tugged at my apron strings as I rounded the pass through. He flinched when I squeezed his shoulder and guided him into the walk-in cooler, forgetting that’s where Freddie often took his cooks to dress them down out of earshot of his other employees.

  “Hey, you’re okay,” I assured him. I pulled my youngest brother into a hug and held him tight. No one knew why, but this had always been the easiest way to calm Matteo when he got in a mood. Mama used to worry we’d squeeze the life out of him, but we knew what we were doing.

  “I’m not!” Matteo jumped at his own outburst, a testament to how scattered his mind was today. “Maybe you were right and I’ll never be able to hack it.”

  “No, I was an asshole,” I argued. “When you started, I was trying to do everything by myself, trying to live up to the standards Papa set. He never accepted help from anyone, so I thought I had to do the same, and it made me a shitty brother. You’re doing the best you can. Asking to move to day shift because the chaos of dinner was too much for you proves you’re more mature than we give you credit for.”

  “You really think so?” Matteo lowered his gaze and brushed a hand over his hair. The way he shrunk in on himself made me feel like an even bigger bag of dicks.

  “I do.” I pulled him in for another quick hug. I had work to do and he needed to get back to his tables. “You need to cut yourself some slack sometimes.”

  “Thanks, Frankie.” Matteo spun around to leave and ran right into a stack of produce boxes someone had been too lazy to put where they belonged, sending peppers of every color rolling across the floor. Fucking wonderful. He dropped to his knees and started scooping up as many peppers as he could hold while I righted the boxes. “Shit! I’m so sorry, Frankie! See, you were right when you said I was a menace.”

  “This one’s not on you,” I told him, even though his spastic departure had cause the pepper avalanche. “Get back to your tables and I’ll handle this.”

  After I had everything picked up, I took a moment to lean against one of the racks and calm down. With the way everything had spiraled out of control in the morning, we’d be lucky if there wasn’t a kitchen fire before the night was through.

  18

  Frankie

  The building didn’t burn down Friday night, but that was about the only thing that didn’t go wrong. Freddie showed up right as the dinner rush started, Sophia in tow, which meant he was distracted. We finally convinced Mama that we could run the restaurant without her oversight so she could take the pint-sized terror home for the night. I love the hell out of my niece, but she makes sure everyone knows when she’s overtired or bored.

  The newest server made Matteo look graceful and managed to drop a bottle of red wine onto a guest’s handbag. There was no calming her down, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she threatened to destroy us.

  The icing on the cake was when Tony got in Freddie’s face, reminding him that he wasn’t the only brother who gave a damn about the restaurant. I raced into the kitchen seconds before fists started flying and dragged Tony back to the office, reminding him that Freddie didn’t cope well when he felt threatened. Which he did, because that crazy bitch he married had told him she wanted a divorce, and he was convinced that meant she was going to try and take Sophia. I’d take out loans against the business, find a loan shark, do whatever I could to make sure that never happened. Once he got over the initial shock, we’d remind Freddie that the Marino brothers took care of their own.

  The second the last server finished cashing out and I had the bar tills reconciled, I was out the door. As soon as Max spotted me, he had a drink poured and waiting before my ass hit the seat at the end of the bar. And he made sure the glass stayed full until bar time, but that may have had something to do with the twins flanking me. Enzo once again only had a couple of drinks, but Tony and I wound up going drink for drink until the lights came up and Eli once again poured us into a cab.

  When I woke up, there was a text waiting from Calvin.

  Good morning, brat. Drink a quart of water and don’t forget to eat. And maybe consider giving your liver a break tonight.

  I closed my eyes and took a quick assessment of the situation. My head didn’t feel half as bad as it had yesterday morning, which meant we’d had the good sense to skip tequila shots, but my stomach was definitely sour. Luckily, Saturday dayshift was slower and I didn’t have to go in until mid-afternoon. So, after getting up to piss and get the water I’d been commanded to drink, I flopped back onto the guest bed and went back to sleep.

  My nap was unceremoniously cut short by a tiny demon with sharp elbows landing on my chest. “Wake up Uncle Frankie!”

  “Freddie! I think I found something you lost.” A little warning that he was dropping Sophia off here today would’ve been nice, but I didn’t mind. Tony and Enzo would be heading in s
oon, and I could use something to keep my mind off the fact Calvin was going to be out of pocket most of the day today. His plan to keep in nearly constant contact had been foiled by sketchy cell reception, but I was determined to prove I wouldn’t fall apart every time he had to take Ryan to a tournament.

  Sophia giggled when I wrestled her to the bed and started tickling her. Thank God for wearing a pair of shorts to bed, otherwise it could’ve been an awkward moment.

  “Hey, I tried calling but you didn’t answer,” Freddie said from the doorway. He looked calmer than he had yesterday, but the dark circles beneath his eyes made it clear he hadn’t slept for shit. “Sophia, why don’t you go raid Uncle Tony’s kitchen? You can even steal a bowl of his cereal if you want.”

  “The sugar kind?” She batted her big brown eyes at her dad and we both knew there was no arguing with her. Freddie nodded and she jumped off the bed and was gone.

  “What’s up? I know this isn’t a social visit.” I leaned over the edge of the bed and grabbed my T-shirt.

  “Swear anything we say doesn’t go past this room?” Freddie leaned back to check on Sophia before closing the door.

  “You know it doesn’t.” It was insulting he even felt the need to ask me to keep whatever he wanted to tell me to himself. There was a code of honor between us and nothing would change that.

  “Angela left me a message yesterday around the time she should’ve gotten off work. Said she needed me to take care of Sophia for the weekend because she needs to get out of town to think about her life.” I could see the muscles in his jaw working as he ground his teeth, likely to keep from saying anything that’d open the door for me to tell him what I thought of the witch. “I think I have someone who can watch Sophia, but she can’t start until next week. I’d ask Mama to watch her, but Sophia’s a handful. I was hoping maybe she could hang out with her favorite uncle until this afternoon and then you could hand her off to Matteo once he’s done with lunch rush.”