Chapter Seventeen
Vince
“I look ridiculous.”
Carly smiles, smoothing her hand down the front of my chest, lingering on the symbol in the center. “You look sexy. And festive.”
“Those two things are not possible at the same time,” I inform her.
“Tell that to my lady parts. I’d drag you to the bedroom for a quickie if it wouldn’t mean fixing my hair all over again.”
I sigh heavily. Carly fiddles with the neck of my sweater.
“And I have some Mrs. Claus lingerie that’s going to make you eat every last wrong syllable you just uttered, mister,” she adds. “I’ll wear it for you later.”
She stands back to gaze proudly at her handiwork. The Christmas sweater Carly bought for me is blue with a Superman symbol at the center, wrapped up in Christmas lights to make it Christmassy.
“Perfect,” Laurel announces, nodding her approval. “After we do take two of the family photo, we can all have a brookie. All of this nonsense will pay off soon.”
“What, exactly, is a brookie?” I ask, though I’m half afraid of the answer.
“It’s basically the Christian idea of Heaven, but in a cake pan,” Laurel states.
“It’s the divine union between a brownie and a cookie,” Carly explains.
“One bite, your taste buds will rejoice. By the end of the brookie, they’ll be convinced they died and are, in fact, in taste bud heaven.”
“I only make them at Christmastime and birthdays, otherwise I would have to spend four to six hours a day working off all the brookie I would absolutely consume. I would have no time to live my life.”
I fit my hands on her hips, tugging her close and brushing a kiss against her lips. “I’d help you work it off. It could be fun for both of us.”
Carly grins, wrapping her arms around my neck. “See? You’re basically a saint.”
“The stench of self-sacrifice hangs heavy in this room,” Laurel deadpans. “Can you guys keep your hands off each other long enough to snap a picture, please? My brookie is waiting.”
“We’re keeping Laurel from her brookie,” Carly informs me, her eyes solemn. “We’re putting our very lives at stake.”
“Worth it,” I tell her, stealing one more kiss before I let her pull back and go to set up the camera. Carly forcefully poses all of us. Laurel is apparently accustomed to this, so she happily lets Carly adjust the hat on her head—they’re wearing Christmas hats that match their sweaters; I am not—and move my arm around Laurel’s shoulder.
I feel a little awkward with my arm around my girlfriend’s sister. Laurel makes it a little less uncomfortable when she jokes, “We should send a copy to your dude at the movie theater. Pretty sure you’re his idol. He can hang it up in his bedroom.”
I smirk. “I don’t think he could handle one of you, let alone both.”
Carly comes back to my other side so I can wrap my other arm around her. “It does kind of look like we’re polygamists, doesn’t it? I may not have thought this pose through. That’s okay, if this one’s weird, we’ll try again. Digital photography. We could fill the memory card with poses if we wanted to.”
“But my brookie,” Laurel objects. “I’ll be a polygamist if the alternative is I have to wait longer to eat the brookie.”
My eyebrows rise. “This must be some dessert.”
“Say cheese,” Carly says.
We take the picture, then take the picture in two more poses before Laurel abandons us to go make hot chocolate to go with our dessert.
“Let’s take one of just us now,” Carly says, adjusting the zoom and bending down to check it. She comes over, flashing me her sultry little smile. “Arms around my waist, prom date style.”
I roll my eyes at the thought of prom, but I assume the position and let her take her stupid picture. Laurel bustles in, setting the table with brookies and hot chocolate. We already have place settings. Carly crafted upside candy canes into little bases and put Vince, Carly, and Laurel cards at each of our seats so we’d know our places.
Mine is in the middle. I take a seat and cock my head, reading the mug they selected for me. It reads, “A fun thing to do in the morning is not talk to me.”
I snort. “This is what you think of me?” I question, quirking an eyebrow at Laurel, the mug picker-outer.
Laurel side-eyes me. “I’m not sorry. That suits you. You’re a grump when you wake up.”
“He wasn’t this morning,” Carly says, breezing in and winking at me.
“Next Christmas I’m sure I’ll know you better. I’ll get you a more fitting mug,” Laurel assures me.
“Oh, we’re already planning next year?”
“Mm hmm,” Carly murmurs, taking a seat and grabbing her own hot chocolate mug. “When we move into the house, we should get a whole cabinet for mugs. I realized when I moved here and had to fill a whole cabinet with mugs, I own many more ironic mugs than the average human being.”
“What’s yours say?” I ask Laurel.
She uses the handle to turn it to face me. There’s a little picture of Einstein and it reads, “Y’all motherfuckas need science.”
“Classy,” I tell her.
“Only the classiest for me,” she agrees, turning the mug back in her direction and lifting it to her lips to blow on it.
Carly blows hers, winking at me over the brim. Her Christmassy mug reads, quite accurately, “Festive AF.”
“So, we’re already planning next Christmas, I’m buying a house, and you demand an entire mug cabinet in my house.”
“Our house.” Carly nods. “We should get Bandit an ironic water bowl, too. He won’t want to be left out.”
“Aw, you guys are getting a dog?” Laurel asks.
Apparently my life is planned now, so I don’t bother agreeing or disagreeing. I shake my head, looking down at the half cookie, half brownie on my plate.
“I wish you could invite Cherie for Christmas,” Carly tells me, using her fork to cut off and stab a piece of brookie.
I frown at her cookie eating habit more than her suggestion. “You use a fork to eat a cookie?”
“Of course. Or a brownie. So, especially yes with a brookie.”
I frown and look over at Laurel. She also has a fork.
I pick mine up like a normal human being and take a bite.
“He’s a savage,” Laurel says, as if scandalized.
Carly grins, bringing her fork to her mouth. “Right? I love it.”
---
Waking up next to someone every morning again is weird, but good weird. I still won’t let her sleep over at my apartment just to be safe. It’s probably an inane precaution to insist on taking. If I’m discovered, if anyone puts in any effort to find me or to watch me, they will easily be able to see me going over to Carly’s every night, even if I get home from work in the wee hours of the morning.
I just love being with her. I love being there in the morning to wake her up with breakfast, I love standing in the kitchen watching (or helping) her make dinner while she tells me about her research. Since we both somehow like Connecticut, I’ve even caught myself looking at houses in the area. It’s too soon to buy, but Carly makes comment after comment about it, casually mentioning how next Christmas we should invite Cherie and Laurel, so we need to make sure we get a four bedroom house. It should freak me out that she’s already talking about this stuff, but I’m so comfortable, it doesn’t bother me.
Carly feels like home. No apartment ever has. So, I stay with Carly.
Laurel bought me a selection of small business books for Christmas. I thought it was a weird gift, but Carly talks about how I’m going to own and run my own bar so much that it seems like a given to me, too.
Carly’s a subtle leader, but I’ve realized she leads me around by my dick. I have no problem with it, but she definitely does. When I finally got around to asking what it is she’s going to school for, she explained she’s getting her doctorate or some shit and she’s going to become a counseling psychologist. It’s kinda funny. Sal made a comment or two once about how we all needed shrinks; I guess at least I get one, I’m just dating her.
We all spend New Year’s together, but then it’s time for Laurel to head back to Chicago. Carly is sad that day. I try to cheer her up by taking her out for milkshakes, but it’s not enough. I take her to the craft store, which is the worst place in the whole world, but that bums her out more because it reminds her of Laurel.
It reminds me how I felt when I first got exiled and went from seeing Cherie every day to not even being able to see her or talk to her. She wasn’t even allowed to know I was alive.
I just got drunk when I was down in the dumps, so when ice cream and craft stores fail to boost Carly’s mood, I stop and buy a bottle of whiskey and we spend the evening drinking and talking about our siblings. Carly gets super drunk and informs me we’re going to have two kids. A boy and a girl. Then she tackles me to the ground and attempts to make one, and I can’t really object to that.
Thankfully she’s a good planner and has been on the pill all along, because otherwise I’m pretty sure we’d be in trouble already. I’m probably in trouble anyway. Dying men shouldn’t fall in love.
Sometimes I stir shit up. We’ll just be sitting on the couch watching some stupid show and my mind will drift. I’ll visualize a knock at the door. Adrian answers to deliver the bullet he should have shot into me back when he killed Joey. I got Carly involved, so now he has to kill her, too.
I had a dream Mark of all people showed up to kill me. After he shot me in the head, but before I was completely dead, he stepped over me, walked over, and kissed Carly. She wrapped her arms around his neck, kissed him back, and said, “About fucking time.”
I wish she hadn’t worked for Castellanos. It makes me so goddamn uncomfortable.
When I get to thinking about how much I could cost Carly, I try to stir shit up. I try to push her away. She’s a patient woman with a spine of steel, so she doesn’t let me, but damn, do I try.
Somehow, she sticks around.
My good, my bad, none of it seems to faze her.
Winter fades to spring. Carly is getting excited about going back to school this year. I asked why she took the gap year if she was so excited—surely she could have done the internship at the same time. It seems like she’s never actually at the internship. The hours must be weird as hell. She only seems to go when I’m at work.
“Life happened,” she tells me, shrugging.
Carly takes everything in stride.
Carly is awesome.
I wish I knew how to protect Carly. She insists she doesn’t need protecting. Nothing I say, no story I tell her seems to convince her of Mateo’s reality. She doesn’t argue with my perception of him, she just continues to insist my facts don’t check out. She’s confident she could find me if she put her mind to it, so if Mateo’s people haven’t by now, he needs to upgrade his intel unit.
The thing is, she’s not wrong. Makes me wonder if he has found me, which leads me right back to horrible, grizzly imaginings of how we’ll both die.
Carly has mostly taken to ignoring my concerns at this point. She listens, nods, makes eye contact, murmurs comments to affirm my feelings, then goes on about her day—and our life—without concern.
---
“We should move in together.”
I look up from the can opener I’m plugging in and stare at Carly. She stands at the stove, her hair pulled up in a messy bun. “What?”
Tossing me one of her sultry little smiles over her shoulder, she says, “You heard me.”
“I must not have, because you’re talking crazy.”
“I don’t think it’s so crazy. We already basically live together. You sleep here every night. You have a drawer in my dresser, several shirts in my closet, and a drawer in my bathroom. You shaved off your five o’clock shadow in my sink yesterday—we live together. It’s pointless to pay rent in two places. We could be putting all that extra money aside for a down payment on a house next year.”
“We’ve been over this, Carly.”
She sets the spoon down, crossing the kitchen and coming over to me. She leans against me, pressing me into the counter, and wraps her arms around my neck. “I’m getting tired of saying this. I’m not going to get killed if we move in together.”
“He’s planning something, Carly. I don’t know what. I don’t know why. But he’s planning something. You are probably right that he’s found me, but you’re wrong that he’s just going to watch me move in with some girl and decide I’m settled and he can move on.”
“I’m not just some girl. And if he is watching, wouldn’t moving in with me look good? I know you said you dated girls before, but you never moved in with them. You’ve only ever lived with Mia, and he knows that. If anything, seeing you move in with someone else should reassure him that you’re not coming back for her. I can write him a letter or recommendation. I’ll tell him about all the progress you made and assure him that if you ever come back for her again, I will kill you myself and he won’t have to.”
I smile, wrapping my arms around her waist and pulling her close. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re such a badass.”
“The baddest of asses,” she agrees, nodding. “I’ll explain that you can’t go save Mia from his evil clutches because we have an agreement. Abandoning me for several days to ride to your death and save your ex-girlfriend would hardcore fall into the category of things you could do to make me bang Mr. Ink Muscles.”
“Vengeful little minx,” I accuse, leaning in and giving her a kiss.
“Hey, it works,” she says, lightly. “Besides, if you leave me, you’ll never find out which saying Laurel would have put on your Christmas mug. And if you leave me, I’ll send you a mug that says ‘dumbass’ because it’s the only mug you’ll ever need again.”
“You’re getting cocky,” I tell her, grabbing her ass.
“I’m a catch,” she tells me, giving me a wicked little grin and grinding against my cock.
She is not wrong.
But she is wrong about moving in together being a good idea, so that’s one disagreement she doesn’t win.
---
“Look what I made!”
Carly proudly holds up some pastel wreath thing. I assume it’s the result of yesterday’s labors, when she spent literally the entire day dipping pastel thread into some kind of glue mix and wrapping the threads around small balloons.
“It’s an Easter egg wreath,” she explains, when I am not adequately blown away by whatever the fuck it is. She points to a pink thread egg, then a blue one, then a yellow. “See? These are all those different colored yarns. I made it to hang on the front door. It’s festive.”
“I can see that,” I reply, since it’s really all I can say.
“You can tell they’re eggs, right? I’m not crazy.”
“No, I see it. Now that you’ve told me what to look for….” She scowls. I revise my opinion. “I mean, they’re obviously Easter eggs. Anyone who doesn’t look at that wreath and see Easter eggs needs their eyes checked.”
Satisfied, she nods and smiles. “That’s what I thought. It came out really well. I’m impressed. If this one doesn’t hold up, I’ll make another one next year.”
“Did you make one for Laurel?”
We haven’t discussed Easter plans yet, but since I can’t go to Chicago, I figured it’s a given Laurel will come here over her spring break. As into holidays as Carly is, I’m surprised she hasn’t turned the whole apartment into an Easter paradise and made name-card-holder-thingies for all our place settings yet.
“Nah, not this time. Wasn’t sure it would turn out. I don’t always have luck with this kind of craft. My hands get messy and the glue takes forever to dry. It’s a whole thing. But I love these eggs, so I’m thinking it might be worth it. When we have a baby, I’ll add a family of bunnies. A mommy, daddy, and baby bunny.”
“Oh, good, we’re talking about babies again.”
Carly grins at me. “We’re gonna make the cutest babies. We should have a Christmas baby.”
“I don’t think you can just order what season of baby you want.”
“We could name him Nick, like Saint Nick.”
“I’m not naming my son after Santa Claus,” I inform her.
“Or a daughter named Noelle.”
“You’re making me itch.”
Carly grins. “Don’t worry, I want to at least start grad school before we start making babies. I’d like to start procreating before I finish, though. The first year or so in the workforce I can’t be having babies.”
I itch theatrically so she’ll stop, but she just goes to hang the Easter wreath on our front door. When she returns, she plants herself in my lap on the couch and snuggles up against me. I settle my arm around her waist and the scent of her shampoo drifts to my nose. She’s stopped using the coconut kind, but I like this one now. I associate it with Carly, and I like pretty much everything associated with Carly—even her lame holiday wreaths.
“We should watch that serial killer show,” she tells me, passively watching the television.
“You’re such a creep,” I tell her.
“I’m sorry, they’re interesting.”
“You’d love my family,” I remark, rolling my eyes.
“Probably. If I ever get to meet them, I’m going to take extensive notes. Laurel still wants to meet the polygamist cousin.”
“He’s not a polygamist, he’s an asshole.”
“I told her it was unlikely. She still holds out hope,” Carly states.
“You’re both crazy. Certifiable.”
“I want to talk to Mia, too. I want to work out how her brain functions.”
“If you figure that one out, you’ll be the first,” I assure her.
“Also, Adrian.”
“I shouldn’t tell you so many Morelli tales. I promise you, none are as interesting as you think they are.”
“Your cousin is like a time-traveler. Owning people and domineering over his multiple spouses while serving cigars and brandy in the study before formal dinner. I want to go to there.”
“I promise, you do not. And there are no pre-dinner cigars. That’s a poker game thing.”
“It all sounds very cool from a safe distance,” she states.
“Yes, speaking as someone whose life he ruined, let me tell you how cool he is.”
Carly tilts her head back, looking unimpressed. “Speaking as your current girlfriend, I’d like to invite you to alter that stupid thing you just said.”
I smile at the lunatic snuggled up against me and lean down to give her a kiss. “Fine, I guess my life isn’t so bad.”
“Better, but not great.”
“I love you?”
She smiles. “Much better.”
“I love you and your Easter egg wreath.”
Looping her arm around my neck, her smile grows to a grin. “Yes! I knew you were perfect, you just needed a little dusting off.”
I roll my eyes, but she crushes her lips against mine and I forget to tell her what a giant nerd she is. It’s hard to tell her she’s a nerd though, since she follows up by dragging my shirt off, sliding down my body, and working absolute magic with her mouth.
“Your turn,” I tell her, pushing her back on the couch and climbing on top of her.
“Yes, sir,” she says, tugging off her sweater and tossing it on the floor.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
“No,” Carly objects. “Tell them you’re not coming in. You have better things to do. Namely, me.”
We had a no-call, no-show this week, so I’ve been picking up extra shifts. Carly’s right though, I don’t see any good reason to stop what I’m doing here.
I frown at the display. No one from work calls me from an unknown number.
Unease crawls down my spine and I’m tempted to ignore the call.
“What’s wrong?” Carly asks, a faint frown of concern on her pretty face.
I hit ignore.
“Nothing,” I tell her, shaking my head. “It’s not work. Probably someone telling me I won a fucking cruise again.”
That makes her smile. “Hey, I wouldn’t say no to a cruise. We could hit up the Caribbean. Spend a few days on the beach. Maybe you should tell them you’re on board next time.”
The phone rings again.
Unknown number.
“You better answer it,” Carly advises. “They’ll just keep calling.”
I sit back on my heels, staring at the screen. Too many horrible scenarios fly through my head, but I tell myself maybe it’s just a wrong number. It’s not Adrian, calling to tell me he’s outside but he doesn’t want to splatter my pretty girlfriend’s brains all over the wall, so I need to make an excuse and get away.
It’s just a wrong number.
I touch the button and accept the call, bringing the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
The deep voice on the other end is calm and collected, the tone of someone who doesn’t let anyone haunt his fucking dreams. It’s also the voice that shows up in every one of mine. “Hello, Vince.”
I close my eyes, blood rushing through my veins, blocking my ability to hear, to think. Pure adrenaline shoots through me. My grip on the phone tightens. My nails bite into the palm of my free hand as it clenches into a fist. Fury like I haven’t felt in a while unfurls inside me—helpless fucking fury.
It’s over.
It’s all over.
My time is up.
I finally stumble into some happiness, and the asshole fucking finds me.
I don’t answer, but he keeps talking because the arrogant fucker knows I didn’t hang up on him. “Your father’s dead,” he states, without emotion. “You need to come back to Chicago and make arrangements for him.”
I rear back slightly, confused. “What?”
Sighing impatiently, Mateo asks, “Have you forgotten how much I hate repeating myself, Vince? Take notes this time. Ben’s dead. You’re the only surviving son. Funeral arrangements need to be made. I’m not going to do it.”
“How fucking stupid do you think I am?” I ask him.
His tone is droll. “You don’t really want me to answer that, do you?”
“I come back to Chicago, I’m dead.”
“If I wanted you dead, you would be,” he informs me. “I expect you here tomorrow. Adrian will call you later to tell you where we’re meeting. We have to clear you before you come to the house, of course.” He misses a beat, then adds, “Bring your girlfriend. I’m sure we’d all like to meet her.”
He doesn’t waste his breath saying goodbye to me, just ends the call and leaves me sitting here a mess of confusion, my world turned upside down.
Carly sits up, watching my face with concern. “Vince, baby, what’s wrong? Who was that?”
I can’t even speak. I drop my phone somewhere in the couch cushions. I shake my head, climbing off her and wandering across the living room.
He knows where I am.
He knows my phone number.
He knows about Carly.
Someone is watching us, even now.
Carly comes up behind me, wrapping her arms around me and hugging my back. “Vince, what’s wrong?”
“He found me.”