The idea of him with someone else sends an ache shooting through me. How dare he tell me he would touch another woman while he was married to me. “That’s bullshit. Let me guess, I don’t get to fuck another man?”
“No other man touches you.” The words are a growl that reverberates around me, sending a shiver up my spine. “If you aren’t fucking me then you aren’t fucking anyone else. You have more control of your life and what happens in it than you’re acting like you do.”
“Oh yeah, sure. Go passively into a forced marriage, lay back and think of the good of the family and allow you to fuck me. Shut up and smile and be a good girl with no thoughts or feelings of my own.”
“How the fuck do you have such an attitude? This wasn’t the way you were in that Catholic boarding school. I won’t believe it. Also, how do you not have an accent after living in Italy for so long?”
I shrug. “I didn’t speak for the first four years I was there.” I shake off the embarrassment of admitting it out loud.
“When I started to speak, I was told by Mother Superior that Johnny didn’t want me to speak Italian more than English. One of the attractions of the school was for the students to learn English, so even though I didn’t understand Italian, there were two teachers who spoke English and some of the older girls knew English too.”
“As for the attitude. No, I wasn’t like this before I came to New York. What can I say? Moving to New York and being around Johnny and his men changed me. When I first got here they weren’t very nice. Any time I was in the least bit timid they made fun of me and laughed at me. I got over it real quick.” The men had taken enjoyment in my blushes and shyness, often going out of their way to make me uncomfortable around them.
“Francis and Danny dropped more curse words in a single week then I had heard in my entire life up to that point. Danny was willing to show me New York and let me hang out with him and his girlfriend. His girlfriend was nice, she talked me into standing up for myself.”
Dominic shakes his head and punches his phone, changing the music from the blues that had been playing.
“Eminem?”
“Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts their cakehole.”
I laugh against my will. “You did not watch that show.”
A chuckle fills the car. Dang it, butterflies appear in my tummy, trapped and fighting to get free. “Yeah, I did. I’m more surprised the nuns let you watch the show.”
“
Oh it wasn’t easy, and I didn’t get to watch until after season five. Mother Superior received the box set as a gift from her sister in America. We were snowed in and running out of things to watch. It was out of sheer desperation we put the first disc in. Within two weeks we were done with all five seasons. Best Christmas ever.”
“That was your best Christmas?” His deep, rich voice is heavy with sympathy.
I shrug. Feeling his eyes on me, I become fascinated by the fast-moving stretch of highway outside my window. “It was a girls’ boarding school run by nuns. There were never more than forty girls there from five to sixteen. What would you expect?”
“What was the second-best Christmas?”
“When Mother Superior told me they would pay for me to go to university so I could become a teacher and go back to the school to teach when I was done. I didn’t have to return to Chicago. It was the best present I have ever received. The assurance I could stay home.”
“But it wasn’t your home. It was where you went to school.” He doesn’t understand.
“It was the only home I knew. Johnny sent me there when I was six years old, only four days after the death of my mother. I talked to him once on the phone two weeks later and then I didn’t have any contact with him for seven years. There were no birthday cards, no Christmas presents, no letters, not a single fucking phone call. Then one day out of the blue he shows up at school when I was thirteen and told me it was time to come home to Chicago.”
A shiver goes through me remembering how angry he was when I clung to Mother Superior, begging her not to make me go with him. “He exploded when I told him that I didn’t want to go with him. Threatened to stop paying for school, I wasn’t in New York a day before he brought it up. How it was my fault we didn’t have a relationship because I didn’t come home when he went to get me. I was the one who fucked everything up. Not the adult who ignores a six-year-old kid for seven damn years.”
All the anger over how fucking unfair Johnny was, still is, comes pouring out of me.
“Out of sheer coincidence, he came the day of my birthday. He had no idea what day it was. I expected, I don’t know, a present, a visit, not for him to demand I pack up my life and go with him now that his wife was finally dead. He refused to listen when I told him that the school was my home. I didn’t know anything else but the school. A school he sent me to without any fucking warning. He didn’t even take me to Italy, let alone drive me to the airport. Some guy took me to the gate, I flew all by myself. A nun picked me up at the airport and explained everything to me.” I take a deep breath, trying to get myself under control, embarrassed at the way I’m trembling.
A soft curse word is an exhalation of air from Dominic.
“I finally talked to him two weeks after I was there crying every day. He comes to the phone and yells at me to shut up and stop crying. Yelled at me that I needed to be a big girl and knock it off. He didn’t want to hear about me crying and begging to come back. I was there to stay, so get over it.”
“That’s when you stopped talking.” It’s not a question.
I nod. “He told me to shut up, so I did.”
A hand goes into his hair. He smacks the dashboard, the music goes down to barely audible. “Why in the fuck did you come to America?”
“He told me he was dying. Told me he wanted to get to know me before he died. He went on and on about how he thought he was doing the right thing by me. There was a part of me who wanted to have a father. The school was a boarding school, but most of the girls left during the holidays to spend time with their parents. Fathers came, mothers came to see their daughters and I envied that. Even though I long ago told myself I didn’t care my father didn’t want me, deep down I cared.” It’s only because he’s not looking at me that I can admit it.