Page 1 of Forbidden Surrogate

Chapter One

Luigi Taviani

The older you get, the harder it is to handle your liquor. I hate going out. Drinking is pointless pain and empty calories. Going out with a certified hot mess like my sister Angela only makes mornings more difficult. But if I don’t take her out to get drunk, living with her turns from annoying to impossible.

I should drop her off at Alcoholics Anonymous next time. I’m shot. I roll out of bed soundlessly for my morning routine. My palms hit the floor as I land in a perfect plank. I don’t care how badly my stomach hurts, I crank out the work.

200 pushups, no questions asked. Hangover status? Irrelevant.

Once I get my body moving, memories from the previous night flood in and worse -- emotions. I hate what drinking does to me. We’re Italian, how much more drinking do we need when we chase every meal after 11 a.m. with red wine?

Around one-hundred pushups in, I hear Angela stomping around outside my bedroom door. This marks our sixth month of living together, and she’s only become slightly bearable since her feet healed enough for her to go on runs. The rest of my sister’s personality still reeks of her troubled past.

She drinks twice as much as I do, but she still gets up before noon to make my life a living hell, even when she’s out all night. She needs a boyfriend. And no, it doesn’t make me feel better that neither of us have a choice.

I’m living with my sister. I just have to accept it.

After Angela’s divorce, her ex-husband threatened to kill her and because of our truce with the Pittsburgh mafia family, we can’t do much about the threat except to keep Angela out of the bastard’s sight until he finds a new wife, or passes away.

He broke her feet. The bastard broke her feet and we can’t even kill him.

Now my 32 year old sister ismyresponsibility, and the one thing she loved, that might have been a profession, if not at least a hobby to get her out of my hair, she’ll never be able to do again. Why dad thinks it’s my job to look after her and not his remains a mystery to me. I don't care if I "don't have a family and have plenty of time to look after my sister". And I definitely don't care that she's family either. We’re Italian, so I can’t leave her out on the streets, but I am far from happy about this.

Before I finish my last set of twenty push ups, I hear Angela's needy fists pounding on my bedroom door. Anger flares up in my chest as I push through the end of my workout, tuning Angela out as much as possible.

"LUIGI! You're out of filters!" she screeches. Her voice echoes painfully around my head. I grunt out the last few pushups, ignoring Angela's pounding as it grows louder and more intense. For a small woman, her voice sounds like a goddamn megaphone. How is she this loud, this early?

Italian families are... exactly the reason why I have no interest in starting a family of my own.

Why the hell would I want even more people banging on my bedroom door demanding coffee filters in the morning? While Angela pounds out the beat toGrindin'on my door, I find a blackt-shirt that doesn't smell like a nightclub and throw it on before swinging the door open with a glare.

Angela smirks up at me with witchy green eyes. Dad’s right. Her hair makes her look… unpleasant and unattractive. Would it kill her to look better?

"Get your feminist ass to the corner store and buy filters yourself," I growl at my sister, who looks absolutely thrilled that I look like shit. "You're not as dumb as you look. You can handle it."

"Or good morning, as we say on planet earth," Angela replies, rolling her eyes and continuing to derive far too much pleasure from my misery.

I'm not in the mood for her to 'mean trouble', especially when it's enough trouble for me to look after her.

"I'm not getting you coffee filters. Drink tea."

She gapes at me like I just suggested getting shot at point blank range. I have coffee filters. I don’t know why my sister can’t find them, but I have a complete mental inventory of the contents of my home.

Like a typical Italian woman, Angela won’t let it rest – nor will she solve the problem on her own. There can’t be any other race or ethnicity of women as annoying as Italians.

"You have absolutely no respect for family," Angela says loudly, shifting straight into guilt tripping me.

Italian women are demanding, exasperating and frankly... a burden.

"Angela. I have a headache. You're a grown ass woman. Let me have a glass of water before you beat down my door."

"Can't," she says. "Dad's coming over. I need to prepare mentally."

"What?" I don’t mean to betray my immediate frustration. It’s never good to give your siblings ammunition to manipulate your emotions, especially not siblings like Angela.

Angela shrugs. "He’s probably going to chew me out about my spending–”

"What did you do?" I growl, pushing past Angela towards my kitchen and interrupting her before she can blame her perpetual screw up on our father.

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