Page 2 of Mistletoe & Mayhem
She shrugs. “Then let him. I’m tired, Pierce. I’m tired of waiting for him to die.”
She means it. I can feel it in the air—frigid and electric, the way weather changes before a tornado.
“You could testify,” I say, hating myself even as I say it. “You could put him away for good.”
She turns. “And put you in the crosshairs?” Her lips twist, not quite a smile. “He’d kill you just for being in my bed.”
She pads over and sits beside me, and I feel the loss of her immediately. The bed is cold where she’s not. I want to pull her back, but she stiffens under my palm.
“I want this to be real,” I say.
“It is,” she says, but the echo in her voice is hollow, a church with all the pews stripped bare.
I get up and start pulling on my clothes, buttoning my shirt with shaking fingers. She watches me, eyes dark and unreadable,and for a second it’s like we’re strangers again, her on one side of a river and me on the other.
She stands, wraps herself in a long sweater, and perches on the edge of the mattress. The room is quiet except for the faint rumble of traffic below, the distant groan of the city dying in the winter.
“I’ll talk to him,” she says. “About us.”
That sentence is a gun pressed to my head. I can’t breathe. “You don’t have to?—”
“Don’t tell me what I have to do.” Her voice is flat, final. “You want this to be real? Then let me make it real.”
A part of me wants to run—a part always does—but she’s looking at me like I’m her only last good thing. I walk over. I kneel in front of her and put my hands on her knees, and in this moment, I want to promise her the world. But I’m afraid, and the words sluice away in my mouth.
She draws my face to hers, and this time the kiss is slow and careful. I taste salt on her lips.
“Come back after work,” she whispers. “I’ll cook. We’ll talk.”
I nod, and it feels like the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.
I leave the room, and down the hall her cat watches me coldly from atop the radiator, judgmental and perfect, a feline warden appointed over the world Laura’s supposed to protect. I want to laugh—maybe I do, but it’s more a bark of air. In the kitchen, I scrawl a note on the paper by the fridge. I’ll be back. Don’t lock the door.
Outside, the cold is surgical, a bite that finds the crack in every armor. I breathe in and look up at the window. Laura’s there, just a shadow behind the glass, hand raised but fingers unmoving—like a goodbye long rehearsed, waiting for the world to catch up and make it true.
I don’t know if I’m walking to my job or my own execution. I know only that every step away from her is the hardest one. But I know where I’ll be tonight, and I know who I’ll be with, and I know, for a few more hours at least, I can pretend there’s still a version of this story where love is enough.
Chapter 2
Laura
When the door closes behind Pierce, I can still taste him—bitter and alive—on my tongue. I burrow deeper into the sheets and drag the comforter over my head like a veil, as if I can keep him here a minute longer. The radiator hisses; my phone vibrates mournfully on the nightstand. I stare at the ceiling and count the cracks like I’m tracking time by fractures. Pierce said he’d call on his lunch break. He promised, and he doesn’t break those—never has, not even when I begged him to.
The sun claws at the frost on my window, but the light is thin, anemic. My limbs won’t move. I don’t want to ruin the perfect geometry of his outline on the sheets. I roll into it and inhale. After a while, his scent fades into detergent and skin and the ghost of last night’s bourbon.
My heart is a cracked egg in my chest, the yolk leaking in slow panic. I promised Pierce I’d do it today. Face my father and make it final. No more family business, no more blood on my hands, no more late-night pickups with pistols in my lap. Just me and Pierce against the world, or whatever is left after the world finishes gnawing me down to bone.
I peel myself out of bed. The apartment is silent except for the muted scuffle of pigeons on the sill, the refrigerator’sbronchial hum. Even my geriatric cat, Pinky, is a statue—coiled on the windowsill, all-seeing eye. He watches me coolly, as if judging my weakness, or maybe just deciding if I’m worth following to the kitchen.
The shower is my confessional. I step inside and crank the water until it scalds my skin pink, and stand there as steam devours the glass. With every second I linger, I imagine my resolve washing down the drain, spinning toward the ocean where it can’t hurt anyone. Sometimes I even pretend it’s blood, that it’s not mine, that it belongs to all the men I’ve put under. Someone should mourn them.
When I finally get out, my hands won’t stop shaking. I blow-dry my hair with militaristic precision and line my eyes with black so sharp it hurts to blink. I slide on a cashmere turtleneck. Deferential. Respectable. Father doesn’t abide vulgarity or carelessness. He considers both weaknesses, and I am not allowed those.
The drive to Brooklyn Heights is a rolling mausoleum of cancelled plans. I see my own reflection in the black window, ruthlessly pale, lips pressed together as if holding my tongue hostage. I answer work emails with trembling fingers. My phone autocorrects “Pierce” to “Peace,” which is either poetic or a harbinger, depending on how you tilt your head.
Dominic Stasio’s brownstone is a beast of a place—dark brick, leaded glass, heavy with generations of failure and triumph. Two men in Parkas nod as I walk up the stoop. The inside is all wood and velvet, spiced with cigar smoke and the faintest hint of bleach. Father is waiting in the front room. He sits behind a desk the size of a sarcophagus, wearing a navy suit and a smile that never unclenches.
“Laura,” he says. “Sit.”
