But of course I didn’t.
I stepped closer to her and put one hand in my pocket, the other holding my glass up in front of me. She had her tray, I had my drink.
She glanced over her shoulder and frowned. She shook her head then looked back at me.
“Really, my boss looks annoyed.”
“All right, fine,” I said. “You can go back to serving drinks to these old assholes. But how about I offer you something?”
She chewed on her lip for a second and looked torn. I could only guess what she was thinking, but I felt my heart beating fast.
Something about her approach got me interested. There weren’t many journalists that would come out and say they were trying to talk to gangsters. I haven’t met many people that had the balls to straight-up ask me to my face if I was involved in the mob like that before. And yet there she was, holding her tray and looking annoyed that I didn’t break down and tell her about every man I’ve killed over the years.
I don’t know what it was about her. Maybe the lips, or the breasts pushing against her tight shirt, or maybe just that attitude.
Whatever it was had me curious. And right then, I needed something to be curious about.
“What?” she asked.
“Lunch,” I said. “I’d offer dinner, but I suspect you’d be more comfortable with lunch.”
She hesitated and her eyes narrowed. “I could do lunch,” she said. “If you had something interesting to talk to me about.”
“Darling, I’ve got plenty of interesting things to talk about,” I said. “Come have lunch with me tomorrow and we’ll see if we can’t figure something out.”
She paused and didn’t move. I could tell she was thinking it over, maybe running what I said before through her mind.
I was a gangster. I was a mobster. She knew it as much as I did, and even if I lied and told her that I wasn’t involved in that shit, she could see my face. She could see that I was lying, and I wasn’t even trying to hide it.
I was dangerous. I was the kind of man she should stay far away from.
But something clicked in her expression. Her eyes narrowed and she took a breath then nodded.
“Lunch,” she said. “I can do lunch.”
“Good.” I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a card. It was plain white with just a number on the front. “This is my cell.”
She took it, stared down, then raised an eyebrow.
“Pretty simple.”
“I don’t need much more than that,” I said.
She opened her mouth then shut it again. She slipped the card into her pocket and chewed on her lip again. I guessed that was a nervous habit, and I could only imagine how fast her heart was beating.
I bet she’d never talked to a man like me before in her life. Those wide, innocent, dark eyes looked scared, and as fucked up as it may sound, I liked it.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said.
“Good.” I took a long sip of my drink then put it down on her tray. She grimaced and glared at me. “Looking forward to it.”
I walked past her and she shied away from me. I opened up the door and let the sound of the party spill back out onto the balcony, ruining the silence. Laughter echoed off the building across the street, broke into bits and pieces of repeated phrases, and drifted down toward the pavement below.
Mona gave me a look then slipped inside and drifted through the party.
I watched her go, her tight, round ass swaying. I swore, she wanted me to see those hips move.
But after a moment, I followed her inside, and drifted into the party again.
I had something interesting again, something to look forward to. So I might as well put in a little work and keep my father off my back, at least until I could get back to my crew.2MonaI sat down on the low wooden bench and stretched out my legs. It was a warm summer afternoon and a breeze blew across my back. I pushed stray hairs from my face and took a deep breath as a group of young kids in rollerblades came striding past.
The park smelled like rain and day-old hot dogs. I didn’t know what it was about Clark Park that made it always smell like a hot dog vendor was right around the corner, even though I’d never seen a single food vendor in the area, but it was always heavy in the air. Couples lounged on the grass and old men sat at the chess tables twenty feet to my left, talking and laughing and staring down at the boards. Parents hustled past, chasing after a little boy, and two teenage girls walking a tiny toy poodle and talking on their phones walked the other way.