Dante is already comfortable: jacket, button-down shirt, and tie are long gone. He’s down to his undershirt and pants, even his shoes are nowhere to be seen. If Dante could he’d walk around in his boxers—he’s never been one for being confined. Opening up the first container, I find calamari; I open one small cup of marinara sauce for me, then the other for him before sliding it to his side of the table. I find my dinner, veal and fettuccine, as Dante opens his spaghetti carbonara.
While I open the bottle of wine, he snags glasses off the bar where I have decanters of whiskey, brandy, port, and vodka. He hands me his glass, and I fill it before filling my own.
“Enzo?” I ask as I sit. Enzo’s office is four stories down, leased at a family discounted rate. Our evenings usually end with all three of us having dinner together before going home. While we often have it delivered, every once in a while Dante demands we get the hell out of the office so we go out for dinner. Dante’s condo is on the same floor as mine, in a building we own on Michigan Avenue. Enzo has a condo in another building only a few blocks from us. Considering Enzo isn’t joining us, I’m surprised Dante ordered in until I catch the time. It’s almost eight thirty.
“Brenda.” Dante rolls his eyes. “She is putting him through the paces, dinner out and she’s hinting at wanting her own credit card. I don’t know why he doesn’t just go back to doing the sugar baby thing. It’s much simpler with those women. Maybe you should go back to the site—you never really gave it a chance. You met one woman, once.”
I don’t bother to respond. I hate the idea of the sugar baby setup Dante tried and liked enough that almost all his dealings with women are through the site. Enzo has had varying successes with the women on the site. Shaking my head, I sip at the wine to wash away the bitter thoughts. My way might mean less sex, but I’m fine with it. While in my twenties I didn’t consider it a good night unless it ended in sex, for the last few years I’ve become more selective and discriminating in regards to whom I fuck. Now at thirty-eight, a woman for a week or two every few weeks leaves me content.
From the corner of my eye, I watch Dante rub his forefinger over his eyebrow. I stiffen in preparation. It’s a tell he has that he’s about to lie.
“I was thinking about Alicia Jeffries. Maybe I was too quick to hire her. After looking over her background report a little more thoroughly, I’m concerned with her financial situation.”
I don’t take the bait, keeping my face void of expression. “Do what you think is best,” I murmur as I twirl the pasta around my fork before lifting it to my mouth.
Dante’s forehead furrows. “Her credit is atrocious. Apparently, her mother uses Alicia’s and her sister's social security numbers and personal information to open accounts then doesn’t pay them. Years ago she opened credit cards and took out loans; it took years and Alicia pressing charges against her mother to get them removed. While both women have locked their credit so no more lines of credit can be opened, it hasn’t stopped the mother from littering the country with unpaid rent and utility bills. Considering she’ll have access to almost half a billion dollars at the tip of her fingertips, I’m wondering if Ms. Jeffries would be able to ignore temptation.”
My jaw stiffens at the idea of her own mother damaging Alicia’s livelihood and reputation with casual disregard. Forcing a deep breath, I pick through the calamari. “She will be your assistant, your responsibility. It’s up to you.”
His sherry brown eyes glitter. “I spoke with Diego. He dug deep as he was concerned as well, yet believes her to be a trustworthy person who had access to funds in her previous position without there ever being a hint of impropriety. However, there’s a difference between a few grand and a few hundred million. Who knows what she might do? What do you think?”
Taking a swallow of wine, I shrug. “I think I don’t give a fuck.”
The fucker laughs. “Really? The vein in your forehead says differently. I was thinking after you slammed out of my office in a snit, between the time she came up in the elevator and you getting into the car downstairs you couldn’t have possibly had more than five minutes with the woman. So I got on the phone and spoke with Debbie at the front desk. She told me it was less than three minutes. You barely said a dozen words to Alicia—I believe the expression was ‘intense eye-fucking’ happened, then you were gone. Tell me, Che, what was it about Alicia Jeffries that got your boxers in a twist?”
I shake my head as I chew on the rubbery calamari. “Whatever it was doesn’t matter. Hire her, don’t. I don’t care what you do. I’ll stay the hell away from her, and within a week or two it will have faded until I won’t remember.”
“I’m sure you think you won’t. Me, I’m laying odds on something a little different.” He sips his wine. I ignore his raised eyebrow. The sigh should have told me it was coming. I know the sigh: from deep inside his soul the air escapes, weak, tired, filled with longing. “You’re really not going to even take a chance? Dad fucked up, but you’re going to pay the price for it.”
Twirling pasta around my fork, I don’t bother looking up. It’s been almost four years since we had this conve
rsation, I think her name was Donna, or maybe it was Dana. The time before that it was six years ago, her name was Vivian, and she had legs that went on forever. “Let it go, Dante.”
He doesn’t listen. “Dad did the crime, you do the time. It’s going to be twenty years this year. Don’t tell me you aren’t counting down the days. I’ve been dreaming of it. Sometimes I dream I was there when he did it. I’ll dream I see him shooting Mom and the boyfriend before he shoots himself. Other times I dream it never happened, that Mom was never a faithless woman who cheated on her husband for almost ten years before she finally found a man who could give her the more expensive life she wanted and left without even telling her children goodbye. That Dad hadn’t already been told to find a new job before he was fired, and knowing he was losing the job he loved and the woman he loved sent him over a cliff no one knew he had. If he still had his job when Mom left, would he have done it? I want to believe he wouldn’t have.
“You did it, Cesare—you built something so big and so fucking valuable no one is going to take this away from you. No one can kick down this castle. Why can’t you even try to let yourself be happy with a woman? They aren’t all faithless. You look like Dad, but you are not him. I don’t understand why you don’t believe in yourself the way I do.”
I wipe my mouth as I put my plate down, appetite gone. “I’m not going to talk about this with you again. I’ve told you my thoughts; it does no good to bring them up again. I’m content with my life as it is.”
Dante’s plate hits the table with a clang. “You’re such a fucking liar.”
With a curse, he’s up and gone in a flurry of movement I barely take in before my office door is slamming shut. With a sigh, I sink on the couch as I let my head fall back. Why couldn’t he let it go? I have, really.
It doesn’t matter it will be twenty years in six weeks. It doesn’t matter I’m now a titan in my field so large no one could take me down. There’s no way I will ever take the chance of history repeating itself. I’m too much like my father, not just in looks but in temperament. Even though I’ve grown a beard to hide the resemblance that was surface, it was there in the way emotions ripple deep within me. I don’t know if it’s an Italian thing I inherited from both my parents or what. I’ve spent years, decades fighting to be cool, cold, to think only with my head, going with my gut only in the rare times it wouldn’t hurt my business. Anger is only free with my brothers; the only other time it’s allowed to surface is during my daily workouts.
The women I’ve fucked didn’t need to inspire lust or desire. I preferred when they didn’t, those who did were limited to a few nights only. It isn’t completely about the murder-suicide that brought my world crashing down when I was eighteen. It was the years before their deaths that had me at sixteen vowing to never marry.
My mother tortured my father with her constant affairs that went from a secret to blatant and had me hating them both. I hated the way my father kept taking her back, pretending like he didn’t see her coming home with her hair mussed up and her makeup gone. I thought of him as weak; I thought of her as a whore. There was no way I was going to go through what he did in the name of love.
Love is what my father called it; I called it an obsession. My father swore when he met my mother it was love at first sight. A nice Italian girl from his neighborhood, she was the sister of an old friend who was one of the few to welcome him back to Chicago from Yale University. My parents were married less than two months after they met, and it only took that long because her mother was adamant it would be a church wedding.
When I was young, I do remember them both being happy. Then my father did something that angered my mother. She wanted one more child, hopefully a girl. My father believed three children was enough, as working in the prosecutor’s office he didn’t have a large salary. He didn’t want to have more kids than they could afford, so he had a vasectomy without telling my mother.
One night when she was home, drunk on wine and memories, she told me that she felt since my father took away her voice in their marriage, they were no longer really married. She loved being a mother, she grew up wanting nothing more, and she didn’t have a baby anymore. For a few brief minutes, I felt sorry for her.
We were independent kids and very close with my father, but it was because he actually paid attention to us. He taught all of us to play the piano, long, patient hours where he shared his love of music. He helped us with our homework, and he also ran patterns with me for football and pitched baseball for Enzo.
My mother grew impatient with us quickly over the smallest things. As soon as we had opinions of our own, wanted to do things for ourselves, she lost interest in us. Slowly she began preferring to spend her hours working as a real estate agent. A profession started as a way to keep busy grew to consume her time and attention.