Who would have thought a casual hookup would lead to something life-changing? Melanie Lombardie was just a girl I met at a coffee shop. We agreed that it was no strings and that if we ever needed a 'fix' we would always be available. To a certain ex...
"Someone needs to clear out the house." My mother doesn't look up from the baby blanket that she's hand-knitting for my niece. The whole table falls silent. Andre quietly shuffles a deck of cards, Alessia has Emery sitting on her lap and is pretending she didn't hear anything as she makes quiet baby noises at the 3-month-old. My other sister Aria looks down at the freshly polished wooden coffee table with tired eyes and I look around for anyone to volunteer.
I don't expect Aria to volunteer, because she has Em to look after and our late father was nothing but a complete ass to her. Just to put it lightly.
The truth is, no one wants to go back to that house. No one wants to deal with the fact that we're going to have to dig through all of Alberto's paperwork and possibly find more disturbing things that he used to do without our knowledge.
"I'll do it." I offer quietly. Like I said, no one wants to do this. No one has any more reason to go back to Rome and relive all the horrible things that he did. But seeing as though I upped and left without any notice, I owe an explanation to someone.
And Enzo offered a seat at his side, so I need to know what Alberto was really doing.
My mother gives me a sympathetic but grateful smile. "Thank you, my son. I know this is hard for all of us but it has to be done." Inside our family estate are countless family heirlooms, that to my mother and sisters, are priceless. I know I can't speak for Andre because I never know where he stands when it comes to that kind of shit. As for me, the objects in my family are useless. The people are what matters.
"I have some things to take care of while I'm over there anyway." Like Melanie. My casual hookup for the past three years. We met in the middle of a busy coffee shop and for some reason we exchanged numbers. Later that week we met for dinner and went to her place for the night.
We then decided that because neither of us wanted something serious, we would text each other whenever we needed to release some stress. We'd have a nice dinner and then we'd wind up at her place. She never asked to go to my place and I'll be forever grateful for that.
The guns and ammo lying across almost every possible surface and the bags of cocaine and heroin in the pantry rather than food wouldn't be the most welcoming sight for the woman I'm fucking.
I still have about twenty unanswered text messages and equally as many missed calls from her. She was texting me almost every other week. Firstly it was her wanting to catch up and when I didn't reply it became a series of her asking if I was okay and why I wasn't replying. Never once did her texts sound desperate or angry at the fact I wasn't responding to her. But those texts stopped around nine months ago.
The periods between the texts and calls got longer and longer in between until they just stopped altogether. And to be honest, I miss her concerned texts.
