Falling for the Killer

“Not a lot,” I said. “I’ve been a little adrift lately, if I’m honest.”

“Oh, girl, don’t worry about that,” Cleo said, waving a hand. She wore twenty different gold bracelets and they jangled like a janitor’s keyring. Her clothes were expensive and designer and fit her like a dream. “I think everyone’s a little lost in their twenties, right?”

“You don’t seem to be,” I said. “And a lot of the girls from prep have jobs or boyfriends or something.”

She rolled her eyes. “If you’re talking about Katie Mathis then that bitch can go to hell.”

I hadn’t thought about Katie Mathis in almost a decade. “What’d she do?” I asked.

Cleo launched in some petty story about wearing the same outfit to a party and talking shit about each other and as I listened, I realized something with a horrible, startling clarity.

She hadn’t changed a bit. Cleo was always like this, even back in school: catty, chatty, and ready to dish. We’d never been great friends, mostly because Cleo never had any true friends. She gossiped way too much for that and nobody ever trusted her. I realized this meeting was going to make the rounds all over the place, and I tried to guess what she’d say.

Poor Ashleigh seems super pathetic, like doesn’t even drink, no boyfriend, no job, like, all she has is her family name and that’s not even so impressive anymore these days.

It made me want to puke.

“And, ugh, okay, so she got this little dog, and she totally named it Max!” Cleo threw her hands up and stared at me like I should be completely appalled.

“Sorry,” I said. “Max?” I grinned sheepishly.

“That was totally my name,” Cleo said. “Like back in school? I told everyone I wanted to name my first baby Max! Either Maximus or Maxine, depending on the sex, and then that crazy psycho bitch named her dog Max, and now I can’t name my baby after her dog, right?”

“Right,” I said, nodding slightly, and resisted the temptation to touch my belly. I hadn’t even thought about names yet, and I didn’t have all that much more time to figure it out.

In fact, I hadn’t thought about anything, and suddenly it felt very real.

I let Cleo keep talking. She went on about old friends and acquaintances, about who makes a lot of money, who mooches off their family, and who is sleeping around. She finished a beer, ordered a wine, made some sideways comment about me not drinking with her, and kept going on and on about people I hadn’t thought about in years.

It was exhausting. And I used to be like that.

Gian hadn’t changed me. I was already changing before him, slowly drifting away from this vapid, empty obsessing with social standing and what everyone else was doing around me. I’d already started that trend anyway, but he accelerated it and made it so much more intense.

I felt like I had nothing in common with Cleo anymore, and it scared me.

For as long as I could remember, I wanted a life just like hers. She had a boyfriend, they made their own money, and she had a job at some little boutique marketing firm that specialized in dog adoption agencies. She had a life and was going to get married soon, and I was jealous of that.

By contrast, I was pregnant by a mobster and had no clue what was going to happen to me in two hours, let alone by the time the baby came.

And yet the idea of going back to that world scared me even more than staying with Gian. He was a killer, a straight-up murdering monster, but at least he was honest about himself. He never lied to me, never acted like he was better than me, and didn’t care about what the world thought of him.

It was liberating and beautiful.

Cleo was empty and terrible.

And I hated myself for thinking that. I wanted Cleo’s life and I wished I could go back to that, but as she finished her glass of wine and asked me some surface-level questions about my life, which I mostly dodged because I didn’t know how to tell her that I was knocked up by a stranger and he wanted me to live with him so he could help raise the baby, I knew that I had to talk to Gian.

I had to start planning for my future, and he was going to be a part of my life.

“It was so good seeing you,” Cleo said outside after she settled the bill. She kissed my cheek and hugged me. “God, you’re so skinny, you bitch.” She beamed at me, perfect white teeth, and walked off.

I watched her go. It was still relatively early, just a few minutes past nine, and I wondered if I could go somewhere to eat.