My cheeks heat. I think of how to word what I want to say. Vito knows that I’ve been assaulted in the past, even before I came here. I revealed as much to him after I was kidnapped, not that he probably hadn’t guessed it already. But still, this story feels a little vulnerable and I don’t want to tell it to him when I already know I can’t trust him.
Yet, my lips are already moving. “My father sold me for drugs after my fourteenth birthday, the man… he took my virginity.” I can’t look up at Vito, keeping my gaze on the skin of my legs, even as I feel him tense up next to me. “I was fucked up, and I’d already tried to take my own life.” Even speaking of it threatens to throw me back to that time, right into the brutality of the memory and that time in my life. “I was depressed, not eating, and it all felt like too much.”
He doesn’t say anything but I know he’s listening, his gaze bruning into me.
“Richard took me to the bookstore, of all places. I hadn’t wanted to go, I didn’t really like reading, but he did and he didn’t want to leave me alone in the house with my father after what had happened.”
I didn’t know at the time that Richard knew exactly what I was feeling, what I was going through. It hadn’t started to wear on him yet, that had happened when he’d started trying to protect me from experiencing the same things as him.
“So, I sat in the store and watched him read a book in a corner, since he couldn’t afford to actually buy one and the library was too far for us to walk too safely. I got bored watching him and eventually picked up my own book. That was the day I discovered how words could help me escape to a new reality, one where things didn’t hurt so much.”
I’ve never admitted it out loud to anyone before. I hadn’t even told Richard what inspired my sudden interest in reading.
“What book was it?” Vito asks.
“Huh?” I raise a brow at him.
“What book did you read?”
My cheeks are really burning now and I think about getting out of the question, but I know he'll only continue to push so I tell the truth. “Twilight.”
I expect him to laugh, but I should have known better, this is Vito. He only smiles, his eyes light. “It was a better book than people give it credit for, though I’m a bit of a Potter head myself to be honest.”
That’s not what I was expecting.
My eyes widen. “You read Twilight?'“
“My mother made me read it,” he says with a light laugh. “She was infatuated with the franchise as a whole. She even tried to get Giovanni to read it.”
“How did that go?”
His eyes squinch together. “How do you think?”
I imagine some middle aged lady trying to convince Giovanni to read about a vampire falling in love with a human and I laugh.
And the laughter doesn’t seem to stop as I remain on the peer, talking with Vito. He entertains me with more stories of his childhood, of his escapades with Giovanni and Maximo. And when he talks about Maximo, it’s not with his usual hostility but with an affection that has been lost.
I don’t know how long we stay there but by the time that we finally get up to return to the party there’s this fluttering feeling in my stomach. And when I realize exactly what I’m doing, the fact that I’m letting myself soften toward Vito, those flutters turn into a hard quiver.
I can’t do this.
I should have gotten up hours ago. Shit, I should have never even followed him onto that pier. Because those stupid feelings are a betrayal to everything I love, to my mother.
Because those flutters tell me I’m falling, and not just for any man, but one who had a hand in the death of my mother.