Page 74 of For Pleasure Or Worse

“God, I pray one day you find a woman who puts you on your ass and turns you into something redeemable, Ech,” I said.

He stretched, jutting his arms out and flexing them with a brutish grin. “Never going to happen.”

My eyes rolled as I pulled the scavenger hunt list out of my pocket. “You guys go, I’m gonna try to map this out. It’ll give me something to do to keep my mind off the other shit. Bring me something back though.” I waved a finger between my groomsmen.

“I’ll keep you company,” Angelo said.

The last place I should have been was standing alone with my brother. I might think too hard about all the grief he’d caused me with my Natalia, and wring his neck in broad daylight. Despite it, I nodded and gestured to Pike, Wink, and Echo to take off so we didn’t lose any more time.

My Delta buddies turned and started in the opposite direction, bumping shoulders as they disappeared into a sprout of people. I watched them for a few seconds too long, partially entranced by the bright lights and flaring neon signs, squinting to adjust to the hue of pink and orange reflecting from the massive hotel windows onto the street and realizing when I started smiling like a little kid that I was already nursing a buzz.

“I never said I was sorry.” Angelo saddled up beside me. “I promise I’m going to do everything I can to win this little hunt for us. Your wife can’t be mad at you and do a choreographed dance for you at the same time. It’s scientific.”

“If there’s one thing you need to know about your sister-in-law, it’s that if she wants to do something she will.”

“Let’s see the list.” He plucked it from my hand and studied it with the same demeanor as our father reading theTimeson Sunday mornings. Vague confusion, a pinch of concern. “Natalia will get over this, I know it. She’ll realize you have her best interests at heart, the same way I did.”

“Same way you did?”

“I was pissed at you too when you joined the Army and left me with Mom and Dad and a family business neither you or I wanted.” He chuckled. “Maybe I didn’t act like it a lot back then, but you were the only person I ever cared about not disappointing.”

I cut him a glare. “You used to steal my ID to buy cigarettes at the bodega.”

“You used to flush them down the toilet so that Mom and Dad didn’t find out.”

“Because you’re an idiot and I wasn’t about to be an accomplice.”

I thought about being eighteen again, right before I left for boot camp, still sharing a bedroom with Angelo who would reluctantly, but always, get up and make his bed after I did. The same kid who would leave his beard trimmings in our sink but never leave the house without a clean shave like mine, and hop in the passenger seat of my beat-up Pontiac and put his feet up on the dash but never try to change the music I liked to play on the radio.

“Every stupid thing I did was to try to get your attention. If you didn’t throw the cigarettes out, it meant you didn’t care.Even if you chewed me out for it, it was better than you not giving a fuck about what I was doing.”

“You’ve been getting yourself in trouble long after I joined.” I looked over his shoulder at the scavenger list but I wasn’t reading anything. “When I wasn’t there to pay attention.”

“Yeah, and then I realized that no one else did. I was pissed at you for leaving me because you were doing the one thing that I couldn’t follow. I had two more years of high school, and by then I was…bitter.” The word came out like it was stuck between his teeth. “When I could have enlisted, I didn’t because Dad would have killed me, Mom would have guilt tripped me, and I was checked out, involved with the wrong people. You know the story. The easiest thing I could have done was stay in the basement with my guaranteed union job and hand-me-down business, because at least that made me feel important.”

I pulled in a deep breath and lifted my chin toward the sky, watching the spattering of long, thin clouds draped over Sin City amble slowly in a direction I couldn’t place. When considering how leaving for the military affected my brother, I had lapsed—significantly. He was too young and proud to be this honest with me way back then, and I was too clouded by the need to get the fuck out of New York to care about anyone but myself. I’d kept that same energy until this past year. I realized that leaving and putting a barrier between my new life and my old one was selfish. It was childish, it was running away from the problem. Which I was still guilty of because I’d been doing it for the last six months with Natalia by purposely keeping her naive to the real, penetrating mental health issues I was ignoring.

Figuring this all out while drunk wasn’t ideal. I needed to tellherthis, but she was so pissed off at me she was probably somewhere across town getting a lap dance by a Chippendale and checking boxes off. Enjoying herself, like she said she would.

“You know, I was jealous of you, in a lot of ways,” I confessed.

Angelo’s cheeks dimpled. “Me?”

“Yeah, because in Mom and Dad’s eyes you couldn’t do anything wrong. You got the youngest child treatment, squeaking by in life. No rent payment, no strenuous responsibility, a regular eight to four?—”

“I’d like to see you haul sheetrock without breaking a sweat.”

I punched out a laugh. “I wanted to be home so many times when I was deployed. Literally yearned for it. My bedroom, the sounds of the city past the window, the homemade meals. I’d hear all this shit about you getting involved with the wrong people, getting in trouble, and it looked like you were just throwing the privilege away, and it fucking aggravated me. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, and I’m sorry.”

That was something I’d never said out loud. I pretended I was aloof so I didn’t have to come to terms with being homesick, with being envious of my brother for having it easier than I did, even though I made the decision to join the Army all on my own because I’d already convinced myself I hated home. Anything else was unacceptable, a weakness. Now that I’d admitted it, my chest opened like adding a link to a chain, loosening the gate it was keeping closed.

“Now this shit is happening with Tally for the same reasons, because I wanted to impress everyone with how perfectly I held it all together. I didn’t take any accountability and now I’ve ruined the entire trip and she wants to kill me.”

“You are the man, Matty boy. The fucking man. Don’t think for a second you’re not.” My brother gave my shoulder a squeeze, and his light eyes softened contemplatively. “She’s in love with you, she’s perfect for you, and she’s going to come around when you get your big Italian head out of your ass. You just have to give her space for like…” He checked his watch. “More than two hours. This is some Romeo and Juliet shit.”

Giving her space made my hands itch. Distance from this woman was like being weaned off an addiction. I couldn’t go two wholeminuteswithout thinking about her, and it had nothing to do with her being angry at me. That’s just where my brain traveled, to Tally. What she was doing, thinking, wearing, saying. To marry a woman I was this mind-numbingly obsessed with was the real privilege.

The night before in the bedroom replayed like a highlight reel in my head, and it would until the day I fucking died. But it felt wrong to fantasize about it on a city sidewalk knowing she was so pissed off at me. Like I didn’t even deserve to think about her naked. I needed to punish myself. Go to mind jail.

---