Chapter 19 Cesare
Rafael was on my heels as we walked through my mother’s house. I hadn’t told him where we were going; it was none of his business. All he needed to do was follow. The button-up shirt he wore that was tight at the waist and the jeans that showed off his ass was a lot. But it was better than usual.
“Cesare!” Concetta said as we appeared in the garden. “I was just talking about you. Does your phone not work anymore?”
I sighed. “Ma, I got a concussion.”
She raised a brow. “They don’t allow phones when you’re concussed? You don’t know how to dial someone and say ‘Ma, I got a concussion’?” She waved a hand. “Excuses. Your father would turn in his grave. That man could take anything, and he would still call.”
Looking at the ground, I flexed my fingers as we sat at the table. A vein in my head twitched. I felt it. Instead of starting anything, I looked up as coffee and snacks were brought out. I ate a piece of cake and drank my coffee. When I glanced at Concetta, she was still staring at me.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Nothing, Ma.” I said tightly. “Have you seen Benito?”
She frowned. “Yeah, last week. He came over and asked me the same thing. If I had seen you.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why? What’s going on? What are you two up to?”
God, she drove me insane. I leaned back against my seat. Rafael was on the chair next to me. For once, he didn’t look like he belonged. If anything, he looked awkward, probably because I’d called her ma. I didn’t comfort or coddle him about it. He wanted to come, he could deal with the insanity.
“Can you ask one question at a time?” I asked my mother.
“Can you answer one question at all?” she asked. “And who is this?”
“Rafael,” I said.
“Who is?” she pressed.
“A human male who is accompanying me,” I said, growing more irritated by the minute. Leaning forward, I rested my arms on my knees. “What did Benito want besides asking after me?”
“Your son?” she asked. “You want to know what your son wanted?” Her hands tightened on her mug. “Cesare, I do not want to be involved in whatever is going on between the two of you. He is your child. If your father had treated you this badly…”
“What?” I cut in.
Her hands tightened more, her knuckles white around the dark mug. “I said if your father had treated you this badly—”
“Are you okay?” Rafael’s voice cut in. His eyes were wide, concerned, none of his usual humor dancing in those depths. But I couldn’t answer him, not when my throat was this fucking tight. “Cesare?” he asked.
I held up a hand. “Say it one more time, Mother.” I stared at her. “Tell me one more time what my father would have done. What he would have treated me like.”
Concetta starred. “Cesare.”
I grinned, my head still throbbing from the headache. “Go on, Mother. Go on. Let’s talk about how good and pious the great Lasario Vitale was. Let’s speak about it.”
“Enough!”
“Cesare,” Rafael tried.
It was the final straw. I was exhausted.
Tired of playing games with Benito, with the rest of my sons.
Exhausted from my mother’s bullshit. Pissed that the only person who actually gave a fuck about the fact that I had been laid up for two weeks was someone I had brought home from a fucking brothel.
It was the story of my life. It was a cataclysm of bullshit years and years in the making, and I suddenly felt violently sick. And old. So fucking old.
I stood up slowly. “Ti piace molto giocare a questo gioco.” You really enjoy playing this game.
Concetta frowned. “Don’t.”
“You have fucking amnesia or something,” I said, panting softly as the nausea gripped me. “My father, my father. He was such a good man, right? Benito and the boys, they loved him. They only ever saw the man that gave them a sweet pat on the shoulder and a smile.”
Her eyes watered. “Cesare.”
“Enough!” I shouted, my voice shaking. “I still see that scar on your head under the line of your hair from him smashing a vase into your face,” I spat.
“I still smell that blood. I still see his fists in your face, and his expensive loafers in your stomach. You sit here and elevate him into sainthood while I still wear scars on my back from his belt. While I still have cigarette burns on my arms and torso from his smokes. They don’t even make them anymore, and I still smell them!
” I shouted at her. “I still remember you watching while his fist broke my nose. Stole three of my teeth. And you watched,” I muttered.
“You watched him. And now that he’s in a hole, you sing his praises and pretend he didn’t cheat on you every night and torture me and my brothers.
” I laughed. “Trovi delle scuse per un uomo morto e fingi che non ti abbia uccisa molto tempo fa, Mamma. Well, I’m not stupid.
I know what died in me years ago. I know who made the scars. ”
I panted, my chest aching in a way it hadn’t since I was young. As I looked at her, eyes wet, her chest heaving, it was both a small sense of satisfaction and an infinite ocean of guilt. Nothing was ever solved from laying your burdens on other people. Nothing.
“Che schifo,” I muttered. “Forget it. I am tired. Never mind, Ma.” I looked at Rafael. The look on his face made me want to rage all over again, but I was too exhausted. “Come. We’re going home.”
Rafael got up quickly and ran to me to his credit. When he held onto my arm, the rage soothed into a whisper, into a small fire instead of a volcanic roar. I pressed a hand into the small of his back and led him out of the house. Once we were outside, Rocky looked at me and cursed under his breath.
“You pushed too far,” Rocky said.
“Fuck you.”
“Not my job, man,” Rocky said.
I slipped into the backseat. Rafael immediately climbed in with me.
I stared out into the distance for a minute before I reached out and dragged him beside me.
The raw parts that had been peeled back were ugly.
Dark. I wanted to skin someone’s flesh from their bones and mail it to their mother.
Until Rafael reached over and touched my cheek.
“Your head hurt?” he asked. “I brought some pain meds.” He dug into his pocket, determined.
That was it. He didn’t ask about my mother. Didn’t push me on it. Just dug into his pocket and pulled out pain pills for me. I watched as he faltered with the cap, opening it, and then fumbling with the pills. When he held out both pills in his palm, I stared at him.
“Get out.”
Rafael blinked. “What?”
“Get the fuck out of my car.”
He’d seen me at a point that wasn’t the usual. No, more than the usual. It was my absolute worst laid out for him like a fucking script. A way for him to see shit that no one knew. Not even my sons. Only Concetta. Only my siblings.
“No.”
I turned and blinked at Rafael. “Excuse me?”
“I said no. Jesus, are you deaf or just stupid? I’m taking care of you, so if you try to put me out of this car, I will come back to your place and stop up every toilet with towels.
I’ll turn on every faucet and flood the entire fucking building.
I will destroy it all!” he snapped, his face furious in a way that made my heart clench.
That made me not want to think about how good he felt beside me.
How he stuck around even when it wasn’t just fucking.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Try me,” he growled. “I will crack open your rib cage and carve out your heart with a rusty spoon, I swear to god.”
The way he wanted to stay soothed something in me. So many people ran. Why the fuck wasn’t he running? A ball lodged in my throat. The city flew by, the tension in the car thick. I lit a cigar after biting off the tip and spitting it to the floor.
“You think just because you stayed while I was a confused old man that it means something?” I blew out smoke. “It means nothing.”
Rafael sighed. “What happened?” he asked. “With your mom, your dad. All of it.”
I stiffened. Heat shot through my body. Every instinct screamed to grab him by the throat and put him into a grave. To leave him there so that he would never ask those questions again. Instead, my hands turned into fists and then I relaxed, forced it, and took another drag.
“You start looking at me like you’re gonna cry, and I’ll put you on the side of the road," I said.
I sucked in the smoke and exhaled. “You already heard it. My father was the kind of man that believed in strict discipline. That came with a closed fist and a leather belt for the smallest infractions for all of us, except my baby sister. Her? She was spared. Pretty sure us boys would have murdered her if he even tried to touch our Sophia.”
I shook my head. “My mother loves to do this thing where he was the best man on earth. Only after he was dead. Before then, I always looked at that hollow face and wondered when she was going to kill herself. What would be the moment she would stop enduring and just… go to sleep. I used to wish she would. For all our sakes.”
Rafael’s hand tightened on my leg. I didn’t move it away. Instead, I just stared out of the window, my chest so raw it felt like I had swallowed glass.
“When did it all stop?” Rafael asked. “I’ve seen the… scars. When did the beatings stop?”
I turned to look at him. “When I got old enough to beat him back. The first time I punched him and he hit the ground?” I laughed.
“That bastard smiled at me with blood in his teeth. Told me I was a real man now. A Vitale. He took me to a brothel the next day.” I shook my head.
“Power was the only thing that ever mattered to him. Once I took it? Once I had it? No one ever touched me again. And for a skinny fucking kid who cared too fucking much? That was the lesson. That was the only truth that mattered from then on out.”
I flicked the cigar out of the window. For a long while, the car was quiet. It wasn’t me and my whore anymore. It was me and someone I was telling secrets to that I swore I would never, ever tell again. Dredging up old memories and hurt like it was necessary. Like it mattered.
“Can I say something?” Rafael asked.
I shrugged and finally took the pain pills out of his hand. Swallowing them dry, I tasted that chalky texture that I hated. When our eyes finally met, I dreaded his expression. However, it wasn’t that pitying bullshit. Rafael’s gaze was carefully shuttered, his hands in his lap.
“Shoot,” I said.
“Why not just tell them, your sons, what you went through? Maybe there wouldn’t be so much fighting if they really understood why you can’t and won’t give up your spot.”
I stared at him. “That’s the first and last time you ever suggest something so stupid to my face, you got it?” I asked. I patted his cheek roughly. “Hey, you listenin’? You got it?”
Rafael nodded, a frown on his lips. “Yes.”
I pulled back a bit. “Good,” I said, shoving the pain back down where it belonged. In hell. “Let’s go home and you can poison me with your cooking.” I lit up a cigarette instead. For a while, it was quiet. “You being with me today?” I started. “Kept me from wringing her neck.”
That was the closest I could get to a thanks.
When Rafael laid his head on my shoulder, I let him.
It was comfort that I swore I never needed and yet here we were.
His long hair brushed against me. Secretly, I reached over and stroked the ends of it.
My eyes met Rocky’s in the rearview mirror, and he looked at me before he focused on the road once more.
Yeah, I knew I was making yet another stupid fucking mistake. But eventually? Everyone got tired of being lonely no matter how much they lied about it.