Going Once, Taken Twice: A Dark Romance

by Claire St. Rose

  Elissa was a lot of things—and petty was definitely one of them—but completely disregarding what she said would be just plain irresponsible. Just because she wasn’t a reputable source didn’t mean that what she was saying was false. Maybe there was an inside man with my dad’s guys. Whether or not Elissa was lying, it didn’t hurt to look into it. That was what I was doing over the extra day that I was away from home. Results had been unclear, but it was good to be careful.

  Elissa had tried again, blowing my phone up like there was an emergency, trying to get me back out to her house outside the city. I was driving and my phone was ringing nonstop. It was her. I didn’t want to hear her, and I didn’t want the way that I died on the streets of New York City to be because I was distracted talking on the phone with her.

  “Elissa, stop calling me.”

  Her voice filled the car, and it made me uneasy because it felt like she was in there with me.

  “Why don’t you believe me?”

  “Elissa, you have never given me that good of a reason to trust you. You lied constantly during our relationship.”

  “I’m not lying about this.”

  “This is the last time I am going to ask you to stop calling and texting me, Elissa. I am going home to my wife and I want you to stop bothering me.”

  “Have you spoken to her lately? Have you heard from each other?”

  “I am going to ask politely, just this once. This is the last time. Stop contacting me. If you have some information about my dad’s men, take it to him. Not to me.”

  I hung up before she had a chance to say anything back.

  Fuck it. I was ready to see my wife. We had been in contact a little bit. Sex over the phone was nice… it was all we could manage being apart, but nothing beat the real thing. That soft, smooth skin. Her hair. The taste of her. Fuck, I was going to jump her when I got home.

  I laughed a little thinking about her. I was excited. What had she been doing while I was gone? Had she missed me? I had missed her. Would I find her in the tub, naked and wet? Would she be in the restaurant with her friends? Maybe she had gone and seen my mother.

  I didn’t know why, but I hoped she had. I loved my mother, and it was great to think that Isa would try and pursue a relationship with her. Yeah, I was looking forward to doing all the things that I had talked about doing to her on the phone, but I just wanted to see her. I wanted to see her face, her smile. I wanted to sleep in the same bed as her and wake up to find her cooking breakfast for me. I wanted to kiss her and asked her what she had gotten up to while I was away. I wanted to take her on another date. I missed the shit out of her. I really liked her. I had been subjected to too much of Elissa’s aggressive negativity. I needed to see someone who made me happy.

  Finally, I hit traffic. It was good to be home. I took Fifth Avenue—even though it was a little out of the way. Isa deserved something nice. Something shiny and expensive to say I was sorry for staying away so long. She never really indicated what she liked and disliked from the things I got her, but a store assistant would help me out. As long as there were enough diamonds, she had to go for it, right?

  She was so hard to impress. I had only ever bought diamonds for two other women. My mother and Elissa. My mom was something of a gemstone expert, so she was naturally hard to please, but Elissa had drooled over anything with a karat value over five.

  Wasn’t it the thought that counted?

  I drove up to Campania. It was still early and lunch service hadn’t begun yet. I walked through the doors and searched the front of the house for someone to talk to. I saw the guy that I had yelled at the last time I had come here looking for Isa spy me from across the floor.

  “We aren’t open for service yet, please come back in an hour,” he said icily.

  “I’m not here for the food. I just want to know where Isa is. Isa Montorini? My wife. She was executive chef here.”

  “We are not yet open for lunch, sir. Please come back in one hour,” he replied.

  “Hey, listen. I don’t want any trouble. Is Isa here or not?”

  “You know, we were all excited when we heard Isa had gotten married to you, but if the last time you were here is any indication of the kind of man you are, I hope she gets out while she still can.”

  I took a deep breath. Either I socked this guy in the nose, or I went to the kitchen to look for her myself. Beating this dude up would have felt good, but I still wouldn’t know whether Isa was here or not.

  “Are you going to tell me whether she is back there, or do I have to go and check myself?”

  “She isn’t here. Has she hit the road already? Good for her.”

  I ignored that.

  “What about Maria?”

  “Marina? Our hostess? She’s in the back.”

  I pushed past him and walked into the kitchen. The conversation and laughter in the kitchen as the chefs prepared for the lunch service immediately stopped as I walked through. Being intimidating was useful, but I knew what they thought of me. They thought I was a monster. I walked into the locker area and found Marina fixing her uniform. She looked up at me and I swear to God the temperature in the room dropped about eighty degrees.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Where is Isa?”

  “She’s your wife. Why are you asking me?”

  “Marina… can you put aside whatever you think about me for a second and just tell me whether you have seen Isa today?”

  “Why was this the first place you checked? Don’t you think you would have found her in the same place that you left her?”

  I called on a patience I didn’t have but desperately needed in order to continue the conversation.

  “I told her to do whatever she wanted to while I was away. I figured she would have come here because she loves this place and she loves to cook. Have you seen her or not?”

  “I haven’t. If you had been here the past few days, you would know she hasn’t left the house at all.”

  “Is there something wrong with her?”

  She slammed her locker shut.

  “Why don’t you go home and ask her that yourself.”

  People had been telling me that a lot lately. Nobody at Campania had any reason to really like me, but what was with the hostility. It didn’t piss me off, it made me worried. Was there something wrong with Isa? Was there something that had happened when I was away? Was I in trouble?

  ***

  I got to the house and I walked through the door and called to her. Silence. I checked the kitchen and she wasn’t there either. I climbed up the stairs and saw the master bedroom door open. I walked in and saw, well, nothing. She wasn’t there either. I entered the room, hearing activity in the closet. There she was, standing over an open suitcase. She was packing.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Isa

  All of it had to stay. I couldn't take any of the stuff he had gotten me. I looked at my side of the closet. The things he had gotten me were mixed in with the things I had moved in with. I couldn’t take anything. There were several pieces that I hadn’t worn, but that was just too bad.

  I couldn’t stay here, and I wasn’t going to keep anything that he had gotten for me.

  I knew that he deserved to be able to tell his version of the story, but hell, who said I had to listen to it in person. Being in the house, sleeping in our bed, was beginning to feel unbearable. I couldn't help thinking that he was out with her. That he was out with her when he was supposed to be here with me. That was rotten. Why would he do that?

  It wasn’t as if I was leaving forever. I sort of had nowhere else to go, but I couldn’t stay here. Once he got here, he would call me, and then I could listen to whatever it was he wanted to say. However, until that time, I didn’t want to be in the house. It felt too disrespectful. I had been waiting for him. Sure, I was doing other things and preparing for the baby, but I had been waiting for him.

  How pathetic was it to be the wife waiting at home for her husband to return w
hile the man was out, for all I knew, fucking Elissa Lazzerini? I prayed that there was some way it wasn’t true. There had to be some sort of explanation. I was hard pressed to think of what that explanation might be, but I just really wanted something that both maintained my positive assessment of Lorenzo and my pride.

  I stopped, hearing him call to me from downstairs. He was here.

  I looked into my suitcase and wondered for a split second whether I would be able to fit in it in order to hide. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want him to come up here and find me. I didn’t want to think that when I asked him to his face about the pictures that he would lie and cover his ass because he had been doing something he wasn’t supposed to do.

  Marina had a couch. She wouldn’t be mad if I asked her to crash there. There was my parents’ house, but showing up there would have potentially been disastrous. They would know that something was wrong if I showed up with a suitcase. I could hear him coming into the room and making his way to the closet.

  “Isa? Why didn’t you say anything? I was calling you,” he said. He walked over and tried to kiss me, but I turned my face so it landed off center, on my cheek. “Is everything all right? Are you packing?”

  “I am,” I said simply.

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  As far away as I can get from you.

  “Nowhere special,” I said. I was purposefully leaving the clothes that he had gotten me on the hangers and inside the drawers. He must have noticed.

  “Isa, stop, could you look at me, please? I haven’t seen you in days, and now you’re leaving. What’s going on?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.” It was catty. I’ll admit it…but I was hurt.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll tell you where I am going if you tell me where you have been.”

  He sighed. His face looked pained, as if he knew that there was something he had done wrong.

  “I was working, babe,” he said wearily.

  “Were you with her?” I demanded.

  “With who?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me Lorenzo. Elissa. Were you with her?”

  “Yeah, I was. She said she had something on my dad, and I had to go ask her what it was.”

  My eyes narrowed.

  “You had to ask her in person?”

  “Yes. Why is this a problem, Isa? It wasn’t like I was with her because I wanted to be.”

  “Are you sure all you did was talk?”

  “Yes. All we did was talk. She didn’t even have anything; she was just wasting my time. Isa. Please calm down. Sit. Why are your clothes in the suitcase?”

  “How can you ask me to stay here when you just told me you have been out spending time with another woman?”

  “I was talking to her, babe. Nothing happened.”

  I walked out of the closet and to the bedside table where the envelope was. I held it out to him.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “You look and tell me,” I shot back. He slid the pictures out, reading the note Elissa had written first. He looked from image to image with a look on his face that went from curious to knowing, to amused. And then the man did the unbelievable. His face broke into a smile, and he started to laugh.

  “Wh-what are you laughing at? What's so funny?”

  I didn’t want him to see me cry, but I broke. I shattered like a mirror right there. How could he talk to me like that? How could he laugh at a time like this? Did he think having me see him fuck another woman was funny? I felt his arms around me and was just too drained to try and fight him off.

  “Don’t touch me… I-I hate you,” I stuttered through the tears. I felt his hand in my hair. I tried to move away from him, but he was holding me too securely.

  “Hey, I’m sorry Isa. I didn’t mean to make you upset,” he said.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have fucked Elissa.”

  “I was with Elissa, yes, but we didn’t have sex. Those shots are years old. Ancient. I told you. We used to date.”

  “Did you know she had them?”

  “I knew she probably had them somewhere, but I didn’t know what she wanted to do with them. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly keen on seeing those again. She came onto me, but I shut her down. She kept saying that she had sent you something. I didn’t know it was this. I didn’t think she would stoop so low.”

  “Your ex is tacky and desperate,” I said childishly. He laughed and reached out for me, touching my hair.

  “I’m sorry she did that to you,” he said. “Did you really believe I had anything to do with it?”

  “I didn’t know what to believe. I had a million horrible thoughts about what was going on. I thought you had gone back to her, or that you and she had gotten back together right after we got married because we weren’t really having sex then… I even thought…”

  “What?”

  I took a deep breath, looking down.

  “I even thought you had mailed it to me together. That it was all a setup, and you just wanted to get rid of me. Make me leave you and humiliate me. Stress me out so much I lost the baby.”

  “Whoa, what?”

  I looked up at him.

  “You thought I wanted you to lose the baby?”

  “I thought you wanted to get rid of me. The baby—at that point—would have just been collateral damage.”

  “Isa,” he said. I looked down. I didn’t want to face him. “Isa, look at me.”

  I did. His face was pained.

  “Never say things like that about yourself or our child again, do you understand?”

  “Don’t give me reasons to doubt you,” I said back.

  He held my face and looked at me, dead in the eye.

  “I need you to be able to trust me,” he said. His voice was hard.

  “I want to trust you. I do. I know that Elissa was part of your past, but I can’t take the uncertainty. It isn’t good for me, and it isn’t good for the baby.”

  He kissed me then—with surprising sweetness considering we had just had a fight—and looked down at me.

  “I made a vow, Isa. I wouldn’t do anything knowing it would hurt you.”

  “I hope you mean that,” I said and sighed. He held my hand and kissed it. Suddenly, he dropped from his towering height above me. He sunk to one knee. That gesture was globally recognizable as the one that precedes marriage proposal, but why? He did know that we were already hitched, didn’t he?

  “Isa—”

  “What are you doing?” I blurted out. Because really, what was he doing? Was he making fun of me? He had never done this because our engagement was something that was pre-planned and then presented to us. He had never proposed, and I had never accepted his proposal. Not officially, anyway. My father had made the announcement, and we had been married within the next fortnight. Why did it make me so uncomfortable? I wanted him to stand up. That suit was so expensive, he needed to get off the floor.

  “I love you, Isa.”

  “Lorenzo—”

  “I do. It was hard at the start, and I know that I wasn’t any help. I’m sorry for making you regret making your vows to me. I love you…and I love our baby that hasn’t been born yet.”

  “You don’t have to do all this to get me to forgive you. I believe you.”

  “Then believe me when I say this. I love you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Lorenzo

  The smile on her face was radiant. She was so happy that she had tears in her eyes.

  She never got to have that. She never got to go to the jewelry store with me and make a selection from a number of rings that she liked for me to come back and pay for later. She didn’t get to wear a diamond engagement ring. Shit, I never got to get one for her and see her face when she saw it. We didn’t get to do anything the traditional way, and I was mad about it. It wasn’t fair.

  I wanted to give it to her if she wanted it. The whole deal. An engagement ring, an official proposal, and a wed
ding—one that she was able to have a say in. I’d fly another wedding dress in from Italy for her if she wanted it. I just wanted her to be happy that she was with me.

  “Marry me, Isa,” I said.

  “We’re already married,” she giggled.

  “Really marry me. Marry me this time because you want to, not because you have to.”