Chapter 37
chapter thirty-seven
Natalia
I was spiraling.
Partly because I couldn’t bring Ophelia home with me, as I watched her from the brown leather armchair across the bedroom while she packed away my entire suitcase. She folded my silk pajama pants into a neat square and tucked them in the main pocket, then moved onto the matching button-up shirt. I swung my legs over an arm of the lounger, resting my neck on the opposite one, and stared at the ceiling. “I wish I was an only child.”
Phee snorted. “Then you’d only have one bridesmaid. You don’t have any other friends.”
“First of all, ouch . Secondly, I don’t even know if I have more than one right now. The jury is still out. My sisters haven’t landed in Florida yet where they can choose to ruin my life or never speak to me again. Maybe they’ll do both,” I sang. “Maybe I’m free!”
“You’re not a whale being let loose into the ocean.” A zipper opened, followed by rustling. “Clean or dirty?”
I dropped my head to the side to see Phee holding out a plum purple thong. “Clean.”
She rolled it into a more compact size and packed it away, next to a small family's worth of unworn socks, four bathing suits, and three different bras for our whopping two-night stay.
“Seriously, what do I do? I need one of those Men in Black mind eraser flashbulbs,” I joked. “I can’t believe I actually thought they might be cool with the sex work thing. I’d imagined Bella might be a little more open-minded, being a lawyer and all, but she was all moral compass this and that, like she doesn’t represent sleazeballs in the courtroom weekly.”
“I’m a little surprised by it all, too,” she murmured. “But hey, at least you’re not a flop. If they found out you were a cam girl and you only had like two subscribers it would be way harder to plead your case. Thousands of people want to see your bits.”
“I’m no cheap whore,” I croaked. “Say my dad does find out, shuns me from the family and removes me from the will, what would really change in my life anyway? I’m already one foot out the door. It might even be a breath of relief for them to be able to say I went off the rails instead of being forced to face that they’re just shitty parents. I can hear it now. ‘ We tried our best with that one, but we don’t know what went wrong! ’”
“They’d probably tell people it was a cry for help.” She laughed. “That you were in a dark place and the only way out was through copious amounts of twerking on your boyfriend.”
“The only way out was through the field of bubblegum butt plugs.”
“You just had to follow the yellow dick road.”
I cackled but it tapered into a little growl of frustration. “Is this my villain origin story?”
Ophelia abandoned the bedside and crossed the room to the closet, swinging it open to look inside and finding it empty. “You are surprisingly high-spirited through all of this, so I don’t think so?”
“I’m not high-spirited, I’m processing trauma through humor like a normal person.”
“I think a normal person would be panicking. You seem like you’re in the stage of acceptance, maybe. Or you’re a possible masochist. Are you turned on right now?”
Frankie swept into the room, knocking his knuckles gently on the door. “Am I interrupting something?”
“I was just about to fuck your girlfriend,” I said without sparing him a glance.
“Nothing says foreplay like folding laundry.”
“We were just chatting about the odds that Nat will be exiled from the Russo family if her sisters force her to come clean about…you know.” Ophelia gestured vaguely.
Frankie’s lip curled. The hat he always wore was resting loosely on his hair, a single brown curl falling down the center of his forehead. “They can’t exile you if you exile yourself first.”
If only it were that easy. Part of the reason I could even make light of the situation was because Mateo and I were already secretly married. Half the pressure of having the wedding was gone. If the entire thing blew up in my face I could at least rest assured knowing we were no less legally bound.
Ophelia disappeared into the ensuite bathroom with an empty toiletry bag, flipping on the light with a gasp. I’d forgotten to put away the pink sex toy after that first night, and honestly, I didn’t think I’d have to explain myself now. “Why is this thing suction cupped to the mirror?”
“It’s air-drying,” I called out. “Avoiding shrinkage.”
“You can pack it yourself,” she shouted back. “I love you, but not that much.”
“That’s fair.”
“Gross.” Frankie knocked my legs off the arm of the chair so he could sit.
“How is it that everyone in this house is perfectly fine with the sex thing except for my sisters?”
“Are we talking about that?” The Swans appeared at the open bedroom door, entering the same way Frankie had. Tyler hopped onto the bed, spreading his long limbs across the comforter, and Sam leaned against the dresser with his hands in his pockets.
“No,” Frankie answered Tyler.
“Because I have some questions,” Tyler continued, ignoring him. “Starting with, how much money are we talking? Because I definitely have a sex tape or two somewhere on the internet.”
My eyes creased and my lips turned upward. “You’d make out handsomely, pretty boy.”
Sam drummed his fingers against the wood grain on the dresser. “I never would have guessed, for what it’s worth. And I’m pretty spot-on at figuring things out.”
“He really is.” Phee shoved my shoes into a separate bag at the top of my suitcase that I never knew was designated for shoes. Apparently luggage was not as self-explanatory as it made itself out to be. That, or I was best friends with Marie Kondo.
“You never would have guessed, or you never wanted to know?” I asked rhetorically.
“Are there any solo vids of Cap?” Tyler tucked his hands behind his head on the pillow and crossed his legs at the ankle.
Frankie shuddered. “Why the fuck would you want that?”
“Oh come on, you’re not curious?”
“Curious enough to watch my best friend wank his dick on camera? Nah, I’m good.”
Tyler scoffed out a refute. “Well it’s not like we can watch the ones with Tally in them. I’m just supporting the biz.”
God bless him, the big himbo whore. It didn’t make me want to crawl into my asshole any less, but at least I knew the respect was there and that’s honestly all I could have asked for.
“I didn’t know we were all hanging out in here.” It was Angelo’s turn to show up outside the bedroom, sticking his head in timidly. He shimmied inside and found a spot against the windowsill. The room was collapsing in on itself, but I welcomed it. It felt so much less lonely and gave me some hope that I still had family, even if family came in a different packaging. These men didn’t need to be here, keeping me company, making jokes, lifting my spirits. Yet they were.
“Is that what you’re wearing to the airport?” Ophelia pointed at my sweatpants, tank top, the threadbare zip-up sweatshirt I had hanging off my shoulder, and my hard-soled moccasin slippers. Effectively: my pajamas. And yes, I would most certainly be wearing them because if I had to slip my shoes off in a TSA line, I’d do so without causing a scene.
“Yes, Mom,” I replied.
Phee took to zipping my suitcase closed, struggling with the final edge of it and then hopping up on the bed to sit on top of the hard pink shell while she wrestled the zipper completely closed. Tyler looked bemused and impressed.
“So, how does it work? You just…you flip on the ring light and fuck?” Sam piped up.
“Sometimes.” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. I’d given Mateo a lap dance in front of everyone in this room less than twelve hours ago, so talking about the details of running a sex cam business was tame in retrospect. There was no visual to go along with the explanation this time at least. “I guarantee you that whatever you’re imagining is exactly what it is.”
“You don’t want to know what I’m imagining,” Angelo said. “I can get really weird.”
“I’ll fill in the blanks for you so that we never have to talk about it again.” Frankie pinched his nose and took a dramatic centering breath. I could tell that with even over a decade in special operations, Matty and I had still given him a pinnacle moment of trauma, and I’d wear that like a prideful badge of honor. “The only reason I know about this little side gig, and you guys don’t, is because I walked in on Cap dressed as Santa Claus porking Mrs. Claus under my own goddamn roof. That shit you don’t forget.”
“It was our highest-paying video of the year, for what it’s worth,” I added. “Even better than the leprechaun.”
“What’s the romantic counterpart of a leprechaun?” Phee mused. The boys thought hard, their eyes creasing inquisitively. Frankie’s frown deepened and his head shook back and forth like someone trying to erase a picture off an Etch A Sketch.
“You’ll never know.” I grinned big.
“I need to know,” Angelo complained. He scrubbed a hand down his face as if the riddle would haunt him. “Female leprechauns don’t exist. So if you’re not doing your research, there’s bigger problems at stake here.”
“Didn’t Mateo tell you? That job he’s hiring you for is actually director of video content.”
“I’m taking my name out of the hat.”
“Where the hell is everybody?” a voice called from the hallway a second before my husband lumbered into the room, stopping short and looking around at all of our friends gathered in several places. His thick eyebrows drew together and steam wafted from the mug of coffee in his hand. I gestured lazily when he found me in the chair. “Is this an intervention?” Mateo asked.
“We didn’t want it to come to this, but you forced us.” Sam dropped his head and put his hands on his hips. The room fell silent, confused. He was a man of very few undeserved words, and the tone was a touch too serious. “We’re worried about you. Doing porn with a cock that small has to be some level of self-harm. Are you okay, Cap? We can get you the help you need.”
We exploded in laughter. A warmth rushed through me, like medicine aiding an aching, cold heart. It would be okay, all of it. The secret being let out, my family, our wedding, the future of this, no matter what it looked like. Because I had them.
Maybe it didn’t always feel like it, but I deserved this happiness. Not for small glints of time like drops of rain in a pool, all the time. I deserved to swim in it.
“Maybe I was supposed to have brothers,” I muttered. The swell of attention was back on me, and Frankie placed a hand on my knee and shook it. Beneath the lip of his faded ball cap there was that beholden kind of love brightening his dark eyes, and a small smile tugged at his full lips.
“You do have brothers,” he said.
I put my hand over his gratefully, fighting a whole shelf of emotions from being knocked down and trying my hardest not to cry, because when that started it wouldn’t stop. But then I favored a glance at a reassuring Angelo, and an agreeable Sam, and landed on an already teary-eyed Tyler and the dam burst open.
“Look what you did, Pike.” Tyler sniffled. “You made her cry.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Ech. Get it together,” Mateo said, crossing the room to lean down and kiss me on the top of the head. I swiped my tears away with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. When we finally got home I’d need a full detox and an uninterrupted forty-eight hours in my bed. Vegas was going to be a dark strike on our vacation destination list for the foreseeable future.
At that point I was practically aching for South Floridian humidity and the familiar coastal palm trees. My coffeemaker, my car, to get back to work and throw myself into it. I could tell I wasn’t the only one chomping at the bit to be home. It might not be any better than here emotionally ; we had to have hard conversations with both his parents, and mine, and though I’d never be ready for that the same way you’d never be ready for death, I was less afraid.
Angelo pushed off the windowsill and to the door of the ensuite bathroom. “You guys got any tissues in here?” He closed the door behind him, right before flicking on the light. I looked at Ophelia, but she was already staring wide-eyed at me with a wicked glimmer.
“One…two…” I counted on my fingers.
A deep shriek rang out, followed by a tormented, equally as boisterous “ What the fuck !” Ophelia buried her face in the crook of her elbow. Mateo hid his own in his hands.
“Well don’t scream at it,” I shouted back. “It’s not going to jump off the mirror and fuck you.”