“I think I’m set,” I say, glancing at Little Al’s wife, who’s making her way toward us, a baby on her hip.
Al follows my gaze and turns to more wife-friendly topics as she reaches his side. “Don’t be gone too long,” he says to me. “I got jobs piling up startin’ this afternoon.”
“I could probably do a couple this afternoon,” I say. “The flight doesn’t leave until six.”
“Forget about it,” he says, putting an arm around his wife. “Go relax with your honey.”
“I’ll do it,” I say, frowning. “As long as I’m back in time to catch the flight.”
My things are already packed and back in the boat if Eliza hasn’t thrown them overboard. Now that she’s unburdened me of the delusion that sex could be a perk of an otherwise empty marriage, a honeymoon seems even more ludicrous. I don’t know why we’re even going through with it, other than my mother already planned the whole thing. I have no interest in a fucking vacation, but I don’t want to make Eliza’s family think I’m not making an effort, that the marriage is as meaningless and hollow as our words on that altar. So, we’ll go through with it, even though neither of us have any interest in the other.
If there’s one thing our families won’t let go of, though, it’s tradition.
I wait until we’re on the way to a job that afternoon before broaching the subject with Little Al.
“You’ve been with a lot of women, right?” I ask, knowing full well that he has. If I’ve learned anything by working with the guy for a month, it’s that he loves women just as much now as he did before his wedding.
He cracks up, and I immediately realize I sound like a fucking virgin. “Dude, you going to ask me how to fuck a firecracker like your wife?” he asks at last, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes.
Ignoring him, I get to the point. He’s not a guy who needs a delicate approach. “You ever been with someone with… Issues?”
“All women got issues,” he says, grinning like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
I frown. “Then maybe some kind of trauma?”
He snorts with laughter. “Eliza Pomponio’s had dudes guarding her pussy since before there was hair on it. She’s got trauma like my ass got trauma. And that’s to say, none.”
I don’t say anything. I’d thought of that. I just don’t know what else would make a girl so fearful about sex. She called it punishment, for fuck’s sake.
Suddenly, a thought makes bile rise to my throat. She’s only eighteen. The only person punishing her up until now would have been her father. That frozen, slow, ache builds inside my chest again, like it’s filled with the dirty slush after a snow is scraped off the roads. Anthony Pomponio looked right into my eyes and told me I should handle his daughter with a firm hand.
And bodyguards don’t protect a girl from her own father. Especially when that father is a mafia king who pays their salaries. Chances are, even if they found out, they’d look the other way out of fear for their lives. Just like I will, like a fucking pussy. Because there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it except sign my own death warrant by trying to kill the bastard. I’d probably fail, anyway, seeing as how the guy has about six bodyguards. Then she’ll be right back where she started—at his mercy.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There were other people in her life. Uncles. That boyfriend she was on the beach with last night. People who work for her father.
“What if one of the bodyguards did something to her?” I ask.
Little Al just shakes his head. “Dude, her dad’s a don. Anyone touched her, he’d have them and their whole family executed with a quickness, you feel me?”
“I guess.”
“Look, Kid, I don’t know what she’s trying to get out of it, but she’s pulling one over on you. She may be smarter to the Life than some of the daughters, but that girl’s so sheltered she may as well have lived in a bubble growing up. No way she’s had any trauma besides reaching the credit limit on her AMEX.”
“Yeah,” I say, staring out the window without seeing. “You’re probably right.”
I know what I saw, though. Eliza was upset. She cried. I saw her tears. I heard her words on the shore with her friends. She wasn’t lying.
Was she?
*
“So, this guy Luigi, he’s behind a few payments,” Little Al says as we stop in front of a walk-up apartment. “You gonna take out his kneecaps, or should I bring a baseball bat? I got one in the trunk.”
“I’ll handle it,” I say, getting out of the car without waiting. My blood is still churning funny in my veins, like it hasn’t quite thawed from the thoughts that hit me in the car, the ones I can’t shake.
Al is probably right, though. It has nothing to do with her having some past that makes her have no desire. The present is what makes her have no desire. She hates me. She didn’t want to marry me. She doesn’t want to fuck me.
But if he’s wrong…