by Maggie Marr
“Never thought I’d see you again, especially after all these years,” the forty-something man said.
A tingle pulsed through her body. Yes. Todd or Tom or… Ted. His name was Ted. She remembered he’d had a penchant for spanking. Or being spanked.
“You look much better than the last time I saw you.” He stepped closer, a possessive step.
When was the last time she’d seen him? The memories…they were blurred, and near the end, dimmed by the drugs especially.
“I…I think you have me confused with someone else.” Her eyes darted from the man, with a fat gut and a fat wallet to match, to where Anthony had been standing a moment ago. A man who she had… She wanted to retch, her stomach heaved. No. This was recovery. This was sobriety. This was making peace with her past…
“Oh no, Shelly.” He sidled close to her now. So close she smelled the garlic on his breath from his lunch. Close enough to reach out and tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear, running a thick finger intimately down her neck as he did. She flinched. “I could never forget a girl like you.”
Deep breath. “No, I suppose not,” she whispered. Nor would she ever be able to forget her past, or save Anthony from the humiliation of knowing it.
“In town for long? Perhaps you’d like to get together? Take a walk down memory lane?” His gaze felt like a bug crawling over her skin as his eyes traveled up her body. Dirty. Unclean. Her teeth ground together, fighting the urge to vomit. “You’re looking good. Very very good.”
“No…” Her voice trembled. “No, that’s not…I don’t…that’s not who I am. Not anymore.”
“Riiiiight.” He drew out the word, the smile that spread over his lips saying, You might fool other people, you might even fool yourself, but you can’t fool me.
Her gut clenched. Her breath tore out in shallow, ragged bursts. The walls, the display cases, the man…all too close. She couldn’t—God, she couldn’t breathe. Where was Anthony? My God, where was he? How could she…she had to…
“Excuse me.” She brushed by him, this man who’d known her body intimately. He clutched her wrist, snapping his hand closed like a trap.
“At least take my card, in case you change your mind.” He held the bright white rectangle out to her. She jerked her arm from his grasp with a look of revulsion she couldn’t hide. “Suit yourself. There are plenty of ladies who’re ready for a good time.”
His laugh pelted her back as she bolted through the store, out the door and down the block, sucking in big gulps of air, blindly needing to get far, far away.
*
“Excuse me, there was a woman—?” Anthony walked over to the clerk who had helped them with the watches. He tucked his phone into his pocket. The call had taken much longer than he’d expected. His assistant had alerted him to two important calls he’d had to return, plus an urgent matter he had to discuss with business affairs. So what he’d meant to spend three minutes doing had turned into over fifteen.
“Sir, I’m afraid she left in quite a hurry. It appeared that perhaps she wasn’t feeling well?”
“Not well?” Anthony turned about the store, scanning from patron to patron. Not seeing Shelly, not finding Shelly. Where had she gone?
A sick yet familiar feeling clutched his belly. “Did she go to the ladies’ room?”
“No, sir. After speaking to the gentleman in the blue tie, she exited the store.”
The blue tie? Anthony turned and his gaze landed on a middle-aged man. A bit too heavy but well dressed. He could be any one of hundreds of executives that populated the sports club or the golf club. Hell, from the looks of his clothes, he could work at Travati Financial. Anthony thanked the clerk, accepted his credit card and the small sleek shopping bag containing the boxed watch in a nest of tissue paper, and walked toward the man in the blue tie.
“Excuse me, you were speaking to a woman I was with, but she seems to have disappeared. Did she say anything about where she was going?”
“So you’re the reason she can’t get together with me.” A smile curved over the man’s face. A smile that caused a slick oily feeling to churn in Anthony’s belly.
“I…uh…how do you know Shelly? She and I—”
“How do I know Shelly?” The man leaned closer, a bit too close, breathing garlic in his face. “I suppose I know Shelly the same way you know Shelly. Isn’t that how any man would know that type of woman?”
That type of woman? Anthony’s free hand, hanging at his side, curled into a fist. He shouldn’t ask it…the question… Anthony didn’t really want to know the answer, to hear this man with horrible breath tell him to his face the truth that somewhere in his mind he’d feared. He tried to stop his own words, to halt their flow, but he couldn’t.
“And what type of woman might that be?”
The businessman tossed back his head and laughed. A harsh, sharp sound. “Really, buddy? You need me to say it? To spell it out for you? For God’s sake, you’re the one paying her now.”
Heat seared through Anthony’s chest. Paying her. A sick feeling seized his gut.
He leaned closer to Anthony. “Lucky bastard. I wouldn’t mind being her john again.”
Red flashed before Anthony’s eyes. His breathing shortened. John?
“She looks a helluva lot better than the last time I saw her in Texas. She was starting to look rode hard. Damn, but she’s in fine shape again. Those legs, that ass”—he shook his head—“the things I did to that ass.” A grin crossed his face at the recollection. “Enjoy that ass, buddy. Enjoy it.” He tapped Anthony on the shoulder, as if they were old college pals, chums.
Rage roared through Anthony. Throbbed through every cell all the way to his core. A deep blinding rage. His Shelly. This man, practically salivating over her legs, that ass…
“Not as much as I’ll enjoy this.”
His fist landed square on the man’s jaw. Hard and fast. The pain that shot up Anthony’s arm felt good, a satisfying kind of pain. A justified punch. The guy dropped to the floor like a sack of wet cement. Anthony stood over him, fists clenched, anger vibrating through his body. He wanted to do more. To lift the man from the floor and pummel him until he bled, until he begged, until he felt the same blinding pain that split through Anthony’s heart.
“You’ve never met her, you hear me? You never speak of her. You never breathe her name, are we clear?” He bit the words out. Brittle and hard. Cold as steel. He never wanted to see this man again. He wanted to erase his presence from the earth. But he couldn’t. How many? How many more could claim that Shelly…how many more had she…he couldn’t bear the thought. My God, he couldn’t even think it.
“You son of a bitch, do you know who I am?” The guy yelled, hand on his jaw.
“No,” Anthony said. “And I don’t really fucking care.”
Chapter 13
Anthony couldn’t find Shelly. She wasn’t at Mrs. Bello’s, nor had she called Aubrey. He’d checked at Joey’s bar and even waited outside the afternoon NA meeting at Saint Bernard’s while the icy wind whipped him cold.
Nothing.
Travati security searched. Not just for Shelly, but also for information about her past. Now that he’d been faced with the truth, he needed to know it all, much as he’d needed to know about Max. A hard, blind need, a rage, simmered and burned through him. She’d been a whore. She’d been that man’s whore. How many others? God, the thought sat like an iron brick in his stomach and yet…and yet…she was Shelly. His Shelly. Still the girl he’d loved, the woman he’d lost, and the love he’d found again.
How could he ever live with her past? He couldn’t live with her past. He wasn’t that good, that altruistic, that kind…and why hadn’t she told him? Of course, he knew why. She hadn’t told him because he hadn’t asked, and because she’d been ashamed. Why tell him? Why let him know the dirt that she’d rolled in, the filth…the…God, the things she must have done.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. The sun hung low on the horizon. Dark
came early in December. Shelly still wasn’t home. Mrs. Bello would’ve called him if she’d arrived. He turned to his car, parked beside the curb, and climbed in. The vents blasted cold air when he started the engine from sitting for so long. Why was he searching for Shelly? What did he want? What did he need from her? She couldn’t be his now, so why even try to find her?
He’d promised Vinnie, that was why. A promise he had made to his best friend on the day Vinnie left, right before he’d shipped out to a faraway place, a place from which he never returned. Anthony pounded the steering wheel with a fist. Dammit. Dammit to hell. Vinnie had been like a brother to him, and Shelly was Vinnie’s only sister. The fact that Vinnie had finally allowed Anthony to date Shelly was a testament to how much respect, how much love Vinnie had for both Anthony and Shelly, how much he valued their happiness.
Anthony started his car and pulled away from the curb. There was one place he hadn’t considered, one place he hadn’t thought of checking until this very moment. A place he rarely visited, one that broke his heart and forced tears from his eyes. Maybe the last place on earth he wanted to go. But he would, now, for Mrs. Bello, for Shelly, and for his best friend.
*
Cold black limbs stood stark against the darkening sky, the leafless branches reaching upward as though to implore the heavens for peace. Brown patches of grass poked through the uneven, dirty snow. Cold cut through Shelly’s coat and sliced her skin. She didn’t care. She tucked her knees up and wrapped her arms around her shins, adjusting herself on the frozen earth. White puffs of air exited her mouth with every breath. Her eyes stung from the bitter cold. Her tears had stopped. How many tears could one woman cry? A friggin’ lot.
“That’s what happened, all of it.” She reached out and scraped her hand against the hard stone, pressing her bare palm against Vinnie’s name as though somehow touching the headstone made her closer to him. “I don’t expect anyone to forgive me. I can barely forgive myself, but I’ve got to try and move on, right? I mean, I can’t wallow in the past for the rest of my life, not if I want to be well. I do that and I’ll be back on the junk for sure.”
Her heart spasmed. A dull ache pressed against her ribs. She’d only been to Vinnie’s grave one time before today. The day he’d been buried. Then she’d left. Jetted. Ran. A deep breath of cold air entered her lungs.
Why had she ever thought she could return home?
There were too many painful memories in New York for her to attempt to build a future here. And she’d come back too soon. Her sponsor Alex had been right. Even her great-aunt Patty had thought six months sober wasn’t long enough to confront the pain of the past.
She rummaged through her purse and pulled out a cigarette and a lighter. “Guess no one around here will mind a little secondhand smoke.” A crooked smile twisted her lips. Vinnie would have appreciated that joke. Sure it was macabre and inappropriate, but he would’ve gotten it. Hadn’t he always gotten her jokes that were a little too…too much? Irreverent? Tasteless? What the hell. When Mom had ditched them and then Dad died, they’d only had each other and Nonna. They’d needed their jokes to get by. The jokes, no matter how edgy, made the pain feel less, dug you out of the muck. Hell, yes, Vinnie would have appreciated the joke. Who knew, he might be laughing right now.
“Those things will kill you.”
Shelly trembled at the sound of the voice at her back. She took a long defiant drag on her cigarette and exhaled in response. She didn’t turn.
“If I haven’t died yet from all the shit I’ve done, I’m not worried about the nicotine.” She ashed to the side of her brother’s grave. Her ass was frozen. How long had she been sitting on the ground? A half hour? An hour? For a long friggin’ time. “How many places did you look before you found me?”
“A few.”
“What tipped you off?”
“The promise I made.”
She knew about the promise. She’d made a few herself. One to Vinnie. One to Anthony. A couple to Nonna. None that she cared to think too much about. Hell, she didn’t have such a great record for keeping promises.
“Why’d you leave?” Barely contained fury edged his voice. He’d gotten better at reining in that Travati temper, but she could feel his anger. If she looked, his face would still be serene, like stone, because that’s where he’d gotten better about hiding his feelings, but his eyes? Tony’s eyes would be clouded with rage.
“Today or before?”
“Both.”
Fuck. She took a deep breath and pulled her knees in tighter. Like she wanted to rehash the past and drag all that old bullshit out into the light. It’d only been in the last three months that she’d really started to examine those decisions. Picking each one up and scrutinizing it, trying to think back to what’d been going on in her head.
“Vinnie, the oxy I took so I wouldn’t think about Vinnie…” She turned her head and looked up to meet his gaze. “You.”
He didn’t like that answer. His lips thinned. Nope. This wasn’t happy Tony. This was the ice king, self-righteous and angry, with all his barriers up.
“I’m here because I promised Vinnie I’d take care of you and your grandmother. Treat you both like family. I’m here because of how much he meant to me.”
Yeah, she got it. It was spelled out in all the words Anthony wasn’t saying. He wasn’t here for her, the ex-addict/whore. He was here for Vinnie, his friend. When it came right down to it, so was she.
He didn’t reach for her, didn’t wrap her in his arms, didn’t tell her she shouldn’t be out here because she’d get cold. He didn’t offer to take her home and make hot chocolate to warm her up. Nope. Had he talked to Ted in the jewelry store? If he had, intimacy between her and Tony was truly history.
“You met someone from my past.”
Silence greeted her words.
Her heart careened to the side, her belly hollow with dread, as her fears were confirmed.
“I wish…Shelly…I wish…” His words drifted away on the cold breeze. “I don’t know what I wish.”
Shelly knew exactly what she wished. She wished that she’d never left. That she’d never hopped the Greyhound for Texas with a pill bottle full of oxy, thinking that her heart would magically unbreak if only she could be somewhere other than where all the memories of Vinnie lived. But the place wasn’t the problem. The memories of her brother, her destroyed family, her dead father, all of them went with her to Texas. So she relied on the oxy, the H, to keep them at bay. The oxy got easier to take and the needle wasn’t so tough to stick in her arm, until they became deep dark overwhelming needs sinking hooks deep into her. The need to get away from the memories and the pain turned into a physical need for the drugs. Then she would to do anything to get the drugs, to avoid the the pain of withdrawing, remembering. Anything.
She’d done a lot of things for drugs.
“You remember the time when Vinnie saved my ass at that construction site?” Anthony’s feet crunched over the snow. “What were we? Nine?”
“I’d just finished kindergarten at Saint Bernard’s, so yeah, you two were nine.”
“Climbed up to the motherfucking top of a cement foundation with rebar sticking out all over the place. Broken glass. Nails. Don’t know how many times my dad had told all of us to stay away from that site. He was going to blister my ass if he caught me there.”
Shelly put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled a lungful of smoke. The memory was there, in her head. She could still feel her little legs pumping her bike pedals as fast as she could to get to Vinnie to tell him that Tony was stuck.
“Why were we together without Vinnie? I don’t remember.” She twisted around and looked at Anthony. Tall and strong and successful and good, he stood with his large frame blocking the wind, his hands in his pockets.
“That was when he was always in trouble. Remember how the first two weeks of that summer your grandma had him scrubbing floors for hiding Sister Beatrice’s rosary?”
“She made
him do it with a plastic dish brush.” Shelly shivered in the cold and took a final drag on her cigarette. “Never got in trouble at school again.”
“Never got caught again,” Anthony clarified. “That day he saved me. Got a ladder and got Leo, because Justin would have told Dad. They managed to get me down without breaking my neck or theirs. Damn, that was some scary shit. Felt like I was forty feet high in the sky.”
“It was probably six foot.”
“Guess everything looks huge when you’re that little. Vinnie would’ve done anything for me or for you or for your grandma, because that’s the type of guy he was. No matter what, he was going to help the people he loved.” Anthony squatted on his heels beside her. “And that’s what I promised to do. Promised him I’d look after you and your grandma. When I failed down there in Texas—”
“You didn’t fail. I disappeared.”
“I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve looked longer. I should’ve made it so you never had to let those men—” He shook his head and his lips thinned. “So none of that ever became a part of your life.”
“You couldn’t have stopped me,” she whispered. “I needed the high so bad, nothing but dying could have stopped me.” She looked at Vinnie’s headstone. Vinnie, the best guy in the world, a great brother and friend, a guy who had served his country, had died. And here she sat next to his grave, still alive, and what was she? A recovering drug addict and former prostitute. Damn, nothing in life seemed fair.
“Temperature’s dropping.” Anthony stood. “I’ll take you home.”
Shelly rose to her feet. Anthony didn’t reach out his hand. He couldn’t even touch her. Could she blame him? Not really. There’d been days, when she was first sober, when she could barely look at her own eyes in the mirror. Bad nights. Vicious dreams. Wretched memories. When her sobriety was raw, brand new, and the world grated on her nerves, the only escape was to fall to her knees and ask God to take the wheel.
