CHAPTER TWENTY
Rosemarie
He came into my life like a hurricane and left like a tornado.
I didn’t know why, but my emotions were all over the place. Everything thrown all about and there I was standing in the middle of the aftermath trying my best to figure out where to start with the cleanup.
A day.
I’d known the man a little over a day and had barely had any interactions with him during that time.
So it was ridiculous that I couldn’t seem to shake him.
I pushed through the next day.
Then the day after that.
Then a week.
I didn’t intentionally count them as they went by, but somehow my brain did. It was stupid. Insane. Crazy. Delusional, even. There was an emptiness inside of me where there hadn’t even been a hole before. I couldn’t explain it, and after a month went by, I stopped trying to fight it.
I had feelings. I wouldn’t say love because that would have just been unimaginable. But there were feelings. The kind that scratched at my soul and punched my heart.
It wasn’t that I was simply attracted to him. There was more to him than his overly charming exterior. There was more to him than that playful façade he put out there. Yes, there was much, much more to that man and I wanted to know it all. I wanted to dig through and explore each layer. I wanted to brush the dirt away to get to the next one. And maybe, I even wanted him to do the same to me.
“Alright,” Sara Ann said as she slid up next to me. “I can’t stand back and watch this anymore.”
I shot her a look like I didn’t know what she was talking about. But clearly, I wasn’t fooling anyone, including myself.
“Tonight. My place. Wine and Chinese food.”
Her tone told me that I shouldn’t dare argue with her. It didn’t matter that I was tired or wanted more than anything to go home, take a shower, and slide into bed. It didn’t matter that I felt like I’d been walking around in a daze. No excuse that I tried to throw out there would be acceptable.
“Fine,” I said with a resigned sigh.
“Oh,” she said as she started to walk off. “And tonight, you tell me everything.”
“I figured that’s why you said wine,” I hollered after her and laughed.
Three hours later, I was in my lounge clothes and curled up on one end of Sara Ann’s couch. She mirrored me at the other end. Neither one of us cared about appearances behind this closed door.
“I feel like I’m just a mess,” I blurted out.
“Well, I have to be honest, you kind of have been. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it has something to do with a sexy, charming biker that I caught naked in your bed.” She winked and I chuckled as I shook my head. She knew nothing like that had happened but the lightness helped me.
“I just don’t know,” I said and blew out a long breath as my head fell back. “I don’t even know him. I don’t even know his real name.”
“And?”
“And…well, isn’t that like crazy. This stranger comes into my life for a day and I can’t stop thinking about him. I have no idea what kind of shit he’s into, but it must be something bad. I can’t overlook the fact that I found him like that. It was…horrible.”
She looked down. I had a good feeling that she knew more than she’d let on but she wasn’t sure if she should tell me. I just wanted to know…something?
“I don’t know the guy at all. I fixed him up. It was like he was a patient. That was it.” Even as I said the words I knew they were all wrong.
“Okay, first. He wasn’t like a patient. You took him into your home. You let him have your bed. You did things that…you shouldn’t have.”
I cringed at her words because they were very true. If it ever got out, it could be the end for me. Goodbye job that I love. Goodbye condo on the fourth floor. Goodbye life that I worked so hard to build for myself.
Her words weren’t threatening and I didn’t even feel an ounce of fear that she’d known what went on over at my place.
“You might be trying to put him into some kind of box that just isn’t there. It got personal the moment you dragged his messed up ass up to your place,” she said and tilted her wine glass in my direction like she knew she had made the right point.
“That still doesn’t explain any of it.”
I took a large gulp of my chardonnay as I tried to dig deep and figure something out.
“And besides,” I went on before she could say anything else. “It isn’t like he feels anything like I do. He clearly hasn’t thought of me. I may not know where to find him but he sure as hell knows where I live. Where I work. He knows how to find me if he wanted to. So the only thing I can think is that he must not want to.”
I had an idea that she knew where I could find him. And that wasn’t why I’d said that. I wasn’t fishing for answers because what I had said was the truth.
He hadn’t done anything.
So what else was I supposed to think other than he wasn’t thinking about me like I was about him?
Hell, given the playful flirting I’d seen, I imagined that he could have his hands full with one simple wink. For all I knew, he had a million girls to go through as he forgot about me.
“So…what happened? You never did tell me.”
Then I went on babbling pretty much about every little thing that happened from the moment I found him a crumbled mess outside the building until the moment his people dragged him out of my home.
The goodbye was such a whirlwind that I almost barely remembered it. A lot happened in that twenty minutes. And maybe it was just a lot of nothing, but I couldn’t be sure.
“I mean, I know he was trying to distract himself from the pain, but he asked me about my day. And though he was gritting through it, I could tell he was still doing his best to listen to me.”
That meant something. Then it hit me. Why it meant something.
“Tad never listened to me. It was always how his day was. What client he landed. He didn’t come home and ask how my day was. He never stopped to notice if I’d had a good one or bad one. Maybe it’s that I’m so starved for attention that I…oh, God! I just became that clingy chick that guys always try to run from. Didn’t I?”
Sara Ann laughed.
“No, I don’t think that’s it,” she said and then took a healthy sip of wine. “Sometimes things happen for a reason.”
“But that’s crazy,” I replied waving her off.
There was no such thing as fate or destiny. There weren’t such things as an instant connection or scintilla, as my grandmother had always called it. No sparks and fireworks and love at first sight were not things that I believe in.
It wasn’t real.
Right?
“Maybe you should stop questioning it. Stop trying to figure it out. If the universe wants it to be, then it will be.”
Her words should have been simple enough but I tried not to snort at the cheesiness of it all.
“No. It’s just me being ridiculous. The first man to come into my life in a long period of time and it has shaken me a little,” I said willing myself to believe those words. “Besides, those men were kinda scary. I know nothing about him and one could only assume that he’s part of some dangerous club. Or at least has involvement with things that are not legal. Not safe. Look how he ended up here. That is just not normal.”
Was I being judgy?
Perhaps.
But even as I pushed those words out of my mouth I didn’t fully believe them. Sure the dangerous part was all truth. There was something going on there. And I knew I didn’t want to know, not even a little. But as far as the men that crowded into my home that day, I honestly didn’t feel any fear. Intimidation? A little, if I had to be completely honest. Though they were big and rough around the edges and scary, I knew that I hadn’t felt like they were there to hurt me.
“Let me tell you about those men,” she said, leaning over and grabbing the bottle to refill both of our glasses. I took a big swig, knowing I was going to need it for this.
Then she spun a story about rough around the edges men that would give their lives for their families. Men that took it even further and looked after a small town just south of here. These men were uncouth and didn’t give a fuck about what anybody thought about it.
She told me a story of a young woman that had been attacked and how all of those men were there for her because they considered her one of their own. Sara Ann didn’t go into too much detail, but I got the feeling that the man that had attacked the woman was never heard from again. She made it very clear that she didn’t know that for sure. But she also emphasized that sometimes, the law didn’t always do the victim justice.
I found myself agreeing with her. I’d seen it before. I’d been there to help the victims right after an attack. I’d seen too many lives ruined and caught in the crossfire of something they had nothing to do with. And those people that caused the pain…well, some of them were still out there living their lives like it hadn’t happened. If there was a lucky break and they were taken in by the police, sometimes that was worse. Because the sentences handed down were never enough.
So yeah, I couldn’t say that I had that gasp, hand-to-the-heart in shock moment over her insinuation. I may have even been silently cheering inside. Which left me to question who I was a little.
“My point is,” she said as she finished up her tale, “they are good men.”
I found myself absently nodding.
I had seen it. Even in the little interactions that I had witnessed in my home. They were a complete mess of panic and worry when they’d come in. They hadn’t known where Bocca was and the relief that washed over them the moment they laid eyes on him was palpable. Standing there, I’d felt like an outsider but I felt their concern and love all the way to my heart.
But how was any of that going to help me out?
He still hadn’t tried to make contact. It was as if he had walked out that door and left the memory of me behind.
“I have found the beauty of life in your eyes.”
His words may have been spoken in Italian but I understood them clearly. There was something meaningful there. I clung to that for weeks, hoping that he really meant it. However, I knew I didn’t really know the guy and maybe it was just false charm.
He was the type of man that could play a woman with a cock of his sexy lips. A wink. A pet name. All of them meant nothing to him, I’d bet. He’d probably been doing it so long that it was a natural reaction by now. He did it without even realizing it. I had forced myself to believe that had to be it.
I was at the end of my rope with this whole Bocca thing. I was hurt. I was confused. And I was pretty damn tired of wasting sleepless nights on some guy that couldn’t even have been bothered to think about me.