5. romeo
romeo
Gasoline
The Text He Should Ignore
Two in the morning and I'm standing in my kitchen holding a glass of Macallan I poured twenty minutes ago and haven't touched.
The penthouse is quiet. It's always quiet. Fourteen months of quiet pressing against walls I've never bothered to fill with anything worth looking at.
The Marchese deadline sits in my chest like a fist. Twenty-seven days.
Twenty-seven days before a dead man's signature drags me to an altar I'd rather set on fire.
Santino's voice keeps cycling through my skull — thirty days, Romeo — that flat, measured tone he uses when he's already calculated three outcomes and none of them end well for me.
I set the glass down. Pick it up. Set it down again.
My father's watch ticks against my wrist. Patek Philippe. Left to me in the will like a leash disguised as an inheritance. Every second it counts is a second closer to becoming the man who wore it before me.
I should sleep. I should drink. I should do something other than stand in this kitchen replaying the way a ten-year-old boy in rocketship pajamas explained blue shells to me like I was the dumbest person he'd ever met.
Tomás. Laughing so hard his granola bar crumbled onto the carpet.
And Nova — twelve feet away in that doorway with her arms folded and her eyes doing the thing they do. The thing where she sees straight through every layer of bullshit I've spent twenty-two years perfecting and lands on whatever's underneath.
I told her it wouldn't happen again.
I meant it.
My phone lights up on the counter. The screen throws a white rectangle across the marble and I glance at it sideways, expecting Santino. Expecting Fabio. Expecting another problem dressed up as a question I don't have the answer to.
Nova.
Four words.
Marisol won't stop screaming.
My thumb hovers over the screen. I read it twice.
Three times. The period at the end hits different than a question mark would.
She isn't asking me for help. She's telling me what's happening because — fuck — because I told her to.
Because somewhere between the arrangement and the apartment and the cracked joystick controller, I said something stupid like if you need anything and she actually remembered it.
Marisol. Thirteen years old. Sharp enough to cut glass with her stare. The sister who looked at me like I was a disease Nova brought home from work.
She's screaming in her sleep and Nova is handling it alone because Nova handles everything alone because that is the only setting she knows how to operate in.
I should text back. Something useful. Something that keeps me on this side of the line I drew.
Call me if you need anything else.
That's what a smart man would send. A man with boundaries. A man running a mafia empire with a thirty-day fuse strapped to his future.
I grab my keys off the counter.
I'm in the elevator before I finish the thought.
I'm in the car before I can talk myself out of it.
The engine turns over and I pull out of the garage too fast, tires chirping against concrete, the city opening up in front of me — empty streets, wet pavement, traffic lights cycling through colors for no one.
The arrangement was supposed to give me control. That was the whole point. A clean transaction. Cash for exclusivity. Her body and my money and a wall between us thick enough to keep everything else out.
Instead I'm doing seventy on the Eastside expressway at two in the morning because a woman I am paying to keep at arm's length sent four words and my body moved before my brain gave permission.
I run a red light on Delancey without slowing down.
This is a problem.
This is a fucking problem and I know it and I'm still driving.
The Apartment at Its Worst
The stairwell at two in the morning is a different animal than the one I memorized last time.
Third step still creaks. Banister gap still wide enough to swallow a kid's arm at the second landing.
But the light on the fourth floor has died since I was here, and someone three floors down is screaming at someone else about money or drugs or both, their voices bouncing off concrete and peeling wallpaper until the whole building hums with it.
I take the stairs two at a time. My shoes — six hundred dollars of Italian leather that cost more than her monthly electric bill — sound obscene against these steps. Every footfall announces exactly what I am. A man who doesn't belong here. A man who came anyway.
The door swells against the frame when she opens it.
She has to yank it with her hip, the same way I watched her do it from the stairwell the night I broke her rule.
Except this time she's wearing an oversized shirt that hangs to her thighs, her hair loose and wild around her shoulders, and her eyes carry the specific kind of exhaustion that sleep will never fix.
She doesn't thank me for coming.
She doesn't ask why I'm here.
She steps aside and lets me in, and the silence between us is thick with everything she won't say and everything I can't.
Marisol is on the couch. Asleep now, curled into herself with the school hoodie pulled up over her ears and the television casting blue light across her face.
Whatever nightmare tore through her has passed, leaving behind a thirteen-year-old girl who looks small, young.
The sharpness in her face smoothed out by something she can only access when she's unconscious.
"She's been out for about ten minutes," Nova says, her voice scraped raw.
She walks into the kitchen and leans against the counter with both hands gripping the edge.
The stove light is on — always on, I've noticed — throwing a dim yellow glow over the laminate and the mismatched plates stacked in the dish rack.
I follow her. I shouldn't, but my feet keep making decisions my brain hasn't approved tonight.
This is the apartment without performance.
Without the cleaned-up version she presented when I showed up uninvited with my jacket folded over her wobbly-leg chair.
The dishes in the sink are real — three days' worth, maybe four.
Laundry is folded on a kitchen chair but hasn't made it to drawers.
The chore chart in colored markers is half-erased, the week incomplete.
And on the counter, next to the permission slips held by the sunflower magnet she's moved from the fridge, there's a shutoff notice she didn't bother to hide this time.
Electric. Eighty-seven dollars past due.
I know the number because I pulled her file. I know her rent, her income, the gap between them that she fills with tips counted by touch on a bus at one in the morning. I know the math of her life better than she thinks I do.
But knowing it on paper and seeing it at two AM — the circles under her eyes so dark they look bruised, her fingers white-knuckled on the counter's edge, the coffee can above the refrigerator where she keeps cash that's never enough — these are different kinds of knowing.
"Tomás?" I ask.
"Slept through it." She exhales and something in her shoulders releases half an inch. "He always does. Marisol screams and he just — keeps dreaming."
"Lucky kid."
"Yeah." Her mouth almost curves. Almost. "Lucky."
She looks at me then. Full on. And I can see her running the calculation — what my presence costs, what it implies, what debt it creates in the invisible ledger she keeps between us.
Whether the man standing in her kitchen at two in the morning wearing a watch worth more than her annual rent is a comfort or a complication.
I watch her decide.
I watch her fail to decide.
The silence stretches and I fill it by doing the only thing that makes sense. I turn on her tap, squeeze dish soap onto the sponge sitting on the sink's edge, and start washing the plates.
She stares at me like I've pulled a weapon.
"What are you doing?"
"Dishes."
"Romeo—"
"Go sit down, Nova."
Her mouth opens. Closes. She grips the counter harder, and I can see the war in her — the part that wants to shove me out the door and the part that is so fucking tired of carrying everything alone that a man washing her dishes at two in the morning might be the thing that finally cracks her open.
She lets go of the counter. Walks to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, leans against the frame, and watches me scrub dried tomato sauce off a plate that probably cost two dollars at a dollar store.
She doesn't say thank you.
She doesn't have to.
The Invitation He Did Not Plan
The last plate is clean. I set it in the rack next to the others and dry my hands on a towel that smells like fabric softener and something citrus — the same smell that clings to her skin when she's close enough to destroy me.
I should leave. Marisol is asleep. Tomás never woke up. The crisis that pulled me across the city is over, and every second I stay in this apartment pushes me further past a line I drew for a reason.
Nova is still leaning against the doorframe. Arms crossed. Watching me with that expression I can't crack — the one that lives somewhere between I dare you and please don't.
I dry my hands. Fold the towel. Set it on the counter like a man who is definitely about to say goodnight and walk out.
"Come to my place."
The words leave my mouth before my brain signs off on them. She blinks. I keep going because stopping now would mean admitting I didn't mean to say it, and I don't know if that's true.
"Tomorrow. Get out of this apartment for a few hours. Bring the kids or don't. No strings. No agenda."
Her arms tighten across her chest. "That's not part of our deal."
"I know."
"Then what is it?"