by Tiffany Sala
“Strange, to be honest.” I started approaching in tentative steps. “I know Caroline is your cousin, but I’ve only just met her, so it didn’t feel like I was doing this whole thing with family like you’re supposed to.”
“I don’t know Caroline that well myself,” Devin said. He was staring into the television screen with tremendous interest, which would have been a lot easier to accept if it hadn’t been there on standby mode. “My mother loves her, says she’s the daughter she never had, but that makes me feel less likely to want to spend time with her. She’s far from a sister to me.”
Caroline had been strangely noncommital about her relationship with Angel. Maybe she didn’t feel the mother-daughter connection either.
I’d been half about to probe Caroline while we were out for details about Devin’s former girlfriends, just to see if her reaction suggested he was generally weird about relationships, but now I was glad I’d decided against it. She would have thought I was the stereotypical tragic jealous fiancée, and I would have probably drawn conclusions from her reaction when she didn’t really know anything.
It was a stupid idea anyway. She was likely to tell Angel who would tell Devin, and he’d be pissed I was trying to give him the runaround. If I wanted to find out more about him, I was going to have to do it directly.
I took a step towards the couch, then froze, the picture of Devin staring down his own faint reflection in the blackened TV screen just a little too much for me to get past.
“Yes?” Devin still hadn’t turned his head.
“Am I… interrupting something?”
There was a flicker of the eyes away from me. To the phone sitting on the arm of the couch closest to him.
Of course: the staring at the TV screen was just Devin being Devin, or something. He really was doing something else behind the scenes… something I knew better than to ask about.
“Sit down, Julia,” Devin told me.
“I was curious if you were interested in my company, not looking to be commanded.”
“It’s bound to end the same way, isn’t it?”
I scowled at him, but when he just kept staring at me I shrugged and sat down. I wasn’t going to be a coward like him and avoid the things that would help me get to know him.
“You mentioned another cousin the other day,” I started. “Are you closer to her?”
“Jellie? No, I don’t have much to do with the Torro side of my family.”
“Because of your mother?” I leaned closer, but Devin wouldn’t even turn his damn head.
“Because their interests are very different to mine. Not everything I do has some mafia politics purpose behind it, Julia.”
“I was more thinking it might be a personal, emotional thing for her,” I said, but my words got caught up on his finger over my lips. I poked my tongue out at it, which made him recoil fast with a grimace he couldn’t hide, and before he retaliated over that move I got in another question. “Will any of the Torro side be coming to the wedding?”
“It would be incredibly rude to leave my own father and his family out of the festivities.”
I scoffed at him in the way that had always gotten Daddy in a huff with me. “That’s not an answer, and you know it.”
“It would be enough of an answer for the average person with half a brain.”
“Insults, always the best way for an intellectual to shut someone else down.”
Well, he was looking at me now, at least. “Would you like to trade further insults, or would you rather see what I was doing today?”
“I didn’t think it was something I should know about,” I admitted.
Something about the way his expression changed made his eyes not seem so big and childish to me any more. “You thought it was going to be business matters.”
“It seemed like a reasonable assumption.”
He shifted sideways so he could draw something out of his pocket. Without showing me, he took up one of my hands and placed the object inside. I uncurled my fingers immediately, because I knew it by shape.
The jewel Angel had given us was completely transformed in a setting that clasped it in a manner so intricate I could barely focus on the details. There were carvings along the band as well, inside and out.
“This was a premade band, right?”
Devin pointed to a symbol carved near the setting. “With the O’Hare symbol?” I saw the matching but differing carving on the opposite side before he indicated it. “And the Torro one? I don’t think the average jeweller has a band like this in stock.”
There was something that really bothered me about those symbols. Where had I seen them before? “But it’s too much. Even if you got the design in the instant I was out of here, surely you couldn’t have had it done in a few hours.”
“Now that,” said Devin, “is where you’re completely correct… except when you happen to be talking about someone with the sort of connections and power I have.”
And there we were back in territory I didn’t want to explore. I turned the ring over in my hand. “It’s really beautiful. Thank you for going to all this trouble for me, I guess.”
“It’s what’s expected,” Devin said. “You need to be wearing a ring worthy of symbolising the commitment we’re going to make.” He took it back from me and slid it on my finger, having apparently gotten enough encouragement.
The thing was, he was speaking about it the same way he’d talked about the situation with my parents and their debt. I could tell this was really meaningful to him, and that was making it matter to me as well.
But that was just making me realise how abnormal my own response was. Any other young woman would have been beside herself, sobbing. Her path to this moment would have been a lot more romantic, of course, but surely I should be feeling something that was… softer.
Maybe what was happening now in my head was as soft as I got. After everything I’d done to guys I judged to be weaker than me, why was I expecting myself to behave like a regular girl?
I thought about that little change in Devin’s eyes. “Hey.” I was speaking before I’d really thought better of it. “Obviously you knew… who you’d been born to, a lot earlier than me… but was there a specific moment when you were younger that you started to understand what that meant? Like, you realised your life was always going to be different to other kids’?”
I didn’t entirely expect him to answer. He was silent for several seconds, hardly moving, and then he made a soft noise, a hum. Warming his voice.
Suddenly I was afraid without really knowing why, but there was nothing I could do. I had asked him to tell me, and for once he was giving me exactly what I wanted.
Chapter Thirteen
“I was seven or eight, in a regular primary school not far from here.” His right hand moved, grasping for his phone, then he left it alone and pulled my hand he was still holding onto his knee, placing both of his over it. If the ring I was wearing was digging in, he didn’t give any sign. “It might surprise you to hear this, Julia, but I was not the best of children.”
“Shocking revelation.”
“I was always targeting kids a bit younger, a bit smaller. The ones I knew wouldn’t be able to give me any shit in return. Except this one time, there was this kid—Billy Burke, I remember his name really fucking vividly—and he did give me shit. He told me he wanted me to stop pushing him around and trying to scare him, and no he wasn’t going to give me his lunch money, by the way. And I’d never run into this situation before when I was running this scam, so I panicked a bit. I hit him in the face, gave him a bloody lip, and he told on me to the teacher. Told on me to his parents.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. It took me all too quickly back to the years I’d spent at school, the way I’d been with some of the other girls. My behaviour had always been a bit mixed: sometimes I would be trying to be best friends with these girls, but when I got tired of that I would switch to pushing and pinching.
“I went home
and told my mother because I thought I was done for sure, there was a really strict anti-bullying policy at my school, but I was really confused. She told me Billy Burke’s family was broke as all fuck and the poor bastard probably never had any lunch money for me to rob in the first place. That was what she seemed most bothered by. Not that I’d done it but that I’d done it to a kid with no money. And I figured that was just because it was a really bad look for a family like ours, with a really nice lifestyle. But then I went back to school, and… nothing happened. I didn’t get called up to account for what I’d done, Billy’s mother didn’t come to the school to address it further… but I could tell from the way Billy glared at me sometimes across the classroom that absolutely nothing had been forgiven and forgotten.”
“Your mother put a stop to it,” I said.
“She never did a thing. She didn’t have to… our teacher put a stop to it.”
“Your teacher? Wow, that’s…” I didn’t know what to say—more to the point, I didn’t know what I could say. The corruption in this world I was apparently a part of was seriously deep.
“She pulled me back after class and had a chat with me, explained she’d headed off Billy and his mother because she knew there was nothing good that could come to them from picking a fight with my family. I swear she said it just like that too, like it was a given an eight-year-old kid from a crime family would know exactly what sort of shenanigans his parents were involved in. I didn’t ask her any questions, I was already used to not asking too many questions at home, but it was in my mind then. I realised we were different, and everyone knew about it. And…”
I wanted to press him when he stayed silent, encourage him to keep talking, but some intuition warned me to keep my mouth shut. I was used to brushing intuition aside, doing what I wanted. This time, I followed intuition.
“I think that moment damaged me,” Devin said. “Before then, I believed what every other kid in that class did, what they’d learned from their parents—that school had authority over us, power over us, and that was just the beginning. I thought I had to be careful, to control myself, or else I was going to be smacked back down into my place. And after that, I knew my world was a completely different world. I spent a lot more time doing things the way I wanted, not factoring other people into it at all. That makes a big difference.”
And maybe the same thing had happened to me. “I don’t think I ever had a moment where a teacher was that explicit with me. I probably wasn’t badly-behaved enough for that. But I guess I felt that too. That the rules didn’t apply, and I could just play the way I wanted with life.”
“And then you met that one boy who made you feel you weren’t beyond everything.”
“Bringing that up again.” But I didn’t feel like Devin was trying to mess with me this time. He was just asking questions, trying to learn more, the way I’d been doing with him. “Yes, I guess what happened with Steven had me running for cover again. Nobody ever told him who I really was, clearly.”
“And your parents never bothered to step up and do something about it.” That had me bristling a lot more, but I tried to bear with him. “The question that bothers me is, was that just some pettiness on their part… or were they trying to protect you in their twisted way?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“I worry about that,” said Devin in return. “I don’t know what the outcome is going to be for you. I think I may be bringing you into a world you are not equipped to handle.”
I tried to touch his shoulder, his face. He moved, so his stubble slid under my fingers. “That’s why you need to open up to me, Devin. If it’s the two of us together, we can help each other. I know we don’t know one another very well yet, but we would be able to get to—”
“And when you say things like that, you tell me I am right to have concerns.” He looked me directly in the eyes and took both my hands in both of his. Maybe he thought he needed to keep me from roving, trying things on him that would lead to trouble. “You haven’t paid any attention at all, have you? In our world, intimate relationships are deeply hazardous. If you expose yourself to someone in that way, you are liable to find it’s your undoing.”
“But not if we’re getting married,” I protested. “We have to come to trust one another. Right?” I pulled my hand now bearing his ring back so I could shake the gaudy diamond in his face. “Wasn’t that the point of this?”
“I see it as more of a protective arrangement for both of us. There are legal protections for each of us… incentives to keep one another’s secrets.”
I fixed him with what I hoped was the most vicious look I had in me. “I never went to the cops after you kidnapped me, didn’t go running to my parents begging them to find someone to break your kneecaps, and you thought you needed some other way of getting me to keep your secrets?”
“I didn’t think I needed to do anything so drastic to have you keep quiet. You always refuse to understand when I am trying to protect you, Julia.”
“No, Devin, could it be I just don’t want to be protected from my future husband?”
“You really want to fall in love?” His reaction to that was soft, subtle: like it was amusing, but not something he cared much about either way. That was exactly what I didn’t want: to be regarded as a child, better seen and not heard and only engaged with when discipline was required. “Haven’t you seen enough to know that is such a fool’s treasure?”
I hadn’t; in that very moment, with him, I realised wanting his love had become secondary, and not even about the protection it could offer any more. I wanted to be the one to fall too. And I could see it now: he was going to laugh at me when I revealed my thoughts to him. He’d say I was soft, not even worthy of the girl who had made those other young men go so loopy.
But fuck him, he was going to hear the truth anyway. “I broke a lot of hearts in the past, twisted quite a few, but you know what? I hardly ever felt anything myself. Maybe you’re going to think this is some feminine nonsense, but I wonder what it would be like to have my own heart broken.”
“You are self-destructive,” said Devin with a strange calm fascination.
“I just don’t want to be protected by someone who claims it’s for my own good. Everyone can see through that.”
“Not everyone.” Devin turned a little more towards me. “It just amazes me that this is even something you want.”
“Well, we can’t help who we are at the end of the day,” I said. “Our inclinations, the things that draw us in… that’s all set in advance.”
Devin had his hands on my shoulders. “I cannot accept that.”
A show of genuine force from such a controlled man… and at such an interesting time.
I felt the old strategising part of my brain coming to life again, trying to anticipate where he was going next with this debate, with the whole interaction, so I could be ready to match it. But I couldn’t imagine where he would go next, and that made it more thrilling than I would have expected.
“I suppose you can try to prove me wrong, if you want. It’s just what I’ve seen, over and over again. And from the way you act about my parents, I have a feeling you’ve seen it too.”
“I don’t want to hear about your parents, Julia,” Devin told me, and he followed that ruling up with a kiss that bent me back against the arm of the chair.
As soon as I could get my thoughts in some kind of order, I pulled myself back upright and got my hands in his hair so he couldn’t get away from me. He caught my wrists and flung me back again. There he was, retaliating before I did anything to him—but no, I understood he wasn’t from his perspective. He was trying to keep the upper hand as a matter of survival, in case I managed to break through and prove him wrong on any one of a number of critical issues.
I didn’t think I was wrong. So I let him take hold of me, use his mouth on me the way I knew he was good at… and I didn’t let on how I was bursting with smugness when I felt his fingers dig in harder, his bo
dy become rigid, his eyes wide and staring like always, but with a level of intensity he usually didn’t allow to come out.
Then I felt him soften, almost like he was melting into me, and when he was close to me like that, all my feelings of superiority at being able to get him in a way he didn’t want to be had were suddenly hard to find. Instead I was left weakened, awed in the face of the way it felt when he opened himself up, even a little.
Had I experienced something like this before? Even the slightest touch of it that would… Surely not. If I’d known anything could be like this, I would never have dared go anywhere near a boy. Not even at my highest levels of confidence.
I tried to squirm away from him, and his grip tightened on me.
“Oh, no,” he breathed in my ear. “If I’m not allowed to protect you… maybe I just have to teach you.”
I was afraid of what I might find as part of this encounter now, but that just meant I had to be stronger facing it. I wasn’t going to back off just because it was scary. I could only imagine what he’d have to say if I pushed him so hard and then went running.
I struggled harder, but as a part of the game. So he could feel the way my heart was racing as I tried to picture just what teaching he had in mind.
I let him have his way when he pushed my skirt up, when he wrapped my legs around his waist and stood with me, taking careful steps towards the bedroom. I pulled my knees together tighter, trying to keep from slipping, and I froze when I realised I could feel something I hadn’t considered: his arousal, apparently determined to make its presence known even if he was determined for his part to try keeping up this repressed aura.
It was a complete shift in perspective. He was interested…
At least body-deep. Something that was shocking to me: I wasn’t so interested in that any more. Once, it had been enough for me if a guy saw I was hot and was drawn in by my mysterious act, never mind if he had the first idea what my favourite movie might be, or who I became once the door was closed on the rest of the world. Now, I didn’t want Devin to just want my body.
