Chapter 17
chapter seventeen
Mateo
I called out her name, but Tally was already through the tall open doors. Not stopping for anyone or anything. Not even me.
“Just let her go. She throws her fits and then she'll be over it in an hour like always.” John resumed working on his plate, dusting off the mess he'd made in front of everyone. As if Tally was the issue here, and not our business being broadcast for the entire table to analyze.
Yes, I was extremely taken aback by the turn in conversation. There was never any mention of a prenup, and Natalia had a conversation with Bella that never made its way to me. I had questions, and I wanted to believe there were simple answers to them.
I tossed my napkin on the table and went after her. As I passed her father sitting unbothered at the head of his grand, lavish table—in front of his wife, and my parents—I took him by the collar of his rumpled dress shirt and pulled him close enough that I could smell the stale whiskey on the catch of his breath.
"Get your fucking hands off me," he barked.
"Make no mistake, John, she'll have my name soon. A name she's going to be damn proud to wear every single day of her life. So think about the kind of impression you want to leave behind on your daughter about how a man acts, and treats his wife and his family. The kind of father she wants for her own children.” I paused. “One day there might be a baby that will never know a John Russo because I won’t allow you to hurt them the way you've hurt her."
His eyes thinned and the cord of his throat struggled against my knuckles as I tightened my grip. I was playing it cool but my heart was working hard in my chest, adrenaline taking over for the anxiety I had been tamping down after my parents started talking about relocating.
A nerve had been struck, and the arrogance John usually carried with his daughters was undetectable now. I had scared him for the first time in his life. He glanced cautiously around the room and his jaw tightened. “You’re out of line.”
I let him go with a shove back into his seat. “There’s no line I wouldn’t cross for her.”
John shook me off as I brushed past him and put his lips to his glass of liquor like it was a security blanket. Dinner might have been ruined—hell, it might be the last dinner I’d ever have in the Russo house—but it would be worth it. A thought crossed my mind, and I turned back around to the stunned silent room. “God help you if my wife is fucking crying."
Too determined to get to Natalia, all my emotional apprehension took a back seat. I had a one-track mind as I stormed out of the dining room and left everyone else to pick up the pieces. There was only one person I was worried about.
At the end of the wide hallway, one of the doors leading outside was swung open and I jogged toward it into the backyard. Wind whistled past my ears and raindrops spattered my face as I approached the dimly lit pool house and stood at the edge of the glowing water. My dress shirt clung to my biceps as rain ran down my neck and cooled against my back.
"Tally," I called out. "It's pouring." Her head peered out from beneath the water, dark hair floating behind her. I rubbed a hand down my face. "Get out of the pool."
She shook her head.
It was only about seventy degrees but the pool was heated. Steam lifted from the top of the water, making her look like a siren. She slipped back beneath the cloudy water and I lost her in the texture of the rain dotting it, nothing but a faint dark blob wading as she beat her arms to keep herself treading at the bottom.
I knew what she was doing, though. I'd been there before, wishing I could turn off the world around me, or at least turn the dial so that the volume wasn’t so loud. It happened in our kitchen. Natalia and I felt in the same extreme ways. We were shit at controlling those emotions, but we had each other to lean on. That was why when she was losing her mind, I had to keep mine together.
We balanced. We were scales.
Which was also why I knew that there was only one way to get through to her, and that was meeting her halfway. Not waiting for her to eventually return from the place she’d gone, but helping her find the way back home.
“Damn it,” I muttered to myself. I threw my phone on a patio chair, took a deep breath, then jumped into the water with her.
That startled her, because when I reached the bottom Natalia was already wide-eyed and waiting for me. It took nothing to gather her in my arms and kick off the hard stone floor, sending us both back to the surface.
"What are you doing?" she sputtered. I flipped my hair out of my eyes and dragged us to the ledge, underneath a circulating waterfall and a rock embankment built into the far side of the pool. We were shielded from the rain and hidden away. For once, all of John Russo’s money was good for something.
Natalia’s mascara was running beneath her eyes, but instead of red-rimmed they were soft and a bit dazed and she hugged her legs around my waist to stay upright. "My mother used to ask me all the time if my friends jumped off a bridge, would I jump off too?" I said. “I would tell her, ‘No, Ma, I know what's good for me. I know right from wrong. I would never.’"
She smiled a sad, crooked little smile.
"I would jump off a bridge if you did, Tally."
"That doesn't make it the right thing to do."
"It doesn't matter." I squeezed her hips. The drenched material of her dress was glued to her body. "Even if it's wrong, I still want it. Because it’s you."
Her jaw relaxed and her lips parted like she might fight that, too, and if she did I'd keep battling. I couldn't tell if there were tears in her eyes or if her lashes were wet from the pool. My hands slipped to her lower back and tugged her closer.
"There's something wrong with me," she choked out like it was stuck in her throat.
"No there’s not, baby."
"I can't stand myself most of the time. I have all this hate inside me, Matty. All this rage. I'm so fucking angry and I don't know where to put that anger, because you are so perfect and when I met you I didn't have to be angry anymore. I got to be light . I didn't have to be on the defense all the damn time."
She exhausted those last few words as if she'd just run a marathon and they were too tiring to say.
"But that doesn't mean it's not still here, Matty. You don't find peace and automatically get rid of the anger. It needs somewhere to go and it just fucking waits until a night like tonight happens. I want to be so angry. I want to scream, but I can't so I end up here . In this pool, looking like a fucking maniac. Because that's what Natalia does," she said matter-of- factly. "Natalia makes everything about her. Natalia is a wreck. Natalia is lost. Natalia is lashing out again."
She tried to writhe away from me but I wouldn't allow it. I’d crawl inside her before letting her crawl out of her own skin. "Natalia is human," I said softly. "Natalia is thoughtful, and brilliant, and resilient, and fucking real. You are allowed to be angry. I’m fucking angry. You want to know why?"
She didn’t look up. "Why?"
"Because it took me so long to get to you." I lifted her chin with my fingers. The rain around us had stopped, so I ushered our floating bodies from beneath the waterfall and back into a dark, cloudless night. It was quiet and warm and I hardly felt our clothes weighing us down. "I'm angry someone hurt you for so long and made you think that was okay. That it was love, and that's just how love works. That it hurts, and it's brutal." I shook my head. "It's not."
"I don't want to hate them." She sighed. "I don't. I'm just so resentful. Ashamed that this is what I have to offer you. Forever with in-laws that you can't stand, broken relationships, things I can't fix."
"They weren't part of the deal," I said lightly. "I was never worried about that. I don't care. My parents are no walk in the park either, Tal.”
"That stupid fucking prenup." She tried to escape me again, but I held her steady in my arms. "I didn't ask Isabella to draw that up, I swear. She blindsided me that day we went for coffee, and I gave her some bullshit answer about looking it over but I ditched it as soon as I got home. I never planned on actually asking you to sign one of those."
Well, there it was. My tension around it eased. It was a misunderstanding that I was glad I hadn't let send me over the edge before I had the chance to hear it from Tally herself.
"I don't understand why you would keep it from me," I lamented anyway. "If it wasn't something you were worried about."
"I was embarrassed." She laughed at herself. "I am still embarrassed. Prenups are for couples who expect things to fail. My family values material things over their relationships. God forbid they lose their second house, but you can always find someone new to marry."
"We are not like them, Tal," I said sternly. "We got together and that was it. It was like the stars were aligning. We knew, from the very first date. And your family can't fathom that. They don't know what it feels like to be so sure."
Her eyes fluttered closed, wet lashes long against her cheeks. She looked absolutely endearing under the pale blue moonlight. "They're never going to. It's going to be a struggle for the rest of our lives. You're going to have to deal with them to be with me, and that scares me, Matty."
“I don't understand.” My chest grew hollow, a large valley with wind whistling through it.
"We're strong right now, because whether we like to admit it or not, this is still new. We haven't been together long enough to test all these things. Now, we're starting to see how hard it can get and you’re getting a taste of the bullshit I've dealt with my entire life. I'm scared that you're going to resent it eventually. And I can't help but wonder, am I worth all of this? Am I worthy of you? Am I capable of being the wife you deserve?—"
"Stop." I was wearing a hole into the inside of my cheek. "Would I be treading water in dress attire in your parents' ridiculous pool right now if you weren't worth it?"
Her lips thinned.
"Your perception of worth is irrelevant," I said. "Do you want it? Want me?"
"Of course I do."
"Life is never going to be perfect. It's going to be really fucking hard. We're going to hit bumps. Our families are going to drive us to drink. I'm going to annoy the hell out of you one day, and then the next call your dad a sad son of a bitch and threaten to hurt him if he upsets you ever again.”
Her eyes glistened. "You did that?"
"I would do anything for you," I said. "Including signing a prenup, if that's really what you wanted. Because if I'm ever stupid enough to make you want to divorce me, you can have everything I'm worth. All of it.”
"I need an outlet.” A lightness had returned to her and she curled into my chest, resting her head on my shoulder. "Some way to let this all out without screaming so loud I break glass."
"I am more than happy to take a rage riding from you, sweetheart."
Tally laughed, a little huff pushing from her nostrils. Anytime I amused her was like a pat on the back. "Tell me it won't always be this way," she sniffled, her warm breath skittering across the exposed skin on my neck.
"I swear it, Tally. Do you know what Duran means? It means endure. You were meant to have this name, because it's what you do. It's what we will always do, together.”
Her upturned lips parted and her teeth scored my skin, then she turned in my arms and kissed me. A ‘ thank you, I needed this ' kiss. She seemed better, having worked through the moment, but there was something remaining. Something in her body language I couldn't pick apart.
"No more secrets, all right?" she proposed. "You're not going to get denied our marriage license because you married someone twelve years ago while you were drunk in the military and never filed a legal divorce, right?"
I jokingly pondered it and she elbowed me. "No, Tal."
"Good. I want us to be on the same page. Vegas is creeping up fast, and we don't need any more hiccups.”
For a moment I thought about TechOps, and the work piling up while I put off hiring. How I was brushing off my mental lapses to avoid acknowledging a bigger problem. They weren’t secrets, they were choices I had to make to keep the wheel turning smoothly. I was also convinced my parents had a significant effect on me, and the second they were back in New York, everything would return to normal. It was different. It was my mess. It didn't involve both of us.
"You're the boss," I settled on. "Now, can we get out of this pool before we both catch pneumonia?"
"That sounds like something your mom would say."
“How dare you.” I pinched her ass as she swam to the steps but we both stopped short as Natalia’s father stumbled out the back doors of the mansion and onto the patio. He trudged toward the side of the pool house, unbuttoning his dress shirt and mumbling something unintelligible and whiny as we watched on, completely undetected, intensely fascinated. He reached a thatch of neatly landscaped bushes, keeled over with his hands on his knees, and vomited into them.
Entirely unsurprised, Natalia clicked her tongue. "Damn it, Mia was spot on with that.”