by Lily Knight
“We had some interesting times, we really did,” I whispered to myself.
I thought about one of the first runs my father sent us on. We were both sixteen years old, and our mission was to go fetch a car that one of his associates owed him. Well by “fetch” he meant steal, since his associate had refused to pay back money that was owed. The associate in question had a black Trans-Am, the one with the golden eagle painted on the hood. This dude loved that car – I mean, he totally adored it. So that's why my pops wanted us to boost it. Perfect revenge.
We were told where the car was, and what time we needed to boost it. So, sure enough, we show up and the car is there. We get to work on unlocking the doors with a Slim Jim – easy peasy. We'd done it plenty of times before.
Then, as soon as we got inside, a police car rolls up the road. We panicked, and scrambled into the back seats and laid down, pretty much on top of one another, so the cops couldn't see that there was anyone in the car. It turned out the cops were actually staking out this guy's house! So, they parked across the street from us, watching this prick's house, while we had to lay on top of each other without moving in the back of this damn Trans-Am for a good three or four hours! Eventually, the cops left and we were able to boost the car, but it gave us something to talk about for days!
I laughed as I thought of the memory. It had been a hellish three or four hours (in truth, it had felt like we were stuck in the back of that car for days rather than hours) but I had said to Tino at the time, “man, one day we're gonna laugh about this shit,”. And now, true as anything, that day had come.
I sipped on my whiskey and chuckled again. It was good to be able to laugh. I needed a laugh after everything that had happened today. The worst part was that it wasn't over yet.
I took one more sip of my whiskey, and then pulled a thick file out of my desk. It was time to get back to work...
***
The next day I got up early, as there was still a lot to do. I took a hot shower to wake me up and then dressed in a dark gray Armani suit with black wingtips and a black tie. I checked and cleaned my .45 automatic, which went everywhere with me in a hidden holster inside my jacket and then headed out. I took the elevator down to the underground parking lot where my car was, and as I stepped through the doors, I saw a familiar vehicle pulling in – a silver Jaguar.
The car pulled up in its spot right next to the entrance to the elevator, and Delia Grant stepped out. She was dressed in a pink dress with a white fur gown, was carrying a Luis Vuitton bag, and looked as if her hair had just been done. To tell the truth, she looked stunning, but I had no interest in her – my heart belonged to Bethany, and Bethany alone. And besides, I knew that inside that chest of hers with its silicone-enhanced breasts, there was only a heart of stone and ice.
She beamed out a huge smile at me as she got out of the car – a smile as fake as the two lumps of silicone on her chest.
“Ben! Oh my God, it's so wonderful to see you!” she exclaimed, rushing over to me with open arms, to give me a hug.
I stepped back though and held up a stiff arm, preventing her from doing that.
“What the fuck do you think you're doing?” I said coldly.
“I just... I just wanted a hug,” she said.
“You know what I'm talking about.”
She shook her head, looking confused. I suspected she was acting though; she knew perfectly well what I was talking about.
“My new girlfriend, Bethany.”
“Oh, is that her name,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Quite plain and forgettable, just like her.”
Anger ripped through me.
“You insulted her in public, Delia. You made her feel like shit with your attitude and your comments! Don't you stand here in front of me and lie, and pretend like you don't know nothin' about that! Don't!”
“I was just having a little chat with her,” she said. “I don't know where you get this idea about me insulting her or whatever.”
“'Just having a little chat' huh? Bullshit! She told me exactly what you said to her, and by God, if you were a man and you had done this, I would already have stomped your damn skull into the ground! But just because I don't hit women, that don't mean there aren’t other things I can do to hurt you. So, you'd best back the fuck off, Delia!”
Tears started forming in her eyes, and an expression of sadness washed over her face.
“I... I only did it because I love you, Ben,” she said, her lip quivering. “Don't you understand that? I love you! We should be together! We're meant to be together!”
She rushed into my arms and wrapped her arms around me tightly, and moved her face up to kiss me. I put a hand in front of her face and pushed her away.
“There's no you and me, Delia!” I snapped, “and there never was! We had sex a few times, and that was it! I didn't mean nothin' to me, and if you think that's 'love', you're crazy! I never told you that I wanted to be with you, I never told you that I loved you or even liked you! That shit is all in your head! Now get the hell away from me, and remember what I said – if you say or do anything, and I mean anything at all to Bethany, so help me God I'll destroy you. I don't even wanna hear that you looked at her in the wrong way! Do you understand me?!”
“Ben,” she said, weeping openly now, “why are you doing this?! We're meant to be together, we're-”
“Stop saying that!” I roared. “There is no you and me! There never was, and there never will be! Now stay the fuck away from me and Bethany!”
I shoved past her and stormed off to my car, not paying attention to anything else she said. I got in, revved up the motor and then tore out of the parking garage with screaming tires, leaving Delia there on her own. In my rear-view mirror, as I left I saw her muttering something and shooting me about the most evil glance I'd ever had fired at me, but that was to be expected, I guess.
The phrase “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” came to mind as I drove away, and for a few moments I was a little worried. After all, I knew that Delia had a very vindictive personality.
Still, I was a powerful man in the Sciotti family – what could a spoiled rich girl do to me? I pushed the worry from my mind, and got back to thinking about the day ahead.
THAT NIGHT
I managed to work hard with my accountant all day, and we worked solid through the day for around nine hours, with only a quick half hour break to eat. By the time we had finished, everything was squeaky clean, and my accountant was convinced that there was nothing that the IRS guy would find. After I made sure, for the umpteenth time, that everything was good, I decided to head straight home.
On a whim, I decided to let Bethany know that I was coming back early. I wanted to sit down with her and apologize properly for my earlier bad mood. I messaged her and told her I'd be back soon, and she replied right away. She seemed happy to hear that I was on my way; that was a good sign for sure. Things had been getting better with her and I, and I felt that we were growing closer, and that an affection for me was unmistakably present now in her. I could see it in her eyes, and hear it in the way she spoke to me.
I drove back, thinking about what to order for dinner from the restaurant downstairs. I was pretty hungry after a long, tough day of work.
I got back home with a meal in mind, and planned to order for both of us as soon as I got upstairs. Much to my surprise though, as soon as I walked into the private entrance lobby of my apartment, I noticed a delectable scent wafting through the place. What was this now?
I opened the front door and saw Bethany sitting at the table, which was decked out with a feast. There were bruschetta, salads, two glasses of red wine, and the main dish – pasta with a homemade basil pesto sauce and Parmesan.
“I got it all ready just in time,” said Bethany. “Now, you can sit down and enjoy a good meal after a long day of work.”
I beamed a broad, ear-to-ear smile at her.
“This is amazing!” I said. “Wow! You've really put my kitchen to go
od use, huh?”
She smiled.
“I have. Thanks to your mother, I've really gotten back into cooking. She helped reignite the flame I had for it, one which I seemed to have lost a long time ago. But it's back now, it's definitely back, and cooking makes me happy. So, this here, maybe it smells familiar... it's one of the recipes from your mother's book.”
“Oh yeah, that little thing,” I remarked with a chuckle. “She likes handing that out!”
“It's fantastic. Full of absolutely delicious recipes.”
“Well,” I said, “let's see how well you've done with this recipe.”
I took a seat at the table, and immediately Bethany stood up and brought me a glass of wine.
“Here,” she said. “I picked this one because it's supposed to go well with a pesto-based dish.”
I nodded.
“Impressive.”
I sipped the wine and enjoyed its flavor.
“Mm, this is good! Well done. This wine will, I think, go down very well with the main dish. Now, speaking of the main dish-”
“Not yet,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn't make these starters just for decoration. Now come on, have a bruschetta and some salad first.”
She dished me up some salad and handed me a bruschetta as well. I tasted both, and both were amazing.
“You've really done an excellent job with this,” I said. “Seriously. I can't wait to try the main course.”
We talked and chatted and drank our wine, and then eventually when we got to the main course, and I finally got to sample it, I was blown away.
“The flavors, the texture... it's all amazing!” I exclaimed. “Seriously! You nailed this! It's as good... no, to be honest, it's even better than when my mother makes it.”
Bethany smiled and blushed.
“Aw really, do you really think it's that good?”
“It's beyond good. It's some of the best food I've ever eaten, anywhere. And that is my honest opinion, not an exaggeration.”
And it was my honest opinion. This was seriously good. I knew that my plan to have Bethany running a real restaurant, connected to the new casino that I was going to build in her diner's street, was the right thing to do. With food like this, I had no doubt that it would become one of the most highly-regarded restaurants in all of Detroit. Still, I didn't think that now was the right time to discuss this with Bethany, so I decided not to bring it up.
There was, however, something else that I did want to bring up with her.
“Bethany,” I said as we enjoyed our main course, “there's something important that I want to discuss with you.”
“Sure,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“My family is quite a major donor toward the Children's Hospital Burn Unit, and there's a big fundraiser tomorrow night. I am going to be attending – as will many prominent and high-flying members of the Detroit business community. I want you there with me. I want our relationship to be fully public – out there in the open for everyone to see. You can take my credit card tomorrow and buy whatever you need to doll yourself up for the occasion – it's a black-tie event, so you need to be dressed to the nines. Will you do this for me – with me?”
She looked up from her plate and smiled.
“Yes... yes, Ben, I will.”
CHAPTER 17
Bethany
The dinner I had made for Ben had turned out to be a complete success. Sophia's recipes were amazing, but when I looked at them I figured that I could tweak them ever so slightly and make them even better. Not that they were lacking anything, of course, they weren’t. It was just that when it came to cooking I had an instinct, if you could call it that, about what would taste good and what sort of changes or additions would enhance a dish to the point of sheer perfection.
I had been trying my new creations out on Tino, and he’d had nothing but positive feedback for me. Those had been my first little forays into my renewed passion of gourmet food and exploring the full potential of the culinary arts.
I had been cooking for most of my life at the diner, so putting recipes together wasn’t exactly new to me, but most of the stuff we served at the diner was rather basic. In fact, at least half of it was pre-made food that we ordered from elsewhere and just heated up, like the donuts.
So, all of this gourmet stuff, it was new to me. As a teenager, I had gone through a phase in which I had dabbled in cooking exotic dishes, and I had briefly entertained fantasies of going to culinary school, but then family stuff had taken over and I had put any aspiration for such things to the back of my mind where they eventually faded away completely.
Now, however, it seemed that that former interest had been rekindled with a vengeance. I was cooking up a storm, and just couldn't wait to get my hands on more recipes, and play around with more exotic ingredients.
Now that my dishes had proven to be such a hit with Ben (well, alright, they were technically his mother's dishes, but I had enhanced them with my own touches), I was inspired to make more.
Before I could think about that, though, there was this whole thing about the charity ball we were going to attend tomorrow. Ben had just asked me, and I don't know why, but I hadn't even thought much about what my response would be – I had just gone ahead and said “yes” right away. I was feeling a lot more comfortable around Ben now, and I could not deny that my physical attraction to him was growing in leaps and bounds. Staring at him across the table, in the soft light, his features seemed even more potently handsome than usual, and I found myself desiring him more and more... I wanted to feel his touch, to taste his lips.
Not right now, I wasn't quite ready for that... but soon. Very soon.
“So, Ben, how did your family become involved in being such big donors for the Children's Hospital Burn Unit?” I asked as we ate our dessert – black forest cake, another of my new recipes.
“We've been involved in raising money for the burn unit for many years,” Ben said.
“Really? How long, exactly?”
“Well, ever since I was a kid. You see, there was a situation that hit close to home for my family. A terrible experience, actually.”
“Oh no,” I asked. “Do you mind talking about what happened? Or is it too traumatic?”
“No, I can talk about it. It was a long time ago – I was around twelve years old. My father was providing protection for this Greek cafe in our neighborhood. And there were these guys who used to deal drugs in the alley behind the cafe. Anyway, my father, like me, had a strict “no drugs” policy in all of the neighborhoods we controlled, so sure enough he got his soldiers together and kicked the drug dealers out. They were pissed. They came back that night and threw Molotov cocktails into the Greek cafe as revenge. The owners of the cafe, the Greek immigrants, they lived in a small apartment upstairs from the cafe. Kinda like your setup with your diner. Anyway, they had a little girl, she was seven or eight years old. She was sitting downstairs in the cafe doing her homework while her parents were watching TV upstairs in the apartment. These drug dealing assholes threw the Molotov cocktails into the cafe, and boom, the whole place was consumed with a raging gasoline fire – and that poor little girl was right in the middle of it.”
“Oh my God,” I murmured, shocked at the horror and brutality of it all.
“After calling the fire brigade and the ambulance, the next person the Greek guy called was my dad. I went out with my dad and saw the full extent of the damage myself – and got there just in time to see the little girl being taken out to the ambulance. It was terrible. I’ll never forget it – patches of her skin was falling off, her hair had all been burned off... It looked like something out of a nightmare.”
“Wow... that sounds utterly horrific,” I exclaimed.
“It was, it really was,” he said. “My father promised that family two things: one, that he would exterminate every one of the scumbags who’d had any part in the incident, and two, that he would pay every cent of the little girl's hospital bi
lls, no matter what the total came to.”
“And that's how you got involved in fundraising for the hospital?”
He nodded. “That's how. When we went to visit the little girl in hospital we saw how understaffed the Burn Unit was, how old their equipment was, how they were lacking in resources. So, my father stuck to his promise, of course, but also decided that for the sake of any other children who might have to be treated there that we would raise money for them. They needed resources badly, and they needed to train and hire more staff, so my father used his connections with the local business community to start fundraising efforts for them. And things have improved there over the years, but they're still not as good as they could be, and there's still a lot of cutting-edge technology for treating burn victims that the Burn Unit doesn’t yet have. And that's what tomorrow's fundraiser is about – we're hoping to raise enough to purchase a new machine that has had excellent success in almost completely restoring skin that has suffered third degree burns.”
“That's wonderful,” I said with a smile. “I'm glad to see that you and your family are such generous people.”
“We like to help people who need help,” Ben replied with a warm smile. I could sense that his concern for the wellbeing of others was genuine; as I had long suspected, he did actually have a good, kind heart.
“I'm glad to hear that, Ben. Very glad,” I said. “And thank you for asking me to accompany you to this event.”
“I wouldn't want anyone else on my arm,” he said, his gaze locking on mine for a brief moment before he quickly broke the connections. “And actually, I have an idea. How about you fly out to New York City tomorrow?”
His statement took me by surprise.
“Fly out to New York? But why?”
“Flights aren’t too expensive, and they're short. Besides, it's your day off from the diner tomorrow, so you've got the whole day free. You could find yourself a much better gown in New York than you could here, and you could spend the day there and easily fly back in time to doll yourself up for the dinner.”
