Page 80 of Back for Seconds

Which was a problem.

“All good?” Sal asked, snapping me out of my stupor. I was half leaning on the bar, my chin resting heavily in my hand, mouth slightly agape. He regarded me with amusement, left eyebrow all quirked up again.

“Perfectly fine, Spock.” I waved a finger at his eyebrow. “Can you control that thing?”

Sal laughed. “You just look a little stressed.”

I straightened up, smoothing a hand over my hair, trying to push away the fresh wave of desire building in my stomach. I looked up at my brother from my plate, gently swirling my wine glass between my fingers. “You know me well enough, Sal.”

“Boy, do I.”

“What did you think of me and Brian?” The arch in his eyebrow intensified. This was a dangerous question. I didn’t want to talk about what Sal had probably done, what I had to do tomorrow. Sal could be very wise, when all of his energy was focused on doing the right thing.

“Please be honest.”

“Ok. Honestly?” He sucked down a breath and crossed his arms over his broad chest, twisting thoughtfully at the end of his mustache. “I thought you’d been abducted by aliens and had the better part of your brain scooped out.”

“Salvatore.”

“I’m not kidding, June. It just didn’t make sense.” Sal picked up a bar towel and began shining glasses. “You’re the smartest person I know—hands down. Do I think it’s a little bit of defense mechanism?” He shrugged. “Kinda.”

“Uh.” I frowned at him. “Ouch.”

“Either way, you run circles around everyone and all of a sudden this fucking…hamster comes into your life, and you’re like putty in his hand. I figured, if you were going along with it, there must be something I wasn’t understanding. But he just got worse with time.”

I pushed back from my plate and let out a terse sigh. “Well, the osso buco was phenomenal,” I said. “Looks like you haven’t been wrong yet.”

“Sally’s never wrong.”

“Must be a family thing,” I said ruefully. “So, you knew Brian wasn’t it for me. Did everyone know?”

Sal tilted his head back and forth, blue eyes flitting around the room. “I don’t think anyone cared, June. I hate to say it—but we’re all pretty fucking selfish.”

I let out a laugh. “Maybe that’s part of it. I was really swept up in the idea that someone wanted me. You know, he’d picked me.”

“You don’t get picked a lot in our family.”

I snorted. “No. I had to cry in order to get picked. Not a very helpful life lesson.”

“Plus, what examples did we have of good love? Mom wasn’t one to stand up for herself—she did whatever Dad wanted. And all Dad did was cheat.” He cleared my place setting and disappeared into the kitchen.

His words hung around my head like a stink cloud.

All Dad did was cheat.

Suddenly my tongue felt too big for my mouth. The last four years flashed before my mind’s eye at warp speed. Had she spotted the signs? Did she always know it would end this way? How had she reacted to Brian cheating? I searched through my memories and came up with nothing.

When Sal was back, I asked: “Dad cheated?”

“June, come on.” He dropped his chin to his chest. “Don’t be so naive. The guy was a massive fucking playboy.”

“How…” I tried to moisten my lips, to force more words out. “How do you know that?”

“Don’t you remember all those women working at the pizza place? All those waitresses in their twenties? All of them had big fake tits and blond hair? Think about it.”

“Mom worked with them.” Pain lanced my chest, knocking me back in my stool. Tears sprung to my eyes. “She gave her life to that place.”

Sal let out a world-weary sigh—the perpetually two-steps-ahead middle child. “She sure did. And that sucks, but some of us get a chance to learn the lesson, to try again. To do things right, the way we deserve. Take it from me, sis. That’s extremely rare. A lot of the guys that used to be my friends—the ones I did drugs with? They never got another crack at life.” He paused, smirking at me. “Excuse the pun.”