A Little Too Much

by Lisa Desrochers

“Yo!” Jerry yells into the receiver.

  “Hey, Jerry. It’s Hilary.”

  “Don’t you dare bag out on me,” he warns.

  “I’m hacking up a lung here, Jerry,” I lie, barking out a cough. “You seriously don’t want me there.” I need the money, so it’s almost never that I do this. I can’t believe I forgot to ask for the night off.

  “You better get your ass better before tomorrow. I need you this weekend.”

  “I’ll find some drugs. I’ll be fine.”

  He hangs up without another word.

  I shower and pull Brett’s favorite dress out of the closet. It’s a black backless number with an asymmetrical hem. The last time I wore it, we had sex in the back of the cab on the ride uptown from closing night of Brett’s last show. I think about wearing no underwear in case he’s planning a repeat performance, but that uncomfortable tightening in my stomach is there again at the thought.

  I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with me.

  I pull on a black lace thong and slip the dress over my head, then turn and look in the mirror. This dress is perfect with my butterflies. They’re a slash of color that sweeps up from the waist at the lower right and disappears behind the strap at the top left. I don’t even need any jewelry. “Yep, baby,” I tell the mirror as I adjust the neckline. “You still got it.”

  I smooth my kinks back into a loose bun and twist a few corkscrews down the side of my face, blend on some blush, and brush on some mascara, but just as I’m slipping on my shoes, the buzzer sounds for the door downstairs. I go to the intercom. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Alessandro.” Mmm . . . that accent. But what the hell’s he doing here?

  I press the button for the door latch. “Wait there. I’m coming down.” I grab my bag and my coat, and head for the elevator.

  When the door opens on one, I find Alessandro standing just inside the front door. “I thought you might be missing these,” he says, holding up my gloves. “You dropped them when you ran screaming from my company yesterday.”

  I take them from his hand. “You did not come all the way uptown to give these to me.”

  He shrugs with half a smile. “I was in the neighborhood.” I smile at his repeating my words from the Y back to me, but then his eyes scan down the front of me and there’s something burning in them when they find my face again. “I shouldn’t have bothered you. You’re obviously on your way somewhere.”

  “My boyfriend’s show opens tonight.”

  His jaw tightens and something flashes in his eyes, but then he holds out his hand. “Let me help with your coat.”

  I hesitate, but then hand it to him and turn. There’s a pause before he slides it on and I can almost feel his eyes sweep over my bare back. Something tingles in the same spot that was squirming a little while ago when Brett touched me.

  He clears his throat as I turn to face him and pull on my gloves. “Thanks.”

  “Let me walk you to the subway.” He places one of those sexy hands on my low back and that tingle is there in my belly again as he guides me to the door.

  I shut it down. I can’t want him like that.

  I bundle my jacket around me and we walk the three blocks to the subway.

  “Have you thought about Thursday?” he asks.

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  There’s a pause as he waits for me to elaborate. “Any decisions?” he finally asks.

  “No,” I say without looking at him.

  “You’re not very talkative tonight.”

  I keep my eyes on the sidewalk. “Am I ever?”

  He doesn’t respond.

  We funnel down the stairs into the subway and just make it onto the train before the doors close. I grab the pole near the door and Alessandro steps up behind me, reaching for the bar over my head. “If I make you uncomfortable, Hilary, I’ll go away,” he says low in my ear.

  I turn and look at him then, because that spot in my gut tingles again. “Honestly, I don’t know what you make me. But, no. I don’t want you to go away.”

  He catches the corner of his bottom lip between his teeth and his eyes cloud. “I really should leave you alone.”

  I don’t know what he wants me to say. He’s right, of course. He makes me feel like that girl again—weak and vulnerable. I can’t be her anymore. I should have told him to go away when he first showed up. I turn and grasp the pole with my back to him. “Probably.”

  As we sway with the movement of the train, Alessandro’s body brushes against mine, and by the time we stop at Fiftieth, he’s pressed tight against me. I don’t know whether it’s that I’ve shifted back into him, or he’s leaning forward into me, but whatever it is, what I do know is neither of us is breathing. There’s a palpable charge, like static electricity, with every subtle shift of his body against mine, and when the doors slide open, neither of us moves for a several beats of my pounding heart.

  Finally, I have no choice.

  “Hilary,” he says as I step away from him onto the platform, and that one word sounds like a prayer. I turn and his expression is guarded. He looks at me with pleading eyes, like there’s something more than my name he wanted me to hear. Like he just poured his heart out and he’s waiting for some response. But before I can figure out what those deep eyes are asking, the doors close, and a second later, he’s whisked off through the tunnel.

  Something deep inside me aches as I stand here watching after him, but I can’t ache for Alessandro. Not like this.

  THE THEATER IS packed and the air is electric with opening-night anticipation. I feel myself getting jazzed just being here, and I’m not even in the show. I envy Brett so much right now.

  I find my seat just as the house lights flicker their warning, and a few minutes later, the first chords of the opening number erupt out of the orchestra pit. When Brett hits the stage a few minutes later, every female eye is trained on him.

  Damn, he’s good.

  I laugh along with everyone else at the funny parts, and dab at my eyes along with everyone else when that one kid dies. And the older woman on my right actually gasps near the end when Brett strips.

  I don’t blame her. He’s spectacular.

  And he’s mine.

  I smile as the familiar ache settles in my groin at the thought, and I’m relieved that, this time, I’m aching for the right guy. I can’t wait to get him home so I can give him his own private ovation. I don’t know what the hell that was, earlier with Alessandro, but I am so back.

  Chapter Nine

  “JUST REMEMBER, YOU’RE the one who said anywhere,” I tell Alessandro as we slide into seats at Argo Tea in Columbus Circle.

  He gazes at me with cautious eyes from his seat across the table. “I’m intrigued to see what you’ve chosen.”

  “I heard it was reopening and I haven’t been there and I’ve been wanting to go, so . . .” I shrug.

  He nods. “Then it’s the perfect place.”

  “How long are you staying?” The question comes to me totally out of the blue and I have to take a second to figure out exactly what I mean by it.

  Alessandro’s eyes scrunch in confusion. “In New York?” he asks after a second.

  Yep, I realize when he asks. That’s what I meant. “Yeah.”

  “As long as it takes to sort things out.”

  “Your ghosts,” I say.

  He lowers his gaze to his coffee cup. “I shouldn’t have called you a ghost, but you have to understand, I’ve been haunted by my past for so long . . . by what I’ve done to innocent people . . .” His eyes lift to me again. “ . . . including you.”

  “So why would you want to come back here, then? Wouldn’t it be easier to just stay away?”

  He breathes deeply and swirls his coffee. “I came to New York for a lot of reasons. I’ve spent some time at the World Trade Center memorial, finally grieving my father. His name is on the north-tower pool.” His distant gaze drifts back to mine. “But I also needed to sort fact from fiction in my head. I�
��ve walked this city—from our house, to the lot where Lorenzo’s gang squatted, to my old school, where I dealt to kids—hoping if I saw it through the eyes of an adult, it would put things in better perspective and I could lay some demons to rest.”

  “And have you?”

  His eyes find mine and there’s despair in their depths. “Some of them didn’t turn out to be as easy to put to rest as I’d hoped.”

  Is that me? Or his family?

  “You never really told me about your father. Just that he worked at the World Trade Center.”

  He nods. “He was assistant chef at Windows on the World, at the top of the north tower.”

  “So he was at work that morning?” I was only nine, but I remember. We lived in Alphabet City, so not super close to the World Trade Center, but close enough. I remember how everything shut down, like a ghost town, except for the military. There were some people in the streets during the day, but at night, it was quiet. Too quiet. It felt like a war zone, and in some ways it was, I guess. Mallory was sixteen then—a junior in high school. She wouldn’t let me leave the house for the first week. The truth is, I didn’t want to. I’d never been so scared. I spent the week sleeping in her double bed with her. Mom spent that week drunk on the couch, watching the news and mumbling that we should bomb the fuckers. Little by little, stores and schools started reopening and we ventured out again. And little by little, everyone got back to their lives. But I’ve never gone to the WTC site. Even still.

  Alessandro takes a deep breath and blows it out. I can tell it’s still hard for him to talk about. “He always went in early to oversee the prep work. He walked with Lorenzo and me to the subway when we left for school that morning, and that was the last we ever saw of him.”

  “Wow . . . I don’t even know what to say.”

  “There’s really nothing to say.” He gives his head a small shake. “He was just gone. They never recovered his body.”

  “That must have been pretty rough.”

  He swirls his coffee again and I’m deciding that’s his new tell. “My father was the cement that held our family together. When he died, it devastated our mother. She spent weeks posting signs and scouring the city, thinking maybe he was injured or unconscious—that he had been taken to a hospital or . . .” He trails off, his jaw tight. “It took a long time for her to accept he was gone, and then she just curled up in bed and stopped living.”

  So it was both of our mothers vanishing that landed us in the group home together, mine to jail and his into her own mind. “I’m really sorry, Alessandro.”

  He looks up at me. “You know the rest. Lorenzo and I started getting into trouble and ended up in juvie, then in the group home.”

  “Where you found more ghosts.”

  He winces a little. “Please, Hilary, forget I said that. You were the only ray of sunshine in that whole nightmare.”

  My stomach kicks. I’ve been called a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure a ray of sunshine isn’t one of them. I down the last of my tea in one shot. This is getting way too uncomfortable. “You ready?”

  He finishes his coffee and stands, pulling out my chair.

  We hop on the F train and transfer at Fourteenth Street to the L, and the whole time Alessandro keeps cutting me glances, like he thinks I might give something away. But he doesn’t ask where we’re going. I stand at the first Williamsburg stop and he follows me off the train. We come up out of the subway into bright winter sun and I spin a circle to get my bearings, then head down North Seventh. Alessandro keeps stride. His eyes flick around as if he’s trying to spot where we’re going, but he still doesn’t ask. It’s like he wants to be surprised.

  I’m pretty sure he’ll be surprised.

  We turn right and finally come to Metropolitan Avenue, and on the side of a yellow awning on a storefront half a block up on the right, I see it. Museum.

  It’s a red brick building with glass display windows on either side of a white door. City Reliquary is in white script across the front of the awning. I stop in front of the building and Alessandro looks at me curiously, like he’s still waiting to see where we’re going.

  But we’re here.

  I tip my head at the storefront window next to us and he follows my gaze. He turns and looks over the vintage lunch-box display there.

  A smile breaks across his face—the first one I’ve seen actually reach his eyes—as he realizes what this is. “This is brilliant.”

  He reaches for the door handle and opens it, giving me an “after you” wave of his hand. I’ll never admit it out loud, but I kind of like all this chivalry. No one else has ever helped me on with my coat, or held doors, or pulled out chairs for me before.

  We step under a two-foot-long model of the Staten Island Ferry over the door into a gift shop at the front of the museum. I smile as I walk past a shelf of whoopee cushions, marbles, and jacks. I love this vintage stuff.

  Alessandro stops me at a mound of rubber cockroaches, picking one up and wiggling it in my face, and it’s as though eight years have slipped away. He’s grinning ear to ear, and in that boyish gesture, I see the boy I knew so long ago.

  “Get that thing out of my face,” I say, swatting it away.

  He laughs and drops it back in the mound, moving to the rack of old-fashioned hard candy. “This place is a gold mine.”

  I step up to the counter. “Two for the museum,” I tell the older woman standing there.

  “You can just place your donation here,” she says, laying a hand on a wooden box with a sign that says, “suggested donation $5.” I slip a ten into the box and she hands me a folded brochure. “It’s all pretty self explanatory, but this will tell you all you need to know,” she says.

  I take it from her and spread it open. “Thanks.”

  I grab Alessandro by the arm on the way to the turnstile that leads to the museum, and he bends his elbow to keep me from letting go. I don’t try. Something’s shifted between us. It’s like him telling me everything over coffee has freed something inside him. The dark curtain isn’t gone, but it’s thinner. I can almost start to see through it.

  We step into the museum and to the left is an entire newsstand, just like it would look on the street.

  “This is so cool,” I say swinging us that direction to get a closer look. I peek at the brochure. “This stand was in Chinatown for thirty years. Those are hand-drawn advertisements on the wooden walls,” I tell Alessandro, pointing at them. “And the guy who owned this stand called that the ‘guest of honor chair,’ ” I say, indicating the chair in the middle, “because that’s where people would sit while he sketched them.”

  Alessandro leans in to get a closer look at the drawings, and I wonder if he misses drawing himself.

  After a few minutes of gawking, we move up the wall to the World’s Fair exhibit. There are knickknacks from both the 1939 and the 1964 World’s Fairs. I pull out a drawer in the display under a Jim Beam bottle from the 1964 fair and find a few tickets under glass. “This is so cool,” I say, and realized I said that at the last booth. I look up to find an amused glint in Alessandro’s eyes. “Well, it is!”

  “That it is,” he agrees, pulling open the next drawer and revealing an old license plate.

  I glance at my brochure. “That’s off an old World’s Fair fire truck.”

  We move slowly past a wall of Brooklyn Dodgers paraphernalia to a vintage barbershop.

  “This is so cool,” Alessandro says, only barely containing the chuckle in his voice.

  I rip my hand off his arm and smack him with it. “Shut up.”

  We continue to move around the room, examining every exhibit, finally spilling back into the gift shop.

  “This is a mandatory purchase,” he says, plucking up a cockroach from the stack.

  I pick one up and look at it. “This could be useful if I want to close the bar down early.”

  We move to the woman at the counter, and Alessandro reaches for my cockroach as he steps up to the register.
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  I yank it back. “You are not buying this bug for me. This is my day. My turn to pay.” I shove him aside. “Two cockroaches,” I say to the woman.

  She smiles as she keys them into the old-fashioned register. “They’re actually Croton bugs.”

  “What’s a Croton bug?” I ask, handing her a crumpled bill from the bottom of my bag.

  She looks up at me and grins. “A cockroach.”

  She makes my change, and as she’s handing it back, I feel something tickle my neck. I lift my hand, then scream and slap at it when I feel a giant bug.

  Alessandro laughs out loud as his cockroach flies off me onto the floor.

  “You bastard,” I growl, shoving him.

  He picks his cockroach up and grins at me. “If I knew that’s all it took to get a rise out of you, I’d have stuck one in your tea a long time ago.”

  “If I find that fucking thing in my tea,” I grumble, pushing him toward the door, “I swear to God, I will cram it up your nose.”

  He smiles and drops his bug in my hair.

  I claw it out as we stumble through the door onto the sidewalk. “You’re worse than my nephews. You’re not getting it back if all you’re going to do is torment me with it.”

  He shrugs a shoulder. “You paid for it. It’s yours anyway.”

  I spin on him, pocketing his cockroach. “So I’m never allowed to buy you anything? Isn’t that sort of sexist?”

  “Au contraire. I let you buy my ticket to this fine establishment,” he says with a semi-smirk, waving his hand at the museum.

  “It wasn’t a ticket. I made a donation in your name. And you’re going to let me buy you dinner too,” I say, turning my back on him and starting toward the pizza place in the next storefront over.

  “Let me cook for you,” he says from behind me.

  I turn and find him right where I left him, near the door of the museum.

  “You cook?”

  “I do. Let me show you.”

  This, I’ve got to see. I catch myself wondering if his cooking is like Brett’s: mac and cheese out of a box, or spaghetti with sauce from a jar. He said his dad was a chef, but he was young then. I doubt that’s where he learned.