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“Even though I embarrassed you in front of your boss?”
“Even though,” I said, nodding.
Then, her lips twitching, she said, “Even though I’m kind of a slob?”
“I’m… working on that,” I said, getting a huge fucking smile out of her.
Millie - 1 week
“Why are you so jumpy?” Silvano asked, completely oblivious to just how stressful it was to meet a partner’s mother.
To him, this was the woman who’d seen him at all his highs and lows, and loved him regardless.
For me, this was a woman who might decide I wasn’t good enough for her son. Then tell him that. Or, worse yet, be passive aggressively mean to me from now until eternity.
“I’m nervous,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Why? It’s not the first of my family you’ve met.”
It seemed pointless to tell him that Miko, Neo, and Salvatore hardly counted.
The previous two because we’d met under such an unusual circumstance.
And Salvatore because, well, we’d gone to see him about my wrist at his little doctor’s office he worked out of. Like a legit doctor’s office. But he only used it for Family members who got themselves into some sort of sticky situation. The type they didn’t want to go to a hospital about because there would be questions that they couldn’t answer.
He’d been a handsome older guy with a no-nonsense attitude toward my fracture, telling me that it was probably healed up, but I might want to wear a brace for a while just to make sure. Before pulling out this scary-ass looking little round saw, and cutting through the cast.
It had only been a few weeks, but my skin looked a sickly white and my arm itself had shrunk in the cast.
I was kind of glad for the bulky carpal tunnel brace Silvano had bought me, as it disguised the differences as I waited for my hand and wrist to strengthen up little by little.
I’d dressed up for dinner, wearing a deep blue dress and little kitten heels, wanting his mom to see me in my best possible light.
Really, I didn’t have to worry.
Because the second we walked into the apartment, his mom flew at me, wrapping me up into the biggest hug ever.
“Oh, you poor thing!” she said, squeezing me tighter. “You have been through so much,” she added.
Tears, confusing and unexpected, flooded my eyes.
What the heck was this?
Maybe some part of me had been, without my ever noticing it, aching for a maternal figure. Or perhaps it was just a reminder of what I no longer had. A parental figure to worry about me.
“Ma, she just had her ribs bruised a few weeks ago,” Silvano said, making his mom pull back, her hands going to frame my face. “These boys,” she said, rolling her eyes, “they didn’t do you justice about how beautiful you are.”
So, yeah, I kind of loved her instantly.
“Just so you know, if you screw up down the road, I get custody of your mom,” I told Silvano as she rushed off to check on her food.
“If anything is gonna break us up, Mills, it’s gonna be the way you load the fucking dishwasher.”
Silvano had very precise ways of doing that—I learned—when I tried to be helpful and load it one day. I always figure that, you know, in the washer was what mattered.
Oh, how very wrong I had been.
There was an order for everything inside of it.
