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And now, since I’ve already jumped into the deep end of poor decision-making, I decide to tie a lead weight around my ankles and sink further. “Let me take you to get a coffee with me at the café next door,” I offer.
“Are you serious?” she asks in a tone that mimics a whisper. “Why?”
I know what she’s really asking, and it has nothing to do with spilled coffee. The true question iswhy would you want to take me anywhere after you left me all that time ago, but that’s not as easy a question to answer. “Sure, why not?” I say with my trademark charming smile that makes most women drop at my feet. “We can catch up a bit. It’s been a long time.”
Dahlia hesitates. I can see her searching my face for ulterior motives and coming up with nothing. She seems utterly confused. Join the club; so am I. I haven’t acted this carelessly since my high-school days. But after a few minutes of internal deliberating that plays out on her face as if I’m reading a script of her thoughts, she finally accepts my offer. “Okay, sure,” she smiles politely as she tucks her actual script inside her jacket and walks beside me toward the door.
I suppose we might was well take the back door exit she’d been initially aiming for, since now we both have reason to avoid the director.Damnit, I think to myself as I walk behind Dahlia after she steps through the open door. I look at the way her jeans cling to her curves like a second skin, and find my thoughts traveling to places they shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t even tempt myself by being around her at all, and yet here I am, doing it anyway. This is exactly why I left her to begin with, not because I was done with her, but because I knew that if I stayed with Dahlia, I wouldn’t be able to keep myself from wanting her.
And in my world, wanting things, caring about anyone, it’s a weakness all too easily exploited. I protected Dahlia once by leaving her in my past, and I paid for letting myself get involved with another woman, by winding up having a motherless child. How bitterly and savagely sweet it is to find myself right back in Dahlia’s world again. This is either going to end up being really good or violently bad for both of us. I guess I was a stronger man back then than I am now, because before I know it, I’m ordering her a caramel macchiato from a doe-eyed barista and wondering how the hell I’m going to explain not canceling the Broadway production to my brothers.
3
DAHLIA
What am I doing here? I’m so nervous as I sit across the high-top café table from Vari that my thighs are shaking against the seat. What was I even thinking, agreeing to “catch up” with him over coffee? This is the man who broke my heart, the man I’ve never truly gotten over being madly in love with, even after he devastated me. I should’ve been happy I spilled his coffee all over his pants. It’s the tiniest bit of retribution for all he did to put my emotional health through the wringer. But instead, here I am, sitting and sipping a caramel macchiato as if we’re old friends.
We’re not friends. We never were. Vari and I were the most passionate, most intensely in love, most reactionary lovers of all time. Being “friends” was never part of the picture. And as much as I desperately want to hate him for having crushed me, I can’t. Even despite myself, and totally despite my mother’s warnings, I’m drawn back in like a moth to a flame, ready to burn up for a moment of orbiting his warmth again. Vari is a powerful and very dangerouscaponow. And I’m at least not foolish enough to think that having a coffee with him isn’t a risky, albeit small, act. He and his two brothers, Petre and Alessio, run their family’sborgata, and they have a healthy control over the entirety of the Theatre District in Midtown Manhattan.
I always thought the reason Vari was one of theatre’s most prominent benefactors was because he recognized the money to be made on Broadway. Plus, it’s such a high-traffic area that it provides a busy enough backdrop for mafia business to get lost in plain sight. The cops tend to stay away from the arts districts and focus more on the boroughs like the one my single mom still lives in, the impoverished and less fortunate areas of the city that are given a bad rap for having more criminal activity. Little do the cops know that the infrequent shoplifting for diapers or the occasional indecent exposure of a recovering addict are nothing compared to the more elegant and severely damaging crimes that people like Vari and the other mafia families engage in. Or perhaps the cops do know, and they simply don’t care. It’s easier to pick on the little guy than to take down a whole operation, especially when that operation lines the pockets of several of the city’s police captains.
But what I didn’t know is that Vari is more layered culturally than I previously thought. “It’s a guilty pleasure of mine,” he says as he sips his black coffee. The stain on his pants is now hidden beneath the café’s wooden tabletop, but I still can’t get the image of the bulge beneath that spill out of my head.
“What is?” I ask, realizing too late that he already told me and I wasn’t paying attention, because I was daydreaming about his cock.
“The theatre,” Vari repeats. “I have an affinity for the performing arts.”
“Really? I figured you just—” I let my voice trail off because I’m not really sure I want to finish that sentence. I might have known Vari very well a long time ago, but I need to keep my defenses sharpened because of who and what he is now. My mother’s warnings flash through my head.Never trust a man in the mafia.
“You figured I was just trying to control one of the highest-profile venues in all of Manhattan, for reasons perhaps not entirely related to theatre?” he asks with an accusatory smirk. “You wouldn’t be entirely wrong with that assumption. But the reason I contribute as much as I do to the theatre is because of how much I love it.” I’m surprised, since Vari never once indicated a love for the theatre when we were together. I guess a lot about him has changed since then. “Giving a lot of money to the theatre gives me a lot of say in what makes it to the stage and what doesn’t.”
I wrinkle my forehead in disapproval. “I don’t think anyone should have the ultimate say on which performances get censored,” I say. “Especially not someone who’s buying their voice. Those choices should be left to the creative directors and the actors themselves.”
“Perhaps,” Vari says like an afterthought as he mulls over my perspective. “But sometimes, things that are placed in the public eye need to be balanced.” I can read between his words to understand he’s referring to the current play.
We talk for a bit more. He asks how my mother’s doing, and I tell him she’s still well and still living in East Harlem in my childhood apartment. “Do you still live in East Harlem too?” he asks. I don’t know why he cares. He didn’t care when he left me, and he obviously hasn’t cared in all the years we’ve lived in the same city but he’s never so much as bothered to send me a text message or call to make sure I’m still alive.
“No, I moved out of there a couple of years ago,” I answer, not sure why I’m even giving Vari any personal information about me. We might as well be strangers at this point. “I live on Canal Street now.”
“Canal Street?” he asks with a look of distaste.
“What, you aren’t a fan?”
“It’s just a dangerous place for a single female to live,” he says. “There’s a lot of crime there and—” The raise of my eyebrows interrupts his sentence. He of all people shouldn’t be criticizing criminal activities. Vari is at the top of the illegal activities pyramid.
“You sound like my mom,” I joke to try and lighten the mood. “She’s always worrying about me living in my shitty apartment in that neighborhood.”
“Well, she’s not wrong.”
“I wanted to be out on my own.”
“Embracing the starving artist vibe, are we?” he smirks.
Damn that grin of his—it’s so sexy, so enthralling, like a snake hypnotizing its prey before coming in to squeeze the life out of it. Vari’s debonair smile gets me every time and makes me feel as if my knees are too weak to stand up.
“Enough about me,” I say, trying to change the subject and relieve the building heat in my chest. “What have you been up to?” Of course, I realize that this is a loaded question to ask a mafia boss. And it doesn’t get me very far anyway, because all Vari does is avoid answering anything directly. He dances around, swinging his words into pirouettes that twirl around each other until all he’s actually said is that he’s essentially keeping very busy.
After our coffee, and after a bunch of talking that seems one-sided, and after a bunch of wanton glances across the narrow table at each other, I head back home to my modest apartment in what has now been determined by both my mom and my ex-boyfriend to be one of the most unsafe areas of the city. “Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you home?” Vari asks before we part.
