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“What do you mean?” Lucero asked.
He opened his mouth to answer, only to close it as his throat became clogged with emotion.
Seeing his struggle, she didn’t insist. Instead, she brought a warm towel to his torso, slowly and carefully cleaning him.
Her scent drifted towards him, lulling him into a sense of comfort unlike any he’d ever experienced before. Maybe only with curiouscat, but that had been different because they’d never met in person—only online.
She moved closer, so close, his skin itched with a need to brush against hers.
But he didn’t.
He just let her tend to him as he listened to the mesmerizing sounds of her breath.
“My brother,” he whispered as she brought the towel to his neck.
His hand caught her wrist as he slowed her movement, keeping the warm material against his skin as he struggled to find the courage to speak.
He’d never said it out loud before, had he?
For years he’d carried the burden with him, thinking about it and churning it in his mind, but he’d never dared to utter it out loud.
“I couldn’t save my brother.”
“You don’t have to tell me if it makes you sad,” she whispered.
Her other hand came to rest against his cheek, her thumb brushing a drop of moisture off his skin. Rafaelo belatedly realized he was crying, the saltiness of the tears only causing him more pain.
He didn’t know what it was about that moment, or about the woman itself that toppled all his barriers. Yet against all odds, he found himself confiding in her what he’d never confided in anyone before.
“I betrayed him,” he stated in a hoarse, inconsolable voice.
The towel dropped from her hand as she simply snuggled against him, her small frame fitting in his lap as she laid her head against his chest.
The rumble of his voice filled her ears as Noelle listened about his own dysfunctional family, how his mother, despite being a good mother for him, was awful to his half-siblings. Raf explained how his childhood had been, happy in ignorance until the bubble had been broken and he’d realize the rotten world he lived in.
He described his brother and sister, and though she could see he bore both of them a great deal of love, she also noted the sadness in his voice as he said their names.
“We were close, but notthatclose. Growing up, it was always Gianna and Michele. They were inseparable. And there was me… A little on the outside,” he paused. “It sounds so bad when I say it. I had my parents’ regard and I was privileged in a way they weren’t simply because of my mother. Yet I always felt like an outsider,” he confessed.
“You’re not the only one,” Noelle whispered. “I’m the youngest and the only girl in the family. My brothers… There’s a big age gap between us and we’ve never been close.”
“Do you wish you were?”
“Maybe… Maybe at some point I did,” she admitted, biting on her lip as she remembered all those lonely times in her childhood.
“My brother and I… There was a time I thought he was my best friend. I had acquaintances at school, but I didn’t have anyone I could be myself with. But then…” he swallowed hard as she went on to tell her of his school years. He’d been the popular kid—thegolden boy—while Michele had been the pariah. Still, Raf had tried his best to help him whenever he would get picked on. But things changed drastically when his father decided to initiate in the family business.
Noelle listened attentively, masking her surprise at hearing he, too, belonged to an Italian crime family. Her brother had never told her that little tidbit, but he must have known.
Was that why he’d been so against him? Because they weren’t on good terms? She supposed that might have been a factor.
Yet the more Rafaelo talked, the more she realized they had in common.
Both born in the wrong families; both without any type of support. Yet she also saw the differences.
While she’d been fine with being judged for being true to herself, Rafaelo had done everything in his power to make people like him—to the point that he’d buried his own self in order to be who people wanted him to be.
It was a different type of loneliness, and in her opinion, a worse one.
