Page 32 of Damiano De Luca (The Five Syndicates)
“Sure.” He kicked off his shoes; removed his suit jacket; unbuttoned his tailored button down, so it hung open; and settled beside me.
I stilled as he lifted the covers, and the length of his body brushed against my back. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he mocked, like we were eighteen and in love again.
Why were we doing this to ourselves?
This wasn’t one of our library dates, where we joked around and fell in love with each other. We were tense. Angry. Full of painful history. Playful mocking was nothing but a lie.
But noise filled the air as he opened the book and flipped a few pages. “I’m doing nothing.”
And then, he read the first line of “The Toynbee Convector.” I knew him well enough to know this was his way of thanking me. His way of evening the score without addressing the emotions that came with seeing me again. It shouldn’t have meant anything.
But just like all those years ago, I gave a piece of my heart to him. I wondered who was hurting who here.
The engagement ring felt as heavy on my finger as the lies I’d been telling myself for the past ten years.
We like to be deceived.
Blaise Pascal
Must-stained pages stifled my breathing as I roused from a deep sleep. I lifted the book off my face and stilled when Knight’s arm tightened around my waist. We’d never done this. Never spent the night beside one another on a bed. I felt like a virginal teenage boy again, and I wasn’t sure if I welcomed the sentiment or abhorred it.
Lifting her arm off me, I slipped out of the bed, hoping her time away from the mafia had dulled her senses enough to keep her sleeping. By the time I slipped my suit jacket on, her breathing remained level, and I could have taken the moment to sneak away.
Instead, I stared.
Her differences stood out to me. The cinch of her waist. The volume of her hips. Her natural dark hair color popped against the pink of her lips. She was the same girl, but so, so different. I wanted to memorize her all over again. I also wanted to get as far away from her as I could.
She’d taken me here to get my mind off things.
I had read a story of our past to her to thank her.
Neither of our actions changed the fact that beneath that duvet laid a rock the size of a nickel.
Fuck.
I still wanted her. Seeing her again reminded me of everything I’d missed about her. I turned and left before I pushed her before she was ready.
My driver showed up with a pair of clean clothes, and I changed into the jeans and white tee as we pulled up to the Wilton University campus, the meeting point Bastian had texted me a few minutes ago.
Another town car pulled up beside me, and I slid into the back beside Bastian.
His face remained blank as he took a sip of a smoothie the same shade as Kermit the Frog, shit you’d never see a grown man doing in small-town Texas. “You hear from Renata Vitali?”
I pasted indifference on my face while swallowing the bitter taste of hearing Ren’s name from another man’s lips. “Yes.”
We sat in silence.
He shifted in his seat. “… And?”
“And she agreed to discretion, so long as the matter is sufficiently handled on your end.”
“What does discretion entail?”
“It means the encounter will be slipped into the Vitali archives, and so long as no attention is drawn to this weekend, there should be no reason for anyone to investigate.”
Translation: don’t fuck up and draw attention to us.
