A Little Too Much

Chapter Three

LORENZO IS DEAD. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I’ve spent so long trying to forget the Moretti brothers ever existed. I never thought I’d see them again. But Alessandro is here. He steadies me with a hand on my arm and I’m not sure if I want him to be a figment of my imagination or not.

I was only fourteen the last time I saw Alessandro and his older brother. It was only three months that we were together at the group home, but those three months have haunted me ever since. There are things I don’t remember . . . things I’ve blocked out. But there are other things that are etched in my memory as if it were stone. Things that, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never forget.

Lorenzo was my first, and I’m pretty sure I was Alessandro’s. Now, looking back, I see it for what it was. Lorenzo was bored and I was something to do. But at the time, my life was an emotional void. Everyone who was supposed to love me had abandoned me. I’d stuffed the pain down where I couldn’t feel it, but without that pain, there was nothing. I was totally numb. I was so desperate to feel something . . . anything . . . that, without even realizing I was doing it, I offered myself up to him on a silver platter.

Lorenzo seemed so alive to me—so far from the numbness I felt. Watching him was like watching a comet streaking across the black emptiness of the night sky: so big and bright, but belonging to an entirely different universe. He was always in trouble with our counselor, but he wouldn’t back down. She’d yell and he’d get right in her face. Then one day he hit her. I saw it. I watched his fist swing out and connect with her jaw. I saw the blood and spit splatter from her mouth in an arc that left a stain on the carpet. I saw the look on her face . . . in her eyes. All of a sudden, she was totally alive.

I wanted to be alive too.

I would say things to piss him off, at first so he’d notice I existed, but then later to see if I could get a rise out of him. I think I wanted him to hit me too.

Instead, he did something else to me.

With Lorenzo, it wasn’t sweet or tender. There was no small talk. No foreplay. And when it was over, he was done with me.

I was alone again, so I went to Alessandro.

He was so different from his brother. He wanted to talk—about my parents and his family . . . the world and our place in it. But that’s not what I needed from him. I didn’t give a shit about the meaning of life; I just needed to feel alive. So I told him about Lorenzo—what we’d done—then I unzipped his jeans. He told me no at first, but I was persistent.

When he finally gave in, it wasn’t what I expected.

All I knew was Lorenzo. He was so sure of himself, taking what he needed and not really giving a shit about me or anyone else. He wasn’t gentle and it hurt, but physical pain was something I could grasp on to.

Alessandro, on the other hand, was scared and soft and fumbling. He was painfully gentle, and when it was over, he held me and asked if I was okay.

I didn’t understand the question.

It wasn’t until later, when he made me feel things I’d never felt before, that I realized sex to Alessandro was more than just physical. He opened me up and saw my black, broken soul, and it didn’t scare him away. He made me believe everything was going to be okay. He helped me understand love.

Then a month later, he left. Just like everyone else.

But now, here he is.

“It’s really late,” I say, trying to sort out what to do. There are things I need to know, but . . . I need to figure some things out first. I’m not ready to do this now. “Are you in the city for a while? Can we maybe meet tomorrow?”

He nods. “I’m sorry, Hilary. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

Well, you do. “Argo Tea at Columbus Circle? Eleven? They’ve got coffee too, in case . . .”

“Argo Tea,” he says with a nod, saving me from myself.

I back a few steps toward my door. “Okay . . . so . . . I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He levels me in his dark gaze and backs off a step. Something in those probing eyes sends a shiver through me and I look away, afraid he’ll see too much. I twist my key and slip through the door without looking back, then pummel the elevator call button with the side of my fist, willing it to get here before my legs give out again. When it finally shows up, I step in and punch four, then lean against the wall in the back corner and slide down it to the floor. I hug my knees to my chest and rest my aching forehead on them. When the doors clank open on my floor, I don’t move. They glide shut again after a minute and I still don’t move.

Lorenzo is dead and Alessandro is here. So much has happened to me since those three months we were together at the group home. Once they were gone, all I had left was pain and anger. I survived by learning to be strong. I stuffed the pain down where no one could see it and pretended like nothing mattered. But seeing Alessandro again brings it all to surface again. It stirs the dark places in my mind where I’ve hidden it away. I’m not going to hurt like that ever again. The pain made me weak.

But my anger fuels me.

So I do it again. As the elevator starts to move, I pull myself off the floor, stuffing my pain away into those dark crevices of my mind. The door opens on one and a couple that I’ve seen around but don’t know gets on arm in arm, giggling over some inside joke. They eye me suspiciously and stop laughing.

When the elevator stops on four, I step out without looking at them and move across the hall to our door. The apartment is dark, but it’s only eleven, so I know Brett’s not in bed. I flip on the light and move to the kitchen, where I grab a mostly empty two-liter of Diet Coke out of the door of the fridge and chug the rest.

On the way to the bedroom, I stop in the bathroom to pee and brush my teeth. When I look in the mirror over the sink, peering back at me is that scared little girl from so long ago. I crank the hot water and splash my face, breathing in the steam and forcing the fear away, and when I look up again, that girl is gone. It’s just me. Hard, tough, indestructible me. I let the Moretti boys close enough to hurt me all those years ago and I learned my lesson. No one’s ever getting through my armor again.

The bed is empty, so Brett must be out. I strip and slide in under the sheets. All I want to do is curl up in a ball and go to sleep.

But I can’t sleep. My mind won’t turn off, wondering what Alessandro has to say. An hour later, when Brett comes home, drunk, I’m still wide awake. I sit up in bed when he staggers into the bedroom. He flips on the light and peels off his jacket. He’s soaked through from the rain, the shoulders and back of his T-shirt wet and clinging.

“Finally,” I say and his eyes flow down the lines of my body as I sweep the sheets aside. I roll onto my hands and knees and crawl to the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

He grins and stalks toward me, stopping in front of me at the edge of the bed. “Now what?”

I reach up and pop the button of his jeans, easing the zipper down. He’s commando, as usual, and his manhood is already half-mast. I lean forward and tease his growing hard-on with my tongue. A minute later, when he’s stiff, I take him into my mouth.

“Fuck,” he gasps when I suck him. He growls and drags me off the bed onto the floor, throwing me down and climbing on top of me. The next second, he stabs into me hard. He growls with every thrust as he pounds me into the hardwood floor, and it hurts so goddamn good.

It only lasts a few minutes. I don’t come, but I don’t need to. That’s not what this was about. I just needed to know I’m here, in this place. Right now. I needed to feel it.

Brett rolls off me and I ooze back up onto the bed, finally feeling sleepy. And when I close my eyes, there’s nothing. Just the way I want it.

WHEN I WAKE up in the morning, I realize Brett never made it into the bed. He’s sprawled in the dirty clothes on the floor, just where I left him, sound asleep and fully dressed, with his limp dick hanging out of his open fly. I pick my phone up off the nightstand and check the time.

Ten.

I step over Brett and hurry to the shower, racing through my routine, the whole time wondering if I’m actually going to go through with this. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to say to Alessandro. Why is he even here after all this time?

I don’t have time to de-frizz my hair, so it’s more afro-ish than normal when I race up to the Argo Tea at eleven fifteen. I’m not sure if I want him to be there or not.

But he is.

He’s sitting alone at a table in the back corner, a coffee cup cradled in both hands. I watch as he brings it to his mouth and sips. He’s changed, but not so much that I can’t see the sixteen-year-old boy I knew. He still has the same silky, black hair, the waves combed off his forehead now, instead of shaggy in his face. He has the same smoky charcoal eyes, dark with black rings around the irises. But, where his features were more delicate then, they’ve turned stronger and more masculine. His sleek jawline is shaded with dark stubble and there’s a shallow dimple at the tip of his chin. He’s tall, probably six-three, but he was lanky before. He’s filled out. He’s in a sapphire-blue button-down with the tails loose over black jeans, and there’s no question there’s a pretty serious body under the thin cotton.

He’s still beautiful. That’s the only word that does him justice. But there’s an edge to him now that reminds me of Lorenzo.

Even though Lorenzo’s face was more boyish in some ways—rounder with a little baby fat in his cheeks—he was tougher and more rugged-looking than Alessandro. His hair was sort of mud brown, and his eyes were totally black and totally unreadable. His skin wasn’t as dark as Alessandro’s either. He was seventeen and half and didn’t shave very often, so he had blondish scruff on his chin and upper lip that scratched my face when he was on top of me. He was shorter than Alessandro, even though he was a year and a half older, and, at the time, he was broader than Alessandro, though it’s clear Alessandro caught up in that department at some point. But he forever had that look in his eye that let you know he could snap at any second. Alessandro’s got that look now.

I stand in the door, staring at him for another minute, deciding once and for all if I’m really going through with this. I hate that I’m this scared. I don’t do scared anymore. Pissed? Yes. A little nervous? Sometimes. But never scared. But I have to do this. I have to know why he’s here—what he knows. I take a deep breath and square my shoulders, then stride over to where he sits.

He stiffens for just a second when he sees me, but he stands when I reach his table. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually come.”

“Yeah . . . whatever,” I say, dropping my eyes from his intense gaze.

“I would have ordered for you, but I didn’t know what you liked.” He pulls out the chair opposite his. “I’ll get something for you.”

I’m just staring at him. I can’t get over the change.

“I can get it.” I spin and hurry toward the counter, where, thankfully, there’s a line. I don’t look back as I wait. Instead, I work to pull my thoughts together. I don’t know if it’s closure I need or what, but there are things I need to know—questions I need answers to.

Now I just need to clear my head enough to remember what the hell they are.

Alessandro stands again as I walk back to the table several minutes later. He holds the back of my chair as I lower myself into it, then helps me slide it in. He sits again and looks at me for a long, awkward minute, swirling his coffee. “I’m sorry I was so awkward last night. You took me by surprise. I wasn’t planning to ring the buzzer, but I’d just found your address and I . . .” His eyes pinch a little and I realize it’s because I caught him there. He’s embarrassed.

“You were stalking me?”

His whole face pinches now. “I never meant to . . . I wasn’t going to contact you.”

“How did you find me?”

He presses back into his seat and hesitates before answering. “It took some ingenuity . . . and Google.”

I slam my teacup down on the table. “My address is not on Google!”

“It’s actually pretty shocking, the amount of personal information that can be found online.”

“So you were stalking me.”

“In a manner of speaking, I suppose I was, if there’s a non-creepy connotation to that term.”

“How is this non-creepy?” I say, waving a hand at him. “You show up in New York eight years after vanishing off the face of the planet, and I find you poking around my apartment building in the middle of the night, then you admit to cyberstalking me. Nope . . .” I say, folding my arms across my chest and scowling at him. “Nothing creepy there.”

He breathes deeply. “As I said, I didn’t plan on—”

“How long have you been back in New York, anyway?” I ask, cutting him off. I don’t want to hear any more of his lame explanations. I just want to know what the hell he’s doing here—why he found me. If he knows.

“About a month,” he answers, and my gaze is drawn back to his eyes.

“You’ve been here a month,” I say, trying to absorb that. “Doing what? Do you have a job?”

“Not at the moment. For now, I’m volunteering at the West Side YMCA.”

“Where were you? Before?”

He takes a long sip of his coffee, and below the rolled-up cuff of his sleeve, I watch muscles of his forearm ripple as he sets his cup down and swirls it. “A few places, but mostly Corsica and Rome.”

“Rome.” He was in Rome while my life fell apart. “So . . . why did you come back?”

“To put some old ghosts to rest.” As he says this, his gaze darkens . . . becomes more intense, seeming to bore through me.

But I won’t back down. I hold his gaze. “Am I a ghost?”

“You are.”

“And you’re going to put me to rest,” I say, unable to curb the cynical edge to my voice.

“I needed to find you,” he says, finally lowering his gaze. “The way things were left . . . I’ve never felt right about it.”

“The way things were left . . .” I repeat. The way things were left sucked. He has no idea how much.

He splays his long, slender hands on the table on either side of his cup as if to steady them and presses into the back of his seat. “I don’t even have words, Hilary. I don’t have words to adequately apologize for what Lorenzo and I did to you. You were so young . . .” He trails off with a shake of his head. “Too young,” he finally says, lower.

“So what is it you think you can do about it now?” I’m more bitter than I realized, and it bleeds through loud and clear into my words.

“Nothing,” he says, lowering his gaze and watching his fingertip trace the rim of his coffee cup. “There’s nothing I can say or do to make this right. All I can do is apologize. All I can do is tell you that I’ve prayed for you every day. I’ve—”

I bolt out of my chair, my palms slamming on the tabletop and splashing my tea. “You prayed for me? What the hell is that going to help? How the hell is praying for me going to make one fucking bit of difference?”

I’m only vaguely aware that the whole shop just went silent.

His face crumples as if I’d reached out and slapped him. Good. He deserves to hurt. “This was a mistake,” he finally says, standing. “It was wrong of me to open old wounds for the sake of easing my conscience. I’ll go.”

He turns and walks out of the shop, leaving me staring after him. Which makes me want to rip his head off. If anyone gets to walk out, it’s me. I storm after him and when I slam through the door onto the crowded sidewalk, he’s waiting at the crosswalk.

“There’s no fucking way you get to walk out on me!” I shout, charging after him. He turns and starts moving back toward me. “Do you hear me, Alessandro? You don’t get to walk away again!”

I stop in front of him. For several beats of my racing heart, we just stand here staring at each other. Then I reach up, not sure what I mean to do.

What I do is slap him. Hard. And it feels really good.

So I do it again.

He just stands there, taking it. He doesn’t flinch, or reach up to rub his face. He doesn’t step back, or grimace, or raise his hand to defend himself, or hit me back. He doesn’t tell me to stop.

So I slap him again.

His jaw tightens and he closes his eyes for just a second, like he’s relieved. But then I’m pinned in that charcoal gaze again. “Do whatever you need to do, Hilary.”

It’s like he’s asking for more . . . like he thinks he deserves it. But he doesn’t get to call the shots. This is my show, and I’m done.

I spin and stride to the Argo Tea without looking back. Our cups are still on the table, and when I drop into my seat and pick mine up, I realize my nerves are rock solid. No shake. Other than a faint sting in my palm, I’m fine. I’m suddenly proud of myself. If you don’t show weakness, then you’re not weak. First rule of survival.

That makes me the strongest sister around.

I LEFT ALESSANDRO standing on the sidewalk outside Argo Tea five days ago, but I can’t stop looking over my shoulder everywhere I go, thinking I see him lurking around corners or in doorways. I’ve never been this paranoid in my life.

Filthy’s is closed Mondays, so I usually spend my Monday nights at the 115th-Street library with my acting group. I can get lost here; become someone else. And if there was ever a time I needed to be someone else, it’s now.

Everyone in my group is black except for a few guys that come over from Columbia. The group facilitator, Quinn, is a retired professor from the theater department at City College. I’m pretty sure he’s always stoned, but he’s pretty cool, and he keeps the group fresh.

“Irish!” he calls as I step into the room. He thinks a mixed kid with reddish-black hair and freckles is hilarious. “You gonna rock our world with Rosalind tonight? Or is it going to be Katherine?”

It’s Shakespeare night, so we each have to do a dramatic reading of a Shakespearian monologue.

“You know me too well, Quinn,” I tell him, sliding into a seat in the circle. The community room is always freezing in the winter, so I keep my jacket on. There are usually about fifteen of us, and about half the group is already here, chattering in their seats. The Columbia guys, Nathan and Mike, are talking and laughing about Mike’s weekend hookup. Across the circle are two sisters from Harlem, Kamara and Vee, who always come together. They play off each other really well, and always leave me laughing.

I’ve been coming here pretty regularly for the last two years, since I lost my agent. At first, I was hoping for connections, but it didn’t take long to figure out that wasn’t going to happen. I’m probably the most experienced person here, other than Quinn. But I kept coming back for the people. And the escape. I get to come here and be someone else, even if it’s just for a little while. I can put on my character and just forget myself.

“So what you got for us tonight?” Quinn asks, nudging me with his bony elbow as he lowers his scrawny old frame into the seat next to me.

I give him a sly smile. “You’re just going to have to wait and see.”

He reminds me of my grandpa, always joking with me, except he looks nothing like Grandpa did. Grandpa was a fair-skinned redhead. Quinn is black as night, with gray fuzz and a voice like James Earl Jones.

He laughs and pokes my shoulder as a few more of our group trickle through the door. “Someday I’m gonna be able to say, ‘I knew her when . . .’ ”

“ . . . she got blacklisted from Broadway for running down a director during a dance routine,” I finish for him.

“I know you can sing, Irish, but I’m not sure why you think you have to do musicals.”

“You know why. The Idol thing is my only in. If it’s not a singing part, I can’t even get the audition.”

“Dumbass business we’re in,” he grumbles.

When the group is assembled, Quinn stands and gets us started with Theseus’s famous “More Strange Than True” monologue from Act Five of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Everyone in turn stands in the center of the circle and acts out their monologue. When we get to the Harlem girls, they stand together.

“Monologues are boring . . .” the heavier one, Kamara, says.

“So we’re doing the scene from Act Two of The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio is trying to get into Katherine’s pants,” the taller one, Vee, says.

Kamara steps in front of her. “I’m Petruchio.”

“And I’m Katherine,” Vee says.

Quinn rolls his hand in a circle. “Just get on with it.”

Kamara clears her throat and stands straight, holding out her hand to Vee. “Good morrow, Kate; for that’s your name, I hear.”

Vee makes a disgusted face. “Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing:

They call me Katherine that do talk of me.”

“You lie, in faith; for you are call’d plain Kate, and bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst.”

Kamara keeps rolling, pouring it on as she finishes the long list of all Kate’s virtues. As they banter back and forth, everyone around the circle is on the edge of laughing. When they finish, they sit with a bow and flourish, and everyone claps. But then the next three girls do utterly uninspired Juliet monologues and bring the whole room down. By the time we get all the way back around the circle to me, everyone is yawning.

“What you got, Irish?” Quinn says, elbowing me. “Time to lay it all on the table.”

“Keep your bony elbows to yourself, old man.” I stand and move to the center of the circle. “So, this is Rosalind . . . or her male alter ego, Ganymede, really, trying to convince Phoebe to love Silvius instead of him . . . or her . . . or whatever. It’s from Act Three, scene five of As You Like it.”

I close my eyes, feeling Rosalind seep into my bloodstream.

“And why, I pray you? Who might be your mother, that you insult, exult, and all at once,

Over the wretched?” A tingly rush prickles my skin as I open myself up to her, letting her have me.

“What though you have no beauty as by my faith, I see no more in you than without candle may go dark to bed, must you be therefore proud and pitiless? Why, what means this? Why do you look on me?” I ask, raising my voice and lifting my hand, pressing it into my chest as Rosalind starts to use my body as hers.

“I see no more in you than in the ordinary of nature’s sale-work. Od’s my little life!”

I open my eyes and move around the circle. Quinn smiles and shakes his head as I glide past.

“I think she means to tangle my eyes too. No, faith, proud mistress, hope not after it: ’Tis not your inky brows,” I say, running a fingertip over Nathan’s, “your black silk hair,” I add, my hand raking through his waves. Mike elbows him and I see him blush. “Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream, that can entame my spirits to your worship.”

This is the part I love about acting—when I totally escape into the character—someone who’s not me. I let Rosalind have me, body and soul, as she tells us about how foolish men are. But as she finishes by telling Pheobe to stop pining over her male alter ego and take what she’s got right in front of her, my real life creeps back into my thoughts.

Just like in Shakespeare, when you fall head over heals in love with someone you don’t even know, it’s never going to end well. Love killed Juliet when she was thirteen. I made it all the way to fourteen before it nearly killed me.