by Jolie Damman
I opened the door and sauntered down the hallway to my room. The sun was shining like a fiery jewel in the impossibly blue sky of the early Spring. My mind was almost not aware of the chatter of people outside the Bello Italiano as they ambled on the sidewalk. Adding to that, cars blared their horns in the distance to remind me where I lived.
And of course, there was a horde of pigeons cooing on the building’s rooftop.
Damn them.
Alide had no idea how much I hated them, and if destiny didn’t decide to fuck my life again, that wouldn’t change.
At all.
I picked up her voice. It was so beautiful. She was talking on the phone.
I knew I shouldn’t be doing this, but I was anyway. I leaned on the wall to overhear what she was conversing about.
Maybe this was my Romani side talking louder than the Angelo one, but I didn’t feel bad about it at all. It just felt right to overhear her when she didn’t know I was around.
“Rita, I-I’m not sure I should be telling you this.”
Her voice sounded a bit startled, like she knew she was doing something wrong but still felt compelled to get it off her chest.
And I felt like gushing into the room to tell her she had nothing to worry about.
I was this close to telling her about the marriage. She was finally ready.
I hadn’t done it before because I got caught up in some things I needed to do for my father. Hunting down Vinicio was hard.
In the meantime, I was glad my ears were good enough to pick up Rita’s words.
“Girl, if there’s something you need to tell me, do it now. I’ve got lunch to make for Luca.”
Alide chuckled. Oh, the sweetest chuckle I’d heard in a long while.
To be honest, it was always like that. I was just so stupidly in love with my soon-to-be bride.
She exhaled. My heart stopped for a second.
“I was walking down one hallway in here a couple of months ago-”
“I can’t believe you’ve been keeping that from me this whole time!”
Damn, Rita was a real piece of work. She didn’t even let Alide finish her sentence before spouting that. And here I was thinking I had nosey friends.
“I know, but I had no choice. I wasn’t sure I should tell anyone. But now…”
“You can’t keep that in your chest anymore, right?”
A moment of quietness.
“Angelo and his father… They were torturing a guy in a room here. I’d never seen anything like that. Oh, there was so much blood and his left eye was swollen. I can still remember all the details as if it was happening in front of me.”
Her voice faltered. So, it was her then. I thought it was just a rat or my imagination.
I didn’t feel betrayed by that, though.
Her reaction to it, on the other hand, was like she had just punctured my heart with a needle.
Of course what she’d witnessed impacted her. You need a strong mind to ignore how inhumane what I was doing to that guy was, after all. I just necessitated the information he had on Vinicio – nothing more than that.
But of course, he had to be tenacious.
He was my brother’s best friend. I never liked him much, so I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse for what I did.
But overhearing Alide talking about it like it made me a monster was a different matter.
Was that what she was thinking of me right now?
Was I a degrading monster to her eyes now?
I couldn’t believe it.
It just couldn’t be happening.
Rita respired on the other side of the call. “I told you what those people are like. You think the restaurant is how they make money? It’s just a front for their operations. They kill, rob and extort people. They’ve got roots in the Assembly and everywhere else. Those people aren’t the bunch you want to involve yourself with. I warned you.”
“You are not making this easier on me. I’m not breaking up with him. He showed me he’s different.”
“Is he? I thought you had said he was beating someone who couldn’t defend himself. What kind of man do you think does that? What if you piss him off after you two are married? What if Luca angers him? What do you think he will do? You think he’ll just let it slide?”
A moment of stillness. I wished I could get the phone and tell her she was wrong.
If Alide happened to anger me in the future, I wouldn’t lay a finger on her. I wouldn’t raise my hand. She was the love of my life.
I’d do anything to keep her safe.
“I’m not so sure. This was a mistake. I’m not talking about this again.”
“Alide, you nee-”
But she ended the call before Rita could finish her line. They lived together, so I was sure she was going to have to listen to what her friend had to say one way or another.
Still, what she said.
It was right.
I slew and robbed people. Sometimes, they had nothing to do with anything.
Casualties – that’s what they were to me and my father. He taught me not to care about people much. It worked for me all these years, but now, things were different.
I loved Alide, and she made me realize I needed her more than anything in my life – more than father, Vinicio and marrying someone who could make the Romani family stronger.
But Rita was mistaken.
Or was she?
Maybe I wasn’t the right man for Alide after all…
✽ ✽ ✽
The table clock ticked endlessly. Time was passing. The building had been enveloped by a veil of deafening silence. My fingers pressed the keys and my eyes scanned the pages on the screen of my laptop computer.
I shouldn’t be doing this.
And yet, I was.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought Alide had helped me beat this battle. She said she didn’t care if we were going to have a baby or not, but after I overheard her talking to her friend about me being a monster…
It made me think.
And it brought me here.
My fingers were like ice stones as I pressed the keys. I was obsessed. I read one story about an infertile guy who broke up with his girlfriend who he first met back when they were just teenagers. I then skimmed a text wall of another guy who had written he couldn’t even use Tinder anymore because he felt insecure about himself all the time.
And what’s more, he also mentioned his cock was too average to make his dates happy.
Now that I was thinking about, Alide never commented on the size of my dick. Was it big enough for her? She seemed pleased the last time we did it, but I couldn’t know for sure. Maybe she was hiding the truth from me this whole time.
Perhaps, she was just feeling pity for me.
And that’s… too humiliating.
I read another story, and then another and another. The moon was behind the building back when I turned on the computer, and now it was standing almost in front of the window.
It was like it was watching me now.
And laughing.
Because I was a pathetic fool with low self-esteem.
It didn’t matter how many compliments I got from different women. I could never gift a child to one of them, and that’s something that would forever be in my mind unless there was some obscure treatment I didn’t know about.
But there wasn’t.
I was all alone with this.
I and these men were, to be honest.
Chapter 15
Was it Fair?
Angelo
Iwas sure she was wondering about this.
Am I ever going to adapt to his world?
What if he gets pissed off at me? Will he kill me then?
Every time we met since that afternoon I overheard her, I fought the urge to tell her I wasn’t that man she defined on the phone. To other people, things were different. But she was like my retreat harbor. She was where I came to be someone different.
A better man.
If only I could tell her what was going on in my mind right now, though.
But I couldn’t. It felt too painful.
I was sitting at one of the tables in the restaurant, my fingers interlaced in front of me. Father opened the door and stepped in. He halted, eyes examining me like I was a dead body in the morgue.
I was aware of his presence, but didn’t dare to glance at him.
I knew what was going on in his mind now.
He knew about Alide and me. He was happy we were making progress and paving our way to becoming a proper couple. But I still didn’t tell her about the marriage. I couldn’t. It felt too painful. It felt almost impossible.
And after I overheard her calling me a monster to her caretaker, it was like a huge wall was built between us.
I just couldn’t approach her and tell her we had this marriage thing to make happen, that her father meant it all along, and that he wanted me to provide for her, as a husband and the father of our child.
The father thing, though – he didn’t know back then it couldn’t be made to happen. He had no idea I was infertile. At the time, neither was I aware.
I was just a teenager in those years. Rock n’ roll and fucking around were my things, not killing people and pondering impossible-to-occur marriages.
Father padded to me and put his hand on the table.
It felt like a rock had just fallen on it.
“Look at me, son.”
“I haven’t told her anything yet, father.”
“Just look at me,” he insisted.
I craned my head to lock my eyes with his. I thought I was going to find the rage of a man who was disappointed with his heir, but I unearthed something else.
Comfort.
Sympathy.
“I know what’s been happening. I know you can’t have children of your own.”
My heart skipped a beat, and he waved his hand in front of him dismissively.
“I was aware of that since you were born. Her father knew it too. And despite that, he chose you for her. Do you know how much that means to me?”
A tear rolled down his cheek.
I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t even move a finger. It felt like ice surrounded my whole body.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me. Just tell her the truth, and I’m sure she’ll be with you. She’s a smart girl and she loves you.”
His hand seized mine. His fingers then foraged it.
“Do this for me and her. She needs you more than anything and anyone else in this world.”
Slowly, my father receded his hand and walked away. After he opened the door to the sidewalk, his hand went up to wipe the tear on his cheek.
I’d never seen father crying in my life.
My infertility problem felt tiny in comparison to this scene.
And a crucial decision was then made.
Alide
I opened the door to Mr. Romani’s office and stepped in. Uh, he’s not here. I walked to the desk and immediately stopped.
I shouldn’t be here if he’s not around.
What if he finds me poking around things that don’t belong to me?
And what was I even trying to find in this room? His letter telling me he was going to kill X citizen in the city or something like that?
This is not a place for me.
I turned and faced the door. I was going to walk out of here and forget I ever thought about snooping around, but that’s when my eyes landed on a semi-open drawer not too far from his desk. It was full of paper sheets, and one stood out among them.
It did so because the title of the document was written in black, bold letters.
Our Agreement.
The first thing that made me curious about it was that the title and the font used for it weren’t common for professional documents I’d seen in my life. It drew me to it, and that coupled with my tendency to poke around were motives good enough to make me pad to it.
I shouldn’t be doing this was the last warning the rational part of my mind emitted before I pulled the drawer and picked up the paper sheet.
I read it.
And I began to cry one second later.
I couldn’t believe my name was mentioned in it multiple times. Dad’s name too. This was written just before he died, and it explained so much.
It told me everything, in fact.
Why did Mr. Romani and – Angelo – keep it hidden from me all this time?
Was this why I was hired in the first place?
My heart leaped. Tears rolled down my cheeks.
I couldn’t wrap my head around this revelation and thus shoved the paper sheet back into the drawer like it was made of feces.
I then hurried to get out while my hands wiped the tears off my face. My shift was over, but the last thing I needed was Mr. Romani and Angelo finding me in here.
I just couldn-
The door opened, and in front of me stood none other than Angelo. His hand reached out to me, but I was past thinking he had come here to explain everything and make me think he wasn’t to blame.
I tried to charge past him, but he didn’t allow me.
His arms went around me and hugged me to him. I tried to punch him, but I was too feeble. I couldn’t muster up the strength to just shove him off the way he deserved.
His mouth was opening and closing, and he was attempting to tell me something.
What it was, I couldn’t care.
That’s when I finally spoke, and my words were tainted with rage.
“I should have known! I should have known!”
“Alide, I’ve been trying to tell you, but it’s been too hard for me. I should have been braver. I’m a weakling and I don’t deserve your love.”
His hands cupped my cheeks as he brought my eyes to meet his.
“I can explain it all. Just don’t go right now.”
“There’s nothing to be elucidated. You hid it from me this whole time. You knew who my father was and that he wanted me to wed you!”
“Yes, that’s what I was going to tell you. I just didn’t have the courage. I didn’t want to ruin you. You are so kind and caring. Being in my life is something completely different from what you are used to.”
“To hell with your life! I need to go. I can’t be in here anymore.”
I threw my weight against him. Maybe that’s what did it, maybe not.
Either way, it worked.
I managed to get past him and was running to the bus stop. I needed to get into it and flee from Little Italy to never come back here.
I was crying and feeling like when my mother died. It was as if hands were squeezing my heart forcefully. I couldn’t comprehend how he had been capable of keeping the truth hidden from me for so long.
Did he think I didn’t deserve it?
But of course he was able to do that.
He killed and tortured people. Hiding a wedding from his bride was easy peasy for someone like him.
I should have known there was something ominous with his family the moment his father hired me and how his father had then been so excessively kind to me, as if he’d known me all along.
Known me.
These people knew who I was, where I lived, my family and how poor we were. No wonder Mr. Romani had been paying me more than what we had agreed on. No wonder his son ‘fell in love’ with me.
It was all planned from the very beginning.
Our love was fake.
Chapter 16
The Wrong Choice
Angelo
Iwas a coward. Always had been. Vinicio ran away because I didn’t dare to change father’s mind. And I was hunting him down for the same reason. I’d always assumed I couldn’t do something before anchoring said supposition in my mind.
And the worst thing about that?
It wouldn’t change.
I was an idiot and a coward. I should never have approached Alide.
She was now hurt and crying. She bolted out. I comprehen
ded that forcing to keep her here was the wrong thing that I could have done. Alide wanted to disappear from my life, and doing anything other than allowing her to fulfill that was wrong.
I was wrong.
I couldn’t gift her a kid, and she wanted it so much.
I went to my bedroom while feeling like I was a zombie. I couldn’t think about anything or anyone that wasn’t Alide and our love. Her beautiful smile and face were in my mind all the time. I needed her, but she was right.
I was mistaken.
I should have been stronger.
I should have confronted my father.
I should have told her the moment she first came here who she was to me and that her father wanted us to wed. It wasn’t my decision. It had never been. That’s his choice, and mine was to obey him.
I did so because it was his last wish before he died, and it meant so much to me.
I didn’t know how much time had passed since coming here. I’d collapsed on the bed and buried my face in the pillows.
The door opened, and I didn’t care who had come.
Maybe it was Alide, ready to tell me she forgave me.
But that was just aspirant thinking. If anything, she could have come here to pick up something she forgot and wouldn’t even glance at me. And I wouldn’t blame her if she had such a reaction.
It would be the right and fair thing to do.
I should be nothing to her.
I thought so much I was doing the right thing…
“Son…”
Father. Of course it had to be him.
I could lash out at him and tell him he’s the one who ruined Alide, but I couldn’t. Doing it felt impossible, like killing your mother in cold blood. All I could do was to keep my head buried in the pillows as if they were going to swallow me whole at some moment.
“I saw her running away to the bus stop. She got into the bus before I could get out of my car.” He paused, clearing his throat. “You finally told her, didn’t you?”
I presupposed he was going to lash out at me, and he wouldn’t be in the wrong. If anything, telling me I was a coward would be the fair thing to do at this moment.
I fucked things up.
I screwed it all up.
But he didn’t persist. His hand shut the door, living me alone with my thoughts. And they were killing me from the inside out. It was like an immense flame was burning me alive.
