“Is it always like this?” she asked. “Are you always so afraid?”
“No,” I said. “No, only when shit goes really bad. But I think things are going to turn around now.”
“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “I think you’re right.”
I stared into her eyes, into her gorgeous, dark eyes, and kissed her again. I tasted her lips, breathed in her scent, gripped her hair. She pulled back with a sigh and stared into my eyes.
“I don’t want you to go,” I said. “I don’t want you to go back to your old life.”
“I don’t want you to go back to New York.”
“You know I love you, right?” I asked. “I won’t leave if you don’t want me to. Someone else can run my crew.”
“Vince,” she whispered, eyes wide.
“I mean it,” I said. “I’ll give it up for you, if you ask. After all this, I know what’s important, I know what I really want.”
“I can’t ask anything from you,” she said. “I wouldn’t let myself.”
“Do it anyway.” I leaned close, pressed my forehead against hers. She let out a little groan and I kissed her, gentle and fast. “Ask it of me.”
“Stay,” she whispered.
“Okay.” I kissed her. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
We stayed like that for a long moment, feeling each other. I listened to her quick breaths and felt my world shift beneath me, but I wanted it, I needed it. I’d been drifting loose and unmoored, lost in a sea of violence and depravity, but I finally found the island I’d been searching for.
I found my Mona, in a sea of nothing but anger and fear.
“Come on,” I said, kissed her one more time, and moved away. “Let’s go inside. We’ll figure out what we’re going to do tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Yeah, we’ll figure it all out tomorrow.”
I opened the door and got out. I went around the car, helped her out. I grabbed the sack of money and the laptop from the back seat. And together, we walked to my father’s front door.
Roberto dipped his head and let us walk in together, holding hands, bodies close, feeling more alive than I’d ever felt before.
I had my Mona, I had my future. I wasn’t just some mafioso with no reason to live aside from money and chasing women. I had a reason for existence, I had my girl, I had my love.
For the first time, it was easy to look ahead, easy to think about the future.25MonaThree Months LaterI typed THE END and stared at my screen for a long time. I felt like I’d been waiting for this moment my whole life, and now that it was here, now that the words had left my fingers and were down on the page, smattered in black screen ink, I felt like…
Well, like nothing.
I leaned back in my chair and took a deep breath. I heard the floorboards down the hall creak and I knew it was Vince waking up and trying to be quiet. We were sequestered in a small apartment in the far end of his father’s expansive mansion, our own little set of rooms tucked away from the rest of the house.
It wasn’t as opulent as the rest of the place. The floors were original bare wood, the walls were freshly painted in beiges and simple whites. The decorations were minimal, those still expensive. We had a kitchen, a little living room, a single bedroom, and an office tucked up in the attic, a sweltering little cubbyhole with a window AC unit that dripped water on the outside of the house and was way too loud.
I hit save, backed the file up to my Dropbox, and closed the lid of my computer. It was just before six in the morning and I’d been up writing for almost an hour already, trying to get my words in for the day before Vince woke up. The room wasn’t too steamy, not yet at least. I stood up and stretched, my fingertips brushing the low ceiling. A little couch was pressed up against the wall a few feet away opposite a simple stereo system, and I’d spent a lot of time over the last few months lying on that couch, listening to music, trying to get my thoughts in order.
Three months we’d been hiding away in our little apartment. Three months of writing, editing, revising, trying to get the story just right.
It felt like an impossible task. I had to tell the world what happened as honestly as I could, but I also couldn’t reveal the identities of the men involved. It was a tightrope act, and I’d written and rewritten and bashed my head against the wall, until finally, finally, I was finished.
I heard more creaking floorboards. Vince would be in the kitchen at this point, brewing us both some coffee and cooking breakfast. I smiled a little to myself and hesitated, looking back at my little brown desk with its ratty black rolling chair. I’d spent so long sitting at that desk, working hard in that chair, and now it was done.