I was inspired.
I was filled with hope.
I was ready to become a college dropout!
Just before we left, I asked Carlo: “What did your mentor make you do on the Monday after your first drawing lesson?” I was assuming we’d be “bumped” a level. Maybe from gopher to gopher-plus or something.
He smiled mischievously. “I did da same as before. Only my boss made me work two extra hours every day. With no overtime.” Then he sent us on our way.
We had no idea if that was intended as a joke or not.
But we sure as heck didn’t complain!
-6-
Trey and the rest of his West-End Boys weren’t available for a night out tonight, Conall told me. I knew what that meant: They were probably scoping out the Prime Minister’s home or jumping through windows in SWAT gear and taking down a super-secret drug cartel. Smokey’s disguise as a “lowly and humble short order cook” had gone by the boards the day he and the rest of the team took out Raphael Varela and his gang, after Raphael had taken Dani and Freckly Troy hostage.
But none of them ever gave a straight answer when we asked them. And, as close a friend as Alex had become, she either didn’t know much herself about what her new husband did for a living, or she’d been sworn to secrecy at the penalty of death by poison-laced feathers or something.
See? I did have an imagination!
I was feeling confident about this fashion design gig. I was feeling confident about learning the ropes at an actual design house—everything from the design to the pattern creation to the final styling of a model with accessories and make-up and the taking of photographs! Carlo really did take care with each and every step. And the way he dressed himself was a statement as to his skill. He only wore his own designs. And his designs looked always gorgeous! He was short and a little round. He looked, body-shape-wise, a little like Danny DeVito (a little slimmer.) But his face was all aristocratic and fine. He was attractive.
But his clothes... Whoa!
It’s true that clothes make the man.
Conall had always dressed exquisitely himself. Not necessarily the latest fashions, but always professional, always “posh.” Suits, dress-shirts, modern cuts. He doesn’t need to dress up, but dressing up had been the cream on an already delectable cake for me.
And when he took his clothes off... Well...
I was feeling upbeat when I left with Kayla to catch the train. I was over the moon. I was following my dreams. I was doing what I felt was right. Things were rolling!
And then my mom called.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
-1-
“Leora Milana Caivano!” Uh-oh, I was in shit. “Are you out of your freakin mind!?”
“Hey mom. Nice to hear from you.” Kayla and I were in the train. She was sitting across a table from me.
“Don’t you fuckin dare talk to me like that! Expelled. Expelled!?”
Huh? “Mom, we weren’t expelled, we were suspended. And I was totally within my rights to—”
“To what!? Look, young lady, I played along when you were eighteen and flew over halfway across the world for this...man. I played along when you stayed there even though you’d planned on seeing Europe! But I won’t play along with you throwing your life away like this! A girl needs an education! This is outrageous! And now? What are you going to do!?”
I couldn’t believe I’d managed to keep quiet throughout that tirade. Kayla’s green eyes were bulging, contrasting magically with her bright pink hair. She looked like something out of a manga comic book.
“Talk to me, young lady!”
Through clenched teeth, I said, “We weren’t expelled!” A teenager two seats ahead from me turned her head and looked in my direction and smiled.
“You know, Leo, Conall came over here and asked your father for permission to ask your hand in marriage. Your father, being the romantic that he is, said that if you’d decided Conall was right for you, then it was your decision to wed! Unfortunately, your father has never been the practical type!”
What. The. Fuck!? Practical! She was actually calling my father the impractical one!? She, who married him and took his money, then married again and again for the same reason—one of them even a drug-addict!—was accusing my self-made-man father of being impractical!?
“I forbid you from being expelled, young missy! I absolutely forbid you from doing that!”
My hackles raised stiffly. “Mother, firstly, you can’t ‘forbid’ someone from being expelled! When you’re expelled you’re expelled! Secondly, we were suspended for fuck’s sake!” I gave up trying to be calm and collected. I just wasn’t any good at it when it came to parents. “And thirdly, goddamnit, you’re not even freakin paying for my college! Pa is!”
“You watch your goddamn language, lady! Oh, you and your father—you gang up on me, both of you! I would never have allowed you to get engaged so young!” She was crying now, I could hear. There was only one explanation for her mood: She’d been drinking. And by the sounds of it, she’d been drinking a lot!
“Ma, is Maria there?”
I heard more sobbing. “It’s all a mess, Leo. Since you left, it’s all a mess. Ramsey left me.” Ramsey? Who the fuck was that? Had I even met the guy!? “I’m all alone.” She sobbed viciously.
I didn’t know what to do. I really didn’t.
“Ma, is Maria there?” I tried again.
“No, of course she’s not here! I’m at the office!”
My mom did start working at one stage, I have to give her that. She took all the money she got from her several divorces and started a boutique store in midtown Manhattan. I don’t know if it ever made any money (she had plenty to fall back on if it didn’t), but it kept her busy.
“Mom, why don’t you go home and take a day off?”
Mom was silent. “Expelled...” she mumbled.
“GODDAMNIT CHRIST ARE YOU NOT FUCKIN LISTENING TO ME!?”
“Leora! Dean Whithers just called me before I called you. He’d just gotten off the phone with your father. The suspension was reviewed. Your actions were deemed unacceptable and intolerable by the board. You have been expelled!”
The phone felt heavy in my hand. Suddenly the wheels on the train tracks below me sounded cacophonous.
“Leo?”
I said nothing, still stunned. My other hand went to my forehead. I was in dream-land.
Reviewed? What the heck was there to ‘review’? And why would the Dean be calling my mom on a Saturday!?
Before I knew it, Kayla had taken the phone out of my hand. I heard my mom screaming even across the table. Kayla just acted bored. Mom used to like Kayla, before all the piercings and the shaved hair and the she-devil tattoo on her waist...and so on.
Kayla just held the phone away from her ear. Mom kept on going ballistic. Kayla rolled her eyes, and finally my mother was even too much for her. She looked at me as if for permission, holding the phone out and having her finger just a fraction away from the screen.
I nodded. Why not? It couldn’t get any worse.
Kayla clicked the phone off. The strident shriek of my mom’s voice on the other side of the line just died. I was immediately calmer. Being screamed at doesn’t freakin help when you’re going through shit! I scream enough at myself in my own head without having someone else scream at me as well!
“And?” Kayla asked. Her body was bouncing left and right from the train’s movements.
“It seems we’ve been expelled. For real. Whithers just called my mom.”
Kayla went a little pale. Then she frowned. “That’s weird.”
“Just one second.” I picked up my phone and called Maria. I asked her to somehow get my mom home. She asked me how things were going and I told her briefly. I actually had a tear in my eye, and I don’t know if it was because my mom ripped my neck out or if it was that I wanted to leave college on my own terms and not just as some disgraced student; or maybe it was Maria’s caring, confident, loving voice.
“More gentlemanly than ever.” I wiped a tear from my eye. Already I was starting to smile.
“And when will dere be some little niños walking around?”
“Maria, I’m only nineteen!”
“I had two children already when I was nineteen.”
“Well, it’s too soon for me.”
“OK, fine. Is jour life, my darling. Joo mus’ decide what joo want to do! And if joo want to have some niños now, have them! If joo want to become a business lady, become one! If joo want to do both, den do it! If you follow what someone else tells you, you will always have somebody else to blame when things fail. But if joo follow what joo choose, you won’t fail, because joo will know dat the only person you could blame is jourself! So you will work harder than ever, because people don’t want to blame demselves!”
I was leaning on my hand, and my elbow was on the gray plastic table. Why couldn’t my mom give me such advice?
“Are you happy with your choices, Maria?”
“Oh, my darling! I always wanted to be a mother. Times changed, and den I needed to work. But I have always been a mother to my little Roberta and my little Rodrigo first. So, yes, I am happy with my choices. Very happy. I would not change anything about them.”
I didn’t know what to say for a second. Then I mumbled, “Thanks, Maria.”
“When is deh wedding?”
“We haven’t set a date yet—but we’re hoping for August next year.”
“Is a long time away. When joo know, joo know.”
Wow. “I love you, Maria.”
“I know, my darling. I call jour Mama now, and I bring her home. You don’t worry. Joo just have a good time there, and do what joo believe is right.”
“I will. I promise.”
“I love you, too,” she said.
Then I called my dad. And you know what he said? “Babe, I’m comin over. Dat fuckin punk got no right—NO right—tellin my little girl she ain’t welcome at his damn school!”
“Dad, you know I was planning on dropping out anyway, right?”
“Dat ain’t da point, babe! He got no right! And on a Saturday? Sumtin fishy’s goin on, sweetie! Sumtin fishy! I know how dis plays out. I seen it so many times back in da Bronx. Everytin’s goin well, den some guy from another neighborhood comes around, starts spreadin lies and makin out like he’s da new Boss. Only problem is, dat guy is always hidden, know what I’m sayin? Da guy spreadin da vile is always da hidden guy! He’s too afraid to come out and bust on da head capo or sumtin. So he sows da seed, starts sayin tings about fellow members an’ all. Starts tellin you yo friends are snitches an’ stuff. Starts makin you feel like yo friends ain’t yo friends no more. And den? Well, you turn on your friends, da familia implodes, and da punk dat spread da lies becomes da new Capo di tutti capi—da main boss!
“I seen it, babe. Dis is fishy. Dis stinks worse dan a Noo Yawk sewer!”
“Pa?”
“Yeah, baby.”
“Don’t come over. It’s OK.”
“It’s not OK! You my baby! And you’s a Caivano, damnit! Nobody screws wit my little girl and gets away wit it!”
Maybe I should be telling Edmond Williams that he’s the one gaining a powerful family, not the other way around! “Dad, it’s cool. I was gonna leave anyway.”
“Dat ain’t da point, babe. You’re a good girl. You don’t deserve to be disgraced by nobody!”
He wasn’t going to let this go.
Sure, the thing did stink. And it was either Edmond Williams and one of his cronies, or the wonderful and irresponsible Bettina Langford—or her father!
And you know what? You know what I thought, right there on that train? So. Fucking. WHAT!
Childish games. Edmond Williams or Bettina’s father or whoever jumped in and pulled this little stunt was no more an adult than my mother was sober.
“Leave it, pops. Ain’t nobody disgraced me.” (I tend to slide into my pops’s Bronx accent when I talk to him for a bit.)
“Of course dey did!”
“No, they didn’t, pops. And it ain’t worth it to come all the way over here and then I’m just gonna drop out anyway.”
“Dat ain’t da point.”
“I know. I know.” I told him about Carlo, about what he’s gonna teach us, about the opportunities he has for us even if we absolutely suck at designing!
But somehow I knew in my heart that I didn’t suck at it. I’d played around with designing on paper, although I’d been missing the basics of just getting the human form right! But I learned that today. And somehow I knew that all those years of looking at Fashion Magazines would pay off.
When I was done telling my dad about Carlo, he waited a second as he digested the information. And then, all he said was, “He’s Italian?” Eye-talian?
“Yeah.”
A beat. “Good.” Another beat. “Dat’s real good.”
You gotta love Italian men.
“I wanna meet him sometime. He sounds like a good guy. OK, baby, it looks like you doin da right ting dere. I’m proud-a you, honey. You know dat, right?”
“I do.”
“I’ll always be behind you, no matter what you do, OK?”
It was suddenly abundantly clear to me why mom and dad got divorced.
He gave a shit.
And, to say it like my dad probably would: She didn’t give a shit about nobody!
Tears were slamming at me from behind my eyes.
But I held them back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
-1-
By now my horniness had died completely.
Conall picked me up in his metallic purple Mercedes. He had dinner prepared when we got home. Whatever it was, it had a lot of garlic and butter. It smelled delicious.
But I had no appetite.
“I’m just gonna go upstairs and lie down,” I told him. I didn’t even kiss him goodnight. I went up to bed, and I slept.
A few hours later I felt his warmth behind me. It woke me up. “Care to talk about it?” he asked.
His arm was around me, his chest to my back. His nose was nuzzled in my hair.
I couldn’t even answer him the whole thing had put me down so much. Not the thing of being expelled. Not that someone had clearly gone in there and wrangled some maneuver to make me and Kayla look like real college dropouts. No, what got me down was how horribly young and irresponsible and...childish...my mother had made me feel!
“No, I don’t wanna talk about it.”
Vaguely, I heard a girl’s voice outside, muffled: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Oh, yes! Ah! FUCK, BRAD. FUCK ME, DAMN!”
I felt Conall stir.
Dani and Freckly Troy had gone off to Seaford to check on things at the Jolly Roger bar. So Kayla and Brad had the cottage all to themselves.
I see they were making good use of it...
I moved my hand behind me, eased it to under Conall’s boxers and held him. “We don’t have to,” he said, sensing my lack of enthusiasm for anything and everything living at the moment.
My hand still behind me, I slid up and down his shaft. We stayed like that for a while, the temperature under the covers getting warmer, his cock getting harder and hotter.
I turned and put him on his back. I kissed his neck, kept on rubbing him below. I pulled the cover off him so I could see all his tattoos on his chest and the tattoo of my name on his waist. I should get one of his on me, I decided.
I pulled his boxers off. I lay next to him, massaging him below. I was lying on his elbow, and his fingers twiddled through my hair.
I pecked his neck. I still wasn’t fully into it now. But I liked holding him, liked rubbing him.
I moved down below and put him in my mouth and bobbed, quickly. Conall groaned and I went at it wildly, wanting him to come and burst. I sucked him and licked him and his fingers interlaced in mine as I felt that moment of pau
se just before he exploded. I pulled away, and pumped him afterwards, watching his juice pour over him. He groaned slowly. “Oh, God, Leora. What was that about?”
I still said nothing. He grabbed a shirt from the side table and started wiping himself off. I took it from him and finished it. I lay next to him, kissed his ear.
He could tell I didn’t want anything myself. I was still down as hell. I liked pleasuring him. I liked hearing his low roars and feeling him jerk and tug just before climax.
But I wasn’t horny. I wasn’t horny at all.
-2-
Much later, I heard Kayla and Brad again. They were going at it like wild! Did she not feel the same as I did? Kayla’s mother, the exotic and supreme queen of New York City escorts, hadn’t even bothered to call her own daughter about the expulsion. Was that worse? Or had the university failed to reach her because it was a weekend and that is her busiest time?
“Oh, Brad. Oh, God! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” I heard rhythmic banging, slapping of glass, screeching wood on the floor. I heard Brad’s voice: “Oh, yeah, babe! Goddamn, you’s hot! Oh, yes. Oooh!” Did they have a window open in the cottage!? It must be hell for Dani when she’s actually in the same building!
Conall breathed peacefully next to me, fast asleep. I looked at the clock. Two A.M.
I got up and sat on a white couch in the corner of the dark room, just by the window. Conall’s entire bedroom is white—white linen, almost-white carpet, white curtains. It’s very romantic.
My mind was spinning.
I grabbed the sketch-pad Carlo Fabiano had given us, grabbed the lead pencils as well. He hadn’t given us any pens or any color pencils because he’d only wanted us to draw the human body and not jump the gun and start adding fashion designs to it. I went downstairs to the living room. There was still heat in the fireplace from a fire that Conall had made earlier. It dawned on me that I hadn’t eaten. I went to the kitchen to see what he had made.
Deep South (Naive Mistakes #4) Page 11