Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (27 page)

When he was gone, Joey leaned close and kissed her on the lips, then set his forehead on hers.

“You and me,” he whispered.

~ 19 ~

“How’s she doing?” John asked as he rolled to his feet and Joey took his place. John moved to the head of the bench, to spot Joey during his set.

As Joey grabbed the bar, he shrugged. He didn’t know how Tina was doing.

Physically, she was much better. Her body was almost fully healed, he thought, and after a week at home, she’d adjusted to doing some basic things for herself again. She was going to therapy at St. Gabriel’s. They’d talked about her going to Boston, doing her therapy at the RTC, but she didn’t want that. Joey didn’t think she wanted her colleagues to see her as she was.

That was the answer to John’s question: She was sad and struggling. Withdrawn. Actively isolating herself.

Joey had some adjusting to do, too, now that she was home. After weeks of sleeping together almost every night, and then more weeks sleeping in her hospital room every night, they hadn’t spent a night together since she’d been discharged. She didn’t want him to stay with her.

He wanted to be with her all the time, to help her, to protect her, to be there to keep her safe and give her what she needed. But he was back at work, because she didn’t want him around all the time at home. She wanted to be alone, hiding in her room.

The worst part of the weeks he’d spent with her in the hospital had been the early days when she’d lingered in semi-consciousness. Each time she’d come up, while her head and face had been buried in bandages and a machine had been doing her breathing, she’d gone into a violent panic, and they’d been forced to sedate her. It had taken days before they’d been able to help her come awake with enough calm not to hurt herself.

Joey had felt more frustrated and despondent while her sight was gone than at any time in his life, during his troubles or hers. With his own limited speech, he’d needed her to see him so he could show her how much he loved her. The words he could say weren’t enough.

It had been him she’d leaned on—when she’d realized that he was there, that had brought her back, and at St. Gabriel’s, she hadn’t wanted him away from her at all. Now, away from the constant attention and intervention of the hospital staff, she was pulling inward.

He remembered every feeling she was experiencing now. Though she couldn’t tell him in any kind of word, spoken or written, how she was feeling, she didn’t need to. It played over her face and in her eyes. And he remembered.

It was worse for her than for him. From almost the beginning, he’d been able to speak. He had trouble knowing what words to say, and some trouble understanding what people were saying, and those problems had been at their worst at the beginning. But he had been able to communicate, in his broken way.

Tina could not. She felt trapped and helpless, and she thought her life was effectively over.

He’d felt that way as well, and he’d spent years letting it be true.

He wouldn’t let that happen to her.

“She’ll be okay,” he answered as finished his set and sat up.

~oOo~

In the locker room after his shower, Joey stood at the mirror with a towel around his waist and studied his face. He wasn’t sure about this new beard, but Tina liked it. She petted his face a lot, or rubbed her cheek over his. It was late in October, so he’d keep it through the cold weather and decide about it when it got warm again.

There was grey in it, though—two thin stripes of it, on either side of his chin. Was thirty-six old enough to go grey? Shit.

His eyes skimmed downward, and he examined the rest of his body. After nine months of hard work—well, eight; he’d stayed in the hospital with Tina for more than a month and hadn’t done so much as a sit-up—he thought he looked okay. Different from his twenty-five-year-old self, but fuck, he had grey hair on his face, so his days of looking like his twenty-five-year-old self were well behind him.

Sliding the palm of his hand over his gut, he felt the definition. He even had visible external obliques over his hips, the muscles he and his buddies—like Angie Corti—had called ‘panty-droppers’ back in the day.

This year, he’d grown stronger, in mind and body, than he’d been since the shooting. Longer than that—Nick had told him he was stronger than he’d ever been, and Joey believed that to be true. Without knowing when or why it had happened, Joey felt changed—and not because he had a decent body again. He felt changed in his head.

He traced his finger over the contours of the scar on his chest. Tina loved to touch it, and her interest in it had redeemed it for him in some way, made him see it differently. More like a badge of honor, and less like a mark of shame.

Now she was scarred, too—though, except for the loss of her hair, he barely noticed that she looked different from before. The change had been gradual for him, and for her father and Matt. They’d seen her every day, seen the pulpy horror Nick’s traitors had made of her, and they’d seen her heal.

To Joey, she looked like Tina, the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. It was only when he saw a ‘before’ photo of her that he saw the changes, and then it was the photo that seemed shocking, not the woman.

Her scars on the outside were healing and irrelevant to him, but not to her. Tina obsessed over each and every one. She couldn’t tell him, but if he’d had to offer a guess, he’d have said that the scars on her face were the way she could understand how much of her life had changed. She looked in a mirror and saw a stranger.

John came up behind him, already dressed. “Okay, Narcissus. You look hot and all, but we’re gonna be late. Let’s get moving before you fall in.”

~oOo~

A few days later, toward the end of the evening, he carried a largish box through the kitchen door of the Corti house. Tina’s father was sitting at the island, reading a book, his reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. There was a round, pink cake on a stand in the middle of the island.

As Joey closed the door, Angelo closed his book.

“Hi, Angelo.”

“Giuseppe.” Angelo nodded at the box. Joey had stuck a big pink bow on top of the plain cardboard. “That’s what we talked about?”

“Yeah. …All good?”

Tina’s father sighed. “Yeah. She’s sore, but everything went okay. Maybe this will help—though she’s up in her room, same’s ever. I hope you can get her down here.”

Today, on her twenty-ninth birthday, Tina had had her jaw unwired. They were pinning big hopes on that helping her speech recovery—and that improved speech would help her writing, too. And her outlook.

“Brothers coming?”

“Matteo is on his way. I told you—not Angelo. He has to make a choice. The right one. And I am through having the conversation.”

During a tense confrontation in the hospital, while Tina had still been heavily sedated, Angelo had declared that he would have nothing to do with his eldest child so long as he was in the Pagano Brothers.

He had put his son in an impossible situation, and he knew it. Angie was made. There was no leaving the organization after that, not alive. But not even Nick’s intervention had changed his mind, and Nick didn’t seem inclined to push the point more than he already had.

If Tina had wanted Angie, her father’s resolve would have crumbled, Joey knew. But she seemed ambivalent on the subject of her big brother.

So Angie was on the outside, disowned by his father. Joey thought that was a mistake—for
Tina’s
sake, it was a mistake. She needed the damage from that night to end, and all its scars to heal. One day, they’d realize that letting it break their family had kept the wound festering.

Today was not that day, apparently. Joey sighed and shifted the box in his grip. “Okay. Going up.”

~oOo~

Het set the box on the hallway floor, knocked on Tina’s bedroom door, and then stepped in. Her room was relentlessly pink and frilly, with flowered patterns and lace, and white furniture, and puffy pillows. It could not have been more girly. Although he’d never gone into her room when she was young and he’d been friends with her brother, Joey didn’t think the space had changed in all those years. It had the look of a little girl’s room in which a woman lived.

Tina wore almost exclusively black, and her makeup, when she wore it, was dark and dramatic. The contrast was stark between the style of her bedroom, her most personal space, and the way she presented herself to the world. And yet this pink froth was exactly her at her truest core—like a sweet strawberry center. He loved this room.

She was sitting at her desk, her laptop closed in front of her. There was a mirror in her hand, and she had a wig on that he hated—chin length, straight black fake hair, with a sharp line of bangs across her forehead. She looked less like herself in that thing than she did with the soft, dark hair that had grown back nearly an inch in the past two months.

Almost two months since traitors in Nick’s business had tried to kill her. They now knew that she was alive only because Angie had been in the middle of a job when he’d gone off to give her a ride, and when he hadn’t returned, they’d gone out looking. It wasn’t Tina they’d been out to rescue, it was Angie. They’d been shocked to find her there, too.

No one had thought a Pagano man, even a traitorous one, would harm an innocent. Damn, had they been wrong.

Tina had turned around to see him come in.

“Hey, baby.” He crossed the room and kissed her cheek. “Free?”

She opened and closed her mouth like a fish—and then she smiled. Those were rare these days, and he laughed in response.

“Good. …A kiss?”

For an answer, she set the mirror down and wrapped her arms around his neck. As he lifted her up from the chair, he covered her mouth with his.

Almost two months since he’d been able to kiss her properly. Two months of anguish and worry, of watching helplessly as the woman he loved suffered, as she lost big chunks of herself.

But when he slid his tongue into her mouth, when her arms tightened around his neck and she moved with him, he knew they’d be okay again someday.

He pulled back and kissed her nose. “…H-Happy birthday.”

One corner of her mouth came up in a halfhearted smile.

Taking her hands in his, he led her to the bed and sat her down. “Wait.”

He went out and got the box, then brought it in. Tina gave him a wry look, and he smiled. Not the prettiest package ever, on the outside. But he couldn’t have wrapped it more.

Before she could open it, the surprise was spoiled when one of the little brats inside complained.

Tina’s expression shifted to shock, and she opened the folded flaps of the box.

Inside were two kittens, sisters, both what the people at the shelter had called ‘tortoiseshell’—one was dark brown with mottles of orange and white, and the other was mottled grey, as if she’d looked like her sister until she’d been run through the wash with bleach.

Tina stared into the box. She made a sound like a whine.

The grey was the loudmouth, making the most pathetic little peeps and mews, and she was trying to climb out, so Joey reached in and picked her up.

“Mimi,” he said. Nodding to the box and the other kitten, who sat blinking up at them. “Poppy.”

After years of speech therapy, Joey knew a few things—like the easiest sounds for the human mouth to make. There was a reason that almost every child on the planet, for all of history, said ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ first. Those sounds were easiest. So he’d named the kittens for her.

The Cortis had never had pets because Matt had bad allergies. Joey’s girl loved babies. She loved animals. And she needed to learn to speak again. After getting her father’s okay to bring cats into the house, and Matt’s agreement to get allergy shots, Joey had known what she needed for her birthday.