Lorenzo

I looked at my call log of the last few days.

I was lucky that Isa wasn’t the kind of wife who demanded to see her spouse’s phone activity. If she was the type, then I was lucky she hadn’t asked to see it yet. If she had looked at it, she would have seen an unseemly number of missed calls and text messages from her favorite person in the world, Elissa Lazzerini. How would she have reacted? I wondered.

The short answer was, of course, negatively. But besides that, how would she have felt, in her heart. Would it have been anger, or would it have been sadness? Something in between the two? A combination of the two? I was curious. Would she have cried, or would she have tried to hit me? I hadn’t made her mad enough yet to have an answer to that question.

It was probably a suicide mission, trying to make your wife mad like that. I should have been happy that I had never upset her in that way as of yet, but I wanted to know. It was selfish, I will admit, because I wanted to see how upset she would be about my ex contacting me. Upset, in this case, referred to jealousy. She had already asked me once not to let Elissa into the house, and I hadn’t. That was partly why I was driving upstate to see her.

Between dodging her calls and messages, I had managed to deduce that she had some inside information she wanted to tell me. It was sensitive, and she had to tell it to me in person, which was why she wanted to come to the house, but I couldn’t have her over because of Isa. If she had all the time and resources to have sent me the number of calls and messages that she had sent me, she should have just said whatever she needed to say anyway. I needed to tell her not to call me again, not on this number anyway. Why hadn’t I changed it after we had broken it off the last time?

I looked out the window at the depressing amount of open space. I hated the country. I thought about Isa and how she would be when she was mad. Elissa, when upset hadn’t been a crier, no. When she was angry, she had the amazing ability to spot the most expensive decorative item in a room and smash it. She had never spilled any tears over me, but she had cost me thousands in property damage. She was vicious. She also would do this thing where she flailed, just sort of threw her arms at you and she always had those long nails which were deadly if they connected with the right part of your body.

Shit. What if that was the thing that Isa and Elissa had in common? I thought about it. There was no way Isa would be that way. It was inconceivable. If you thought about it, Elissa was the type that got what she wanted without having to work for it. She had never had a job in her life and she was getting along just fine. I couldn’t remember whether she was single or not because it didn’t matter. I wasn’t. It also didn’t matter if she smashed a seven-thousand-dollar vintage vase because she was firstly, not the person who had bought it, and secondly, not the person who had to clean it up when it was smashed on the floor. The colloquial term was ‘spoiled’—but I preferred ‘bitch.’

Isa worked for her living, and up until recently, was living on her own and paying her own rent. She was more likely a crier. For the sake of my belongings, our belongings, I hoped she was. Not because I was intending on vexing her, but because I really didn’t want to go through what I went through with Elissa again. They were so different; they had to be different in that way, too.

They were. Isa was sweet, which was a trait that Elissa lacked. I didn’t want to limit Isa as a person; she could probably chew my balls off, too, if I rubbed her the wrong way, but Elissa went from zero to bitch a lot faster than Isa did. She was also a hell of a lot more manipulative. She lied more. She was more demanding, high maintenance. I sighed. We were together for a minute, lucky for me she was someone else’s burden to bear.

I finally got to Elissa’s house. The place wasn’t so much her house as it was one of her houses. She had two. One in the city that her parents got her when she moved out, and one outside the city for when she needed to get away. That one she had bought herself with money you would have to ask her how she procured.

It was big on the outside, built probably to comfortably hold a family of five. It held only Elissa, but she was vain enough to make up for the four missing individuals. I rang the doorbell and waited. This was going to be painful.

Elissa was beaming when she answered the door. Her skin glowed and her hair was down around her shoulders. It looked a lot longer than it did the last time I had seen her. Self-tanner and extensions, but still nice. Very nice, actually. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t real. If it looked nice, it looked nice, and Elissa—without fail—looked amazing every single hour that I had known her.

We were exes, but we had remained friends, or at least we remained familiar because the circles we ran in overlapped. I hadn’t touched another woman since marrying Isa, but she had put a ring on my finger, not a blindfold over my eyes. I was still a man, and both my eyes could see just fine. Elissa was hot. Of course, she was. Why would I have been with her if she wasn’t?

I noticed her hair was lighter, too. Not black the way she usually had it dyed. The dress she had on was either the one she had had on when she went out the night before, or the one that she had put on so she could go out today. She was overdressed. My guard went up immediately. She might have something to say to me about my dad, but that dress was not casual.

It was no use doing it, but I found myself comparing her to Isa. It was maybe a little unfair because, for one thing, Isa was my wife, and I was really beginning to like her. On top of that, she was the mother of my unborn child, which scored major points for her. I was a biased judge, but being as impartial as I could be, Isa still smoked Elissa on all counts.

Elissa was definitely a looker, but Isa’s beauty was effortless. Isa looked like the genetic meeting of Isa Loren, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor. Elissa was taller, but that made us nearly eye to eye when she had heels on, too tall. She was long and lithe like a runway model, but that meant she didn’t have Isa’s tits or her nice round hips. Elissa’s father was Italian, but she had taken after her English mother and was pretty pale when she didn’t get her spray tan done. Isa turned an even and beautiful nut brown in the sun.

There was no comparing them, and even if that was what Elissa wanted to do, if this was a race, she had already lost.

She kissed me on both cheeks and led me in.

“It’s so nice to see you again,” she said. “It’s been a while since you invited me over.”

“My wife and I have been really busy. You look nice, are you heading out?”

“Oh, this? I just threw it on. You’re my only meeting today.”

She was in front of me facing the other way so she didn’t see me roll my eyes. She even had heels on. In the house. When she had nowhere to be.

Everything looked good on Elissa, but this latest look...desperation...was not cute.

“So, what do you have for me?” I asked.

“All your old favorites, what do you feel like?” she said flirtatiously. I took a deep breath. This was going to be a long chat.

“I’ll take whatever was so urgent that you couldn’t have typed it to me in any one of the twenty-plus text messages you sent me.”

“Marc, even if I had told you, we would have had to meet up anyway. It’s really deep.”

“Then spill. What do you know about my dad’s business that you couldn’t tell me over the phone?”

“Is it always just business with you, Marc? Have a drink first. I know how much you like your brandy; she’s almost your favorite girl.”

“I can’t drink. I drove here. Just tell me what it is you want to say.”

“Okay,” she said crossing her arms. “There’s someone on your dad’s team who’s rotten. He’s posing as one of your dad’s guys, but he’s actually working with the Matticchios.”

“My father has a spy?”

“Mm-hmm.”

I looked at her, waiting for her to go on. Surely that wasn’t it. That was not what I drove all the way out here to hear. It wasn’t. Isa was pregnant and alone. This was bullshit. She didn’t have a name, a suspect at least, because she was making an accusation? She couldn’t tell me how it was that she had come by this information?

“Is that it?” I asked her.

She narrowed her eyes.

“That’s all I can tell you as far as your father.”

“Why do I feel like you’re lying to me, Ally?”

“I would never lie to you, Lorenzo. I might hide things but never lie to your face.”

“I came all the way here to hear this, Elissa. Just tell me what you know so I can leave.”

“You have somewhere to be?”

“At home. With my wife.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. But you’re going to have to stay here longer. With me. You know how traffic back into the city is. You might even have to stay the night.”

She was too close now. Both her hands were on my chest, and our bodies were nearly touching. I backed up, but she followed me.

“Hm. Great idea, but I’ll pass. What sort of husband leaves his wife alone to sleep in another woman’s house?”

“You, if you want the information.”

“I want it Elissa, but not that bad.”

I held her arms by the wrist and got her to let go of me. I turned to let myself out.

“Where are you going?” she snapped.

“Manhattan. My wife. We went over this already, Ally. If you want to waste my time, at least do it somewhere on the island.”

“Why are you so attached to that bitch anyway? She isn’t your real wife.”

“We have several legal documents stating that she is, Elissa,” I said. She was wearing my patience dangerously thin.

“You aren’t fooling anybody, you know. Everyone knows the two of you are together because your fathers arranged the whole thing. You got married to a bitch you don’t even know.”

“Call her a bitch one more time, Elissa,” I growled. “Whatever problem you have with me is between us. You don’t slander my wife and get away with it.”

“Do you even know what her middle name is? Her birthday?”

“Shut up, Elissa.”

“You’ve known her for like a month. We’ve known each other for years, babe. We dated for years.”

Her claim that we had dated for years was tenuous. We had certainly known each other for a long time, and if you counted all the times that we had been together continuously from the first to the last, then yeah, maybe you could say we had been together for years, but she was out of line calling Isa names.

“Maybe that’s true, but she’s still the one who got the ring,” I said.

“Lorenzo, did you forget. Have you forgotten everything we used to do together? Everything I let you do to me.”

No. I hadn’t forgotten and right there, in that dress she was wearing, they all came back to me. When she used to tell me I could fuck her any way I wanted, she really meant it. We had done everything, and I do mean everything, short of mutilation and the illegal stuff. She was the sort of girl who, when I asked her if we could bring another woman into the bedroom, she had said, “What’s your type?” If I asked Isa that... I didn’t know what she would do. I wasn’t going to find out. I had no desire to fuck anyone else, but Elissa had a point. She was a freak, and I had definitely enjoyed that. Too bad she wasn’t Isa.

“What’s your point, Elissa?”

“Leave her. Ditch your fake wife and your fake marriage and you can have it all again. Everything. Whatever you want.”

“This was cute for about the first five minutes, but you’re pissing me off, Elissa. I’m leaving.”

“Because you’re married? Did that girl cut your balls off when she put that ring on your finger? What’s a piece of paper got to do with the two of us?”

“Goodbye, Ally,” I said, turning my back to her.

“Tell your little wifey hi for me. Ask her if she got the letter I sent her. If fact, just give me her number so I can ask her myself.”

I turned and faced her. She had this smug look on her face, as if she had really hit a nerve. It was warranted because she had. There was no way Elissa was in communication with Isa. Isa had asked me specifically not to invite her over anymore. My ex and my wife were not friends. A letter? They weren’t fucking pen pals, were they? What the hell was she talking about?

“What did you do, Elissa?”

“I sent a letter,” she shrugged. “Loads of people do it.”

“Elissa, you can mess with me all you want. If you harass my wife—”

“You’ll what? Send your goons after me? Kill my brother? What?”

If she was a man, we could have thrown fists and called it a day. Mind games were just tiring. I didn’t need it. Isa didn’t need it either.

“What was in the letter?”

“You were in such a hurry to get home, why don’t you go and ask her?”