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That brings a laugh to my lips. “It might get cold.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Say hi to your dad for us,” Cynthia says as I take hold of my case. “Come on, Alicia, let’s see if Grammy Moon’s is open today.”
They all wave and then turn and walk away. I stop dead for a moment. That’s why I see when Bex tries to run past the security guards, and they grab hold of her.
I march over, ready to break both of their necks for so much as touching her.
“You are in big trouble now,” one of them says, reaching for a set of cuffs. “Stop resisting, would you?”
“Put her down,” I say. Bex twists in place, and her eyes fix on mine. “Put her down right now.”
The two of them look at me and realize who I am at once. “Apologies, Don Lombardi,” the taller of the two says, letting go of Bex at once. She gives him a shove and then marches over to me. I wave the two guards away, and they almost run, looking glad I didn’t decide to have them killed.
“What are you doing here?” I ask when she reaches me. “Why aren’t you at work?”
She stops dead a couple of inches away from me, her jaw moving but nothing coming out of her mouth. “Come on,” I tell her. “Out with it. I thought you hated me.”
“I wanted to say sorry,” she replies. “It wasn’t you I hated. It was me.”
“What?”
“I hated the way you made me feel. I hated the fact you made me dependent on you. Because I am dependent on you, Hunter. I’m not me when I’m not around you. I’m someone else, and the longer I spend away from you, the more I realize that’s not me. God, this made a lot more sense in my head on the way over here. I’m trying to say that I hated myself for liking the way you dominated me. I thought I was falling for another Oswald, but you’re not him. You never hurt me in the way he did.”
“Hurt you in some other ways, though.”
“Not the same. I hated how I held your attention; your focus was so fixed on me. I thought it would turn bad like it did with Oswald like it did with my parents. I hated how good you made me feel. I fell for a bad boy once, and he turned out to be a major-league asshole, and I thought I was doing the same thing, and it scared the shit out of me. If we’re going to do this, I mean, if you want to do this, we have to take it slow. I’ve got a lot of shit to work through, and I’m not even halfway through it yet. Can you accept that? I’ll make mistakes, lash out, and misinterpret things because I’m a fucked up person, but I’d love to try to be a fucked up person with you if you’ll have me.”
“One, I’m not a bad boy.”
“Don’t try to tell me you’ve turned good.”
“I’m a bad man. No boy about me at all.”
“That’s what you took from my speech? I’m putting my heart on the line here. I didn’t have to come here.” She pauses. “Well, I did have to, actually. How could I not after you kitted out the store, got the magazine printed on time, and gave all that money to Eddie and Catherine? How could I not at least come and thank you for that?”
“I have a point to make, if I may.”
She nods. “All right, go ahead.”
“One, I’m a bad man. Two, I’d like to try to be a good man. For your sake and Alicia’s. Three, you put your heart out there, so allow me to do the same. I do not function as well without you as I do when you are around. I thought you were a distraction from work, but work was a distraction from you. That was where my focus should have been: building a relationship with you like you did with Alicia. I’ve not been a good father and made a pretty shitty husband, but I am willing to try to improve if you’ll forgive me my mistakes like I’m willing to forgive yours.”
“So you’re saying you’ll give this a go with me?”
“I’m saying that we were never married. We are two single people. As one single person to another, would you like to go on a first date?”
She wrinkles her brow and her nose. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On where we’re going. I have expensive tastes, you know?”
“And as your boss, I would be remiss not to indulge them. How about Giuseppe and Antonio’s restaurant in Rome? I hear they have reasonable food.”
She beams at me, but then her face crumbles. “I haven’t got my passport.”
“Don’t worry about that. You can make all those little irritations disappear when you’re the Don.”
