Page 3 of The Moon & His Tides
“Not more so than you,” she returned, those big blue eyes sparkling with humor.
“Ah, such a compliment fromla duchessa, I will treasure it,” I teased her.
“Oh please, do stop speaking in Italian before I disgrace myself by going from ‘duchess’ to ‘pile of mush on the floor.’”
“I can’t say I haven’t turned a woman into a ‘pile of mush on the floor’ before, but usually, it involved more than just my voice,” I teased.
We smiled at each other in the rearview mirror for a moment before she seemed to remember herself, and I returned my eyes to the road. I could feel the air shift as she closed herself off again, tugging the mantle of class and poise around her shoulders like a mink coat.
“Classical,” Mrs. Meyers reminded me softly, primly. “Bach, if you have it.”
She didn’t speak or look at me for the rest of the trip.
But it didn’t matter; the damage was done. I was hooked on her brand of class, on the idea of stealing that wealth for myself and dirtying it up.
I went home that night and fisted my cock to an intense orgasm, picturing all the ways I’d do just that.
2
SEBASTIAN
“Ican manage it,” my sister repeated, a steel edge of determination in her tone. “You focus on what you need to do.”
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel as I sat outside The Ivy restaurant waiting to pick up Mrs. Savannah Meyers the following Friday afternoon. I’d driven her six times in the past week, but the rapport we’d established hadn’t been revisited. If anything, she was even more careful around me, a portrait drawn against the back seat in oils and old-school ideals.
“You don’thaveto manage it, Cosi,” I said between my clenched teeth. “You think if we move to England, we completely abandon our values? I’m the man of this family. It kills me that you’re the one supportingla mia famiglia,but I understand that you need to do it for our mother and sisters. That doesn’t mean I’m not pitching in with what I can to lessen your responsibility,capisci?”
“Sebastian, money is not an issue. Please, save what you make to get an apartment without four other males sharing the one bedroom,” Cosima insisted.
I didn’t want to dwell too long on how it was exactly that my twin sister was making enough money to support a family of five, including tuition at one of the top art schools in the world for our older sister, Giselle. I didn’t want to think about it because those dark, troubling thoughts that carved me up like a butcher with a cleaver were reserved for the dark hours I lay sleepless in bed, when the good little Catholic boy in me reared its naive head to worry about our eternal souls.
It disgusted my pride, as both a man and an Italian, two separate but entirely too arrogant sides of me, to rely on my sister to support my family. However, I was also disgustingly grateful because I had a plan. I just needed time.
I was a good actor. It could be argued that there were innumerable good actors out there.
I was also, it had been said by many,manywomen, unaccountably attractive. Of course, it was easy to see that there were many,manyattractive people in this world, and it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that many of them wanted to be actors.
So what set me aside from the rest?
Well, I doubted very few people had grown up using their acting skills to survive as I had. When lying became a matter of violence or absolution, food or starvation, their safety or ruination. Everything in my life thus far had boiled down to being a good actor. If the Mafia came calling for my father, I had to be prepared to spin a good tale, convince them that hewascoming back from wherever he’d disappeared to, and thatof course,he would have their money for them on his return.
The safety of my mother and three sisters depended on me acting as the man of the house from the time I was eight years old. Now, eleven years later, I was still honing my craft, but even though the life-and-death circumstances had passed, I practiced with the same intensity. My tool of survival had become my passion.
I’d also been writing stories since I was a boy, stealing papers and articles from my father’s desk so I could pen my own words on the back using one of Giselle’s pencil crayons. They weren’t grand tales of dragons and princesses because I was a poor boy in the Italian countryside; we didn’t have the scope or sensibilities to waste time on other worlds. No, my stories were about desolation and small joys, the intricacies of life made so real on the page that I imagined I could feel the grit between my fingers when I held them. I reached out to the stack of papers that comprised the screenplay I had been working on for the past three years and fingered a page just to feel the texture of it.
Cosima knew these stories, these talents, and she called them “my gifts.” She spoke about them with the same reverence as a disciple of her religion, and I knew in a way that twisted my insides that she would do anything to ensure my gifts were brought into the light.
“I’ll send Mama and Elena what I can,” I finally responded. “I don’t care if you have it covered, Cosi, at least they’ll know I’m thinking of them and working for them too. They can use the pitiful cash to buy better groceries or save it toward Elena’s computer fund.”
There was a silence and then softly, “Va bene, fratello mio.”
I closed my eyes and pounded my head back against the seat rest as pain radiated around my sensitive heart. “One day soon,mia bella Cosima, we will be together again.”
“One day sooner, not later,” she stated authoritatively, and I again wondered what she was doing in order to secure that promise. “Insieme.”
“Together,” I repeated in English, feeling the ache where my twin sister, my best friend, should be in my life like the loss of a limb.
The opening of the back door jarred me out of my thoughts, and I raised shocked eyes to the rearview to see Savannah Meyers sliding inside.
