Page 19 of Wicked Mafia Mistake
My hands rest in my lap. Faint pink marks run across my wrists where I gripped the sheets so hard the fabric burned. I turnmy hands over and study my palms. They look the same as always, but they don't feel the same. These hands know what his skin feels like now, the heat of his chest under my palm, the faint ridges of his viper tattoo beneath my fingers, the way his stomach contracted when I touched him. I can't unknow that. And I'm not sure I want to.
The driver pulls from the curb and I close my eyes, letting the motion of the car rock me against the worn vinyl.
I look back. I don't decide to. My body just does it, the same stupid, reckless impulse that made me text the wrong name in the first place.
Through the rear window I see the glass entrance doors of Redthorne Holdings fly open. A man bursts through them, barefoot, shirtless, gray sweats slung low on his hips, the dark lines of the viper tattoo stark against bare skin in the predawn light.
Massimo.
He's running. Toward the taxi. Toward me.
My heart slams into my throat so hard I taste adrenaline on the back of my tongue. Every muscle locks me to the seat and my hands fly to the glass. My palms press flat against the cold window, fingers spread wide, and my whole body screams at me to open the door and run back to him.
"Oh God." The words come out strangled, barely a sound. "Oh God, oh God."
I slam my eyes shut and pray for strength to stay where I am. If I open that door, I have to tell him my name. If I tell him my name, he's not looking at his anonymous stranger anymore. He'slooking at Harrison Whitmore's daughter. The teenager who parked herself in the back corner of the study with a textbook she wasn't reading just to be in the same room when he came over, who memorized the way he rolled his sleeves and loosened his tie and laughed at her father's bad jokes, and he never once looked at her as anything more than Harrison's kid.
Every soft thing he said to me tonight turns into evidence that I played him, and I will watch his face shut like a door and I will not survive that. His friendship with my father, twenty years deep, goes up in smoke. My father finds out his best friend took his daughter's virginity and there is no version of that conversation that doesn't end in blood. And Massimo never touches me again. That's what's at stake. That's what I lose if I open this door.
I know what I'm doing. I'm hiding again. Running back behind the armor before the sun comes up and makes everything real. An hour ago I was brave enough to stand naked in front of a man and let him see every inch of me without a single layer of protection. Now I'm in the back of a taxi pressing my palms against glass because I can be naked for him but I can't be known by him. How's that for fucked up?
His voice carries through the closed window, muffled by glass and distance but unmistakable. That low, rough voice that an hour ago murmuredtesoroagainst my throat while his hand circled my neck and his body moved inside me with a patience that ruined me for every man who will come after him.
"Wait! Stop!"
I slap at the seat in front of me. "Step on it." I choke the words at the driver without turning around, my palms still flat against theglass, my breath fogging the window in quick panicked bursts. "Please go faster."
The driver glances at me in the rearview, eyebrows climbing toward his hairline, and presses the accelerator.
My heart clenches and I swear with everything in me I wish I was anyone else in the world right now so I didn't have to live with this pain.
My face crumples. The sob that rips out of me is ugly and loud and graceless, and I press my forehead against the window and cry with my palms still flat on the glass. Through the condensation of my breath on the cold glass, I watch him stop in the middle of the street, chest heaving, hand still outstretched, getting smaller and smaller until the taxi turns a corner and he disappears.
I want to tell the driver to stop, but fairytales and reality don't share a zip code.
I sit back against the vinyl. Wipe my face with the backs of my hands. The driver keeps his eyes forward and his mouth shut, and I silently thank him for being the one decent man in Chicago tonight who understands that a crying woman at four in the morning needs silence more than conversation.
"Happy fucking birthday, Sloane," I whisper to the window. My handprint fades on the glass as the condensation dries, and I watch it disappear because staring at nothing is easier than thinking about what I just did.
The ride to Wicker Park takes twelve minutes. I pay in cash, walk up the steps of my brick three-flat with my single shoe dangling from one finger and my feet numb against cold concrete, and let myself into an apartment that is exactly the way I left it.Record player silent. Cupcake with its melted candles still on the counter. Wine bottle still half full next to the glass I was drinking from when I made the worst and best decision of my life. Everything froze the moment I walked out the door.
Nothing in here has changed. Everything in me has.
I head for the shower, stripping as I go. I stand under the spray, press my hands flat against the tile wall, and let the water find every place he touched. My neck, where his hand wrapped around my throat and held me. The insides of my thighs, still burning from the scrape of his jaw, and his mouth pressed tender kisses against the sting. The soreness between my legs that flares under the heat, and I press my hand against myself and hold it there because the ache is the last physical proof that tonight happened outside my own head.
I wash him off now before I lose the willpower it takes to erase his scent from my body.
His cologne runs off my skin in the steam, swirling down the drain. I stand there and watch it go. Twenty-six years of keeping every man at arm's length, every boyfriend at second base, every wall reinforced with lipstick and liner and vintage armor. The first man I let past all of it is the one I can never have. I let him inside my body and he has no idea he was the first. He called metesoroand he doesn't know my name. He held my face in his hands and said "then we do this right" and his voice cracked on the wordright, and the memory of that crack hits me under the hot water and I fold forward against the tile and press my forehead to my hands and cry.
Not sad tears. Not exactly. These are the tears that come when you've been brave enough to have the best night of your life and clear-eyed enough to know it can never happen again.
I'm rebuilding the armor already. I can feel it happening. The hot water strips away his cologne and my body starts closing back up, folding in on itself, pulling the walls back into place one muscle at a time. By tomorrow morning I'll pin the victory rolls and line my eyes and paint my lips cherry red and walk into Midnight Boutique and smile at my customers and no one will know that under all of it there's a woman who gave everything she had to a man who called hertesoroand meant it.
The water runs cold before I'm ready to get out. I dry off, pull on an old t-shirt that smells like nothing and nobody, and crawl into my brass bed where the white linens are cold and smooth against my shower-warm skin. An hour ago I was wrapped in dark sheets that smelled like cologne and sex and the warmth of a man who held me against his chest and told me he wanted to talk in the morning. My sheets smell like laundry detergent and the loneliness of a bed that has only ever held one person. Hell of a downgrade.
My phone sits on the nightstand where I left it. I pick it up, scroll to his contact.
Massimo.
