Mob Daddies: A Contemporary Romance Box Sex

by Alexa Hart

  Elena Fanucci was a lot of things, but she most certainly was not scared of her son. “Up! Alzati, ragazzo mio! Get up! There are more bags in the car, Maximo! Nicola is asleep? He will never go to bed tonight! You can’t let him sleep midday, Maximo! Up! Nicola! Nonnina is here!”

  My father, when he was alive, had a special nickname for my mother that he used often, and affectionately. He called her his piccolo tornado. Little tornado. I didn’t think a more accurate description of my mother could possibly exist. She was always in motion – no idling, no braking. Elena Fanucci had things to do, and she was going to do them.

  I gave her a tight squeeze and obediently retrieved the rest of her haul. She had made a habit of doing this – showing up with absolutely no warning, armed with enough provisions to survive an apocalypse. Ever since I had bought my own house, she had become more than convinced that I was in no way capable of caring for myself or Nic properly. I wasn’t sure she would ever forgive me for no longer living under her roof, eating her meals, and letting her do my laundry.

  We had adjusted, however. This was the new norm. She now had two houses to take care of, and as long as I could accept that, she could let it slide that I had left her to die alone in the Fanucci home.

  A fresh spread of food soon overtook the kitchen table, and Nic didn’t hold back from attacking all of the goods his Nonni had laid out. He was small. His appetite was not.

  “You look flushed, Maximo. Are you not feeling well? You’ve been busy. You’ve been entirely too busy!” Her dark eyes were piercing into me, digging up any truths that I had failed to mention since she saw me last.

  “I’m just a little tired, Ma. You know. Just a lot going on,” I protested calmly, playfully tossing a cracker at Nic when she had turned away.

  “Maximo! You teach him that, he’ll be throwing food at school, getting detentions, running with the troublemakers!” She really missed nothing, my mother. But I saw the corners of her mouth fighting off a smile as Nic pelted me back with a cheese block. She refocused her gaze on me, once again serious. “It is overwhelming for you. I remember your papa, around your age, suffering a similar pain. You are in charge now, Maximo. It will make you a man, but it will not be easy. You can do it because it is in you, as it was in him. Your father was strong. You are strong, ragazzo mio. There is nothing my boy cannot do.”

  All of this was said with unflinching certainty and motherly love. My mother was fully aware – fully aware – of the business and my position in it. Aside from Johnny and Dario Angelone, she was the only other soul who knew that I had not killed Frank. And furthermore, she knew I was internally struggling to accept that Frank had died at all. Her unwavering confidence in me should have been comforting.

  I had found it disturbed me all the more.

  “It will be okay, Ma. I’ll be okay,” I assured her, smiling and patting her hand.

  “You will be okay, Maximo,” she agreed, now grabbing my giant hand with her tiny one and squeezing fiercely. “Pop Angelone. He is not so okay. You need to pay your respects, Maximo. Visit him soon. He’s not predicted to make it through the month. It is all very sad.” She shook her head, and I knew she was fighting tears. My mother and Pop had always been very close, especially after my father died. I suspected on some level they were in love but had never acted on it out of respect. We didn’t do that here. We didn’t cross those lines.

  “I will stop by, Mama. You know I will,” I spoke quietly, noticing Nic eyeing his Nonni inquisitively. He instinctively felt her pain.

  What my mother failed to realize was that I saw Pop nearly every day. Dario had been my best friend since we were small kids, and these days he was also my right-hand man. He was one of the only people who I could talk both business and personal matters with, without carefully separating the two. We didn’t have that luxury, he and I. We’d been born directly into the melded fusion of them both.

  It was often easier, and much more peaceful, to talk things over at the Angelone household away from other business associates. No games, no candy coating – Dario and I communicated with an honesty that was sorely lacking in the business these days. It had taken me years to enter that house without the stabbing agony that accompanied it. Memories of Natalia were everywhere. Every room, every piece of furniture – she saturated her family’s home with her presence, while simultaneously staying thousands of miles away.

  Over time, the ferocity of my longing for her had subdued itself to a dull ache. I could sit on the Angelone couch in the Angelone living room and almost smile when I thought of Nat, and all of the times she had sat right there beside me.

  She was my “one”. She was my “one that got away”. And I couldn’t blame her for leaving. She had always deserved more than I or anyone else in the neighborhood was capable of giving her.

  Sweet Natalia...

  Almost as though she could read my mind, my mother broke the silence with her most tender of tones. “Are you ready to see her, Maximo? She will come for the funeral. She must. She loves her father. And he adores her...” Again, I thought Ma was going to cry.

  Terror raced through my bones at her words, and I realized I hadn’t allowed myself to even begin to think about Natalia returning home ever, for anything.

  “I think I’m goin’ for a run, Ma. Could you stay with Nic a little while?” I was up and moving, retreating to my bedroom and changing clothing swiftly. I had to get out. I had to get air.

  “You always did think you could run that girl off, Max. It never worked, you know,” Ma spoke kindly through the closed door of my room, seemingly lost in her own heartbreak.

  I whipped the door open, meeting her eyes with my own, and joining our sorrows briefly. “Well. Gotta keep tryin’ anyhow, right Ma?”

  She smiled faintly, nodding.

  I planted a kiss on her forehead, did the same to Nic, and got the fuck out of the house.

  The neighborhood’s park had never been anything to brag about. It was maybe twenty acres, with a couple of ancient playgrounds dotting the sides, one pond, and a plethora of trees surrounded by untended overgrowth. Aside from some childhood memories, there wasn’t a lot to be said for it.

  It’s saving grace for me was the paved path that wound in and around the withering scenery, eventually making one big circle and giving me enough road to work up a sweat – and work out a problem. I had been running this course for over ten years. It stayed the same.

  I could appreciate that.

  Nat and I had run it together – first as friends, then as much more than that – so many times that it seemed to belong to us. No one else used it. No one else cared to. After she left, I had stopped my park runs altogether. The gym had treadmills, and I was there a few times a week anyway. I couldn’t even look at the park in passing.

  That first year was the hardest. When Natalia left, she was really gone. No phone calls, no texts, no emails, no anything – she wanted a clean cut and she made one. It was the only way we’d be able to truly get over “us”, she had said.

  My feet were hitting the pavement in smooth, steady pounds. The snow was only trampled down by the occasional passerby, and of course, me. I had come back to this trail eventually. It was still hers. It was still mine. But I had accepted long ago that it would never be “ours” again.

  Five days a week I ran, and five days a week thoughts of Nat rolled over me like thunderclouds. Sometimes they just kept rolling away and I could run in peace. Other days they seemed to multiply and compound upon themselves, and by the time I ran out of the park heading for my house, Natalia was all I could see.

  Ma was right. I had never been able to run her off – and I had spent six years trying to. It was just one of those things, I had decided. My father used to say “E fatta.” when a problem existed that simply could not be solved.

  “It is done.”

  And it was.

  Breathe in – pound, pound – breathe out... pound, pound... Breathe in –

  It couldn’t have been
anyone else. I nearly tripped over my own feet coming to a short stop on the path, staring at her from a safe yet telling distance. It had to be her. No one else came to this park – certainly not in January. And no one else gave two damns about that shitty, worn-out gazebo except for the little girl who had left her dead mother flowers in that pond faithfully, year after year... Until that girl had left forever, that is.

  But she was here. That was her dark brown hair blowing in the relentless wind. It was just as long as ever and it had to be her. It had to be. I walked closer, leaving the running path, hearing my heartbeat pounding in my own ears.

  “Natalia?”

  Chapter 3

  Natalia

  “You can’t do this, Nat. You won’t. I know you. You won’t do this!”

  Max was grabbing my arm, and I heard a desperation in his voice that I had never heard before. I wrenched my arm away from him, angry now. And the anger was better. It was a short reprieve from the heartache that was pulling me violently through the ground with the promise of no tomorrow. The anger was good.

  “Don’t tell me what I will and won’t do! I AM doing this, Max! I’m leaving! I’m fucking done with this place!” I had screamed it at him, only inches away from his face. I knew my eyes were full of tears, but I hadn’t been prepared to see that his were too.

  Those beautiful hazel eyes... They were enough in and of themselves to cause the frantic, panicking thought that maybe I was wrong. Maybe this wasn’t the only way. Maybe you’ll never love anyone again like you love Max.

  He had put his hands on my cheeks – gently – and pressed his forehead into mine. I could hear him struggling to control his breathing. I knew he hadn’t believed that this day would ever come.

  I hadn’t believed it myself.

  I had been in love with Maximo Fanucci since I was fifteen years old. We had grown up together in the neighborhood, gone to school together since kindergarten, and shared the inexplicable bond of being “business kids”. Though Dario was a year younger, he had been an ever present third wheel to our friendship; and as we grew, the three of us became tighter than steel.

  I could never have pin-pointed the exact moment that I started seeing Max differently. He had been such a constant part of my life that I almost felt I had another brother – at the very least, an extraordinarily close best friend. But his smiles had stopped being just smiles. His eyes had stopped being just eyes. If he gave me a friendly pat on the back or brushed up against me a little too closely, I found I had developed a very electric, powerful response to his touch.

  Being a gangly, awkward teenage girl, it had horrified me at first. I was so embarrassed to feel what I was feeling that I had actually started to avoid him. I slipped out of the house when he would stop by to hang. I let Dario answer the phone every single time it rang, scared that I’d be forced to act normal and make small talk with Max. I made an actual effort to spend time with the girls at school, whom I had never quite been able to bond with in any real way.

  Max had not appreciated this. He had finally decided to address the situation head on – in true Maximo Fanucci fashion, and barged into the Angelone home one Sunday afternoon when I had failed to accompany Dario to our notoriously regular matinee meet-up.

  His shaggy hair completely out of control, he had dramatically thrown his arms in the air. “What did I DO, Nat? WHAT?” And immediately I was crying, despising my teenage self more than ever before, and certain the world was ending.

  But then he had hugged me. And then he kissed my forehead. And then he kissed my lips. And I had understood immediately that I wasn’t the only one who had experienced a shift in feelings.

  After that, we had never looked back. We were inseparable in an even stronger way, and all of the forces of nature couldn’t have torn us apart. Dario had accepted the change between his sister and his best friend in his typical, light-hearted way; and life in the neighborhood had continued on for the three of us like some type of magical, adolescent clockwork.

  Even as we graduated and became adults, the loyalty and the love remained Herculean. I had opted to start a psychology program upstate, but faithfully drove home every single weekend to be with Max. He and my brother applied to the local community college to earn their business degrees – a source of many inside jokes amongst our inner circle – and the future seemed written in the stars.

  I hadn’t realized how the time I spent away from the neighborhood – away from the business – would affect me. My views on my father’s occupation, which had always been realistic but indifferent, now became mildly hostile. I was learning so much about the human brain – how the mind works – and it finally occurred to me that I had perhaps been dealt a shitty hand by being born into such an organization. I felt tethered to something I had neither chosen nor would choose if given the chance.

  And I had not been given the chance.

  My father had taken my change of heart in stride. Tearing up ever so slightly, he had taken my face in his hands and said, “Natalia, you were born free as a bird. Fly to your dreams, my love.”

  Just like that, I had felt released from it all. I could live a different life. I could live any life I wanted.

  I was certain Max would also feel emancipated by this. Immediately I imagined our new life together, where we had our love on our own terms.

  It had never occurred to me that Max would not feel as free. It had never occurred to me that he saw a certain familial honor in becoming a part of the business. It had never occurred to me that without his dead father to crawl out of the grave and give him the same permission as my own had, he would never feel anything less than permanently chained to the life he had always known.

  We argued, we cried, we cajoled each other. Both of us were certain in our individual hearts that we would somehow come to agree on the subject, and the turmoil would pass. It had to pass, didn’t it? You couldn’t love someone as much as we loved each other and not make it through something like this.

  We would make it. We would figure it out.

  Only we hadn’t figured out anything.

  “Don’t do this, Nat. Please. Don’t. Do. This. You love me. I love you. This isn’t how we fix things. This isn’t the way,” he had pled in a quiet, husky voice – his tears now actually falling from his eyes.

  I had frozen for a split second. How badly I had wanted to fix things. How ruthlessly I had torn myself apart going back and forth with this decision. But there was one thing that I could not let go.

  “Quit the business, Max,” I had begged him, our faces still together, both of us crying openly now.

  Max had stepped back from me, just enough that we could look each other straight in the face. He was shaking his head and his eyes were imploring me for mercy. “Natalia... I can’t. You know I CAN’T. You know better than anyone!”

  My heart had sunk, though I had no reason to believe that his answer would be any different than it had been all along. I pulled completely away then, also shaking my head, though thoroughly unaware of it.

  “I do understand. And I don’t want that life,” I was forcing out the words, and making myself hold eye contact. If I were expected to understand him, he was going to fucking understand me – for the last time.

  I knew there was more. I knew he wanted to say so many things. I knew he would speak until sunrise if I gave him the chance to. And I knew I would cave were that to happen. He would convince me to stay because deep down I did not actually want to leave him. Instead, I had turned and sprinted into my house, locking the door behind me and fleeing to my bedroom where I cried for hours, knowing I couldn’t possibly love anyone – want anyone – the way I did Maximo.

  And simultaneously I had known that there were some things our love just could not fix.

  It shot through me so fast – that memory. That was the night it had ended – rocky at first, and then smooth and straight like an open highway. I drove away three days later – literally and figuratively – and I wasn’t coming back.
If Max wanted all of that – the neighborhood, the business, the tradition, the crime – he could have it. But he would not also have me.

  And now, here he was, looking sheepish and beautiful – and so very much like a man. If I thought Dario had grown up, it was nothing in comparison to the transformation of Maximo. He had always been muscular – obsessed with lifting weights, staying fit, eating healthy – but now he was positively huge. His shoulders sat wide and strong, and his sweats clung to bulge after bulge of solid man. I knew the skin beneath was covered – nearly blacked out – by tattoos. I knew what every single one meant to him – Max Fanucci did not go under the needle without a specific purpose – and I knew instantly that my fingers still longed to trace the art slowly and sweetly as I had so loved to do before...

  “Natalia?” He spoke again, and I knew I must say something. But this man before me – shaggy light brown hair that I had always played with absently now trimmed down to a more manageable, mature length, the patchy goatee replaced by a completely filled in and well-kept beard, and those eyes – glowing, alive, and still so intense – this man before me had rendered me speechless.

  How could I have spent the last six years avoiding him at all costs – trying to forget him with every last ounce of strength I had and putting an entire country between us – only to see him now and immediately want him more than ever?

  “Max,” I breathed, frozen in place. For a moment I thought neither of us would ever move or speak again, and then he was walking to the gazebo, smiling nervously and peering at me like I might not quite be real.

  We hugged – semi-awkwardly – and I smelled the fresh sweat covering his body. He was so big... I struggled getting my arms around him. Max had always been the neighborhood “dreamboat”, but now he was something much more powerful. Much more heart stopping. I squeezed my eyes closed tightly, willing myself to stay impassive, and pulled back with my best pasted-on smile gracing my face.