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That time I looked at her. Her side profile was just as beautiful as her front. They were just those little intricacies about her that drove me crazy. The little hair is by her ear; how slender her neckline was; from the side, you can see just how juicy her lips were. They were so kissable, and the other, I wanted to keep myself reserved. I wanted to enjoy my time on the boardwalk with her and keep her relaxed rather than constantly suck her face off. As much as I wanted to.
"What don't you like?" I asked her.
"I don't like that you put yourself down. You're the strong mafia CEO. Whatever you want to call yourself. And yet beneath, you don't find any value within yourself. How am I supposed to be your fake fiance when you don't believe in yourself?"
My lips were frozen. It made me think way too much. She hit a nerve. It was like driving down the road at 90 miles per hour and then heading to a speed bump. That was how my tongue felt.
"I'm sorry if I said too much. I'm just trying to understand you." Angelina said. Her tone was a little bit more reserved than before. She was still stern, but she pulled back a bit.
"No, it's fine. Maybe I could benefit from these questions. I don't know. No one's ever asked me them before. I don't know who the real version of myself is. When you have three different versions, it's hard to tell."
Based on her silence, I couldn't tell whether or not she was happy with that answer. But I guess at the end of the day, it was about her being happy but more about me being truthful. At least I wasn't being fake."
"That makes sense." She said.
We continued to walk. There was silence between us. But it wasn't one of those tension-filled silences. It was an okay silence, one that we were both copacetic with.
"When you're with me," she started, "Do you feel like you have to pretend to be someone?"
"No. And that may sound good to you. But at the same time, it's tremendously scary to be this person that I am with you."
"Well then, dare I say you might actually be the real version of yourself with me."
I chuckled. " Whatever helps you sleep at night, Angelina. But guess what?"
She looked at me with a smile. " What?"
"I know how we can help figure out the sound."
Everything I had told myself about not kissing her before went into the water nearby. Because I turned to kiss her as the sun was setting. It was weird. Somehow the kiss felt different all over again. It was kind of like I was kissing her for the first time. Her lips were soft, plump, wet, everything that would keep a man hooked. And boy, was I hooked. I pulled her in closer to me. The boardwalk would never be the same. It would forever be the place where she and I share the moment. No matter how we ended up or what the contract did to our relationship, this moment could not be taken away from us.
I took her to an outdoor restaurant not too far down on the boardwalk. It was called The Wood House. It was stationed right off the boardwalk, with a little deck with a perfect sunset view. The breeze passed us by, making the moment unforgettable. What was also unforgettable about that moment was her face.
Angelina sat there with wandering eyes. She took in the scenery and would rest her beautiful eyes on the water occasionally. I wondered what she was thinking about. She was curious about my dark mind. I was curious about what went on and that head of hers. We acted like we were together. We did everything a boyfriend and girlfriend should do. It didn't feel right that I was sitting there wondering what our label actually was. To me, that was a girl thing to do. But I couldn't help but wonder. Were we actually dating? Were we boyfriend and girlfriend? We were obviously fake engaged. But when you took away that fake piece of paper, what were we?
"As we sit here and wait for our appetizers, I can't help but wonder, when you look into your future Tomaso, what do you see?"
"See, you just keep coming up with these deep questions."
She pursed her lips and cut her eyes at me. "I do. And you're going to have to keep dealing with them if you want me to be your fake fiance."
I smiled and gave her a little shush. "Keep your voice down, okay. We don't need that advertised. Going back to her question, I looked hard. I went inside my brain and roamed to see what was up there. What did I really want for my future?
If I was being honest with myself, the only thing I could see in my brain was a black fog. I saw nothing ahead of me. This wasn't the answer that she wanted. Hell, this wasn't even the answer that I wanted for myself.
The answer that Angelina probably expected was for me to say I wanted her to be in my future. She probably also expected me to say that I had dreams of a white picket fence, a few kids in the yard, a wedding band, and waking up next to her every morning. Maybe they were parts of that which were true. Maybe I did have inklings of that in my head occasionally, but they were always clouded by that dark fog. That dark fog was not something that you could easily cut through. There was no mental flashlight to see through it. The story never ends well for a guy like me. She didn't want to hear that most mafia men either wind up being killed or going to jail. Sure, we had a fake engagement going. But that wasn't to get me out of my life. That wasn't to end my role in the mafia. That would simply be so that I didn't have to marry Linda. What did my life have in store for me when that contract was up?
It didn't seem like Angelina would be part of that. No matter how many times we kissed. No matter how many times we had sex. She did not deserve to get involved in the world of the mafia. Just because I have moments where I let my guard down and allowed her into who I was, did not mean that I felt secure enough to ruin her life.
As we sat in the restaurant, she gave me this look as though she could hear all my thoughts. It was a broken look. If I had a child and told them that we were not going to Disney World, I would have likened that look to what she had on her face.
"Are you that broken inside, Tomaso? You can't even imagine yourself living a good life in the future?"
I wasn't going to make a joke about her asking deep questions again.
Because she knew the answer to the one she had just asked, I wish she didn't. I wish that I didn't.
But the truth was that she and I did not have a future. As much as I wanted her to have one with me, a man like me only had two outcomes. I may have been three people. But one of those people had to die. No matter how nice she was to me or how much she got me to open up, that was reality. A harsh reality.
