Chapter 25
chapter twenty-five
Mateo
“The girls left half an hour ago.”
Sam held his phone out, staring at the screen while my groomsmen and I waited at the edge of the villa driveway for our ride to pick us up. Try as I might to shake off the blow of the morning and pretend like everything was fine, the gallery of sorry looks when I came moping down the stairs said all they needed to.
“They’re determined.” Echo cracked his knuckles and did some calisthenic stretches on the scorching blacktop like we were running a marathon. The desert road was broad and pale, dust picking up with every shuffle of a step. “It’s cute they needed that little head start. I wonder which thing on the list they’re after first.”
I checked my own phone with a sigh: nothing from Natalia. I’d watched her from the window in her white mini dress and sparkly ankle boots and nearly choked on my saliva. It was so perfectly her, flirty and tiny, feathers on the short skirt that showed off her toned tan legs. The other four followed into a Suburban wearing different shades of pink, and the saving grace was that they’d be easy to pick out in a crowd looking like a pack of flamingos.
Pike came to stand beside me, slapping a silver flask against my chest. “Drink.”
My attention sliced toward him out of the corner of my eye and I took a generous swig without argument.
“It will blow over,” he assured me. “You have to man up and take your licks. Won’t be the last time.”
Wink shoved his phone into the back pocket of his tan slacks. “What happened, anyway? Everyone seemed great this morning, then Tally came downstairs like a tornado and I’d hate to be the man that got in the way of that storm. What did you do?”
“You wouldn’t survive it,” I grumbled. “She overheard a conversation I wasn’t ready to have with her yet.”
“I was trying to help.” Angelo shifted on his feet, fragments of pebbles and sand crunching beneath the rubber soles of his shoes. “For what it’s worth, we didn’t know she was being a little eavesdropper.”
“It’s her party, she’s allowed wherever she wants to be.” Angelo avoided my eyes, adjusting the collar of his shirt and plucking a string of lint off his chest. “Now I’m in hot water, and I’m not going to be able to think about anything but my impending groveling on the one day I didn’t think I would need to. Leaving the families in Florida for the weekend was supposed to leave the drama behind too, but look at that, it just follows me around.”
Wink shook my shoulder and wrapped an arm around me. I shrugged him off lazily. “You are strung tighter than a wire spool, man. Think about it this way. You and Tally are getting married, right? That’s happening. You’re deeply fucking in love with each other, and a little misunderstanding isn’t going to throw that away. You both need to let off steam and find your way back. Let’s do it the way we know best, which is getting drunk and scavenging. Friendly competition. I don’t know about you guys, but this is my bread and butter.”
“Hell yeah.” Echo nodded. In the distance tires popped over gravel and an SUV started down the long flat road toward us like a mirage, heat bouncing off the hood in waves.
I wasn’t operating in the present. All I could think about was hours from now talking to Natalia again, the days from now when we got home to confront my family, a month from now at our wedding, every year of the rest of my life and every moment that could be stressful: having kids, anniversaries, gatherings, vacations. My anxiety controlled me. I didn’t want it to control this day, either.
The boys stared at me apprehensively and I threw everything to the wayside and stole the flask of rum back from Pike, taking another long drag of the sweet liquor as the taste burned down my throat.
“Boy howdy.” Echo laughed. “The captain has boarded.”
Pike waved at the approaching car as it pulled up to the curb. “Come on, Cap. We’re going on a treasure hunt.”
We let out on a busy sidewalk and were immediately lost in a crowd of early afternoon partygoers and performing buskers. The wind whistling through the tall alleys between hotels and restaurants was a reprieve from the heat, but despite it, my neck was clammy with sweat as I put a palm to it and turned in circles, orienting myself with the street signs and landmarks.
I found myself looking for Tally, too. Just a glimpse of her in the crowd somewhere, standing beside the spouting marble fountain, ducking into a hotel lobby, her feathery dress and sweet laugh mixing in with honking car horns and the distant bass of a drum thumping. I’d recognize that sound anywhere.
There was no Natalia, but there was a very intoxicated mime tripping over himself attempting to stand inside a glass box.
“First stop is drinks,” Frankie suggested. “It’ll make embarrassing ourselves more appetizing and hopefully unmemorable.”
“All right, liquid courage,” Sam said. “I’ve benefited from it a time or two.”
Tyler scoffed, licking his lips. “We don’t need any help. The drinks are purely ambiance. Some of this shit on the list is a regular fucking day for me.”
“God, I pray one day you find a woman who puts you on your ass and turns you into something redeemable, Ech,” I said.
He stretched, jutting his arms out and flexing them with a brutish grin. “Never going to happen.”
My eyes rolled as I pulled the scavenger hunt list out of my pocket. “You guys go, I’m gonna try to map this out. It’ll give me something to do to keep my mind off the other shit. Bring me something back though.” I waved a finger between my groomsmen.
“I’ll keep you company,” Angelo said.
The last place I should have been was standing alone with my brother. I might think too hard about all the grief he’d caused me with my Natalia, and wring his neck in broad daylight. Despite it, I nodded and gestured to Pike, Wink, and Echo to take off so we didn’t lose any more time.
My Delta buddies turned and started in the opposite direction, bumping shoulders as they disappeared into a sprout of people. I watched them for a few seconds too long, partially entranced by the bright lights and flaring neon signs, squinting to adjust to the hue of pink and orange reflecting from the massive hotel windows onto the street and realizing when I started smiling like a little kid that I was already nursing a buzz.
“I never said I was sorry.” Angelo saddled up beside me. “I promise I’m going to do everything I can to win this little hunt for us. Your wife can’t be mad at you and do a choreographed dance for you at the same time. It’s scientific.”
“If there’s one thing you need to know about your sister-in-law, it’s that if she wants to do something she will.”
“Let’s see the list.” He plucked it from my hand and studied it with the same demeanor as our father reading the Times on Sunday mornings. Vague confusion, a pinch of concern. “Natalia will get over this, I know it. She’ll realize you have her best interests at heart, the same way I did.”
“Same way you did?”
“I was pissed at you too when you joined the Army and left me with Mom and Dad and a family business neither you or I wanted.” He chuckled. “Maybe I didn’t act like it a lot back then, but you were the only person I ever cared about not disappointing.”
I cut him a glare. “You used to steal my ID to buy cigarettes at the bodega.”
“You used to flush them down the toilet so that Mom and Dad didn’t find out.”
“Because you’re an idiot and I wasn’t about to be an accomplice.”
I thought about being eighteen again, right before I left for boot camp, still sharing a bedroom with Angelo who would reluctantly, but always, get up and make his bed after I did. The same kid who would leave his beard trimmings in our sink but never leave the house without a clean shave like mine, and hop in the passenger seat of my beat-up Pontiac and put his feet up on the dash but never try to change the music I liked to play on the radio.
“Every stupid thing I did was to try to get your attention. If you didn’t throw the cigarettes out, it meant you didn’t care. Even if you chewed me out for it, it was better than you not giving a fuck about what I was doing.”
“You’ve been getting yourself in trouble long after I joined.” I looked over his shoulder at the scavenger list but I wasn’t reading anything. “When I wasn’t there to pay attention.”
“Yeah, and then I realized that no one else did. I was pissed at you for leaving me because you were doing the one thing that I couldn’t follow. I had two more years of high school, and by then I was…bitter.” The word came out like it was stuck between his teeth. “When I could have enlisted, I didn’t because Dad would have killed me, Mom would have guilt tripped me, and I was checked out, involved with the wrong people. You know the story. The easiest thing I could have done was stay in the basement with my guaranteed union job and hand-me-down business, because at least that made me feel important.”
I pulled in a deep breath and lifted my chin toward the sky, watching the spattering of long, thin clouds draped over Sin City amble slowly in a direction I couldn’t place. When considering how leaving for the military affected my brother, I had lapsed—significantly. He was too young and proud to be this honest with me way back then, and I was too clouded by the need to get the fuck out of New York to care about anyone but myself. I’d kept that same energy until this past year. I realized that leaving and putting a barrier between my new life and my old one was selfish. It was childish, it was running away from the problem. Which I was still guilty of because I’d been doing it for the last six months with Natalia by purposely keeping her naive to the real, penetrating mental health issues I was ignoring.
Figuring this all out while drunk wasn’t ideal. I needed to tell her this, but she was so pissed off at me she was probably somewhere across town getting a lap dance by a Chippendale and checking boxes off. Enjoying herself, like she said she would.
“You know, I was jealous of you, in a lot of ways,” I confessed.
Angelo’s cheeks dimpled. “Me?”
“Yeah, because in Mom and Dad’s eyes you couldn’t do anything wrong. You got the youngest child treatment, squeaking by in life. No rent payment, no strenuous responsibility, a regular eight to four?—”
“I’d like to see you haul sheetrock without breaking a sweat.”
I punched out a laugh. “I wanted to be home so many times when I was deployed. Literally yearned for it. My bedroom, the sounds of the city past the window, the homemade meals. I’d hear all this shit about you getting involved with the wrong people, getting in trouble, and it looked like you were just throwing the privilege away, and it fucking aggravated me. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, and I’m sorry.”
That was something I’d never said out loud. I pretended I was aloof so I didn’t have to come to terms with being homesick, with being envious of my brother for having it easier than I did, even though I made the decision to join the Army all on my own because I’d already convinced myself I hated home. Anything else was unacceptable, a weakness. Now that I’d admitted it, my chest opened like adding a link to a chain, loosening the gate it was keeping closed.
“Now this shit is happening with Tally for the same reasons, because I wanted to impress everyone with how perfectly I held it all together. I didn’t take any accountability and now I’ve ruined the entire trip and she wants to kill me.”
“You are the man, Matty boy. The fucking man. Don’t think for a second you’re not.” My brother gave my shoulder a squeeze, and his light eyes softened contemplatively. “She’s in love with you, she’s perfect for you, and she’s going to come around when you get your big Italian head out of your ass. You just have to give her space for like…” He checked his watch. “More than two hours. This is some Romeo and Juliet shit.”
Giving her space made my hands itch. Distance from this woman was like being weaned off an addiction. I couldn’t go two whole minutes without thinking about her, and it had nothing to do with her being angry at me. That’s just where my brain traveled, to Tally. What she was doing, thinking, wearing, saying. To marry a woman I was this mind-numbingly obsessed with was the real privilege.
The night before in the bedroom replayed like a highlight reel in my head, and it would until the day I fucking died. But it felt wrong to fantasize about it on a city sidewalk knowing she was so pissed off at me. Like I didn’t even deserve to think about her naked. I needed to punish myself. Go to mind jail.
“Okay, the list, the fucking list.” I tapped on the paper and squeezed my eyes hard enough for a manual factory reset, sending a burst of color into my vision.
“Right, right. Back to that.” Angelo tutted, scanning the columns as two women in barely-there clothing sauntered by wearing large, extravagant wings and rhinestone heels. Their faces were painted and jewelry ran up their arms and around their necks. My brother's face lit up and he shoved the list into his pants pocket. “Here we go, we can check this one off right now. Photo with a street performer.” Angelo waved them over. “Would you ladies take a photo with my brother? He’s getting married.”
“No, come on, not me.” I backed away, but the two women surrounded me in a fit of giggles and posed.
Angelo pulled his phone out. “It’s all in good fun.”
My glare intensified as a foreign hand landed at the small of my back. “You get in here instead.”
“Too late, say cheese.”
His camera shuttered with a flash. I didn’t smile. I didn’t fucking move a muscle. My hands remained at my sides like a little kid whose father took him to Hooters on his bi-weekly custody visit.
Angelo leaned in awkwardly and cleared his throat. “You got a couple bucks on you?”
“Are you serious?” I deadpanned.
“I mean, you gotta tip the ladies. Look at this.” He fluffed a pink feather on one of the performers and jingled a hanging bead with his fingers. “Extravagant. Gotta be hell to dry clean.”
“After all that mushy, pour-my-heart-out shit and you’re still a goddamn pain in my ass, Ang.” Tugging my wallet from my pocket, I handed the girls a few bills and they skipped past my groomsmen who were heading back toward us juggling several tall drinks. Echo broke his neck to take them in from every angle.
Pike handed me a cocktail so strong it hit the back of my throat and burned like battery acid all the way to the empty pit of my stomach. “You guys good? Everybody sorted? Let’s get this party started.”
“One down,” Angelo announced. He rooted around in his pockets, looking for something, then came out with a tiny nub of a carpenter's pencil, crossing our item off. “Street performer.”
“What’s the game plan?” Wink was casing the streets with both brows furrowed, a habit he would probably never shake. Not that we ever let our guards down, but when he was around it was easier to. Sam had a distinct way of keeping us all at ease. He didn’t miss anything weird, out of place, unidentifiable. Perks of being a special operative sniper.
Pike swiped across a map screen on his phone, clicking on a dropped pin I realized was Ophelia’s location. I rubbed my bottom lip between my fingers, the necessity of knowing making my pulse thrum eagerly in my neck. “Where are they?”
“I feel like watching their every move on a map is cheating,” Echo pointed out.
“Like they’re not doing it, too.” Pike edged Tyler away with an elbow, shielding his screen. “Just keeping an eye on them in case.”
“Let’s ask ChatGPT,” Angelo suggested as the swooping sound of a text being sent came from his phone.
“Now that is cheating,” Tyler doubled down, pointing an accusing finger at my brother. “And insulting. We don’t need a fucking robot telling us how to win a hunt. We are fucking hunters.”
“Calm down, John Rambo. You can eat a cheeseburger without shooting the cow yourself. It’s not telling us how to win, it’s guiding us in the right direction.”
“O purposely made the list AI proof. These aren’t tourist tasks,” Pike said. “Let’s start at a casino.”
“Is that where the girls are?” I asked.
“Cheating,” Tyler added once more.
A text pinged in my pocket, then Pike, Echo, and Wink’s phones simultaneously. I all but wretched my cell out of my pants. We all stared down at the message sent from Angelo to a group of the entire wedding party and a chill brushed across the back of my neck. “Angelo, what the fuck did you do?” My eyes snapped in his direction.
There on the screen was the photo of me between the two scantily clad street performers and the message, On to the next one , right underneath.
“What?” My brother looked around confused. “What’s wrong?”
“‘On to the next one’?” Pike pinched the bridge of his nose. “She’s going to fucking peel the skin off his sack, man. You don’t know Tally.”
“On to the next one, like, the next item on the list,” Angelo explained, a sliver of panic making his voice tremble. “How are we supposed to win if we don’t send our proof?”
I paced the dirty concrete sidewalk, feeling my blood pressure rise. The fear of death was somehow easier, and more peaceful, than the fear of my fiancée and what she could unleash if she ever saw the need. I was afraid of her in the healthiest of ways. The way a man should fear his woman. “I have to kill you,” I decided, taking a lunging step toward my brother.
“Woah, WOAH. Wait!” He threw his hands up, defending himself from mine finding their way around his thick neck. Sam put himself between us, and Pike pulled me back.
“It’s the only way. She’ll see it as a necessary sacrifice and forgive me,” I reasoned. I broke free of Frankie and grabbed ahold of my brother’s earlobe like we were children, yanking him harshly once before Echo stepped in and stiff-armed us both in opposite directions. “I’ll make it quick and painless.”
“This isn’t doing us any good,” Pike said. “Take a breath. We’ll fix this. We’ll find them.”
A sharp cramping feeling hit my gut. I swallowed the panic in slow gulps, recentering by reading the names of the businesses on the buildings around us, counting the tips of my fingers tapping against one another. I’d gone from one less than ideal situation to an even more intensely rupturing one. The post had moved, but the goal remained the same: win back my wife.