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My lips felt numb as I struggled to answer. I couldn’t tell her the truth. She would be shocked. She would demand I come home.
Home. Where was that, exactly? The place I’d stayed at with my aunt? The house where I’d grown up in Georgia, now crowded with the apparitions of my dead parents? Or was it the tiny place I shared with Mia, where we tried not to notice each other’s ghosts when we passed too close to them? We were both waging a battle for normalcy. It had been in short supply since I’d been eleven and Mia fourteen, and we’d mourned its loss ever since.
But what was normal, really? Did it even exist? If it meant denying the darker, neglected parts of myself I’d never been brave enough to explore, I didn’t want anything to do with it.
“I’m at a club,” I said, couching a lie in the truth. She’d never suspect a club likethis. “How is the movie?”
Movies seemed so banal and ordinary. I’d aged in the past hour. I didn’t feel more experienced, but I sure felt older. Even a little wiser.
No wonder Giovanni didn’t want to play withlittle girlslike me. He knew where he could be satisfied by women who wouldn’t saynoorwaitorplease pretend you love me, just a little bit. There was an honesty here, maybe more than the average person could handle.
More thanIcould handle.
“What club?” Mia demanded.
No movie could compete with smothering me.
“Just a club. No big deal. Did you go to an early show?”
“It’s past eleven, Carly Ann. The movie’s over. When are you coming home?”
When I find one that’s mine.
“Soon,” I said vaguely, aware of voices coming from another one of the VIP rooms. Loud male Italian cursing. The sound of a glass being slammed onto a table. Those guys weren’t getting their dicks sucked—or else they weren’t pleased with the service.
Unlike Giovanni, who hadn’t made a peep when that woman knelt between his splayed legs.
Mia’s sigh gusted over the phone, somehow audible even in the noisy club. “Are you okay?” Her voice gentled. “I don’t mean to be a nag. I know you’re an adult now, I just worry.”
“I know.” Because I understood all too well how it felt to watch the clock when Mia was out late without calling, I tried to dial back my annoyance.
My sister was my whole world. I adored her. Whatever problems we had, they were insignificant in the scheme. She couldn’t help wanting to shelter me. After what she’d been through, that was the only way she knew how to be.
At twenty-five, I’d probably appreciate her attentiveness. Now it just felt restrictive and cloying, like a noose around my neck she could pull from miles away. I hated that feeling. I wanted more than anything for it to go away. I didn’t want to chafe at the boundaries she’d set for me. If only I could just…behave.
But I couldn’t. I’d behaved for far too long.
“I should’ve left a note to tell you I was going out,” I conceded, moving toward a corner that promised relative privacy. I could chill next to a fake plant and pretend not to remember that Giovanni was probably panting through an orgasm at this very moment. One he’dpaidfor, no less. “I thought I’d be back before you were. Didn’t you guys stop for a bite after the movie?”
“Mama drama,” was all she said, and I left it at that.
I knew she meant Fox’s mother, because ours was long dead. I’d been just a kid when our mother had died of an aneurysm. Sometimes I barely remembered her, though before she’d been kidnapped, Mia had fought hard to keep Mama’s memories alive for me.
So many things had changed the day my sister had been taken. My dad, before he’d passed shortly thereafter from a heart attack. Mia. Me.
I’d always been the strong one, the one who had everything together. I’d had a counselor after Mia came home again, until it had been decided I was so well-adjusted that I didn’t need one.
Yeah, not so much.
“You should watch ‘Pretty Woman’,” I told Mia before realizing what I’d said. It was my sister’s favorite movie, and one we’d watched together a million times, but right now, the hooker with a heart of gold struck too close to home when girls were getting paid for blowjobs a few feet away.
Not that I would ever do that. But I might do something else. Like…dance.
“I’ve seen it so many times I can recite the lines myself. Besides, you’re not here. I usually wait to watch it with you.”
Was I imagining things or was that really a whine in her voice? She probably sensed I was in a place I didn’t belong. One that might push me closer to an edge I hadn’t realized I’d been tiptoeing on forever.
“You sound like you need the feels. Go ahead and start it.” I forced myself to move out of the corner I’d disappeared into.
