Play Me (26 page)

Except Aria. I had no trouble hurting Aria when she was at her most vulnerable. The thought makes me sick. Makes me furious. At myself for being such a goddamn control freak. At my father for making me that way with his lies and games and million different subterfuges that only got worse after my mother died when I was five. At the fucking universe for helping to create the perfect storm of circumstances whereby I hurt the only woman I've ever really given a damn about.

“I met a woman.” The words tumble out of my mouth without my consent.

My father doesn't make a sound, but I can tell by the way his shoulders stiffen and his head tilts that he heard me. That he's listening.

“She's great. Smart. Funny. Tough as hell on the outside but a complete marshmallow underneath. Her name's Aria and she's one of our cocktail waitresses.”

My father does make a sound then, and it doesn't sound like he's pleased. Which pisses me off all over again, because who the fuck is he to tell me anything? About Aria, about my life, about anything? He's lucky I haven't left him and his empire to die a painful, bloated, very public death. It's no more than he deserves.

“This was a bad idea,” I tell him, getting to my feet. “Let's go back to the hotel.” What goes unspoken are the words, “before I'm tempted to dump you headfirst into the fountain and leave you there.”

He grabs my hand then, tries to push it off his wheelchair. But he's so weak now that he can't even budge me, let alone get me to let go. He makes another unintelligible noise, though. One that sounds a little bit like stop. And there's an “f” sound in there somewhere, too.

So, against my better judgment, I do stop. And this time, instead of sitting down, I walk around until I'm standing directly in front of him. And then I crouch down and look him straight in the eyes.

“I'm done,” I tell him, meaning it more than I've meant anything I've ever said. “I've spent my life listening to you and your archaic ideas about class and money and people. I hid my best friend from you for years because you wouldn't like him. I went to Harvard because you wanted me to, and was too far away to save Dylan when he needed it. I took a job with an international charity because I knew it would drive you crazy. I've hated Las Vegas and everything associated with this city because of you.

“I've lived so much of my life doing either exactly what you wanted me to do or doing the exact opposite of it just to spite you. And in doing that, I've ended up just like you. Bitter. Angry. A control freak who hurts those closest to me because I can't control them any more than you've ever been able to control me.

“And I'm done. I'm done living my life to spite you. I'm done trying to control everything because I've never felt like I'm in control of my own fucking life. I'm done trying to be someone I'm not. All that shit ends right here, right now. Because I love her, Dad. I love her and this is one relationship I'm not going to let you fuck up.” I pause as the truth settles in. The fact that I do love Aria. The fact that I don't want to give her up. “No. Not you. Me.
I'm
not going to fuck this up. Not now. Not this time. Aria is too damn important to me.”

At that moment, the fountains erupt behind me, water shooting into the sky to the rhythm of “
It Must Have Been Love
” by Roxette. For a moment I'm frozen in shock. Because the fountains shouldn't be erupting now. Because this isn't one of their standard performance pieces anyway. Because it's like the universe—and my goddamned father—are conspiring to tell me something I've been too stupid and too stubborn to see.

I turn back to my father then, a little shell-shocked and a lot confused. “Did you know about…?”

He nods, and the left half of his face twists up into the closest thing he can make to a smile right now.

“I'm sorry.” It's garbled and weird sounding but I swear that's what he said.

Still, I can't believe it. “What did you say?” I demand.

He says it again, a little more clearly this time. “I'm sorry.” The two words I've never heard from him before. The two words I've wanted to hear for ten years but never thought I actually would.

And now that they're here in front of me, I realize they don't matter. Not really. Not nearly as much as I always thought they would. Because they don't change anything. Not the past and not the future. Not who I am or who he is or what we've both done to hurt each other. But maybe they make it better. Maybe they make it easier for me to see that in letting go, in trusting something bigger than myself for once, maybe I really am making the right decision.

Because I really am done living my life to get back at my father. It's time for me to live it the way I want to. Loving Aria.

“I've changed my mind,” Lucy says. “I don't want that color. Can we do blue instead?”

I glance down at her hand, at the three nails I've already painted a bright, outrageous orange. And with an indulgent sigh, reach for the nail polish remover. “Blue it is.”

She giggles. “Or maybe green? Or turquoise. I kind of like that turquoise color.” She points at one of the cheap polishes I picked up on my way over here today. It cost ninety-nine cents and came from the corner drugstore while most of her polishes are from the makeup counters at Nordstrom or Neiman Marcus. But that's the one she wants.

It never fails. We get together once a month for girl day—we paint our nails, try new makeup on, put our hair in sophisticated or just plain weird styles. Every time, I bring along a few dollars worth of stuff I pick up on sale to mix in with all her fancy department store brands. And every time whatever I bring becomes her instant favorite.

“You know, you don't have to choose the turquoise just because I brought it,” I tell her, being extra gentle as I remove the polish from my sister's twisted fingers. It's so easy to break one of her bones, so easy to hurt her just by touching her the way I would touch someone else—someone healthy—that I'm always extra careful when I'm around her. I've spent too many hours in emergency rooms through the years, waiting for her to be x-rayed and casted from small accidents that wouldn't even have bruised me but that have broken bones, punctured organs, caused her excruciating pain.

“I like turquoise,” she tells me with a defiant tilt of her chin. “I've decided it's my new favorite color.”

“Then turquoise it shall be,” I tell her as love wells up inside of me. Lucy has had such a rough life, dealt with so much pain. And yet she manages to be so optimistic. To keep it all together even though she's got such a raw deal. I don't know how she does it—know that there's no way I ever could—but I admire her for it. So, so much.

“I heard this new band the other day,” she says, reaching over and putting her iPod in its speaker with her free hand. “They're so good. You've got to listen.”

Even as she says that, a really interesting melody fills the room, followed by a singer with a voice that's half-twang and half-gravel. We listen as the words fill up the room, and it isn't long before I'm struggling to breathe. Struggling to stop the tears from falling that I've—up until now—done such a good job of holding in.

But it's hard when the words are rushing over me, words that seem to be mirroring everything that I'm feeling right now. Words like being ankle deep and the tide rushing up. Words like drowning while waiting for something, words like burning with desire, being consumed by fire. Words like reaching and beautiful and being scared.

“What—” My voice breaks and I have to start again. “What's the name of this song?” I ask.

Lucy looks at me strangely and when she answers her voice is softer, more subdued than it ever is. “ ‘Something Beautiful' by Needtobreathe. They've been around for a while but I just discovered them. Do you like it?”

I clear my throat, nod. “It's good. It's really good.”

I duck my head, get back to painting her nails as the song continues to play around us. When it ends, I brace myself for whatever's next. For some other love song that's going to rip me apart just because I'm fragile. Because I'm weak.

But Lucy reaches over and switches her iPod off. She smears her nail polish as she does, but when I reach for her hand to fix it, she shakes me off. Instead, she just looks at me, eyes dark and face serious, when she asks, “Who is he?”

It's the last thing I expect her to ask and I bobble the bottle, end up spilling turquoise polish all over her
Cosmopolitan
magazine. “Who's who?” I ask while I frantically try to wipe it up with tissues.

She laughs. “If you want to pull off the whole nonchalant thing, you probably shouldn't freak out at a simple question.” She stills my movements by picking up the magazine and ripping the back cover off before folding it in quarters so the nail polish won't leak.

Then she grabs my hand, holds it tight. “I've never seen you this nervous about a guy before. Not even Carlo. So come on, spill. I want to hear all about him.”

“There's nothing to say. We weren't even really dating. We were just—” I pause, drawing the line at telling my sixteen-year-old sister just what Sebastian and I have spent so much of the last week doing.

“Just what? Just fuckbuddies? Or just hooking up? Or—”

“What the hell?” I demand. “Where did you even hear the term fuckbuddy?”

She rolls her eyes. “I'm sixteen, not six, you know.”

“God, I hope so. Because fuckbuddy is a term I don't ever want to hear come out of a six-year-old's mouth.”

“Gross!” She throws a pillow at me, further messing up her nails.

“Exactly.” I make a grab for her hand. “Now, can I fix the mess you made or are you going to keep trying to traumatize me?”

She yanks her hand back. “Oh, I'm going to keep traumatizing you. There's no trying to about it.”

I roll my eyes at her. “You suck.”

“Sadly, I don't. But I hope you do.” She reaches for the
Cosmo,
turns it over. “See. It says right here that the way to a guy's heart isn't through his stomach. It's through a world-class blow job.”

“Okay, I'm done,” I tell her, climbing off the bed and starting to clean up the detritus from two hours spent playing with makeup. “I have to get to work.”

“It's your day off.”

“Yeah, well, maybe they need an extra cocktail waitress. Anything is better than—”

“What? Talking about boys with your sister? I thought that's what sisters were supposed to do. Is it because I'm sick? You think because I'm like this I couldn't possibly have something to say about a guy?”

“No! Of course not!” I'm horrified that she'd even think that. “It's not that I don't want to talk to you about guys. It's just that the situation with Sebastian is…complic​ated.”

“Ah-ha! His name is Sebastian. Now how did you meet him and is he good in bed and why are things complicated?”

I narrow my eyes at her as the truth dawns on me. “You were never upset. You were using your illness to make me feel guilty.”

She shrugs, looks at me guilelessly. “Hey, if you've got it, flaunt it, I always say. Besides, I might as well get something good out of this disease. So spill. Now.”

And so I do. I don't tell her everything, obviously—I can barely think about the kind of sex Sebastian and I have had, let alone try to vocalize it—but I talk about who he is and how we got together. How he hurt me by pushing and pushing at me until I felt like I had no control. Until I didn't have any control.

And Lucy listens, she really listens. She interrupts every once in a while to ask a question, but mostly she just lets me talk. In a way, it's such a relief. It's only been a week since I met Sebastian, but it's been the most intense week of my life and there's a part of me that felt like I was locked in a pressure cooker, just waiting for the chance to blow. I haven't talked about Sebastian at all since I met him, not to anybody except for Janet when she was warning me away from him and it feels good to just be able to tell someone about him.

About the way he touches me. The way he talks to me. The way he bought me groceries because I needed them and tries to protect me even when I don't need it. It hurts to talk about him because it hurts—so much—to lose him before I ever really had him. But it does feel good, and so I concentrate on that instead.

When I'm done talking, when I've run out of things to say but am still filled with emotion—too much emotion—I settle back against the bed. And just wait.

It doesn't take long. Lucy reaches over and slaps the back of my head, not hard enough to hurt but definitely hard enough to get my attention.

“Hey. I'm pouring out my heart here and you're hitting me?”

“Because you deserve it!” She shakes her head at me. “Geez, I might not have had a boyfriend yet, but even I know you have to stop fucking long enough to actually communicate every once in a while.”

“Excuse me? We communicated.”

She snorts. “Whatever.”

“We did. We actually talked quite a bit.”

“Oh, yeah? Did you tell him about Dad? Or Carlo? Or what happened fourteen months ago?”

“No. But in my defense”—I duck away as she starts to hit me again—“he never asked.”

“And that's his fault? Sorry, Aria. The whole ‘hey is your dad head of a Mafia crime syndicate and did he force you to become engaged to the future head of another Mafia family because he wanted to cement an alliance?' is not exactly a standard dating question. And as for what happened after—no one would ever think to ask about that. Most people can't even imagine something like that happening, let alone that they know someone it happened to.”

She's right, I know she's right. And yet it doesn't matter. Not when he did what he did. “He wants to control me,” I blurt out, as she winds up to deliver more of her speech.

“Like Carlo?” she asks with narrowed eyes. “Because if that's the case, then you're better off without him. The jerk.”

“No, not like Carlo. And not like Dad.” I flush, twisting a loose string from her comforter around and around my finger. “I mean, it's really just in the bedroom, but—”

“Whoa! Seriously! He's into BDSM? Like Christian Grey—”

“No, not like Christian Grey! How do you even know who Christian Grey is, anyway?”

Once again she rolls her eyes at me. “Sixteen, not six. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. The question is am I going to remember long enough to tell Mom when I see her later?”

“Where do you think I got the book from?”

“And on that note, I'm done,” I tell her, pushing off the bed to begin a hunt for my shoes. “I really do need to get going.”

“Did he hurt you?” she asks after a second, and I know she's watching my response carefully.

“Not the way you mean. He just…pushed me a little too hard. Scared me. Churned up all the old control issues I've got.”

“But he doesn't know about your control issues. Or, at least, doesn't know why you've got them. Right?”

“Right.”

“So why are you blaming him for them?”

“I'm not.”

“Of course you are.”

“No. It's just that—”

“Aria. Listen to yourself. He's obviously got his own issues or he wouldn't be the way he is anyway. And I can tell from the look on your face that you know exactly what those issues are. So maybe you should cut him a little slack. I mean, if he really didn't hurt you. And if you love him like I think you do.”

“It's only been a week. Of course I don't—” This time I'm the one to stop myself. Because, yes, it's only been a week. And yes, it seems crazy that I could fall in love with Sebastian in that short amount of time. But I knew Carlo for years, was engaged to him for eighteen months and nothing he did could make me fall in love with him. What I feel for Sebastian is so much more than I ever felt for Carlo. So much more than I've ever felt for anyone. I've been miserable without him these last few days, have called in sick because I didn't trust myself not to go up to his office and beg him for I don't even know what.

But still. “He scared me, Lucy. He really scared me. Because of how he got with me and because of how I got with him. I wanted to give him everything, did give him everything I had and it wasn't enough. He wanted more. He wanted too much.”

She crawls across the bed then, wraps me up in a vanilla scented hug that is way more comforting than it should be, considering I'm the older sister here. “Because he didn't know about what happened to you, Aria. If he did, I'm sure it would have been different.”

“Are you? Because I'm not.”

“You know, it's like when I used to go to school. Remember? Before Mom and Dad insisted I stay home and get tutored.”

“Because you got hurt—”

“I know, because I got hurt. But when we were playing tag and Johnny grabbed my wrist, he didn't mean to hurt me. He didn't mean to break my arm. He did it because he didn't know. I didn't tell him, didn't tell any of my friends at school about what is wrong with me because I didn't want them to treat me differently. I didn't want to be that sick girl that I always am.

“So when Johnny broke my arm, it wasn't his fault that he hurt me. It was mine. Because I didn't give him the information he needed
not
to hurt me. I know Mom and Dad blamed him, but I never did. I couldn't. Not when by not telling him, I ended up hurting both of us.”

For long seconds, I just stare at my sister as her words reverberate through my head, cutting through the fears I've been holding on to for the last three days. Because she's right. I've been blaming Sebastian for what he did even though he doesn't know about my past. Even though he doesn't know about who my father is and what being his daughter has meant to me.

And I've also been using it to disguise, even from myself, the fact that I'm afraid. Deathly afraid, of telling Sebastian who my family is. Where I come from. Getting him to understand and accept all the shit that went down with Carlo is one thing, getting him to accept the fact that marrying me means he'll be marrying into the Mafia is very different. Even though I've turned my back on my father and everything he stands for, I'm still a part of the family. Still a part of Lucy's life and I always will be. I can't turn my back on her and I wouldn't even if I could.

But how can I expect Sebastian to accept who I am and the responsibi​lities that come with being me? Especially when I was once engaged to Carlo Valducci, the son of the man responsible for Dylan's death. How can I possibly expect him to want to have anything to do with me?