by Tiana Laveen
“What?!”
“You know this isn’t over, right? The whole time we were talking right now, you were doing that thing you do when you’re turned on… swing your foot and do that nervous blinking, you know… it’s real fast like Morse Code.” He smirked.
“Be quiet. All you’ve spoken about is sex tonight. I have not heard one word about you missing me, loving me, nothing, and you expect me to listen to the rest of this nonsense and take you seriously. You’re just some pervert now.”
“That’s a given.” He chuckled. “This shock value is a given, too, because you need to be woken the fuck up and reminded about who I am, and who you are. Yeah, I’m talking about sex because I was locked up for ten fucking years and hadn’t seen pussy, particularly yours, that whole entire time, Cass. I used to jerk off to your picture practically every night! Pretending I was deep inside of you in our nice apartment in California, instead of locked away in that funky ass cell! I got out and fucked like a jack rabbit, a bunch of random women I didn’t give a shit about, but I always thought of you… came right back to you. No one could compare.”
Her eyes glossed over, but she quickly blinked it away.
“Tony, you’re just emotional right now, okay? None of what you’re feeling is real. It’s just—”
“Don’t tell me how I feel. I don’t hold a flame for someone for over ten years in the fuckin’ pen if I don’t still love them, Cass. To me, the fact that I still love you is obvious, so why say it?! IT’S A GIVEN!” His feelings boiled over, flooded the world around them. “I. Never. Fucking. Stopped. Loving. You. It never died… it never even paused. I tried… God knows I tried. I wanted you to be happy, but I suffered in silence. When I saw you had gotten married, I was so damn jealous! I was miserable for weeks and months and years! When you got divorced, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face… Yeah, I didn’t want you to hurt, but I knew then that you weren’t happy. I wanted to contact you, so I could tell you all the things I’m telling you now.”
“I don’t believe you… anything you want to do, you do it! You would have done so by now.”
“Your divorce was final ten months ago. I was planning to give you a good year before I made my move, out of respect for you, but then, Grandmama died so I took it as a sign that it was time to come and have this chat.” She looked as if she’d suddenly seen a ghost. “I didn’t just come down here for Grandmama’s funeral. I came here to look you in the eye to see if my obsession with you, after all of this time, was still valid. It is. It’s alive and well. I want you back, Cassidy. I still love you, as much as, if not more than, before.”
“You don’t even know me anymore! Who I was at seventeen is vastly different from who I am at now!” She huffed. “I don’t know what you’ve been smoking or what fantasy world you’re living in, Tony, but—”
He grabbed her by the sides of her face and pressed his lips to hers, hard. He was beyond needy, overflowing with lust and desire, married to his ever-burning love for the woman. That flame burned on. When he pulled away, she raised her hand as if to smack him, then rested it back against her side. Her body trembled, her lips parted as if to speak, yet nothing came out.
As he made his way off the porch, one step at a time, the flavor of her mouth lingered against his lips, feeling like a ‘welcome home.’
“I’m goin’ back to New Jersey, Cassidy, but I’ll be back very soon. I got the information I needed.”
“Don’t bother returning. I’ll be gone in a few days. Please don’t contact me, Tony. I’m serious.”
“I’m serious, too. Your kiss told on you, baby, and that’s all I’m going to say for now…”
He got in his car, started up the engine, and drove off, the enthusiasm he harbored deep within him re-ignited. She hadn’t pulled away when he’d kissed her, hadn’t offered resistance even for a second. It was as if she’d expected it, wanted it, needed it. Her soul had spoken on her behalf, while her mind fought temptation. He ran his tongue along his bottom lip and smiled…
She ate the Cruller in the kitchen. That’s her favorite…
…The next day
“You mean to tell me that he told you why he liked to start shit wit’ you, then kissed you and said he’d be back?”
“Yes!” Cassidy stood from Grandmama’s dining room chair and tossed their empty plastic cups in a nearby trashcan. She’d needed that vodka and pineapple juice to help calm her nerves.
“You failed.”
“What are you talking about?” Cassidy raised her brow in question as she grabbed another trash bag.
“The man said, ‘I would make you mad on purpose to have more passionate sex, get your inner freak to come out ’nd play, then he got you mad yesterday, baited yo’ ass into an argument like he had a fishing rod wit’ a worm and you was some salmon going upstream. You standin’ there huffin’ and puffin’, all angry ’nd shit, and he kiss yo’ ass dead in the mouth then pulls an Arnold Schwarzenegger: ‘I’ll be bach!’ Girl! He tricked yo’ ass, played you like a fiddle! Name of the tune? Dumb Diddly Dumb! He did exactly what he said he’d do, and now, you done handed over the keys to the mansion and got the nerve to not understand why he movin’ in.”
Cassidy stood there in shock, then let the bag drift from her hand onto the floor.
“Oh… you think… you think it was a test?”
Danica pursed her lips and rolled her eyes, “Do I think it was a test? Do you know how damn silly you sound, Cassidy? I thought you was the smart one! This is a damn shame… graduated summa cum laude, too.” She burst out laughing and tapped the table, her expression incredulous.
“Shit.” Cassidy grinned. “Tony is a piece of shit! He hasn’t changed one bit! Oh, my goodness!” She shook her head, cracking up, feeling embarrassed and strange all at once.
“So, have you heard back from him yet?”
“No.”
“You will. He ain’t gonna let this go that easy. I can’t wait to see him. That’s my boy.”
“Stop. Don’t encourage this mess.” Cassidy grabbed a large plastic box full of books and odds and ends and began to rummage through it. “Oh, let me tell you. You know that Grandmama had a will and she left mostly everything to me and some for the church, but the will had a note in there about some books she wanted me to look at, too. I am hoping they are in here. I’ve checked practically everywhere else. I had no idea Grandmama read so much! My goodness… and she had a lotta nerve chastising me about romance novels! Look at all of these!” Cassidy pointed to piles of old vintage romance books such as “Carnival of Lust” and “He Couldn’t Refuse.”
Danica got to her feet, laughing all the way.
“Girl, let me see those!” She plopped down beside her on the floor and they worked as a team, enjoying each other while sorting, telling jokes, talking about old times. And then, she saw it…
“Danica,” she whispered, unable to find her voice as her emotions flooded her.
“What?” Her friend was peering at an old, yellowed nasty book about some maid getting her groove on with the madam’s husband.
“Grandmama’s cookbook! She had a recipe book all this time! That sneaky little devil!”
Danica set the book aside and her eyes got big.
“What? I thought she always said that good food she’d cook for us was from memory or from the top of her head?”
The woman took the book from her hands and flipped through it. Some of the pages had bits of paper wedged between them, with notes in her lovely handwriting.
“That’s what she said… but look, there’s the chicken and rice one, crab legs, fried cabbage, pepper cornbread, everything! It’s big, too. I can’t believe this.” Cassidy’s eyes filled with tears of joy as she grabbed the thing back from Danica’s hands and turned the pages carefully, ensuring the fragile sheets didn’t rip. “These are all from her great grandmother and grandmother, right out of Louisiana. Her mother was the first generation born here in Florida. Do you know my great-great-Grandmother was
a famous chef?”
“No! If you told me I sure don’t recall that.”
“Yeah… good cookin’ runs in the family. I was never as good as Grandmama though. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“Well.” Danica smiled at her, then leaned in and gave her a hearty hug. “Now that you have the cookbook, maybe you can practice?”
“Yeah, so that’s taken care of and I’ll have the drafts finished in the next day or two, okay?” Tony stifled a yawn as he kicked his feet up in the hotel room. He’d arrived back in Florida at the Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites Clewiston and planned to stay for at least a couple of weeks. Exactly how long, only time would tell.
“Okay, that’s fine. Now the final drawings are 8x10, right?”
“Yes. The printable resolution will be fine. I know you want to place them around the room for your presentation,” Tony explained.
“Yeah, all right. Thanks again, Tony. You’ve made this much easier on me,” The guy said in a tone of gratitude.
“No problem, that’s what I’m here for. Expect some emails from me soon.”
“Okay.”
“Talk to you later. Bye.”
“Have a good evening.”
And then, his client disconnected the call. Tony set his phone down and sat up from the bed to go get a drink. He looked at the time on the alarm clock in the hotel room: it read 5:15 P.M.
God, I’m beat.
He’d had a long flight from New Jersey, and spent less than a day there before he was back on a plane again with more of his belongings the second time around. He walked over to the mini-refrigerator in the hotel room and pulled out a can of beer. Popping the tab, he downed all of it then flopped back down on the bed and let himself drift into a daydream…
What the fuck am I doing? He closed his eyes.
I have uprooted myself, left my apartment, and stationed myself here for a girl I haven’t seen in over twelve years. I act like I can easily get her back, just like that. She’s basically told me to fuck off but I come back as if everything went my way, as if we’ve set a fucking wedding date like Dante and Marilee… Jesus, why the hell am I like this? I just can’t let this go without a fight. I exhaust myself sometimes…
He chuckled dismally and shook his head as he stared at the plain white ceiling, then reached for his phone once again.
“Heeey, Mom, how are ya?”
“I’m good. George just went out to pick up a pizza.” George was Mom’s husband of four years. He was a square guy; not exactly ‘Mr. Excitement’, but he was a nice man and treated Mom real well, and that was all he and Dante had ever wanted. “So, uh, I understand you’re back in Florida.” He could hear the judgment in Mom’s tone, but she didn’t say anything off-color just yet.
“Yeah… Cassidy has to go through the entire house and get it all sorted, then put it up for sale.”
“For sale?” Mom huffed. “Good luck with that. No one will wanna live there, Tony. I heard the neighborhood got even worse after Dante and I moved back to Jersey.”
“It probably has.” He shrugged. “But Grandmama kept her house pretty nice. It’s in good condition, just not updated.”
“What about our house? What does it look like now?”
“A mess. No one is in there, or if they are, they have no electricity and are squatters.”
“Geeze Louise! I bet it’s depressing. Well, those days are behind us. Please come home as soon as ya can. Oh, Dante said Marilee wants you to get fitted for the wedding. I wish she would use a wedding coordinator, but she insists on doing all of it herself,” Mom said sadly, as if this were some great injustice.
“Well shit, Mom, I mean she is a wedding coordinator herself.” He chuckled. “It’s her expertise. She knows what tha hell she wants and how to do it so why pay someone and waste money when she can just do it herself? That’s like me askin’ someone to draw me a picture, ya know? It’s unnecessary.”
“Well, that’s fine but she should be enjoying the process, Tony… a wedding is one of the most important days of a girl’s life.”
“Nah, the marriage is… anyway, gotta go. Just wanted to check in, let cha know I’m still alive.”
“All right, thanks… you so rarely do that.” He rolled his eyes. “Please be careful down there, Tony. You know I get…” She hesitated for a moment. “I get nervous because—”
“Ma, all of that is over, okay? I know it was hard on you when I went to prison; it was hard on everyone. Trust me, I’m not exactly over the moon about bein’ here, either, but as a final act of respect, I wanna help get Grandmama’s affairs in order. This woman would call me on my birthday in prison, send me a Christmas card every year. She even came up to visit one time.”
“Yes, that’s very nice. She was a great woman, she helped look after my boy, but are you sure you’re not doing this to get Cassidy, too?” He smiled and took a deep breath, wondering if he should come clean to her. Tony simply didn’t have that sort of relationship with his mother anymore. Things had changed. Okay, he’d never been super close to his mom, but he’d become far more private since his incarceration. The experience made him more guarded, mistrustful, especially when it came to the deepest secrets he kept locked away in his head. “So, I guess that’s my answer. You didn’t answer, so I’m going to take it as a yes. Tony… Geesh!”
“There’s nothing to report, Mom. Just doing what I feel is right. Well, gotta go. Tell Marilee that I’ll get measured down here and tell her everything over the phone, all right?”
“Okay. Be careful, honey.”
“You already said that, Mom, but I will.”
“All right. I love ya.”
“Love you too.” He ended the call and sat up, running his hand through his hair. After a few minutes, he made another call.
“Hey Cassidy, this is Tony. This is my second voicemail. Look, we kinda got off on the wrong foot but I’d like to finish our conversation, the one we had before things went south. I know that, uh… you don’t want much to do with me. Well, to be honest I don’t believe that, but you want me to believe that.” He smiled. “But you know what? I’m really feeling like you need a friend, a team partner, someone who understands your love for your grandmother to be by your side as you get that house sorted. I saw it… there’s a lotta shit in there. Some of that stuff is pretty heavy, and I can move it but you probably can’t… and before you call me sexist or some shit, I’m just tryna help. This voicemail is about to run out, I’m sure, so uh, just call me back. I’m back in town just to help ya get the house together. After that’s all done, I promise I’ll be outta your hair. Grandmama would want me to help ya.”
He disconnected the call and lay back on the bed, then drifted to sleep… His eyes shot open when his phone was ringing. He snatched it off the sheets.
“Hello… Cassidy?”
“…Yeah… got your voicemails. Meet me at the house tonight around eight. Let’s talk…”
And before he could respond, she killed the call.
CHAPTER TWENTY
If Memory Serves Me Well…
Mazzy Star’s, ‘Fade Into You’, played from the old radio propped up in the kitchen on a couple telephone books. Cassidy took a deep breath, poured two glasses of red wine, and brought them into the living room where she’d set up her work station to sort, discard, and lament over the past.
“Here you are.” She handed Tony a glass of the good stuff.
He sat cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by worn garbage bags full of clothing, cardboard boxes containing trinkets, and a blue basket laden with old magazines, receipts and the like.
“Thank you.” He took the glass without making much eye contact. After taking a sip, he set it to the side then continued to flip through more papers. “All right, she has a couple unpaid doctor bills so I put them right here, but the rest of these all look to be taken care of.”
He pointed to a huge stack of papers behind him. Cassidy was in awe. She’d only been trying to cool her nerves i
n the kitchen for around seven or eight minutes, and the man had already combed through one of the boxes, deciphering and sorting it with the greatest of ease.
“Thank you. That definitely saves me some time.”
Taking another sip of his wine, he pressed his back against the wall and closed his eyes, as if needing a little break. Cassidy leaned up against the wall beside him, crossing her ankles. She snuck a downward glance at him.
He was beautiful.
He has a little premature silver at the temples… sexy.
“Tony, I want to ask you something.”
“Yeah.” He kept his eyes closed.
“What happened to you in prison? How’d you fare? It’s just that you were so young in there, with all of those hardened criminals. I worried about you… I couldn’t come see you though. You wouldn’t allow it.” She shrugged. “So, for me, it always remained a mystery.”
The man took a deep breath and then another swallow of his wine. He opened his eyes, looking straight ahead.
“Well, where shall I begin?” He crossed his arms over his chest as ‘Get Off’ by Prince started to play. “My first year there was probably the worst year of my life. I was a kid. I was scared. I had no idea what to expect. I tried to not come off as afraid, but I was and it showed.
Thankfully, Sly found out I was locked up eventually and sent one of his guys up to visit me. He gave me some pointers, like, don’t accept any gifts from anyone. Don’t let anyone talk to you crazy, things like that. I’d had a close call when I got into a fight with one of the older guys who tried to say I owed him money that I didn’t. Luckily, I won that fight or they all would’ve tried to test me, but it caused me to get in trouble and I was put in isolation for a few days because of it, even though I hadn’t started the fight. It was like high school here all over again, only more dangerous.”
“I’ve always believed they should have a separate area for anyone between the ages of, like, eighteen and twenty-one.”
“But then, if we’re coddled, Cassidy, we may come back… see it like some fuckin’ band camp. Once the second year rolled around, I had a much better grasp on how to handle myself. Things improved, though I was still in Hell. I kept to myself, read a lot, worked out. I didn’t engage with anyone except this one guy who was young like me. Orlando was his name.”
