by Liz K. Lorde
“I can’t imagine you being anymore headstrong than you seem.”
“Well, trust me babe, it happened. They call it history. That scar on my brow? Best friend stuck me with a beer bottle – I got him good in the gut, though.”
I laughed at that and squirmed against his touch. “Best friends typically don’t shank one another.”
Leonardo deadpanned, “We’re not typical best friends.”
“That I believe…”
“So I killed a bunch of people,” he said matter of factly, as if he were just pointing out the time of day. “Bad ones, but people. I mean fuck, even the worst bootlickers are still people, hard as that may be to remember.” I could sense a lingering regret in the lilt of his voice. “The more blood I spilled, the more I helped to expand not only my territories – but the whole family’s. Because if there’s one thing that Pops taught us—or taught me, rather, was that at the end of the night, family is all that matters.”
“That’s not true,” I asserted, not wanting to interrupt his tale – but also not wanting to let him think such a thing.
Leonardo’s eyes widened just a bit, and I felt him squeeze me almost imperceptibly tighter. He hadn’t been expecting that.
“Family matters, but so do people. Some people are worth forgiving, sometimes hate isn’t worth holding on to.”
“Well, be that as it may, it’s a dark, dark place babe. The world I come from, it’s all blood and violence and greed,” I thought that I could hear a sense of distaste in his voice. Maybe this really was a man that did regret the bad that he had to do. “So, I made a big name for myself – more fearsome than my brother, more shrewd than my sister.”
“Sister?”
“Yeah,” he swallowed hard, and I felt a tremor run through his body. That was the signal, I thought, of a man whose heart was bleeding. “Lenore was her name,” he said it with certain wistfulness, as though perhaps in uttering it the world might have listened for it. “She never got talked about in the press or the media, same with Killaine but for different reasons. Pops always wanted her to have as sheltered a life as possible given the family business. He never planned on having her, really.”
“So she was never in the spotlight, and your brother less so than you.”
“Yeah. We always wanted it to look like it’d be me next in line to control things, and I always thought that was the end of it. I guess somewhere along the line—“
“You proved your worth,” I put my hand on his chest. “You’ve got goodness in you, I can tell that much. A lot of darkness just means the light in you has to be that much stronger.”
Leo shook his head and moved me in closer, making me feel completely safe and wrapped in warmth. “You’re wrong.”
“No,” I told him, “you’re just being stubborn and letting pride keep you down. I can see it in your eyes,” I put my ear to his chest, “and I can feel it here. You’re no big bad wolf, you’re just as human as anyone else.”
Leonardo grabbed either side of my face, gave a melancholy smirk that sent a punch to my gut, and pulled me in for a long, threatening-to-make-me-cream-again kiss. After a momentary breather, to find my body after that wondrous little trip, I urged him to keep telling me about his past.
“Long black hair and the clearest blue eyes you’d ever seen,” I could tell how much he cared for her just watching the way his eyes lit up talking about her. “She’d beat me in basketball all the time. She’d beat anyone, really. We’d go out back and you know, we had plenty of money, but there was always something appealing about keeping junk around every once in a while. We played in that dusty, torn-up courtyard and ratty old net; the hoop was a little tilted and every time you went to dunk in the rock you’d think the whole thing would come crashing down.”
“I take it getting trashed by your sister didn’t encourage you to take up the NBA challenge.”
“Some of my men still remember how bad she made me look,” there were peculiar lines of pride on his face. Pride in losing to his sister. “Ramona, she’s one of my made guys,” it sounded funny to hear him call her a dude. “She took pictures, and she was there every time that Lenore wanted to play ball. If I’m not painting a clear picture yet, they double teamed me ruthlessly on and off the court. And whenever they did, it was like, suddenly I’m not the boss anymore, so all the men under me would take their side.”
“So… what happened to her?” It made my chest heavy to ask the question. Sometimes, those were the most important ones to ask.
Leonardo didn’t say anything for a moment. “I flew too close to the sun,” he finally said. “She trusted me, that I’d keep her safe. Don’t get me wrong, she was tough as nails – but the families that I’d angered were from overseas. They weren’t just some street trash. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. My brother found out that they were coming, but instead of helping me – he kept himself hidden and out of harms way. Rat bastard.”
“So, we got tipped off that these people were coming after us,” I felt his hand move down to my belly. “We took our precautions. Course, life had other plans.” His heart tapped harder and faster from what I could feel. “Me, Lenore, Killaine. We were all celebrating. Doing drinks and taking shots at this seedy old pub, nestled away in a dark corner on a bad street. It was raining that night,” Leonardo paused and drew a breath. “If I close my eyes and sit still for long enough, I swear I can remember every rhythmic patter as the rain came pouring down.”
He stopped then for a second and asked: “Have you ever saw something?”
I didn’t quite know how to respond to such a thing. “Could you be any more ominous and vague?”
This time, when I expected his devilish smirk to return, it did not. No, instead he kept a stern face – a haunted look, like his visage had gone rigid from the regret. Leo’s tongue flicked across his lips and he blinked, “Have you ever saw something… Call it dejavu. Call it gut instinct. Whatever. Something that you knew was going to screw you up? Like a warning sign on the road of life.”
First came his broken eyes. Next flooded in the vision of Dad standing over her closed coffin, too overcome with grief to take one last look. “I think so,” I replied, but I knew intimately that I had seen what he was describing. All those knives that I thought I’d buried came from every direction, and they slid into my flesh like hungering vipers.
Pain and sorrow, my constant companions of the persistent past. I stuffed them back down where they belonged, hoping that I wouldn’t cry while Leo tried to tell me about all of his painful dealings.
“Well, I’d called for Connifer to come down and celebrate – took him a while since he was uh, busy, with this girl.” He cleared his throat. “When he got there, and he sat down, I saw him smile at me. That was probably the first point. Raising our glasses together? That’s when it really sank down into me. Not another ten minutes later, and I start to get feeling real, real bad,” Leonardo shook his head. “Like someone’s watching me. Can just feel this, this burning sensation on my back and I’m trying to look every chance I get – but you know, with the laughter and the talking and trying to drink twice my weight in poison… you can probably still see the scars from that night.” He sat up and twisted around to show me his backside, beyond the series of colorful tattoos, towards the base of his spine, were three bullet sized patches that didn’t quite match up with the rest of his skin.
“They’re there alright,” I ran a finger across the spongy flesh, unintentionally keeping eye contact with him. Raking my eyes downward, I stopped to admire his, erm, anatomy, before noting the jagged, faded cuts close to his knee. “Knife fights there, too?”
Leo’s eyes shifted to where I’d spotted the scars. “I got those when I was twelve, actually. Flippin’ skirts is a risky business, let’s leave it at that.” Suddenly I wanted to know more about this, but I knew I’d never hear a word about it again. “But yeah. That’s where they hit me first. Everyone else got tagged by bullets, but it wasn’t so bad for th
em. Nearly cost me my legs. Everyone scrambled for cover. There was yelling and screaming, god, there was so much screaming – just civilians and working men and women, fucking staff, just, begging for a chance to live. They didn’t know what the hell was going on… they were so innocent. Lights were shot out, and what light remained would swing and sway with the breeze of every violence.” His hand held onto mine tightly, and as he talked I could feel him squeezing me harder and harder.
Still, I didn’t want to interrupt him.
“Connifer dashed off behind a nearby booth and while he tried to lay down some kind of protecting fire, me and my sis managed to get over the bar counter. I like to think that I helped her get across, but if I really sit down and remember it – I remember that she was the hero that day. Not me. I could barely move.” He laid back down in the bed and put a hand over my ass, pressing me against him. “When we got back behind the bar, Killaine wasn’t anywhere to be found. He left us for dead.”
“He didn’t come back for you guys?”
“No,” Leonardo grimaced, “not in his blood to have any real convictions, other than for serving himself. The men were approaching to finish us off, but Con and Len nailed a few of them – and by the grace of God above I somehow managed to get one myself without leaving cover. At the time it jacked up my hand real bad. That shootout lasted for less than sixty seconds, Tabitha. One minute’s all it takes to ruin your life.”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
“No,” he replied, “not lucky. Unlucky. Unlucky that it was me that lived, and she that died. She was the bravest girl I knew,” I could hear the stone in his throat, could see the glistening of pain in his eyes, “Con was reloading, and there was one last guy out there crazy enough to go on without his bastard friends. Lenore checked for him with a piece of shattered glass, popped up and shot him down. One of the last things she told me, before she collapsed to the floor, was that she got him. ‘I got him, Leo. I got him.’ She bled out with the others before help could make it to the blood bath.”
“She was the brightest star in my sky,” he intimately confessed. It was like he was giving me a piece of him. A piece of his soul.
“I’m sorry Leo,” I told him solemnly.
He looked right through me. Right past me. As if there were a mirror in front of him, and all he could do was mutely measure the worth of his own existence. “It’s stupid,” he announced softly, still lost to the demons that I couldn’t openly observe. “I already burned the light out of my life once.”
This fearsome demon of a man didn’t seem so big beneath the shadow of his past. No, this was a broken man. Broken things seemed to be my calling, but fixing things never was my strong suit. Invisible fingers pressed against my chest, and I truly didn’t know what to say. Powerlessness was all that I seemed to be able to feel anymore. “Don’t make the same mistake that your brother did,” I told him.
Leonardo shook his head, not understanding.
I inched myself closer to him and held either side of his face snugly. “You can’t let fear control you. The only time that you can be brave, is when you’re afraid. Be the brave that I see in your eyes, the strength that I taste,” I brushed my lips against his, “on your lips,” I breathed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THY PRISON IS FLESH
LEONARDO
Her lips touched mine and suddenly the room disappeared. All my senses melted away, and this weight that had always seemed to hang from my shoulders lifted. Tasting her was like sipping divinity; I couldn’t get enough of it, and I never wanted to. I’d never told anyone else, anyone that wasn’t already there, about what happened.
Guilt, regret, remorse. Those things didn’t seem so nasty anymore. All these feelings and thoughts that wrapped around me, they coalesced into something grander than I’d ever dreamed – it all hit me in a rush as I raked my fingers through her hair, as our passion grew and her lips became my form of sustenance.
I was free.
Freer than I’d ever been.
All of a sudden all those worries and concerns I had for Tabitha’s safety just bloomed into something totally different.
I lost Lenore… should I even risk feeling something for this girl? She’s so damn smart, so damn good and captivating, and she doesn’t even know it. Len would have been best friends with her, I’m sure.
That was when a particular thought scratched at my mind, and at my heart too, I think. I had to be there for her. Had to make sure, certain, beyond a doubt. That she makes it out of this mess that I got her into.
Letting shit between me and Tabby go past this? That was dangerous. Risky. Tantalizing. But getting her out of this? That was my duty. I fucked her life up, and I wasn’t going to stop until I made things right.
When I pulled from Tabitha’s sweet embrace and looked over her stunning, intellectual face, my insides lit up like Christmas in July. The memories of my past, I realized, were just stones to carry me here – to this very point. To this very person. For once, I found myself looking to the future, looking to what was and what will be, rather than what had been.
I pushed her down onto the bed and pressed my lips against the corner of her sinfully delicious mouth. Tonight, on this small planet – instead of feeling like the devil of Chaos, Nevada, I thought for once that this nuanced beauty of a girl had given me proper wings. And oh, if I could reward her in this lifetime or the next – so too I would. I would bathe her in the love that I felt, even for as much as I railed against that terrible, if not joyous feeling.
Was it love? That terrified me. No, something like that… it must be a mistake, to feel that.
Breathing in her delightful scent, I suddenly remembered the smell of chamomile as I once walked through the family garden.
This was a creature that I had to protect. That I had to make mine.
Listening to her whimper, I trailed my lips down past her cheek and her jaw, moving next to her neck and glorifying her body with kisses and sucks and bites. I wanted her to feel everything. Every pain, every pleasure. If I was going to be her first, I wanted her to feel like a woman properly should. When I’d had my fill of her neck, and when my cock properly stirred to life at the prospect of fucking this delectable woman, I went to her breast. She called out my name as I sucked her nipple until it became hard and engorged with earthly delights; this only served to make my cock all the harder, all the more excited.
I went down on her and tasted her in the most intimate way possible.
Honestly I’d never been one to give head, but she tasted so good and sweet – I wanted to give her more.
We fucked twice more after, shorter rounds, but intense all the same. Turning off the lights I sauntered back to the bed and slipped beneath the covers, pulling Tabitha to me so that she could be the little spoon. As I stroked her stomach with my thumb, I found my mind at ease for once – no longer turning and turning with dark ideation.
“Hey,” she said after a while. She said it softly, cautiously, as if she wasn’t sure that it was something appropriate to say.
I pulled her tighter against my naked body, “Hey,” I whispered, feeling the weight of the day start to take over my bones.
“I let my mother die.”
Energy jolted through my body like someone’d taken a baseball bat to my chest. I didn’t say anything for a second, I just froze. “I’m sorry?”
She tried to curl up, to become small so that the world wouldn’t see her – or that’s what I figured, anyway. But I wouldn’t let her. I wouldn’t let her think that the world didn’t see her. I saw her. “I let my mom die,” she said, every word coming out in a teary strain. Tabitha shuddered and breathed in sharply, and my heart choked for her.
I flipped her over and cupped her already tear stained face, “Hey… open up to me. I know, I know you don’t mean that like you say,” I thumbed away some of her tears, and I stroked the side of her face, but she wouldn’t budge. “Whatever it is, you can tell me,” I whispered sincerely, perh
aps, more sincerely than anything I’d ever done. “You can tell me, Tabitha.”
She just shook her head and closed her eyes, burying her face into my neck and letting the tears quietly escape her.
“Please?” I didn’t want to push it out of her, but I couldn’t lay idly by, either.
No, she gestured once more. So I held and stroked her for what felt like forever, let her get what she could out of her system, until she finally drifted off to sleep. Before I knew it, when I could not take the weight of the day any longer, sleep consumed me just as it did her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SOURCE OF SUFFERING
TABITHA
I’d actually fallen asleep.
Damn. That cry felt good. That, well, that everything felt good.
Really good.
So good that I felt a tapping finger of fear against my chest. The room was quiet now, with Leo fast asleep.
Somehow I already knew what that meant. It was time for the poison in my head to leak through. This was how it always happened; things would quiet down, there wouldn’t be anything there to distract me. That was when my mind would go: ‘Yes! Now it’s the perfect time to drag yourself over the fiery coals, over every little thing you’ve ever done.’
Even the air around him felt electric. Just being next to him almost made the bad thoughts withstandable.
I didn’t have my nighttime medication with me, either. So that’s not good. Carefully, oh so carefully, I turned and twisted in Leonardo’s embrace, so that I could look upon his resting face. He looks so peaceful. You’d never think that he would be capable of such destructive things, what with the way he occasionally snores and drools just a tad from his mouth.
For a moment I just watched and listened in the quiet of the black. It was almost enough to keep my thoughts settled.
Almost. I swallowed absently and sucked in a long breath through my nose, wanting to spirit myself away from the world.
