by Seth Eden
“Gabriel,” I growled. I dropped the silverware and napkins on the couch and foisted myself over the back, leaning across Gabriel, and the unexpected action caused him to slip up. I pulled the remote from his hand and stuck my tongue out at him. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to me winning.”
Gabriel didn’t laugh. “I don’t want to watch that.”
“Fine,” I conceded. “Just let me add it to my queue, and I’ll pick something else.”
I threaded back up the list, with Gabriel still protesting, and found the show. I opened my mouth to scold him for being such a brat about it when my eyes caught something shocking on the screen.
“In this week’s episode,” the quick trailer began as soon as I landed on the title, “we’ll cover one of Philly’s most notorious crime families, the Varassos.”
I watched in horror as the show dramatically scanned across three men, all with Gabriel’s same dark hair and mysterious, void-like eyes. When they scrolled over a fourth man, I felt like I was going to throw up. Standing there, with an expression that was unrelenting and cold, was Gabriel.
8
Gabriel
I watched my face flash across the television screen under the rain of dark, horror-film music and lighting that made me look like a serial killer, and my stomach bottomed out. I couldn’t believe my dumb fucking luck. Stacy was leagues better than any woman I’d ever dated before, and it just so happens that the morning after we spend the night together, she happens across a show that I didn’t even know existed about my family.
Didn’t they have to have permission to put that sort of shit on the television? Surely they weren’t just allowed to use our faces and names without our consent. I imagined telling Luca about it, and my bones were already going brittle from the pressure. Things had gone so south with Marco and Kelly because she found out who he was, and now I was sitting next to a woman as she discovered that the family business I’d spoken about earlier was not landscaping or a law firm as she was hoping, but actually an underground crime organization.
Stacy let out an awkward chuckle. “Wow. I’d always heard that stuff like this was scripted, but I never believed it. It was always cooler to think it was true.”
I could feel my face flush with confusion. “Wait, what?”
Stacy didn’t look over at me. In fact, her body was so rigidified that her knuckles were turning white around the remote.
“Yeah.” She forced out another laugh. “I mean, obviously, this stuff isn’t true, right?”
I didn’t know what to do. I could plainly see that Stacy was trying to convince herself just as much as she was waiting for me to confess I was actually a high-profile actor, and those other three men just happened to be guys who looked a devastating amount like me. I wanted to say those words to her, and more than anything, I wanted them to be true.
“Um.” I stammered over the best way to tell her that what she was looking at was true, or at least that the notion was true. The documentary was already putting a spin on events I knew the facts about.
“The Varasso family leaves a trail of bloodshed behind them wherever they go.” Luca’s worst-self appeared on the screen, one who looked like our dad and had none of the warmth his family brought him behind his eyes. “Luca Varasso, a man tasked with kidnapping and enslaving a young woman for slandering his family’s name.”
I hunched my brow. Yes, Molly had been kidnapped, but it was Luca who saved her from my father’s wrath and trained her in our business when everyone else just wanted to kill her and get it over with.
“Marco Varasso, who still wears the scars of a mysterious fire that is only dwarfed by his using an innocent waitress to launder money through a downtown eatery.”
That one stuck a bit closer. Yes, Marco had used Kelly’s restaurant to launder money out of in a desperate attempt to patch where my father had gone wrong with the Binachis, but he didn’t use Kelly. In fact, both of them have sworn on the bible itself that Marco did his best to keep Kelly out of it. It was her own brother who used her more to his benefit. The fire, however, happened when Marco was born because of a scorned runner for our family. Yeah, that runner didn’t survive that mistake, but how could my father let him? He succeeded in killing three of my would-be cousins and nearly ended both Marco and his mother’s lives.
“Alessandro Varasso.” I perked my ear for what the television host had to say about that. Alessandro was as close to me as any of my brothers were in terms of clean hands. He’d rough a guy up if he had to, but he’d never murdered before. “A California rowhouse turned into a bloodbath with him at the helm.”
My stomach twisted into a knot. I’d blocked that out. I’d blocked everything that happened after Alessandro snapped. Luca and I rushed to California after Luca went rogue. Some of the Binachis were threatening Marco’s family and had to be dealt with. Luca shoved a gun into my hands and told me it was time to show my true Varasso colors. In the end, I could only cower outside, protecting Willow and Ricky, when in truth, they were the ones looking out for me.
“Possibly the darkest of them all is the youngest, Gabriel Varasso.” I let out an audible scoff. How was I, in any way, shape, or form, the darkest? “Always keeping his head down, the youngest Varasso is always by his brothers’ sides, no doubt the slyest and the one most likely getting away with everything.”
I held my arms out wide, briefly forgetting where I was. “I’m not getting away with anything. I’m not doing anything.”
The sneak peek trailer ended, and Stacy finally looked at me. “Gabriel.”
My eyes snapped to her. “Yeah?”
There were already a few tears wettening the corners of her eyes. “Tell me this stuff isn't true. It’s just scripted. Right? Please tell me that.”
I stuttered and stammered for a minute to try and find the right words. I started a couple of times and stopped short before I finally started stringing words together. “The way they make it sound isn’t true.”
Stacy’s face went from desperate shock to white rage in a second. “Don’t mince words with me. You know I’m not asking if their account of it is true. Unless you’re saying that they’ve somehow confused your family’s woodworking business for being in the mafia.”
I sighed. “No. That part is true.”
Stacy’s hands cupped over her mouth. She slid back from me on the couch, and it killed me. The first woman to ever make me feel the way she does, and she’s staring at me like I’m a cold-blooded killer. “But listen, they’re stretching the truth. Like really stretching it. I’m not the darkest one of my brothers. All that stuff he talked about. The fire, the restaurant, the shootout—yes, my brothers were involved in all of that stuff, but I wasn’t, and even the stories around them are totally different.”
“He said you’re always by their side,” Stacy said.
“I mean, I am as much as I can be. I wasn’t there for any of that except the shootout, though, and even that I was all the way across the street trying not to piss my pants.” I knew Luca would strangle me if he heard me demean myself so badly. Not because he cared about me, but because he cared about the Varasso name. It felt worth it to me, though. If I could get Stacy to believe me, it was worth it. “I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never even beat anyone up. There are mules working for us that have done worse shit than me. I swear.”
I clapped my hands out of frustration, and Stacy jumped. It was awful. She was afraid of me. I reached out for her hand, but she recoiled, so I returned my hand to my lap.
“Stacy. I don’t even like what my family stands for. I swear. I’ve never wanted this life.”
A glint of hope flickered into Stacy’s eyes. “So, you don’t really have anything to do with them? You’re not part of all of that.”
It would have been so easy. I could have just told her that I wasn’t. I was my own man. I didn’t even work for my brother. We were trying to find our way out of it anyway. If I could just keep the facade up until then, I’d be golden. Bu
t my brothers’ smiles flashed across my mind, and that stupid, Varasso, family-first trait kicked off in me. The one thing I’d always found commendable about my family was about to cost me such an amazing woman.
“I didn’t do that stuff,” I explained quietly, “but they’re my family. I love them, and I’d do anything for them.”
“Anything?” Stacy pointed at the screen. “Even that?”
I thought about the shit my brothers had been through. I thought about the rage I felt when my dad was killed or the way I was compelled to do whatever necessary when the Binachis were threatening Marco’s family. Even when Alessandro ran off, and Luca told me it was time to step up. I was afraid, but if for a second, I thought that Luca and Marco didn’t have things under control, I would have swallowed that fear and did what it took to protect my family. That’s what this life meant. That’s why my dad snatched me from my mother’s hands and brought me to his house and beat his older sons until they at least pretended to love me the way he did. That’s what it meant to be a Varasso.
“Gabriel.” Stacy still had her arm outstretched, still waiting for an answer.
I settled for just repeating myself. “I’d do anything for them.”
Stacy’s arm shakily felt to her side as she turned her beautiful, green eyes away from me. “Then I need you to leave.”
9
Stacy
I was in my parents’ bedroom, trying to carefully arrange their various trinkets on a shelf when I heard my phone ringing in my purse from the living room. I didn’t even flinch in its direction. I already knew who it was, and I wasn’t interested. I was just trying to power my way through my mom’s OCD as she decided if her tiny, wooden hippo looked better on the left or right side of her tiny, wooden giraffe so that I could go and see my childhood best friend, Mira.
“Hmm,” my mom said, her left hand petting her chin. “When it comes right down to it, is the aesthetic more important than the wildlife accuracy? You know? Would a hippo stand behind a giraffe? That’s the question, Stace.”
I shook my head. This back-and-forth had been going on for the better part of two hours. Each individual item had to have a place that contributed positively to my parents’ qi, and I was cursing myself for not taking a picture of their shelves before they moved out of our old home so I could just mimic the design.
“I don’t know, mom,” I responded. “I don’t think the animal kingdom is going to take offense. If they do, they’ll tell you.”
My mom giggled. “I suppose that’s true.”
“So right side or left side?” I asked.
My mom wrapped a few strands of her hair around her fingers. “Right.” My phone screamed out again, and I sighed. My mom looked back towards the living room and then at me. “Do you need to get that, sweetheart?”
“No. It’s just…” I didn’t want to involve my parents in even the little bit of interaction I’d had with Gabriel and his dangerous lifestyle. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
My mom perched herself on the edge of her bed. “Now, Stace. What have we taught you about holding things in?”
My parents weren’t the kind who pressured me to talk about things I didn’t want to, but they lived in constant fear of my aura darkening. Holding emotions in was just one of the things that could make one’s aura darker, and I had to imagine mine definitely was after what had happened with Gabriel.
“I’m going to see Mira after this, Mama,” I replied. “I’ll get it all out with her, and then, if my aura still feels heavy, I’ll come over so you can clean it.”
My mom raised an eyebrow but seemed to accept my plan. “Okay, baby.”
I set the tiny hippo down on the shelf and then instinctively walked over and sat on the edge of my parents’ bed. My head fell into my mom’s lap, and she pet me gently.
“A little cleaning right now?” she asked.
I nodded without a verbal response, and my mom immediately took to waving her hands above my head, picking invisible objects out between two fingers while humming softly to herself. “Very murky, Stace. It wasn’t like this yesterday. Did something happen? You don’t have to tell me what, just let me know you’re okay.”
“I’m okay.”
It wasn’t really true, though. Physically, I was fine, and even in spite of what I’d learned about Gabriel, I had no fears I was in danger from him. If anything, I was perturbed with how much I missed him. It had only been a day, and I’d been ignoring his back to back calls, but I desperately wished I could rewind time twenty-four hours and have our date and night together all over again.
“Guy stuff,” I finally admitted. I didn’t often keep things from my mom. I didn’t want to start, so if I had to save some details to protect her, I at least wanted to share what I could. “We went out last night, and it went really, really well, but I don’t think it’s going to work out.”
“Oh, that’s why it’s so dirty up here,” she replied, referring to my aura. “Nothing brightens an aura or darkens it more than love.”
Love. It was weird hearing that word, not because it described Gabriel and my situation, but because I was actually relating to it. I didn’t love Gabriel. I’d known him less than a day, and yes, we spent the night together, and yes. it was the most natural feeling thing that had happened to me in my entire life, but still, instant-love wasn’t possible. If I just kept saying that to myself, it was bound to be true.
I chose not to respond to my mom’s statement, and she didn’t try. She continued to finger herself through my aura until she either finished or gave up, I wasn’t sure which. Her hand settled on my forehead to pet while looking down at me sweetly.
When my phone next interrupted our silence, it wasn’t a phone call, but my alarm. I’d set one, knowing I was coming to my parents and may get lost in whatever I got into. Mira and I were meeting for lunch, and I didn’t want to be late. I sat up out of my mom’s lap and wrapped my arms around her in a huge hug.
“Thanks, Mom.” I smiled and stood up.
“It’ll work out, you know,” my mom called after me. I stopped and looked back at her, and my confusion must have been prevalent because she chuckled. “Whether it’s with or without this guy, things will work out for you. They have to because you’re a wonderful girl, and things always work out for wonderful girls.”
I smiled warmly at my mom, gave her a nod of affirmation, and she clapped her hands together. “There. All clean.”
The restaurant I was meeting Mira at was called Surento’s and was one she always gushed about after traveling here for work. It was ironic that I lived here while she was still in Woodstock because, though we were both born into a holistic life, I was the one who hung onto my parents’ natural roots. The second Mira could, she went corporate. Pencil skirts, shimmering black pumps, and her brown hair cut into an executive bob. The people watching us sit at the same table must have thought she was helping me bail my boyfriend out of jail or something; we did not look cut from the same cloth. She always wanted to move to Philly, but circumstances had helped me make the jump first, and she was still just passing through for work. At least we could finally visit this infamous restaurant together.
“How’s Philly been?” she started once we’d placed our food orders. “I can’t believe your parents actually came up here. My parents went to your parents’ house looking for them yesterday, even after I told them they’d moved, because they didn’t believe me.”
I chuckled, imagining Mira’s parents, equally as hippie as mine, wandering up to the new couple that now lived in my old family home.
“Nice.” I took a sip of my iced tea before continuing. “Philly’s good. You were right. The energy here is awesome. Things are going well at the studio, too.”
Mira grinned, and her smile was comforting amidst my current disdain. We’d been friends since elementary school. There likely wasn’t a single soul on this earth that knew me better than her. “I’m glad.”
“And you?” I asked. “When are
you ditching Woodstock?” I raised an eyebrow. “Or are you waiting for Stephen to finally pop the question? You guys have been together, what, ten years? It’s about time.”
Mira’s face saddened in an instant, and my heart sank.
“No. What happened?”
Mira shrugged. “Oh, you know. The typical stuff.” She fiddled with the straw in her drink. “I’ve been traveling more with work, and he’s been diving into his studies. We went from being lovers, to being roommates, to being acquaintances, at best. I walked in, asked him what he wanted for dinner, we narrowed it down to chicken or steak, I made a joke about doing chicken fried steak, and he said ‘this isn’t working anymore, is it?’ I guess he just realized that that conversation about chicken or steak was the most enjoyable conversation we’d had in months.”
“Were you guys fighting and stuff?” I asked. It was unusual for Mira not to confide in me about stuff like that. I didn’t know what would have held her back this time, but I was hoping it was just a fear of more change when I had just moved. “Was it bad?”
Mira shook her head, and she was staring off into space like she was watching a replay of it that I couldn’t see. “No, we weren’t fighting at all. I think that was it, you know? If we were fighting, then at least that would mean we were still fighting for something. It didn’t feel necessary to fight. There was nothing worth fighting about.”
“I’m so sorry, Mira.” I was struggling so much, having to say goodbye to Gabriel after one day. I couldn’t imagine if we were ten years in. It was a gentle reminder that I was lucky. I was getting out before the damage was too severe. “What about the house? What about Roxie?”
Roxie was their miniature pinscher, almost as old as their relationship.
“I travel so much that it just made sense to leave Roxie with him. It killed me, though. Maybe that’s why he let me keep the house. He knows I’m going to sell it. I told him I’d make sure he got half, but he said he didn’t want it, to use it to situate myself where I could get more sleep.”
