Going Once, Taken Twice: A Dark Romance

by Claire St. Rose

  Babies were expensive. The kid would need furniture and clothes. There was a ton of accessory items that needed to be procured as well. The decision to keep the baby when I found out about it had been instant, so how had I fallen into complete inertia? Just because Lorenzo didn’t know where he stood, didn’t mean I had to stick myself in whatever limbo he was still in.

  A knock at the door after I had spent hours online made me jump. It was Carlotta. She had been around a lot more often now that Lorenzo was gone.

  “Mrs. Montorini, I’m done for the day. I’m heading out.”

  “Thank you, Carlotta, see you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Something came for you a couple hours ago. I left it downstairs on the dining table,” she told me. I thanked her again and resumed my frenzied googling before heading downstairs to eat something. I felt like Doritos but also raspberry sorbet. I settled for a plate of the ziti that Carlotta had cooked and stashed in the refrigerator. Settling down to eat my reheated meal, was when I saw them. It was a bouquet, but likely the largest one that had ever been recorded in history. It was huge, definitely more than twelve roses.

  I held the roses and inhaled their sweet scent. They were white. I noticed a piece of card, lodged between the stems. I pulled it out. It was covered in writing, Lorenzo’s handwriting, which I had never seen other than when we were signing the marriage certificate.

  ‘I don’t know if I can be a good husband and father. But I want to try more than anything.-M’

  I read the note then reread it. I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face. It wasn’t as good as having him here supporting me, but it was something. This was his olive branch. He was going to try. He wanted to try, and that was all I really wanted. I wanted him to make the effort, and he was going to do it for me. He was going to do it for us.

  I put the flowers in a vase and went upstairs. This was great. This called for a celebration. I ran the bath and poured in the bubble bath. I pinned my hair up and slid inside. The flowers were a sign. I was going to treat them as an invitation. He had communicated, and his answer was what I had hoped it would be. Sure, he wasn’t here gushing about how happy he was to become a dad, but I didn’t need that. All I needed was for him to try, and he was. I reached for my phone and carefully dialed his number, careful not to get water on it. He picked up after two rings.

  “Did you get the flowers?” he said instead of a greeting.

  “I did. Traditionally, you’re supposed to give your wife red roses,” I said playfully.

  “Come on, baby. You know traditional is the last thing that describes us.”

  “Don’t ‘baby’ me. I’m mad at you.”

  “What is it? What did I do?”

  “You made me wait a whole day before you let me know you weren’t going to divorce me.”

  He laughed at that.

  “Why would I divorce you after we just got married, Isa?”

  “The way you left… I was so scared you hated me after I told you that I was pregnant.”

  “I don’t hate you, Isa. You’re my wife. You’re going to give birth to my child.”

  “Do you think you’re ready to become a parent?”

  “Honestly, no. I don’t know the first thing about parenting, but I know I could do it if you were with me.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “I do. Our relationship started rough, but not a lot of guys get set up the way that I did with you. I think we’d make a great team. The way that we started doesn’t matter because being stuck in the past doesn’t help anything.”

  “Are you scared?” I asked.

  “I’m excited.”

  “When are you getting back?” I asked.

  “A few more days. A week at the very most. Something came up.”

  “More thinking?”

  “No more thinking. Work.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Isa…you know I can’t tell you that,” he said.

  I sighed. I wasn’t going to push it, not when he was making an effort. “What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”

  “Whatever you want,” he said.

  “Everything I want to do involves you,” I told him.

  “Like what? You want me to take you out again?”

  “I want you to take me down again.”

  He was silent. I heard him clearing his throat.

  “Where are you right now?”

  “I’m in the tub.”

  “You’re already naked… I wanted you to undress for me,” he said. The bath water was hot, but it didn’t matter. The heat I felt between my legs was searing.

  “I wish you were here,” I said.

  “If I was there, we wouldn’t be in the tub.”

  “Where would we be?”

  “We’d be on the bed. You’d be wearing something pretty, with lace that I could peel off of you.”

  My free hand went between my legs and stroked my clitoris.

  “I’d wear something nice for you. I’d wait on the bed for you to get home.”

  “Are you imagining me there with you? Are you touching yourself like it’s my fingers inside of you?”

  My eyes shut as I let the fantasy take over.

  “I wish it was your hands, Lorenzo. I wish it was your cock. You’re so big.”

  “Can you feel me kissing you? I would kiss all the way down to your perfect tits. I would suck on your nipples till you screamed. I’d hold your legs apart and eat your pussy till you couldn’t move.”

  “Lorenzo, I’m so close. I wish you were here fucking me.”

  I shuddered silently as I came.

  “The first thing I want to do when I see you is take you, hard and fast on the bed. Wait for me, okay?”

  “Don’t take too long. I can only stay entertained with my hand for so long,” I said.

  “I can’t wait to see you,” he said.

  I smiled. The statement was so sweet following what he had been saying just a breath ago about how he wanted to pound me. “I can’t wait to see you, too.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lorenzo

  I looked at my call log of the last few days.

  I was lucky that Isa wasn’t the kind of wife who demanded to see her spouse’s phone activity. If she was the type, then I was lucky she hadn’t asked to see it yet. If she had looked at it, she would have seen an unseemly number of missed calls and text messages from her favorite person in the world, Elissa Lazzerini. How would she have reacted? I wondered.

  The short answer was, of course, negatively. But besides that, how would she have felt, in her heart. Would it have been anger, or would it have been sadness? Something in between the two? A combination of the two? I was curious. Would she have cried, or would she have tried to hit me? I hadn’t made her mad enough yet to have an answer to that question.

  It was probably a suicide mission, trying to make your wife mad like that. I should have been happy that I had never upset her in that way as of yet, but I wanted to know. It was selfish, I will admit, because I wanted to see how upset she would be about my ex contacting me. Upset, in this case, referred to jealousy. She had already asked me once not to let Elissa into the house, and I hadn’t. That was partly why I was driving upstate to see her.

  Between dodging her calls and messages, I had managed to deduce that she had some inside information she wanted to tell me. It was sensitive, and she had to tell it to me in person, which was why she wanted to come to the house, but I couldn’t have her over because of Isa. If she had all the time and resources to have sent me the number of calls and messages that she had sent me, she should have just said whatever she needed to say anyway. I needed to tell her not to call me again, not on this number anyway. Why hadn’t I changed it after we had broken it off the last time?

  I looked out the window at the depressing amount of open space. I hated the country. I thought about Isa and how she would be when she was mad. Elissa, when upset hadn’t been a crier, no. When she was ang
ry, she had the amazing ability to spot the most expensive decorative item in a room and smash it. She had never spilled any tears over me, but she had cost me thousands in property damage. She was vicious. She also would do this thing where she flailed, just sort of threw her arms at you and she always had those long nails which were deadly if they connected with the right part of your body.

  Shit. What if that was the thing that Isa and Elissa had in common? I thought about it. There was no way Isa would be that way. It was inconceivable. If you thought about it, Elissa was the type that got what she wanted without having to work for it. She had never had a job in her life and she was getting along just fine. I couldn’t remember whether she was single or not because it didn’t matter. I wasn’t. It also didn’t matter if she smashed a seven-thousand-dollar vintage vase because she was firstly, not the person who had bought it, and secondly, not the person who had to clean it up when it was smashed on the floor. The colloquial term was ‘spoiled’—but I preferred ‘bitch.’

  Isa worked for her living, and up until recently, was living on her own and paying her own rent. She was more likely a crier. For the sake of my belongings, our belongings, I hoped she was. Not because I was intending on vexing her, but because I really didn’t want to go through what I went through with Elissa again. They were so different; they had to be different in that way, too.

  They were. Isa was sweet, which was a trait that Elissa lacked. I didn’t want to limit Isa as a person; she could probably chew my balls off, too, if I rubbed her the wrong way, but Elissa went from zero to bitch a lot faster than Isa did. She was also a hell of a lot more manipulative. She lied more. She was more demanding, high maintenance. I sighed. We were together for a minute, lucky for me she was someone else’s burden to bear.

  I finally got to Elissa’s house. The place wasn’t so much her house as it was one of her houses. She had two. One in the city that her parents got her when she moved out, and one outside the city for when she needed to get away. That one she had bought herself with money you would have to ask her how she procured.

  It was big on the outside, built probably to comfortably hold a family of five. It held only Elissa, but she was vain enough to make up for the four missing individuals. I rang the doorbell and waited. This was going to be painful.

  Elissa was beaming when she answered the door. Her skin glowed and her hair was down around her shoulders. It looked a lot longer than it did the last time I had seen her. Self-tanner and extensions, but still nice. Very nice, actually. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t real. If it looked nice, it looked nice, and Elissa—without fail—looked amazing every single hour that I had known her.

  We were exes, but we had remained friends, or at least we remained familiar because the circles we ran in overlapped. I hadn’t touched another woman since marrying Isa, but she had put a ring on my finger, not a blindfold over my eyes. I was still a man, and both my eyes could see just fine. Elissa was hot. Of course, she was. Why would I have been with her if she wasn’t?

  I noticed her hair was lighter, too. Not black the way she usually had it dyed. The dress she had on was either the one she had had on when she went out the night before, or the one that she had put on so she could go out today. She was overdressed. My guard went up immediately. She might have something to say to me about my dad, but that dress was not casual.

  It was no use doing it, but I found myself comparing her to Isa. It was maybe a little unfair because, for one thing, Isa was my wife, and I was really beginning to like her. On top of that, she was the mother of my unborn child, which scored major points for her. I was a biased judge, but being as impartial as I could be, Isa still smoked Elissa on all counts.

  Elissa was definitely a looker, but Isa’s beauty was effortless. Isa looked like the genetic meeting of Isa Loren, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor. Elissa was taller, but that made us nearly eye to eye when she had heels on, too tall. She was long and lithe like a runway model, but that meant she didn’t have Isa’s tits or her nice round hips. Elissa’s father was Italian, but she had taken after her English mother and was pretty pale when she didn’t get her spray tan done. Isa turned an even and beautiful nut brown in the sun.

  There was no comparing them, and even if that was what Elissa wanted to do, if this was a race, she had already lost.

  She kissed me on both cheeks and led me in.

  “It’s so nice to see you again,” she said. “It’s been a while since you invited me over.”

  “My wife and I have been really busy. You look nice, are you heading out?”

  “Oh, this? I just threw it on. You’re my only meeting today.”

  She was in front of me facing the other way so she didn’t see me roll my eyes. She even had heels on. In the house. When she had nowhere to be.

  Everything looked good on Elissa, but this latest look…desperation…was not cute.

  “So, what do you have for me?” I asked.

  “All your old favorites, what do you feel like?” she said flirtatiously. I took a deep breath. This was going to be a long chat.

  “I’ll take whatever was so urgent that you couldn’t have typed it to me in any one of the twenty-plus text messages you sent me.”

  “Marc, even if I had told you, we would have had to meet up anyway. It’s really deep.”

  “Then spill. What do you know about my dad’s business that you couldn’t tell me over the phone?”

  “Is it always just business with you, Marc? Have a drink first. I know how much you like your brandy; she’s almost your favorite girl.”

  “I can’t drink. I drove here. Just tell me what it is you want to say.”

  “Okay,” she said crossing her arms. “There’s someone on your dad’s team who’s rotten. He’s posing as one of your dad’s guys, but he’s actually working with the Matticchios.”

  “My father has a spy?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  I looked at her, waiting for her to go on. Surely that wasn’t it. That was not what I drove all the way out here to hear. It wasn’t. Isa was pregnant and alone. This was bullshit. She didn’t have a name, a suspect at least, because she was making an accusation? She couldn’t tell me how it was that she had come by this information?

  “Is that it?” I asked her.

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “That’s all I can tell you as far as your father.”

  “Why do I feel like you’re lying to me, Ally?”

  “I would never lie to you, Lorenzo. I might hide things but never lie to your face.”

  “I came all the way here to hear this, Elissa. Just tell me what you know so I can leave.”

  “You have somewhere to be?”

  “At home. With my wife.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you. But you’re going to have to stay here longer. With me. You know how traffic back into the city is. You might even have to stay the night.”

  She was too close now. Both her hands were on my chest, and our bodies were nearly touching. I backed up, but she followed me.

  “Hm. Great idea, but I’ll pass. What sort of husband leaves his wife alone to sleep in another woman’s house?”

  “You, if you want the information.”

  “I want it Elissa, but not that bad.”

  I held her arms by the wrist and got her to let go of me. I turned to let myself out.

  “Where are you going?” she snapped.

  “Manhattan. My wife. We went over this already, Ally. If you want to waste my time, at least do it somewhere on the island.”

  “Why are you so attached to that bitch anyway? She isn’t your real wife.”

  “We have several legal documents stating that she is, Elissa,” I said. She was wearing my patience dangerously thin.

  “You aren’t fooling anybody, you know. Everyone knows the two of you are together because your fathers arranged the whole thing. You got married to a bitch you don’t even know.”

  “Call her a bitch one more time, Elissa,” I growled.
“Whatever problem you have with me is between us. You don’t slander my wife and get away with it.”

  “Do you even know what her middle name is? Her birthday?”

  “Shut up, Elissa.”

  “You’ve known her for like a month. We’ve known each other for years, babe. We dated for years.”

  Her claim that we had dated for years was tenuous. We had certainly known each other for a long time, and if you counted all the times that we had been together continuously from the first to the last, then yeah, maybe you could say we had been together for years, but she was out of line calling Isa names.