by Liz Crowe
He put my hand in my lap, re-zipped, and sat, gripping the steering wheel and staring out into the dark. Flustered, confused, my mind racing from one possibility to the next, I got out without a word and went inside. My parents were sitting on the couch, my mother’s feet in my father’s lap. He was watching television. Her eyes were closed.
“I’m moving back to New York,” I declared, daring them to contradict me. “I’m gonna finish school.”
Mama sat up and yawned. “Did you fight with your boyfriend?”
“God damn it, Mama.” I hated her even more for reducing me to this adolescent emotional state—or more accurately for sussing out why I was so upset without me saying a word. “He finally kissed me for the first time tonight, and then made me get out of his car before I got what I really wanted.”
My father raised one dark eyebrow. I guess by this stage of his life, after parenting me and my wild-ass brothers, there was very little that would shock the man.
Mama got up and stretched. Daddy sat there, having not even moved from his position since I first walked in.
“I knew I liked that boy,” she said, giving my cheek a little pat on her way past. “Will they give you your place back at the school?”
I sighed and gritted my teeth. “They will, even if I have to start all over again.”
I stomped after her into the kitchen. “You’re not sick anymore, right? I mean, I’m not gonna get yanked back to this fucking hellhole over a cancer surgery or another emergency, right? Mama?”
She regarded me in that flat, neutral way she’d adopted for as long as I could remember. “Well, since I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t say for certain, but I’ll make you a promise. You go to New York and finish your schooling, and I promise not to bother you with my silly cancer anymore. Deal?” She walked past me before I could respond.
“Deal,” I said into the empty room, stuffing a couple of bucks into the swear jar out of habit.
I grabbed a set of keys and headed out. “I’ll be late,” I said to Daddy. “If I come home tonight at all.”
When he opened the door to his apartment, Cal looked rumpled, as if he’d fallen asleep on the couch in his clothes. I launched myself at him and wrapped my arms around his neck, moving us toward back to the couch. “It will be tonight, Cal Morrison. Humor me.”
He did. Several times. When I woke in his arms I’d never felt safer.
Chapter Twenty
New York City
Three Years Later
“Honey, please, just listen to me.”
I blew out a breath and leaned against the tiny counter in the miniscule walkup I’d been squatting in since returning to New York.
“I’m not in the mood, I’m sorry.” I flexed my foot, pondering the nasty, swollen ankle, and worrying about the audition coming up for the end-of-year performance. “I know you’ve got the weekend off, but I’m telling you I don’t have time for …”
“Angel,” Calvin said, the calm in his voice like fingernails on my internal chalkboard. “It’s been almost six weeks. I’m sorry, too, but I need …”
I grinned, despite my aggravation. “Steady diet of phone sex not enough for you, Doc?”
He was almost through medical school. Since I had to start from scratch, I still had one year to go at the performing arts school. He was now, in fact, my boyfriend. And I loved him so much it scared me sometimes.
“You could say that.” He sounded stressed.
“How’re Diana and the baby?”
“They seem to be doing fine. Dominic’s stuck fast to her side. He’s helping her find a new house.”
The only thing that could have forced my prodigal brother to return to the bosom of the Love family was the God-awful tragedy that befell Diana Brantley and her brief marriage to Lee Tolliver, the handsome and perfect vet. But that whole thing had gone down while I was working my way back into my professors’ good graces. I felt sufficiently removed from it to be objective. “How’s her frame of mind?”
“Better every day. Jen and Dale are busy renovating the farmhouse. The B&B should be open in the spring.”
“Good.” I hesitated, flexing my sore foot and ankle again. “I miss you, baby.”
“Oh, Angel, you have no idea how much I miss you.” He sighed, making me shiver all over. “Please let me see you this weekend. I won’t take up much space. Just a corner of the bed, me, and my blue balls.”
“Oh, all right,” I said, since I wanted to see him as much as he wanted to see me, if not more. “I gotta go.”
“I love you,” he said.
I bit my lip. “You too,” I said … flippant, I know. But the way I felt about the genuinely gentle, kind, smart, handsome, amazingly-adept-in-bed man had a way of overwhelming me to the point that I resisted it.
I jumped in the shower and got dressed up for a night out with girlfriends. I loved the sort of dancing I could do at a club—wild, un-choreographed, unscripted, sexy. I’d rebuffed plenty of hot guys at the end of those nights; all it took was the memory of my first time with Cal, when I cried and he wiped my tears and swore he’d never let anyone hurt me again, for me to head home alone.
That night, I drank a little more than usual, thanks to a dude who kept sending ice-cold vodka shots down the bar to our little group.
“He’s into you,” I said to Gwen, a tall, willowy blonde.
“Nah, it’s you,” she said, slamming her shot and heading to the dance floor.
I shrugged, drank mine, and had to grip the edge of the tall table when my sore ankle almost gave out. A warm hand gripped my elbow and I looked straight into the face of Mr. Generosity.
“Too much?” he asked, slipping an arm around my waist.
“Yeah,” I said, moving away, instantly on alert. “Back off, dude. I have a boyfriend.”
He laughed and sipped his drink. He was perhaps the most perfect-looking man I’d ever seen. Tall, dark, and exceedingly hot, with deep brown eyes and the physique of a bodybuilder, or maybe a model. Those guys were a dime a dozen in this town. His teeth were blinding white against the fullness of his lips.
“You’re Italian,” I said. He raised his glass.
“E tu sei la donna più bella che abbia mai visto.”
“Huh, flatterer.” I grinned at him, then winced when I slipped my feet out of the too-tall shoes.
“Well, I do know a good pick-up line, anyway. Sorry to interrupt. Tell your boyfriend he’s a lucky guy. You have some great moves. Call me if you ever want a change of scenery.” He cupped my elbow, put his lips to my ear and let them trail down my neck a few seconds. I froze, watching him saunter away. When I looked down, I saw he’d pressed a business card into my hand.
“Marco Lucanza,” it said in bold Times New Roman.
“President”
“Sun Coast Entertainment”
I checked his website when I got home, and was shocked to see he owned two theaters in Florida, one in Arizona, and he managed the entertainment options for two large cruise ships. When I woke, still on the couch and in my clubbing outfit, I realized that the banging on the door must be Calvin.
I let him in and we didn’t leave my bedroom for two days. The day he had to fly to Louisville, we sat at a coffee shop sharing overpriced muffins. “I love you,” he whispered, as he took my hand and dropped something in it.
I blinked, shocked but yet not at the same time. “I can’t, Cal. Not yet.” But I opened the ring box anyway, and let him slip the impressive diamond onto my finger. He put my knuckles to his lips.
“Just wear this while you think about your answer, okay?”
I nodded, unable to speak. He blew me a kiss and headed out, leaving me dazzled, confused, and pissed off at my inability to recognize and accept the perfection right in front of my face.
My phone buzzed with a text from my mother, who’d recently entered the twenty-first century and was now utterly addicted to texting, Facebook, and even had her own little following on Pinterest with her recipes
and housecleaning hacks.
“Well?”
I rolled my eyes and deleted the message. The next one came from Rosie, followed quickly by one from Diana.
I ignored them all, finished my coffee and walked around my Bronx neighborhood for an hour, plotting an escape. When my fingertips hit the business card tucked into my jacket pocket, I sat on a park bench and stared at for another hour.
I knew Cal would leave me alone to stew—to “think about it”—for a while. He understood me well enough to know that pressuring me would not work in his favor.
I held out my hand, admiring the tasteful, marquis-cut stone. When my fingers started shaking, I clenched my fists and pressed them into my eye sockets, willing the bad Angelique away, the one who was urging me to call this Marco, to tell him I did, indeed want a change of scenery.
I grabbed my phone and sent Cal a text:
“I’m not good enough for you, Cal Morrison. I’m sorry. You deserve someone better.”
He responded a couple of hours later:
“That may be. But I want you.”
But I didn’t see that message until the next week, when I finally turned my phone on while lounging poolside, topless, and watching Marco swim laps. I’d returned the ring via insured package, so he should have gotten it about the time I read his last message to me, along with the hundred or so from the rest of my family. They ranged from furious to worried to apoplectic.
Tears blinded me as I scrolled through them all, then touched “Call” when I got to the one message from my mother. It read:
“I just need to know you’re alive. Confirm that. Then you don’t ever have to tell me another thing if you don’t want to. Please, Angel.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Palm Springs
Seven Years Later
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t answer that right now.”
The voice of Marco’s secretary made me cringe. I gripped my phone, attempting not to whine at my husband’s bitch of a gatekeeper.
The fact that he was fed up with me and had instructed her not to tell me where he’d gone this time was clear in her voice. Not that he was home much anyway. Between adding a fourth venue to his portfolio, and getting contracts with a couple of European cruise lines, he was gone more than seventy-five percent of the time.
I threw the phone across the cavernous family room with a yell and a curse. My stomach grumbled, but I ignored it. I’d trained myself to survive on less and less food for the past few years, ever since moving to Palm Springs and straight into Marco’s bedroom. He preferred skinny women. And it helped me measure up to the ever-younger hordes of girls I had to compete with for stage time.
“I love you, baby,” Marco loved to say in front of crowds of people, usually before giving me a kiss and an ass squeeze. “Let’s go make a baby.”
And, Lord help us, we tried that a lot, nearly non-stop for the entire span of our marriage. I knew he wanted kids. He’d made that perfectly clear the night he proposed to me, in Maui at a super-exclusive resort overlooking the ocean. Marco was everything Cal was not—flashy, loud, rich, and showy, and a total pig when it came to women. He never hid that fact. Claimed it’s why I called him up that night, drove to his hotel and let him fuck me six ways to Sunday.
“You ladies love a bad boy, no?” he’d said the next morning while we lolled around naked, eating strawberries and drinking champagne and screwing.
“I’ll make you the star attraction, my love,” he said, while he took me shopping for clothes later that day, before we flew to Florida in his private jet.
And he did. I got to dance as many nights a week as I wanted. Had my own no-limit Amex. I could sleep late or not. Work or stay home. And sex with Marco was like something out of a romance novel. Every encounter was special … rose petals, candles, oils, music, long hot baths, and sexy showers for two, multiple orgasms, the works.
All for one goal, of course. The one I could not reach. Not even a miscarriage I could hide behind and say, “I tried, see?”
When he got mad about it, he would redouble his efforts. We’d go on long vacations to exotic places, with my ovulation thermometer packed with my expensive makeup and perfumes.
I was sick of it now. And bored out of my ever-loving mind. A girl can only get so many pussy waxes, facials, and massages when she knows she is failing her Prime Directive. “Why is it that every other member of this family gets pregnant or impregnates at the drop of a hat, and I can’t manage it, even though I’m starting to feel like the proverbial cum bucket?”
“Damn, Angel. Nice mouth,” Kieran said in our weekly phone call. He was the only one I allowed myself to communicate with. I considered him Switzerland—a neutral party, willing to convey information between warring nations.
I waved away the girl who hovered, ready to give me my daily massage. “I’m a spoiled rotten vessel for Marco’s future. And I’m not producing his heir. I’m getting a real negative vibe from him.” I left out the part about him being gone for the past three days and not telling me where.
He chuckled. “Hie thee to the tower, Lady Anne?”
“Yeah, that. So, give me the weekly report, Francis.”
“Mama’s great. She has a new book club, and has started a blog. Daddy’s confused, but once I explained what a ‘blog’ was, he stopped bitching about it. He had his annual physical and is healthy as a horse. I don’t think he’s gained an ounce of fat his whole life.”
I sipped my green tea, wishing I could have a drink, but I’d promised to cut out alcohol in the name of getting knocked up.
“Dominic and Diana are living in that ranch house not far down the road from Antony’s brood. Dom is completely head over heels about Diana’s little girl. It’d be annoying, if it weren’t so damn funny.
“Let’s see … Aiden’s new book is selling like crazy, and the producer who bought the movie rights for the first one, the one about Mama and Daddy, is claiming he’ll start casting it soon. My boys are great. Cara wants another one. I’m not so sure. I mean … whoops, sorry.”
I closed my eyes picturing him, my lanky, handsome older brother, with the woman who’d finally agreed to marry him right after their second strawberry blond son had been born. A surge of homesickness made me lean over my knees to keep from crying.
“Great,” I said, softly. “I’m so happy for everyone. Seems to be a lull in the usual drama.”
“Don’t say that, Jesus. You’ll curse us all.”
“I want to come home.”
“Oh Angel …” he trailed off.
“I know. I made this fluffy, pampered bed. I’ll lie in it. What did Cara say about y’all coming down and bringing the boys? They’d love this pool. And we could fly over to Orlando, go to Disney?”
I was desperate to see him, to see anyone from my family, really. I’d even sat up the past few nights staring at an email I’d written to my mother. But I hadn’t sent it.
“Well, um … listen, we can’t really afford to—”
“But I can. Aren’t you listening to me? The whole thing would be on me. Well, on Marco. You know. He always says any or all of you are welcome any time.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“That means ‘no,’ so why don’t you just fucking say no?”
“Okay. No. But thanks anyway.”
We stayed silent so long, I thought he might have hung up until he spoke again. “No one understands why you did what you did, Angelique. Least of all Dom, now he’s with Diana and she’s in-laws with Cal. It’s—it was—a cold-ass move.”
“I know, I know. We’ve been through this.” I sniffled. “I don’t know why I did it.”
“We have been through it,” he said, calm as ever. “And as for ‘why,’ well, I guess you’re just one of those people who can’t stand the smell of your own happiness, maybe.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I glanced around at my “happiness.” The giant house, the staff, the cars, the closets burstin
g with clothes, the jewelry … the absent husband. “I am happy, mostly.”
“Right,” he said. I could hear little boy sounds in his background. Somehow, this pissed me off. He had no right judging me. But he kept going. “Cal Morrison was just too perfect for you. I don’t think you’re happy unless you in some kind of misery, despite how cushy that misery might be in sunny Florida. Not too far removed from Dominic in that department, really. Even though he seems to have figured that out in time to be a decent daddy to Jace and to Diana’s girl.”
“You’re full of shit, Francis. Having a sister-in-law therapist is rubbing off on you in an annoying way.”
“Maybe.” He was silent a few beats. “I’ll pass on your news.”
“Not that I have any,” I said, before blowing my nose. “I miss you. I love you the most, you know?”
He laughed, a sound I loved, and had loved my whole life. “I know. I’m your favorite ginger brother, anyway. Take care, Angel. I’ll talk to you next week.”
Marco got home from wherever he’d been late that night. I was still awake, staring at an old movie in the family room and trying not to order pizza. When I heard the door open, I got up and wandered into the kitchen. He put his watch and fancy fountain pen in their designated spots on the counter, loosened his tie, turned to me and said, “This isn’t working out.”
“I gathered that,” I said, while panic skittered up and down my spine. What in the hell did I have now, if I wasn’t Mrs. Marco Lucanza? Where would I go?
I’d left school yet again. I highly doubted they’d have me back. And the thought of moving home brought on a serious bout of dizzy dread. “So, who, exactly, is working out for you now, Marco?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. I pondered his too-handsome-for-its-own-good face for the millionth time as he parsed his answer. “What difference does that make? I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”
Unwanted, angry tears spilled down my cheeks. He slumped against the counter. The man was a sucker for crying women, that much was certain. I should let the next potential baby vessel know that.
