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“I’m fine,” he shrugs.
“Are you sure? You know you can tell me anything.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Lucas says as he nods his small head. “I really like Dahlia a lot. Do you think we can keep her?”
I have to admit to being perplexed by his question, and by his instant affection for a woman he’s known not more than a hot minute. “Keep her?” I ask. “Like have her stay here with us, you mean?”
Lucas nods again. “She reminds me a little of Mom.”
I let him know that Dahlia will indeed be staying with us for a “little while,” but I don’t have the heart to tell him that it won’t be forever.
9
DAHLIA
Vari has every conceivable thing I might possibly need for the next several weeks during my time staying here brought into the apartment. On the surface, it looks like he’s going overboard trying to make me comfortable and happy, for reasons I still don’t understand. But I’m still feeling much too out of place and anxious to appreciate his efforts. The bottom line is that he forced my hand and essentially gave me no choice other than to stay here with him, and no amount of gifting is going to gloss over that.
Vari’s apartment is luxurious, heavily guarded, and entirely overwhelming. I find myself just wanting to go back to my dingy apartment on Canal Street where I can be alone and put some physical distance between me and all of the conflicting feelings I’m having about Vari. I know with every fiber of my being that I still love him, and every time I see him I want him. It’s a terrific torture. But Vari is dangerous and arrogant and controlling, and I don’t like the way he looks at me with longing in his eyes when he’s the one who broke my heart and not the other way around. It’s hypocritical and perplexing at best, and entirely earth-shattering at worst.
But still, even as much as I try to convince myself of all the reasons I shouldn’t keep falling back into his orbit, I can’t help but wonder why he’s trying so hard to protect me. Could it even be possible that he still cares about me and just doesn’t want to admit it? And if so, then why would he have left me behind to begin with and run off to knock up some other woman? The more I try to think about it and come up with some sort of answer that makes any sense at all, the more twisted around my thoughts become in my head, and the more curious I become about what kind of man Vari Roberto really is. If he’s truly the cold, calculating mafia boss his reputation makes him out to be, how can he be so gentle with his son and so protective over a woman he once left behind in his past? It just doesn’t make sense.
So, since I’m stuck here in this penthouse with nothing better to do than stay awake all night plagued by questions without any viable answers, I decide to wait until Vari and Lucas are asleep and then go exploring. Late at night, I peek out of the room I locked myself into and see Vari fast asleep on the couch. I stand there in the darkness for a minute or two, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest to make sure he really is sound asleep. Lucas is tucked into his bed with a soft yellow nightlight shedding a glow out into the hall, and nothing else is stirring in the sprawling space at all. So, I start to snoop around.
I wander from room to room, not even sure what I’m in search of, just anything that might help me piece together the puzzle that is Vari. Everything I find reads like nothing other than a normal home for a single guy and his son. Obviously I know that Vari is a mafiacapo, but his personal place doesn’t breathe a word of it, until I step inside his office. At first the room is incredibly appealing, filled with the kinds of things I’m drawn to, things I never knew held space in Vari’s heart and mind as well.
The shelves are packed with various novels, plays and poetry compilations that I’m quickly learning are Vari’s guilty pleasures. But interspersed between the volumes are things that make my heart sink as soon as I see them. Bottles of pills, designer drugs, guns with silencers, with no attempt to make their contents hidden. It’s an alarming amount for a personal stash and it makes me feel ill to think that Vari would have these in his home.
It isn’t until I come across a box of old photographs tucked behind a stack of scripts that I realize I’ve found the most disturbing thing of all. I expect the photos inside to be old mementos, probably of Lucas’ mother, but I realize they’re of me. I don’t even know what I’m feeling as I stare at the old photos of myself and the time Vari and I shared together. It’s like looking at another woman living a life I barely even remember or recognize anymore. I want to feel flattered or even hopeful as I think about the possible reasons Vari might’ve held onto all of these. But I also feel disarmed by it. Why, after having left me and gone on with another woman, would Vari still have these?
I thumb through the pictures, looking at each one with tenderness as I remember the moments they were taken. It’s as if I’m reliving a previous life, one that still exists for some inexplicable reason, inside this box. But then, just as I’m thumbing through the last of them, I hear a noise behind me and turn to see Vari standing there. I don’t mean to drop the box, but I do. Between how startled I am to see him standing there in the dimly lit doorway, shirtless and looking hotter than ever with the moonlight reflecting off his chiseled chest, and the fact that I was caught rifling through things that don’t belong to me, I’m frozen in a stiff silence.
Vari looks annoyed, probably because he caught me going through his things without permission. There are plenty of incriminating and dangerous things in this room I shouldn’t know are here, let alone touch. But none of those things interest me as much as the box of photos does. I look down and see the pictures all scattered in disarray at my feet. The box itself landed top-down and I can see the corners of photographs peeking out from beneath it. Quickly, I bend down and try to collect them all back up to replace within the box and return all of it to the shelf. “Leave it,” Vari says gruffly.
I stand up without trying to pick them up anymore. This is reminiscent of when I first ran into him again and spilled coffee all down his pants. “I’m sorry,” I stammer. “It’s just that you startled me and I—”
“You were snooping around in my library?” he interrupts.
I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of being the righteous one here, not after all he’s already done. So I turn the tables back around on him. “Why don’t you just leave me alone and let me go? You’re the one who broke up with me, remember? So why am I even here, Vari? You seem hell-bent on protecting me from some invisible enemy, when all I really want to do is go home and get back to my rehearsals.”
“It’s not safe for you to do that.”
“It sure seems like things started getting unsafe right after the morning you first showed up at the theatre.” I look down and reach for one of the photographs sitting right on top of the box. It’s an old picture of me and Vari dressed up for a Monte Carlo night our senior year. God, that was a fun night. I felt so free and in love and invincible. The night after that is when Vari broke up with me.
“I don’t understand you,” I say with a frown. My heart still feels as bruised as it was on the night that he left me. “If you didn’t want me, then why hold onto all of these? Why won’t you just leave me alone?” I stare at his face in the doorway and search his eyes for answers, but all I can see is that it looks like he’s wrestling with himself.
“Ihavetried to leave you alone, Dahlia,” he says with desperation in his tone. “But I can’t.” Vari takes two big strides inside the room, lunges forward toward me, and pulls my body against him. The next thing that I know, his mouth is on mine and I’m sinking into the fantasy that I’ve had in my sleep every night since that night Vari left me. Except this time I’m not dreaming.
10
VARI
I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s a moment of unprecedented weakness, yet I can’t seem to help myself. Catching Dahlia snooping around in my apartment in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but a set of skimpy camisole pajamas that I had delivered here for her, quite literally erects all the feelings I’ve been trying to push down. Everything I once felt, tried to forget, and still find myself wrestling with all come rushing right back up to the surface the moment I see her standing there.
Am I mad that she’s snooping around my apartment, peering into pieces of my life she shouldn’t be? Yes. But not for the reasons she might think. I’m only mad that she’s now forced me into this position of not being in control of my emotions and urges. I feel exposed as she stands there holding the box of photos I shouldn’t have kept for this long. And not because my chest is bare or my cock is quickly swelling and pushing against my cotton sweatpants, but because the box she just dropped on the floor and all of the pictures inside were supposed to stay tucked neatly away and hidden, just like my feelings for Dahlia. Now everything is out in the open, and when she asks me why I still have them and why I don’t just leave her alone, there’s nothing else that I can say but the truth.
“Ihavetried to leave you alone, Dahlia,” I say with desperation in my tone. “But I can’t.” Her lips fall ever so slightly open in shock, and I simply can’t control myself. I step into the room, grab Dahlia in my arms, and pull her against me. My mouth covers hers before she has a chance to utter a sound, and I push my tongue between her lips to meet with her own. It’s only a matter of seconds before I feel her tongue encircle mine with an urgency I’ve desired since the moment she bumped into me and spilled that coffee on my pants. And despite all her halfhearted protests about me stepping back into her life at the theatre, I can clearly see now that she’s been fighting these same feelings I have. Because as soon as I have Dahlia’s body pressed against me, she doesn’t try to pull away. Instead, she throws her arms around my neck, twists her fingers in my short hair, and pulls me closer.
The single kiss leads quickly to another, and yet another, until we’re an inseparable tangle of arms and tongues, trying to get closer and closer until our clothing feels like an unbearable barricade that needs to be broken through. I lift Dahlia into my arms and carry her back to my bedroom, kissing her the entire way down the hall until I reach the bed and lay her down against the soft blanket. There is no slow gentleness about how I tear the clothes away from her body, only the ravishing need to have her now. My cock fills with the pounding desire to push inside of her, and as soon as I do, my head fills with the pounding thoughts of how much I still love this woman. All my feelings for Dahlia are still there, right where I left them, as strong as they ever were. And I know now that it’s because she’s the one woman I’ve ever truly loved.
