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“Why did you leave?” I ask straight up.
A tear runs down her cheek and she sniffles. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?Last night was good Maria.” I can’t fucking call her Mimi now, or babygirl. I can’t hide that I’m pissed as fuck.
“Yes… It was.”
“Then why?”
She shakes her head. “Salvatore… for the next few seconds I truly need you to be …my friend.”
I growl and my eyes blaze but I’m listening. I hate that word.Friend.
It signals what she wants and what she doesn’t want.
“Why?”
“I can’t be with you. I can’t keep pretending I’m fine when I’m not.”
Pretending?That could only mean one thing. One person.
“Gabe…” My brother’s name leaves my lips at the same time it enters my mind. “Pretending you don’t still love him,” I fill in and rise to my feet.
“No... It’s not what you think,” she says, standing too.
“What do I think Mimi? That you can still be in love with my brother and pretend you aren’t so you can screw with me? Is that what I’m not supposed to think?” I glare at her.
I have never given a woman the chance to do this shit to me. I don’t pussyfoot around or allow fucked up shit like this to happen to me, but this broad has made me lose my damn mind to the point where I can’t see for shit when it comes to her.
“I didn’t screw with you.” She shakes her head and more tears run down her dewy cheeks.
“No? Then explain it to me soyour boycan understand.” I sound like an immature brat, but I think on this occasion I can be excused. “You’re still as in love with Gabe as much as you always have been. That’s what this is, that is why you don’t want to be with me.”
“No Salvatore… that is not why. Last night was real, every time I’m with you it’s real. The reason I can’t is because I’m scared. I’m scared that if you break me I won’t make it back,” she blurts in one go then opens her mouth and the tears fall harder.
Hearing her say that seeps into me and calms me enough to delve deeper into what she’s saying.
“Mimi, you know me. I would never break you,” I promise, but from the look of her I see she actually looks terrified.
“I… can’t, I just…”
I take hold of her shoulders and stare her down. “Babygirl… you trust me.” I say that as a statement of fact because it’s supposed to be true. Her hesitation however tells me it’s not as true as I believed. Not like it was a few years back. “You trust me…right?”
Seconds pass and she doesn’t answer. I drop my hands to my sides and look at her.
“Maria Cipriani what the hell happened to my babygirl?” I can’t keep emotion away when it comes to this girl so it’s all there in my voice that her not trusting me cuts me deep. “She’d fucking trust me if I told her the sun would come up pink tomorrow. Or if I robbed a bank and told her I didn’t, but had the fucking dollar bills falling out of my ass. She would trust me if I told her to walk off a cliff and she wouldn’t die because I’d catch her. Why wouldn’t she trust me now when I ask her to be mine? Why wouldn’t she trust me if I vow I’d never break her the way my brother did.”
Her hands come up to her cheeks and she inhales a quivering breath.
“She… had an accident last year… she had an accident and …she lost her baby,” Mimi answers and a bolt of shock slams into me. I’m pretty certain my heart stops and seizes up right there in my chest.
“What?” I narrow my eyes at her. She said she lost her baby.She was pregnant?“What are you saying to me Mimi?No…”
She wipes more tears from her eyes and I find myself tearing up too the longer I look at her.
“I … was nearly four months pregnant. I wasn’t showing yet.” She swallows hard. “I never told him. Gabe. I found him in the dressing room fucking the new girl. I was so upset I left… got into my car and drove. A homeless man just ran out into the road. I saw him too late because I was crying so much. To avoid hitting him I drove off the road, lost control of the wheel and crashed into a tree… That was how it happened. It’s funny… ironic even... when I got back to work weeks later I found him the same way I left him, except he had a different girl.”
I’m looking at her and I’m listening but I can’t process it. I can’t and I’m not surprised when a tear runs down from my own eye.
