by Bethany-Kris
Catherine appreciated her mother more than she could possibly explain in that moment. Catrina reached out and stroked a hand down Catherine’s hair, as though she were smoothing wayward strands. She saw the action for what it was—silent support.
“Do you know that I thought he left me?” Catherine asked quietly.
Dante’s brow dipped low. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, it does. That’s why a few months after I started seeing Cara, I had a setback and had another spiral into depression. I was doing so well. I wanted him to know it, but I thought he left me.”
“He did leave you, Catherine. He kicked you out. Two weeks later, you tried to bleed yourself out in a fucking bathtub!”
Catherine ignored her father’s shout. “No, not that, I meant after.”
“He can’t leave you a second time when he’s already left you, dolcezza.”
Wrong.
Catherine didn’t bother to explain the promise Cross had made to her that day almost seven years ago. A promise she thought he had broken without care. To be honest, she didn’t think her father would understand.
“You know what,” Catherine said quietly, “I’m really not ready to talk to you, Daddy. I need to figure out how I feel without you trying to tell me how you would like for me to feel right now.”
“I’m not—”
“Not intentionally,” Catherine interjected fast. “I know that, but you will. You will want me to be okay, to talk and talk and talk, or to forgive you. I am not ready to. I need to take time and figure out how all this makes me feel. Or how it changes the things I thought I knew.”
“Changes what things, exactly?”
“Things like Cross.”
Dante’s gaze narrowed. “That man—”
“Is not your concern,” Catherine interjected firmly. “He’s my concern, and that’s it. It’s for me to deal with, and I want you to let me do that.”
“No, I think it would be far better for you—and the rest of us—if you don’t see Cross again. Not at all, Catherine. Mentally, he’s bad for you. We’ve all seen where it takes you. No one wants you to go to that place again, and certainly not me. In fact, I want you to stop seeing him. I’m not requesting it. I’m demanding it.”
Catherine’s anger over being told what she could or could not do spread through her body like a wildfire. Still, she managed to hold it back from spilling out. She would not let it consume her and devastate when it escaped from her mouth in the form of words. She loved her father too much to hurt him that way.
“You don’t get a say,” Catherine said simply, “not after this.”
“Excuse me?” Dante stood. “Catherine, I don’t make demands of your life. I never have. On this, though, I will not budge. You are not to see that man after today.”
“It’s not your choice.”
“Catty, it is for your best interests.”
“I’m a grown woman who can decide what is in my best interests.”
Dante stood firm.
Catherine didn’t move an inch, either.
Catrina cleared her throat behind them. “Dante, maybe we should go.”
“Not until I’m finished.”
Catherine shook her head, and spread her arms wide. “This is my home. My apartment, Daddy. Not yours. You don’t get to finish if I don’t want you to.”
“And you are my daughter!”
“What I said remains the same.”
“I told you what I told you,” Dante said, a warning ringing loudly in his words.
“Yet, it means nothing to me,” Catherine replied. She put her back to her father, ready to ask him to leave and be done with the whole conversation and day. “Had you not did what you did to him, I wouldn’t have thought he left me again. He didn’t have to be with me to love me; that’s something you can’t possibly understand. Except when I found him gone, I thought he didn’t love me at all anymore. That was your fault, not his.”
“Would he have ran if he really loved you?”
Her father’s words felt like a slap to bare skin. Still, she stood still and refused to move. She didn’t want to look at him, so she kept her back turned to him.
“Wouldn’t you have run, Daddy?”
“What?”
Catherine’s gaze met her mother’s. Catrina, always calm in the middle of a storm, kept her expression blank. She could see her own pain and sadness reflecting in her mother’s eyes, though. Still, Catrina’s silent strength was a pillar for Catherine. It was something she strived for. It was one of her mother’s greatest qualities.
“It’s okay,” her mother mouthed to her.
He can take it.
You can say it.
Go ahead.
Catherine heard all of those things with two words.
She turned to face her father.
“What would it have meant if Cross didn’t run like you told him to do, or worse, if his step-father had wanted an answer for what you did to him?”
Dante blinked. “Many things, I suppose.”
“Wrong. One thing. I was raised being told to always respect others in our life because disrespect leads to only one thing. You know what it is, and what it means. Say it.”
“I don’t know that’s what it would have been.”
“Yes, you do,” Catherine argued. “Say it.”
Dante scowled. “A war between our families would have likely been the result of everything.”
“And who would that have put in danger?” she pressed.
Her father stayed quiet.
Catrina was the one who answered. “Everyone. All of us.”
“Including his mother,” Catherine said, “who he adores. And his sister, who grew up thinking he was her very best friend.”
“Yes, well—”
“Me, too, Daddy. It would have put me in danger, too. No matter what Cross and I were—together or not—he would never put me in danger. Because he loved me. He always did.”
Loves, her mind whispered.
“So wouldn’t you have run, too?” Catherine asked again. “Had it been you and Ma, wouldn’t you have run, too?”
Dante scrubbed a hand down his face.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Of course, I would have,” he admitted softly.
Catherine nodded. “I know. Everyone knows. I stand by what I said. I need time to figure out how I feel about what you did. Then maybe if I need to, we can talk more about it. Or maybe I won’t need to talk about it at all. But no, you do not get a say about Cross, me, or what I do with him. You’ve already said and done more than enough, Daddy. It’s time to let me decide the rest.”
“Except no,” Dante said, “because I have already decided this. Do not push me.”
Catherine stared him down.
Dante was unaffected.
Well, if he wanted a fight …
She didn’t mind giving him a war.
Catherine was his daughter, after all.
Catherine entered the quiet café, but stayed back from nearing the table Cross was currently sitting at. Behind the booth he sat in, a little girl—maybe five or six years old—had turned around to talk to him. The girl’s mother chatted away on a phone, seemingly oblivious to the fact her daughter was making a friend.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Cross.”
“That’s a cool name.”
Cross grinned. “Thanks. What’s your name?”
“Kenna. I’m almost six.”
He nodded dramatically. “Almost a big girl, then.”
“I am a big girl!”
“I bet you are. What grade are you in?”
“First grade,” Kenna answered with a toothy smile. “What grade are you in?”
“I haven’t gone to school in a long time,” Cross replied.
“Oh noes. Only bad kids don’t go to school when their mommy says so.”
Catherine could see that Cross was making a great effort to be serious when h
e said, “Make sure you’re a good girl then, huh? Not bad like me.”
“I will!” Kenna promised.
Then, Cross’s gaze turned on Catherine. She had no doubt he knew she was there from the second she walked in. “Seems my friend has finally come, Kenna. You don’t mind if I talk to her now, do you?”
Kenna peered at Catherine with curious eyes. “Well …”
“Hmm?”
“I guess not,” Kenna said with a pout. “But only because she’s pretty.”
The little girl said that with a fierce nod that made Catherine laugh under her breath.
“Kenna, eat your muffin,” the girl’s mother said without even looking at her daughter.
“Bye, Cross!”
“Bye, Kenna,” he said with a wink.
Catherine sat down in the booth when the little girl turned back around. “Making friends?”
Cross shrugged. “Can’t be mean to kids just because I don’t like people, can I?”
“I mean, you could. It might make you an asshole, though.”
“Might?”
“Definitely would,” Catherine assured.
Cross chuckled, and cupped his to-go cup of coffee. “Noted.” Then, he pushed an extra to-go cup toward her. “Two sugars, extra cream. Right?”
“Yep.” Catherine shoved the sleeves of her wrap sweater up to her elbows, and reached for the coffee. She didn’t miss how Cross’s gaze dropped to her wrist with the tattoo. He quickly averted his eyes, but she still saw it. She hadn’t put any bracelets on before leaving the apartment because she didn’t see the point anymore. It was there. The scar no one could see beneath a tattoo that she loved too much to hide. “You can ask about it, if you want. It’s been a long time. I don’t really talk about it because no one brings it up. It’s like they think if they do, it might make me do it again. That’s ridiculous, by the way.”
Cross let out a long exhale. “I’m not sure I should ask anything, to be honest.”
“Up to you.”
Catherine sipped her hot coffee.
Cross’s dark gaze ventured over her face, and his tongue peeked to wet his lower lip. “Could I …”
“What?”
He put his palm up on the table, and opened his fingers with a wave at her hand. She placed her left hand upside down in his, leaving her wrist turned up and her tattoo exposed. Cross’s thumb stroked the tattoo once, then twice. Careful and soft. Slow and gentle.
“What about the other one?”
Catherine cleared her throat, and said, “I, uh, was drunk when I did it, and dehydrated from not eating or drinking anything in days. I didn’t realize how deep I had cut, I guess, and I didn’t really feel anything. I was kind of dazed by all the blood in the bathwater. I was starting to pass out by the time I even thought about the other one. So …”
“I’m sorry,” Cross murmured thickly.
“Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault, or anyone else’s. It was mine. I chose to do it. No one else.”
Cross’s fingers tightened around her wrist, holding her in place. “Still, Catty. Maybe not for this, but other things. I am sorry. That day when I made you leave … after, too, I guess, when you thought I left.”
“You did leave, though,” she pointed out gently. “Technically.”
“I figured …”
“What?”
Cross’s eyes met hers again. “I figured you would find me if you needed to. If you wanted to, you would find me. We always came back together before, didn’t we? I thought going to Chicago wouldn’t make a difference to that at all.”
“Chicago. That’s where you went?”
“Three years,” he said quietly. “Three long years.”
“Why did you finally come back?”
“My parents needed me home, and I hoped enough time had passed that me coming back wasn’t going to cause problems with the Marcello family.”
“It didn’t, clearly,” Catherine said.
He laughed darkly. “Not until last week when I assaulted your father. How is he, by the way?”
“Pissed off.”
Cross didn’t even seem surprised. “I figured.”
“If he knew I was here with you, he would probably lock me in the basement until I was an old woman.”
His smirk grew sinful. “Come on.”
“No, I’m pretty serious. He’s forbid me from seeing you, but he forgets I’m not a child.”
“Then why did you call me, Catty?”
Catherine expected him to let her go when he was done looking at her wrist, but he didn’t. Instead, she did what felt good and right for her by turning her hand over to lay her palm inside his. Their fingers intertwined together tightly.
“Because I’m trying to figure things out,” Catherine whispered.
“What things?”
She looked at him, and smiled. “Everything, Cross.”
“Can I help?”
“Maybe.”
For some of it.
He didn’t push or ask.
Then, he looked down again. “Why a cross like that?”
Catherine swallowed the nerves in her throat. “Reminded me of the one you had drawn on the same spot once.”
“I remember that. Black Sharpie. Nosy girls all around. My birthday.”
Her laughter felt light when it escaped. “Yeah.”
“I thought … I don’t know, maybe to remind you of why.”
“It wasn’t because of you. It’s far easier for everyone else to feel guilt for someone else’s choice when it comes to suicide, but you don’t have to feel that at all, Cross.”
“Easier said than done, my girl.”
My girl.
Catherine let the invisible butterflies beat inside her belly. She had never felt that with anyone else—only ever Cross. Sometimes, he hadn’t even needed to do anything but look at her and she would feel it.
It didn’t seem to have changed.
She liked that.
A lot.
“It did remind me of you, though,” Catherine admitted. “That was another reason why I chose it.”
“Oh?”
“I got the tattoo done a year after I made the attempt. Months after I went back to see you and found you gone.”
Cross looked away.
Catherine kept talking. “I got the cross done after all of that because a part of me was still holding onto a part of you.”
His fingers tightened around hers. She answered that back with her own squeeze.
“Do you want to do something?” Cross asked. “Go somewhere, maybe?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
“Sure.”
Movement in the next booth quieted them both. Kenna and the girl’s mother shrugged on their jackets and turned to head out of the café. Not before Kenna stopped at Cross’s side, though. She beamed up at him. He smiled back.
“Here you go,” the girl said, holding out a napkin for him.
Cross took it. “Thank you.”
“Be good and go to school,” Kenna told him.
“I will.”
The girl’s mother laughed, and tugged her daughter along.
Cross looked at the napkin, and then set it on the table. He pushed it across to Catherine for her to see, too. The messy handwriting and shaky hearts made Catherine smile.
Do you love the pretty girl?
Check yes or no.
It was too sweet.
“Well, do you?” she asked, looking up at him. “Yes or no?”
Cross’s intense stare pinned her in place, made her throat tight, and her body hot. What he did to her with just a look … it never failed. She already knew his answer before he said it.
She wished she knew what to do with it.
“When did I ever stop loving you, Catherine?”
Catherine stepped out of her Lexus, and held her wrap sweater tighter to her chest as the cold air sneaked beneath. She looked out to the damp sand and water of Jacob
Riis Beach. With darkness falling, and the smell of rain in the air, the place seemed all but abandoned. The parking lot was basically empty. A couple walked about a half of a mile down with a dog, but in the opposite direction of where Catherine parked.
Cross’s Range Rover was right beside her Lexus. He had backed into the parking spot, and the hatch on the vehicle was opened wide. Catherine found Cross sitting in the back of the Rover’s hatch. His leather jacket rested open, and he had an arm sitting on a propped knee. One of his legs dangled over the edge as he looked out at the water.
“This was not what I thought you would pick when you asked if we could do something,” she admitted.
Cross looked down at her. “No?”
“I thought a club, dinner … something.”
“Those are good things to do, too.”
“Sure.”
“But I prefer this when I want quiet,” he admitted.
Catherine hugged her torso. “Do you do this often?”
“More often than not lately.”
“Why?”
“Things on my mind, Catty.”
He didn’t offer more.
She chose not to push.
Turning to look over her shoulder, Catherine admired the darkness of the sky and the calmness of the water. “This is good, though.”
“Yeah?”
She found him looking far too sexy for his own good over her shoulder. Grinning. Content. Cool, calm, and collected.
“Yeah, Cross.”
Thunder boomed overhead.
He leaned forward and looked up at the sky. “It’s going to rain.”
“You can feel it in the air.”
It made goosebumps bloom over her skin. Then again that could have been Cross when he grabbed her around the waist without warning, and pulled her into the hatch with him. Catherine laughed as she settled in Cross’s lap. He tugged a blanket from behind him and tossed it over their shoulders. She snuggled into the warmth—his and the blanket.
Things were always easy with Cross. Like they never missed a beat. Time kept going; they had just stopped for a while.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you that day you came to the college,” Catherine murmured.
Cross’s fingers sifted through her hair. “It’s all right.”
