by Sam Mariano
“Yes, the fat point,” she agrees.
“I don’t want to hear that bullshit again. You’re gorgeous. Your body is perfect. If your jeans make you doubt that for even a minute, I’ll throw the fucking things in the garbage.”
Laurel grins, leaning against his side and hugging him. “I love that you think you can punish my jeans for being mean to me.”
“Damn right I can,” he mutters, his arm around her tightening.
She glows some more and leans in to steal a kiss. “You’re the best.”
God, someone fucking shoot me. I like having these family days with them, but a man can only take so much. Virginia must see me over here hoping someone puts me out of my misery, because she appears like a fucking angel with a new drink for me.
“Have I told you lately you’re my favorite waitress?” I ask her with a charming smile.
Grinning back at me, she says, “I know I am. Drink up.” Looking at the lovebirds beside me, she asks, “Dessert?”
“No,” Laurel says.
“Yes,” Sin says, more firmly. “Bring her a piece of cheesecake.”
“To-go,” Laurel adds. “I’m too full of food right now.”
As it always does, Sin’s gaze drifts to Skylar’s carrier in the booth on his other side. He always needs to check on her, even if she’s asleep—which she is right now. Has been since ten minutes into dinner, but still he checks every five minutes like she might have stopped breathing since he last looked.
Virginia brings Laurel’s cheesecake, but not the bill yet since I’m still drinking. I always pick up the tab on Sundays anyway, so Sin looks over at Laurel. “You ready to get out of here?”
Shaking her head, Laurel sits back in the seat. “Rafe hasn’t finished his drink yet.”
“You don’t have to wait for me,” I tell her, taking a sip. “I’ll probably have one more after this. Go on home; I’ll see you next week.”
“You sure?” she asks, giving me that damned look. That “I don’t want you to be lonely” look.
Smiling softly, I tell her, “I’m sure, kitten.”
“We really don’t mind waiting.”
“I insist you leave,” I reply.
They finally do. I have mixed feelings about it—on one hand, I don’t feel like being alone tonight. I spend a lot more time alone now than I used to, and while that was the point of this pussy-cleanse, it’s beginning to get old.
On the other hand, I’ve endured too much of their lovey-dovey bullshit today, so one of them had to go. If one wanted to take the baby home and one wanted to stay, I would have said great, but that never happens anymore unless Sin and I have business to discuss. He’d much rather be home with Laurel and Skylar than out with me. I don’t take it personally. Sin’s a family man, and now he has one. Good for him.
Less good for me, since I’m the one he used to spend most evenings with.
Wouldn’t matter if I’d stop this self-imposed celibacy, I suppose. I draw out my phone, looking at the names of the women who have messaged me lately. Not quite as many as it used to be, but only because I’m not putting out the signal. If I really wanted to, I could end the loneliness and the lack of sex all in one fell swoop.
Instead, I drink.
I drink and I drink, and then I drink some more. Like the loneliest bastard in the world, I drink until the place closes. The funny thing is, they can’t make me leave. Perks of owning the fucking place.
The manager keeps shooting me looks, the little bastard. He wants me to clear out of here. It’s not because I’m being a pain in the ass, it’s not even because he wants to go home. It’s because Virginia should have left already, but she’s waiting for me. She’s going to give me a ride home like she always does when I drink too much. She’s fanatical about none of us driving home drunk. She quotes statistics and tells horrifyingly detailed stories about little kids killed by drunk drivers until none of us would even think to tell her no when she offers us a safe ride home. I’m fine with her offering me a ride, but I don’t like that she does the same thing for the other guys. Guys in my family, guys that work for me. She used to give Gio rides home, even, and now that I know all I know about Gio, I feel retroactively nervous about it. Drunk assholes aren’t the best company, and late at night, all alone—any one of them could hurt her. Then I’d have to kill ‘em. It’d be a whole damn thing.
Trent knows she’s gonna offer to give me a ride home and he doesn’t want her to. I’m surprised he doesn’t do the smart thing and offer to give me a ride before she can. Knowing Virginia, she would offer anyway, but hell, he could at least try. Dumbass. I catch him looking at me again, second time in the space of a minute. I tip my glass at him and wink before I throw the rest of it back.
He’s so fucking mad at me right now. He should be; I’m an asshole. Nothing he can do about it, though. Storm in the back and kick a cleaning bucket across the kitchen in a fit of impotent rage.
I laugh a little, picturing him doing just that.
Virginia has nothing left she can even pretend she has to do. She’s just leaning on the counter, waiting me out. Now she sees me laughing at nothing, so she walks over to check on me.
“Hey, looks like you’re done with that,” she tells me, nodding at the glass.
“Looks that way,” I agree.
“Want me to take it and clean it?” she offers.
Trent appears around the corner like a little weasel. “I’ll take it so we can get out of here.”
Virginia lets him take the glass, and instead she takes a seat in my booth, sliding in next to me. She keeps a little distance between us, where most women would slide all the way until our thighs are touching. I’m looking at her thigh covered in the sturdy fabric of her work pants when she touches my arm and steals my attention. My gaze snaps to her face a little too fast, and I have to blink to steady my vision.
“Are you okay?” she asks softly.
Virginia’s not ordinarily soft-spoken. She used to be, back when she started working here, but no one ever listened to her and it started pissing her off. I used to rag on her for being too meek, and boy did that light a fire under her ass. She wasn’t meek, people just thought that because she was quiet. Eventually, she learned to dress for the job she wanted—in this case, the job of making people do whatever the fuck you tell them to do. Started carrying herself with authority. No one fucks with her now, not even that little bastard Trent, even though he’s technically her manager.
It’s different for me, though. She kept a soft spot for me.
I try to nod my head, but it fucks me up, so I stop. I probably should have stopped before that last drink. “Yep. I’m good.”
“You don’t look good,” she tells me.
“Thanks,” I say, dryly.
Rolling her eyes at me, she says, “You know that’s not what I meant. You don’t need me to tell you that you look good. You’re too well aware of that already.”
My head feels heavy, so I rest it back against the cushioned seat of the booth. “How crazy is it that they went from 0 to family like that? From nothing. Just… cobbled together a fucking family out of pieces and parts. I had all the parts, they were actually mine, and I couldn’t do that. It’s like I had the flour and the water, and I couldn’t make bread if my life depended on it. Sin had fucking sawdust, and he made a basket full of dinner rolls.”
“Yeast.”
I look over at her. “What?”
“You don’t make bread out of just flour and water, you need yeast—never mind, that wasn’t the point.” She pauses. “Using your bread analogy, Sin and Laurel may not have had the right ingredients, but they knew what they wanted to make. They knew they wanted bread, so they found a way. You had a counter full of ingredients and no idea what to do with them. Or maybe no desire to do anything with them. You didn’t want to make bread, so all the ingredients and recipes in the world wouldn’t have helped you.”
“It didn’t work because I didn’t want it to work.”
She nods. “Exactly. Sin wanted it. You didn’t. You just like playing with other people’s toys.”
I grin, turning my head to look at her. “That’s true, I do.”
Instead of being annoyed at me, her eyes shine with indulgent fondness. “You’re such a rogue.”
“That’s a nice word for what I am,” I tell her.
“Yeah, well, I’m a nice girl,” she says dryly.
“You are a nice girl,” I agree, with much less irony. “Too nice. You should have kicked me out of here an hour ago.”
Amusement twinkles in her brown eyes. “I should kick you out? You own the restaurant. I’m a waitress. I don’t have the authority to kick you out.”
“You never know. I might listen to you if you tried.”
“Well, I didn’t, and here we are. You wanna go home? It’s late and I’m tired. I worked a double.”
“A double? That doesn’t sound fun.”
“It’s not,” she agrees, poking me in the arm playfully. “Some of us actually have to work for a living.”
“You don’t have to. You could hook yourself an old millionaire and be a trophy wife if you set your mind to it.”
She snorts, and it’s fucking adorable. “Yeah, right. Let me get right on that.”
Trent comes storming back on the floor, mean-mugging the shit out of me. “Back’s closed up. I open in the morning, so it’d be really nice if we could leave.”
“See yourself out then, pal,” I tell him. “I have a key.”
Turning to look back at Trent, Virginia shoos him. “Go on. I’ll make sure the place is locked up before I leave.”
Since that is not his motive at all, he tries to stall. “It’s dark. I don’t want you to go outside alone. I’ll wait and walk you out so I know you’re safe.”
“I’m going to give him a ride home,” she tells Trent. “I won’t be alone. Unless you want to make the argument that someone is going to fuck with me on my way to the car with Rafe Morelli walking next to me?” she suggests, making no attempt whatsoever to mask the ridicule in her question.
Trent leaves, but he grumbles all the way. Amuses the fuck out of me. Sorry bastard.
Leaning close as if to tell her a secret, I loudly whisper, “He wants to bang you.”
She doesn’t bother playing coy. “Yeah. But he wants to bang every decent-looking woman who comes through here, so it’s nothing to write home about.”
Since I’m already this close, I lean a little closer. I can’t tell what she smells like, and suddenly I need to know. She’s been working all day long and her dark hair is pulled back in a severe pony tail. Without thought, I reach behind her head and tug it free. She jerks in surprise, her eyes darting to my hand as I offer her the elastic that was just holding her hair in place.
“Was my ponytail offending you?”
Hardly paying attention to her response, I push my hand into her hair and shake it out. The part of her hair where her ponytail was tied is somehow still damp, so she must have tied it back straight out of the shower and come directly to work. What a fucking drag.
“Your hair is too pretty to be tied back in a ponytail 12 hours a day,” I inform her.
I hear her swallow, but then I remember the reason I took her ponytail out in the first place. I wanted to smell her hair. I want to know what she smells like when she steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around her bare breasts.
My hand automatically moves to her chest as I think about her breasts, wondering what they look like. She gasps, stunned, and a breath shudders out of her, but still she doesn’t speak. I definitely shouldn’t touch her, but since she lets me, I palm the soft globe through the fabric.
God, it has been a long time. Way too long. Since Laurel left, since Cassandra died—too much happened all at once, and I started to wonder if the man looking back at me in the mirror each morning was the man I wanted to be. The man who had wrought such destruction. I needed to be alone for a little while to get my own head straight. Given I am currently drunk off my ass, groping the only woman I have ever been able to maintain a non-sexual relationship with in my adult life, I’m not sure I managed to get my head on straight in these few months alone, after all.
Finally, Virginia clears her throat. “Why don’t I get you home?”
“Come with me,” I murmur, my lips grazing the shell of her ear.
“Oh, my God.” Her voice is more tortured than it should be. “Rafe, come on.”
I cup her jaw in my hand and draw her close to me. “I don’t want to sleep alone tonight.”
“That is not a good idea,” she says, looking anywhere but at me.
“It feels like one,” I assure her.
“Because you’re drunk,” she says, far too soberly. “You’re drunk, and you’re feeling sad tonight. You just watched the mother of your unborn child go home to live her happily ever after with someone else. I get it, I would be sad, too. But I’m not a tumbler full of alcohol. You can’t consume me and then go about your life casually as can be like it didn’t happen. And even if you can, I can’t. I want to stay in your life, and that means I need to stay out of your bed. We both know that.”
“I won’t fuck you,” I promise. Her eyes narrow skeptically, but she doesn’t outright shoot me down, so I go on. “I won’t. I just don’t want to sleep alone. That’s all.”
Now her shoulders sag, and I know I have her. I don’t even know if she believes me, but she has a soft heart underneath it all, and an even softer spot for me. If she makes me go to sleep alone tonight, she’ll feel worse about it than I will.
Swallowing, she says, “Why don’t I think about it on the way to your house?”
“Why don’t you say yes now and save us both the suspense?” I suggest.
Rolling her eyes, she says, “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”
“I know what I bring to the table.”
“Commitment issues and a dreamy smile? Yeah, we all know what you bring to the table.”
As I drag my ass out of the booth, I mutter, “I don’t have commitment issues.”
“Fine, a deeply-seated certainty that everyone is unreliable,” she offers, watching me grab onto the back of the booth to get my bearings. “Is that a more palatable summary?”
“Now that’s more like it. That’s just the truth, not me having commitment issues.”
“Like I said,” she murmurs, walking ahead, preparing to hit the light switch once I’m out the door.
“You don’t think people are unreliable?” I ask her.
Rocking her head back and forth, she says, “It’s complex. If you mean disappointing, then yes. People are consistently disappointing, but that’s usually because we trick ourselves. We use hope to set our expectations, thereby setting ourselves up for inevitable disappointment. People show us exactly who they are, and we ignore that reality in favor of who we want them to be. For instance, you and Laurel. I could have told you the first night she came in here with Sin that you were wasting your time trying with her. You’re wasting your time with most of the women you bring in here. Without even being present for more than snippets of conversations, I can tell they’re terrible matches for you. I think that’s why you pick them. I don’t know what your love life was like before Cassandra, but since her, you have consistently chosen women who would prove what you wanted to believe—that they will always let you down.”
Now she hits the lights, slips out the door, and holds out of her hand for my key.
“Laurel wasn’t a terrible match,” I murmur, as I dig the keys out of my pocket.
“For you, she was. Aside from the facts that she was clearly into someone else and she wanted kids, she’s territorial. The only way you could possibly live a mutually happy life with a territorial woman is if you lived alone on a desert island with no hope of rescue.”
That makes me laugh. I can’t really argue with that.
Virginia smiles faintly, using my key to lock up, pulling the handle to doubl
e-check, then handing me the key.
“You don’t think I’d come to Jesus for the right woman?” I tease.
Shaking her head firmly, Virginia says, “People don’t change. Not like that, anyway. They obviously change over time and as life happens to them, but they don’t experience personality transplants because they fall in love—and if they do, when the limerence wears off, they’ll get tired of selling themselves out and revert to their old ways. Sometimes people shift in subtle ways to accommodate one another, to grow together instead of apart, but not the way you’re talking about—not permanently, anyway. People need to already be compatible, not change to fit one another. That’s not a recipe for lasting happiness. No woman will ever change you, and it would be a shame if one tried. You’re great; you just don’t go out with women who match your personality.”
“Sometimes I do.”
“No,” she says decisively. “Not once. Not here, anyway.”
“Mia would have been a pretty good fit.”
“She’s married. I’ve never met her myself, so I don’t know if you’re right, but if you are, surely I don’t have to explain why her emotional unavailability is the only reason you even looked twice at her. You’re drawn to women who disappoint you—the only exception is women you can’t have. You like Mia because she loves your high-maintenance cousin. In your eyes, she has probably already proven by being happy with him you could depend on her, that she’s a safer pick than most women, but it probably isn’t true. Mateo might be difficult, but you’re completely different people. I’m sure he has his issues, but they’re not the same as yours. Mia and Mateo have kids, don’t they? So, clearly she wanted kids, and you don’t. Would you have compromised to make her happy? If so, would you have resented her for it and felt trapped later on? Is Mateo a flirt? If not, she might be territorial. Could she have handled going out to dinner and having you shamelessly flirt with the waitress? Even if she gritted her teeth and sat there through it, would it slowly erode her feelings for you and breed resentment? There are all kinds of ways she probably doesn’t fit you that you gloss over because you can, because she can be an untouchable idea in your head, but even if I’m off and she is a paragon of perfection designed specifically to suit you, that’s not what you look for. If Mia is perfect for you and you had met her when she was single, you would have walked right past her. You look for reassurance that your viewpoint about relationships is accurate, not someone who can prove you wrong.”
