Marco read it, and his eyes widened. His gaze crawled up to me. “You stood up Anthony Carducci?” My phone stopped ringing in my hand, but then a few seconds later, it started again. “Just get it. He’s not going to kill you. Hopefully.”
“Thanks,” I grumbled at Marco, and then finally mustered up the courage to answer my phone. “Hello?”
“Get your ass home now!” It was all I heard of Luca’s angry voice before the line went dead.
The waitress came back with our food, boxed up and in a bag for easy transport. Marco pulled out his wallet, slammed a couple of hundreds down on the table—way more than was necessary, so the waitress’s eyes nearly fell out—and then grabbed the bag. He motioned towards the door, and I dragged myself up from my chair and led the way down the aisle towards my funeral.
“You told me you fucking had it!” Luca screamed at me when Marco and I were sitting in his office thirty minutes later. Molly was standing just behind him, and her usually warm expression was severe and cold. She was pissed at me too—a true sign that I’d caused irreparable damage. “I told you that time was a thing with him. I told you not to be late. What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, knowing that this was one of those times where an apology was warranted. “I fucked up.”
“Yeah, you fucked up!” Luca barked back. “Not only did you cost us a powerful ally, but Anthony Carducci isn’t called The Beast for nothing. He’s sunk people into the Atlantic for less, do you realize that?” He waved the napkin Carducci had written his note to me on. “Do you get what this shit means? Consider this matter settled, means we’re enemies now. We already had the Binachis on our backs, and now we fucking have the Carduccis, too. Are you trying to get us all killed? What the fuck could be more important than protecting your family? Why the hell were you late?”
“It was my fault.” Marco had leaned forward in his chair and was looking at Luca and Molly, staunchly avoiding the shocked stare I was now throwing him. “I showed up out of the blue. I used my app to track him.”
“Why couldn’t it wait?” Luca bellowed before turning his attention back to me. “Why wouldn’t you tell him where you were going?”
“I took him by surprise,” Marco defended again. “Kel’s pregnant.”
Luca and Molly’s eyes shot to Marco.
“Really?” Molly asked.
Marco nodded. “We really had it out. I told her it wasn’t a good time, and she can’t believe I’d ask her to get rid of it. I didn’t know what else to do, so I came here.” He finally looked over at me. “Gabe helped Sandro through all that shit with Willow, so I thought he could give me some advice.”
I knew he was just weaving a lie, but it didn’t keep my mind from wandering to how false he was with the word help.
“I barely let him get a word in edgewise,” Marco continued. “I’m sorry.”
Luca seemed to accept Marco’s explanation but glowered at me regardless. “You need to grow a pair. You should have told him to shut the fuck up so you could work.”
I nodded. “Yes, boss.”
Luca scoffed. “Fuck.”
“I promise it won’t happen again,” I muttered. “I won’t let anything distract me from serving this family again.”
Stacy’s glowing eyes and her marvelous smile faded from my mind. Getting rid of all distractions started with her.
12
Stacy
There was something to having a choice to ignore something versus having it ignore you. At least, when Gabriel was calling incessantly, I could ignore him and act like I was making a really responsible decision not to cavort with him when I knew I wanted to. After that day I saw him after lunch with Mira, he stopped calling. It’d been just over three weeks, and I hadn’t heard from him at all. I also think I realized how definite it was. If he wasn’t contacting me and I wasn’t contacting him, then didn’t that effectively mean that was it, we were finished? At any point, I could have responded to a text or answered a call. At any point, I could have thrown caution to the wind and decided that nothing was worth being apart from him, especially on Mira’s claim that I didn’t fall in love easily. If the door was still open, I could walk through it when I wished. Now it felt like the door was closed in spite of my desire to know what awaited me on the other side.
I’d risked watching the documentary, and subsequently decided it was bullshit. I knew that people sometimes had the ability to hide their true selves, and I’d even seen that there were pieces of Gabriel buried beneath the surface of his innocent, stressed existence, but he wasn’t the man that documentary claimed he was. Maybe he was a Varasso—some research had proved as much—but any detailed account I could find of the stories referenced on the series varied significantly from what the documentary suggested, and none of them included Gabriel. He wasn’t just so sneaky that he wasn’t getting caught. He was staying out of it, exactly as he’d said. I didn’t know what I hoped to gain from proving that to myself. He still was part of a crime family that was very dangerous, but I wanted more than anything to believe Gabriel wasn’t a bad guy, and I knew now that he wasn’t.
So, did that make it my turn to extend an olive branch? He’d made so many attempts to fix things with me that maybe he just got fed up and dropped it. The door was closed, but I could hope and pray it wasn’t locked.
I jumped a little at the sound of my phone ringing. I managed to convince myself that it was Gabriel, having heard my wishes from across space and silent brooding, so I was that much more disappointed when my phone screen said Nicky was calling instead. I imagined the tall, tan-skinned, black-haired, green-eyed guy I’d gone out with about a week prior. He was the third in a string of guys I’d attempted to date to get Gabriel out of my system. Nicky was the only one I slept with, s
o he was the only one who wasn’t taking my ghosting as easy as the earlier two. I let the phone ring until the blaring went silent. A minute or two passed, and a notification pinged, notifying me of a voicemail.
“Hey, Stace. It’s Nicky. Listen, I know that I’m probably doing a little too much here. I get that. I’m not actually calling to try and get you to go out with me again. I just have some friendly advice to offer. Whatever guy is stuck on you, he’s the one you’re meant to be with. I know it sounds stupid, for someone to call you up out of the blue and tell you to go for a different guy after sleeping with you. Please take no offense. I had an amazing time with you. If I didn’t think you were so hung up on your ex, I’d be sending you flowers every day trying to get you. I let a girl go, probably the one I should have married, so I know what it feels like, trying to scrub off your own skin. Don’t be dumb, okay? If he didn’t cheat on you or something crazy, and I can’t imagine you’d be stuck on him like this if he did, just do what you have to do to make it work. From one broken heart to another. Call me up if you wanna get a drink some time, as friends, of course. Bye.”
The line clicked off, and I just stared at my phone quietly. Trying to scrub off your own skin. That’s what it felt like, trying to get Gabriel out of my mind. It wasn’t that he latched onto me somehow. It was like his presence turned on the light in a room I didn’t know I had, and turning the light off didn’t matter because I knew the room was there now. Nothing belonged in that room except Gabriel.
I’d heard people say that they fell in love at first sight, but I always thought it was retrospective. It’s a nice thing to think after you’ve fallen in love, that the first time you saw them you knew, but it wasn’t true, it was just a cool sentiment. What I was rapidly discovering, whether or not I wanted to accept it, was that sometimes people did fall in love at first sight. Maybe I was living, breathing proof that the less you believe in something, the more likely it is to happen to you.