by Mj Fields
“Tatum, you have no idea,” she whispers.
She doesn’t say any more.
When I get the link, I click on it.
“You get it?” she asks quietly.
“Yes,” I answer as I read the article out loud.
Seventeen-year old Michelangelo Mazzini, from Highland Park, was arrested in the suspected double homicide of his sister, Maria Mazzini, 18, and Blane Barker, 18, on Saturday, March 21st, 2008.
Police say, when they arrived at the scene after neighbors called in what was thought to be a domestic disturbance, Michelangelo Mazzini was curled in a corner of the Mazzini home, holding his eighteen-year-old sister, rocking her while he cried, “He’s gone. He’ll never hurt you again. I killed him, Maria. I killed him for you,” over and over again. When officers tried to take her from him, he fought them.
Mazzini was eventually restrained, cuffed, and taken to county jail, where he pled guilty for killing Baker, and said, “I should have done it when they started dating. I should have killed him then.”
In interviews with classmates at Holy Trinity, an elite private school that both Maria and Michelangelo Mazzini received scholarships to, classmates said the siblings were very close. So close, rumors spread through the campus, that they were thought to have a relationship that was highly inappropriate.
Allegedly, Michelangelo, who for two years was called Saint Michael due to his kind, calm, and selfless demeanor, was jealous of Baker and his sister’s relationship. Maria and Michelangelo were seen on more than one occasion in the month preceding the murders arguing about Maria and Baker’s relationship.
A source close to Baker states that he believes Mazzini killed his sister by overdosing her on heroine, and that Baker tried to stop the murder and met the same fate, but fought back.
Mazzini denies that he had anything to do with his sister’s death, but repeated, “I should have done it when they started dating. I should have killed him then.”
Mazzini is being tried as an adult.
Silence.
I look at the picture that is without a doubt him, but younger, in a school uniform and tie, with shorter hair. And he looks... happy.
“Tate?”
“I’m here,” I say quietly.
“Is it him?”
I clear my throat. “Yes. Yes, it’s him.”
“You need to stay away from him,” she says matter-of-factly.
I start to reread the article.
“Tatum Longley, stay away from him. He’s dangerous,” she warns.
“I know.”
“No. No, that’s not the response I am looking for, Tatum. Tell me you’ll stay away. Tell me that now. Get on a plane and come home. Forget the book. Forget the costs. Forget the muse. Forget what I’ve asked of you. Come home. This isn’t a bad boy you can win over and change. This man is a killer. He’s done time. Tatum Longley, you need to come home now. I’ll get the ticket.”
“I’ll call you later,” I tell her, not listening to a word she says. I simply continue to stare at the picture of the young man in front of me.
Before she can reply, I hang up the phone.
I read and reread the article. By the fifth read, I am still in as much shock as the first time. Then I google his name and sit for hours, reading articles and watching news clips.
When I am exhausted, I lie back, holding my phone against my chest and staring at the ceiling, thinking about Michelangelo.
In all the pictures plastered all over the news before that day, his eyes were so full of life, his smile inviting, his presence grand. After the murders, it was all gone.
The picture and tape of him in court, he didn’t give eye contact. He didn’t even look at his father, and that poor man looked devastated, and rightfully so. He lost two children that day. And if the allegations about Angelo and his sister are correct... Well, I can’t imagine what Michelangelo Mazzini, Sr. must have been going through.
I found it odd his mother wasn’t in any of the pictures or tapes. Tomorrow, I decide I will go to a public library and do some research and find out why.
My phone dings. I pick it up and look at the screen. It’s a text from Melanie.
Forget about him, Tatum. Don’t do that to yourself. Do what you went to Detroit to do, and come back as soon as you can if you must stay there. Call me when you have let this all sink in. And please, Tate, please don’t beat yourself up about this. And don’t you dare give up on you. You may not believe in a happily ever after, but dammit, I do, and I know there is no one more deserving. I love you. Call me tomorrow.
After picking things up, I climb into bed and close my eyes. Then I roll to my side and hug my pillow, thinking about what I came here to do.
I fight back the tears that come from the unknown and the known. Inhaling, I can still smell his faint scent. It calms me when the reality is that he should scare me. Only, deep in my soul, he doesn’t.
What a mess.
What. A. Mess.
Chapter Eleven
Angelo
As I walk back to the gym and the wind blows, I see a few snowflakes fall. It reminds me that, even though it’s spring, it doesn’t mean we are out of the cold.
I remember nights my old man would stay and work overtime at that factory. Maria and I would sit up and watch The Tonight Show, eat popcorn, and laugh. We didn’t have much, but life was good.
Life was good until it wasn’t.
The past two nights... Fuck, they have been good nights. Really good. But as life goes, all good things must come to an end.
Tatum, Legs, the woman who writes what she wants from me, the woman who wants to use me, the woman who will soon find out who the fuck I am—the damned—and then... Then I will be just a guy who came on her soft, trim, little belly.
Fuck, that was hot—her begging for my come, begging for my release, making it happen.
But that’s it, right?
Does it even matter?
Not anymore, it doesn’t.
The headlines splashed all over the papers said I was guilty of a heinous crime. Murder in the first degree. I killed a man in cold blood while my sister lay dying after drugs were forced into her veins.
A boy who had a future given to him, served to him on a silver platter, her boyfriend was the epitome of a privileged fuck. He didn’t even give a second thought to his actions or just how good he had it.
Fuck their silver platters and their handouts. Maria and I busted our asses in school because our father didn’t want us ending up at that damn factory. We did it to make him proud, to make ourselves proud, not for a fucking handout.
The thing about handouts, freebies, breaks, they come at a cost.
I look forward, straight ahead, not in the past, and as I do, two people walking toward me cross the street.
It’s not lost on me that before my life detonated, blew all to hell, a pin pulled by me, I was clean cut, wore a damn uniform every day, and people didn’t cross the street when they saw me. They used to smile, and I smiled back.
Now, I don’t give a damn if they smile at me or cross the fucking street. The minute I allow anyone in, they find out who I am and what I did, and they not only cross the street, they run in fear. Therefore, my hair goes uncut, I never shave to the skin, and I will never wear a fucking suit and tie again.
Every dream I had for my future died the same moment Maria took her last breath. We died together; the man I was supposed to be and my sister.
I walk into the gym and lock it behind me. Then I take the stairs to the place I sleep, and although not always peacefully, I don’t have to worry about someone trying to start shit with me while I try to sleep.
After throwing off my sweatshirt, I push off my sweats and flop down onto the mattress.
She thought I was older than her. I thought she was my age. Floored me when she announced she is thirty-one. Doesn’t matter. Legs will be running as far away as she can as soon as she finds out who I am. Any smart woman would. I just hope she tak
es my advice and stops putting herself in messed up situations. When she gets the memo that I’m a bad guy, maybe she will be a little more apt to check out a guy first.
All the next day, while training the guys, I look at the door, waiting, expecting her to come in. Am I wishing she would, or worried she will?
Well, it doesn’t matter much. I won’t see her again, not after she finds out who I am. She has my full name. If she’s like every other person in today’s modern world, a simple search will tell her more than she ever bargained for when she picked me as her muse.
When it’s slow, I leave the guys to it and walk up to my place to sit and rest my body for half an hour or so. I hold the journal in my hands, knowing damn well I shouldn’t read it. I don’t. I do what I should and rest for a while.
When my alarm goes off on my phone, I get up and throw the damn thing on the table, walk to the bathroom to take a piss, and brush my teeth. The only good thing I got out of being locked up were these teeth being perfect, so I take care of them.
When I walk back out, I again look at the book, and then I keep on walking out the door and back to work.
The next morning, I set a nice even pace as I begin my jog. It never stays even. The rage inside of me drives me to run faster, push myself harder. Pounding the pavement under me, I relentlessly go on and on without looking back.
For five years, I dreamt of the day I would walk out of that hell hole and go to a baseball game with my old man. I dreamt that we would watch TV, old westerns like he used to enjoy. I fucking dreamt of working at that factory with him because no one in their right mind was going to hire a kid like me. I dreamt of going to the cemetery and telling Maria I was sorry. So fucking sorry I couldn’t save her.
Next to her is my mother’s stone. I would tell her that I am sorry that I killed her during childbirth. Because I know damn well that Maria would have been alive today if I hadn’t killed our mother.
After the news of my father’s death, knowing that he died alone, knowing that Shaw found him after two days, I dreamt of nothing. I hated myself for not being there when he had a heart attack. Had I been, I could have gotten him help.
For the next two years of my sentence, I sat and stared at the fucking walls of my cell, or spent time at the prison gym, where I tried to exhaust myself enough to turn off my mind. It never worked.
I am damned. Have been since birth. Every member of my family is gone, even Shaw, the man my father grew up with in the Michigan State foster system.
I want nothing more than to get the fuck out of here, but I can’t leave the state without permission. I want to get away from the chance that I may run into someone who will recognize and judge me.
There is no harsher judge than myself. I know who I am, what I have done, and what I am capable of.
Even those who think they want to be around me, if I were them, I would run. I would get the fuck away from me as fast as they can. Death and the damned are separated by moments; moments no motherfucker should want to be a part of. I am the fucking damned.
Tonight, while I sit in my apartment, in the old gray chair next to the window, looking at the city lights, I think about tomorrow being another day, pushing forward—all those things that my dad and Shaw said to do. I try my best to focus on being positive, because today was some sort of hell I haven’t experienced.
Since being released, I have been with several women, all eager to please me. When involved in underground fights, there is always the after-fight fuck options, which I avoid. Women swarm around whether you win or lose, wanting a piece of a man who they know is capable of destruction. I never fuck them. A quick blow job is all I allow, and they eagerly provide it.
To be honest, I would rather jerk off than deal with the possibility of a woman thinking she would want a man like me for anything more than that.
Tatum, she should heed my advice, leave well enough alone, and stay the fuck away. I never gave her the impression I was interested. I never gave any one of the women I have encountered a reason to think I was up for anything more than a release. I should have made it so with her. But this fucking book, I think as I grab it, is a release of its own.
Jonathon and Annie, not Michelangelo and Tatum, until she wanted it that way, until she wanted me to call her by name. For some fucking reason, I am so drawn to her alternate reality that I did.
Sure as fuck was better than this, I think, looking around my apartment.
I open the dog-eared journal to see what she wrote that she didn’t want me to see.
On the top center of the page is, Michelangelo, and under it in parenthesis is: I want to know from a man’s point what he would want. Muse me, Michelangelo. Tell me what a man like you thinks a girl like “Annie” would want.
I shake my head, thinking she doesn’t really want to know. Then I grab a pen, knowing it doesn’t matter. The game is over, so why the fuck not?
I begin to write exactly what fictional Michelangelo, a Michelangelo without death and bars, a man not damned, would want from a girl like Annie.
“Dinner, your place tomorrow, Annie,” he would tell her before he left. Then he would kiss her nose because he knew, if he tasted her lips again, he would have to stay. Then he would walk across the hall to his apartment and look around. It was the same as hers, but more masculine.
He would look at the pictures on his walls of the people he loved. They... lived too far away, and he missed them, but not as much now that he had met Annie.
He was gonna have dinner with her tomorrow night.
He would grab a bottle of wine, a bouquet of flowers, which would make him really uncomfortable, but since this is fiction, he would be okay with it.
She would open the door and have a dress on—black—and it would have just a thin belt tied around the waist so that after dinner—pasta and meat sauce—he would sit on her couch, and she would sit on his lap facing him, straddling him. Then he would untie the belt’s bow, letting it fall open so he could see the tits he had jerked off to again.
He would take them in his hands, then take her lips, because he knew how they tasted. Hell, he would never forget how they tasted better than anything he had ever tasted before.
After neither of ’em could breathe, he would suck on her nipples until she was grinding against his lap. He would be hard. So fucking hard it hurt. But he wouldn’t care, because he would be sucking tits and licking inside her mouth, and she would be on him, and he wouldn’t be there alone with a raging fucking hard-on, writing in a journal he would never want any one, Annie included, to see.
I close the damn thing, toss it on the small table next to the chair, and look down at my dick.
I’m hard.
Fuck.
Chapter Twelve
Angelo
Three days. Three days of waking in a fog and staying inside of it. I have exhausted my body physically and killed the rage and the anger that lies just below the surface.
Three days. Three fucking days, I have fucked my hand, thinking about that woman and trying to avoid those pills. But fucking my hand doesn’t do shit. Coming doesn’t do shit.
Three days. Three motherfucking days, I have taken two of the fucking pills and still I fall asleep to the same vision. My old man’s eyes, disappointed and confused. He never understood, and I never understood why he pushed.
Three days. Three fucked up days, his eyes changed to hers when mine closed, and I saw the same in hers.
Hell, I even tried to write it out of my system; tried to play the fucking pornographic Mad Libs she started, hoping to get lost, to no avail.
No more. No fucking more. I will never let my guard down again.
Fuck being used. Fuck being anything but who I am.
I have two pills left and no hope in finding a different way to crash.
Most people wake up from a nightmare. I go to sleep to one every fucking night of my life. It’s blue lips, disappointed eyes, people I once considered friends talking shit about who I was, men try
ing to fuck with me, me flying out of control, and me sitting in a solitary box, caged with the damn demons in my head and behind my eyelids.
Hell is what I deserve, and I fucking got it by the barrel.
I flop onto the mattress, exhausted from the beatings I took and the ones I gave to the heavy bag.
Jagger and Tatiana have been prying, asking about the girl, Tatum, and I have been less than receptive. They have opened for three days. Jagger says it’s how it’s supposed to be. Me, three days; then him, three days. I’m well aware of the agreement, but we never adhered to it. Until now.
They are both spewing shit about wanting to take off for a couple days. Then I can do the same. Where the fuck would I even go? I can’t leave the state without permission. And honestly, I’m not too damn sure anywhere is far enough away to run.
I mean, how many miles do you have to travel to get away from your past? That’s like the chicken crossing the road. It’s not a straight fucking answer. Therefore, I’m stuck in my hell until death takes me and shoves me to the literal hell. One that I think is probably paradise as opposed to this fucking life.
I close my eyes, wanting to fade into nothing, but that’s a joke, so I sit up and grab the journal. I read about the man Jonathon, jealous of him, me, whoever, until there is a knock on my door.
“Come in,” I call out, pushing myself up off the fucking mattress and wait for Jagger to come in.
When the door doesn’t open, I stand up and say it again. “Come in!”
Nothing.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mumble as I stalk toward the door and fling it open. “I said, come in.”
Brown eyes, pink lips, a look of terror, and a quick step back.
“Dammit, Tatum, be careful,” I snap as I grab her arms before she goes ass over tea kettle down the stairs. Now she is snug against me, looking up, as if she’s frozen. I am looking down, doing the same.
When I get my shit together, I step back and let go, asking, “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I, um... I...” She pauses and shakes her head, then sighs and whispers, “The book.”
