Forgotten Luca (The Four 1)

Neither of us spoke again for a while. I was surprised that Luca still had his arm around me, but I was just as surprised that I was allowing it. I had no idea what Luca’s sexual orientation was, but at the moment, I didn’t really care. If he’d wanted to hurt me, he would have done it in the den at Ronan’s house or during any of the many opportunities today when it’d been just me and him. There’d been a few times when he’d been touching me that I’d been sure he was into men, but he also had a son, so for all I knew he could be just curious and his preference was mostly for women.

Whatever it was, I was just glad to be able to take advantage of his strength and warmth for the moment. The tempting taste of heroin on the back of my tongue was finally starting to fade and I felt like I could breathe again. I wasn’t proud of the fact that I’d had to rely on Luca to pull me out of the episode, but it was what it was. There’d be plenty of time tomorrow to beat myself up over it. Admittedly, I’d been hanging on by a string all week as I’d had to enter my old world to search for Carla and Violet. Under normal circumstances, I might have had enough fight in me to deal with all of that, but Luca’s reappearance in my life earlier in the week had fucked with my head a lot more than I wanted to admit. Searching for Violet had given me something to keep me moving, but now that things had quieted again, the old demons were trying to take advantage.

“Better?” Luca asked quietly. He didn’t sound triumphant or gloating. In fact, he sounded calmer himself. He’d left his glass by the chair he’d been sitting in. At some point he’d put his feet up on the ottoman in front of the couch. His one hand was still holding mine, but his thumb wasn’t stroking mine in a consistent pattern anymore. I wondered if that was because he knew I no longer needed that rhythm to focus on… or he didn’t need it.

To an outsider, we probably would have looked like a couple having a sweet, domestic moment.

I nodded in response because I was starting to feel my eyes getting heavy. My cheek met with a little bit of resistance while I was moving my head. Good lord, when had I started resting my head on his shoulder? I jerked my head up and mumbled, “Sorry.”

The hand he had on my shoulder came up to brush the side of my head and then to my utter shock, he was urging my head back down. “S’okay,” he said. Did he sound a little tired himself? Maybe he’d just had too much to drink? I’d only seen him have the one shot, but he certainly could have had more before his cigarette.

But he didn’t smell heavily of alcohol.

“Do you have a dolphin story?” Luca asked. He was still toying with my hair and the sheer pleasure of it had me leaning more heavily into him. Warning bells were going off in my head, but I couldn’t make my legs and arms follow the silent order to get up and go back to bed.

“I’ve never seen any,” I said.

I felt Luca shift a little and when he next spoke, I swore I felt his mouth against my temple.

“Is there something from when you were a kid that you’ll remember forever… before you were…”

Taken.

He didn’t need to say the word. I was glad he hadn’t.

“My grandmother taking me to a movie set when I was around eight.” The second I allowed the memory to take root in my mind, my eyes began to burn.

“Your grandmother was an actress?” Luca asked in surprise.

I shook my head. “She was a caterer. The movie was only in town for a week or so—they were filming a couple of scenes at this old farm. It was a horror movie… like with vampires and zombies.” I forced back the emotion that was threatening to close off my throat. “She told me to stay with her by the catering tent, but I was fascinated by all the people in costume. These zombies would come over in full makeup and start chatting with her like a regular person and I was just completely entranced. I was sure I’d never seen anything cooler. I started wandering around the set and asking everybody questions about their jobs. The director took notice and put me to work. I ran errands for him and everyone else… taking scripts to people or getting an actor a snack or something to drink. When the film finished wrapping and left town, I was so disappointed.”