7. Stella
STELLA
My brain is doing that thing where it tries to process too much information all at once and sort of short-circuits, like a browser with forty tabs open.
Enforcer. Organized crime. Dorian Moretti. I stare at his hands, and then at his face, then his hands again. The bruises on his knuckles are deep and ugly, and he’s standing in my hallway looking like a man who just handed me a grenade and is waiting to see if I pull the pin or hand it back.
I should be terrified, right? Horrified. I should close the door and slide the chain and call someone, though I’m not sure who, since my best friend is a freaking rabbit.
I should be feeling those things. I know I should.
But then I’ve never been very good at doing or feeling the things I’m supposed to do or feel, have I?
“Like in The Godfather?” I hear myself ask.
He blinks rapidly, like he just heard a question he wasn’t expecting. “What?”
“The Godfather. Is Dorian like the Don of the family? Are you his consigliere?” I’m already stepping aside to let him in because it doesn’t occur to me not to.
“Wait, no. You said enforcer. Is that like Luca Brasi? Please tell me it’s not like Luca Brasi.
He died very early in the movie, and I would prefer if you didn’t.
Just promise me you won’t go along with a plan to pretend you’re switching alliances, because you’ll end up sleeping with the fishes. ”
He steps into the apartment slowly, as if he’s afraid there’s a mine hidden somewhere, ready to explode. He’s waiting for my brain to catch up with my mouth because he expects me to be horrified, too. Any normal person would be, I guess. But then I’ve never claimed to be normal.
“You’re not scared?” he asks.
I close the door and flip both bolts. “I’m not scared. I mean, should I be? Are you going to hurt me?”
“Christ, no.” It comes out fast, almost like he’s offended.
“Then I’m not scared. I am very curious, though. Like, extremely curious. I have so many questions. Do you have a code of honor? Did you have to take a blood oath? Do people actually kiss rings, or is that just a movie thing?”
He sits on the couch and puts his head in his hands. Not in a dramatic way. More like he rehearsed this moment, and it’s not going anything like what he expected. “Stella...”
“Do you carry a gun? You carry a gun, right? You would definitely have to carry a gun if you were an enforcer. What would you have if it wasn’t for that? Pepper spray? An iron pan? Tazer?”
“Can you—” He looks up and blinks at me. “I just told you I hurt people for a living.”
“I know. I heard you. I have excellent hearing.” I sit down on the couch, tucking one leg under me. “But I also have excellent peripheral vision and a borderline photographic memory. None of that helps me in any practical way, but I thought you should know.”
The way he’s looking at me says he clearly can’t understand where this is coming from.
Not that it matters. People have been looking at me that way for a long time.
“You told me the truth,” I remind him. “That’s a big deal.
I know you expected me to freak out, and I guess I’m sorry if I’m not freaking out the way you planned. But honestly?”
I place a hand over his, where it’s resting between us on the cushion.
“I know how you make me feel. I know what you’ve done for me.
You protected me. You got rid of the straws in our glasses when we went to lunch.
You make the fear that’s always in my mind quiet down, and nobody else has ever done that.
None of what you just told me changes what I already knew. ”
He doesn’t believe me. I can tell. I wonder how many times he’s felt rejected and decide not to ask that question out loud because even I have a degree of self-awareness. Maybe not a very large degree, but some.
“I mean.” I squeeze his hand in case that gets the point across. “I think it’s pretty cool. Or should I not think it’s cool? Is there something wrong with me that I think it’s cool?”
He shakes his head and holds up his other hand. “Don’t spiral. Your reaction is not what I expected.”
“Don’t you know by now? You need to expect the unexpected around me.”
The short, almost silent laugh that bursts out of him makes me laugh along with him. “You should meet them,” he blurts out.
And just like that, my laughter’s gone. Like it never existed. “What?”
“Dorian and Quinn, his wife. You should meet them. And their daughter, Lillie. She’s five. Technically, she’s Dorian’s daughter, but Quinn is her mom in every way that counts.”
He’s hitting me with a lot of information in a very narrow window of time. “Okay. Wife, daughter. Got it.”
“You can see what it actually looks like before you decide my life is like The Godfather.”
“Is it not The Godfather?” And am I a little disappointed? Because I sound like I might be a little disappointed.
“It is not The Godfather.”
“Maybe just a little bit?” I hold my fingers up roughly half an inch apart. “A tiny bit?”
He only shakes his head, though he’s wearing the tiniest hint of a grin as he calls Dorian so they can make plans.
Apparently, neither of these men understand what it means for a girl to meet a guy’s family for the first time. Or business associates. Whatever he considers them. How do I know? Because they decide to have dinner tonight. As in a handful of hours from now.
By the time we head out, I’m paint-free... at least, I think I am. I’m also wearing the only nice dress I own. “You’re sure this is okay?” I ask, tugging the hem a little further down until it touches my knees. I might be too dressy, but then he’s not giving me much to work with here.
“You look fine.”
“Okay, you really need coaching on how to speak to women if you think that makes me feel any better.” After tugging the hem another few times, I take the hand he holds out and let him lead me from his SUV across the street to the entrance of a restaurant I’ve never heard of.
I spent the whole drive here to tame my hair imagining what I’m about to walk into.
A dimly lit back room full of cigar smoke.
Men in pinstripe suits discussing someone’s unfortunate kneecaps.
Maybe a violin player who seems normal but is definitely also an assassin.
What I actually walk into is a well-lit Italian restaurant with white tablecloths and a hostess who smiles at us and doesn’t appear to be concealing any weapons... though I suppose that’s sort of the point of concealing them.
And then there’s the family.
Quinn Moretti is pretty and blonde and stands when she sees us.
Right away, she hugs me, which is alarming because I don’t get hugged by strangers often, but it’s also kind of nice because she smells like vanilla and seems genuinely happy I exist. Dorian is tall and handsome in an intimidating way that reminds me a little of Tristan.
He shakes my hand very politely before pulling out Quinn’s chair for her.
That’s not Godfather behavior. Not that I’m an expert or anything.
And then there’s Lillie. She’s five years old and has curly hair and very sharp eyes. “You have long hair,” she announces.
“I do,” I admit as I take a seat.
“How come?”
“Lillie,” Quinn murmurs, stroking the little girl’s curls and tucking them behind her ears. “It isn’t polite to ask a lot of questions when you first meet someone.”
“That’s all right,” I murmur, winking at Lillie. “Sometimes scissors are scary for me.”
Lillie looks very serious as she weighs this with all the gravity of a Supreme Court justice. “I don’t think scissors are scary,” she concludes.
“That’s because you’re way braver than I am.”
This seems to satisfy her, and she goes back to coloring on her placemat while I settle in next to Tristan and try very hard not to blurt out every thought running through my head. It’s a losing battle. Let’s just put it that way.
“You’re very... normal,” I tell Quinn, for lack of anything better to say.
She laughs gently. “Thank you?”
“I mean—sorry, that came out wrong,” I babble. “I don’t know what I expected. Something more dramatic? Maybe someone smoking a cigar? There are no cigars at this table. I’m pleasantly surprised by the lack of cigars.”
Tristan’s hand finds my knee under the table. I’m not sure whether it’s affection or a warning. It could be both.
“No cigars,” Dorian confirms. “Quinn made me quit.”
Quinn rolls her eyes. “Don’t listen to him. I don’t think he’s ever smoked a cigar in his life.”
“And she would never try to make me quit anything. Would you?” he asks her, joking gently. Definitely not what I would’ve expected from the head of a crime family. I can almost ignore the dark-clad men sitting by the front door like they’re guarding the place. They probably are.
“If it meant keeping you around longer for the sake of your daughter? I might think about it,” she tells him with a grin.
I like her. I might even like him. This is not a crime lord and his long-suffering spouse.
This is a man who loves his wife and his little girl. Crime just happens to be part of it.
The waiter arrives to place water glasses in front of us, along with what looks like a sippy cup of chocolate milk for Lillie. That’s when I notice something critical. No straws.
I look at Tristan. “Did you...?”
It’s Dorian who answers without looking up from his menu. “Tristan mentioned you would prefer we leave out the straws tonight.”
That’s it. Like it’s that simple. Like he called ahead to a restaurant and had every straw removed from the premises, and it’s the most unremarkable thing in the world.
Like this is just what happens when you have the kind of power that makes waiters nervous and gets entire restaurants rearranged with a phone call.
“I’m starting to understand the appeal of organized crime,” I murmur to Tristan.
When his hand squeezes my knee, it’s definitely a warning this time.
I don’t care. I’ve never walked into a restaurant and not had to worry about straws before.
It’s like someone cleared the minefield before I got here.
Dinner is good. Really good. The kind of pasta that makes you want to close your eyes and make a sound that’s not appropriate in public and definitely not in front of a child.
The conversation is easy in a way I wasn’t expecting.
Quinn seems legitimately interested in my painting.
Dorian listens more than he talks, but when he does talk, it’s precise and deliberate.
I respect that. I talk too much and waste words constantly, so people who use them carefully fascinate me.
Lillie, meanwhile, has decided I’m worth paying attention to. She shows me what appears to be either a horse or a very confident dog. She then leans across the table and asks with the casualness of someone asking for directions to the nearest gas station, “Do you want to meet my horse?”
“You have a horse?”
“His name is Poptart.”
I look at Quinn, who nods. Dorian is wearing something close to a smile.
“One question,” I reply, lowering my voice. “Does Poptart bite?”
She screws her little face up like she’s thinking it over, trying to remember. “I don’t think so. Just food and stuff.”
“Then I would love to meet him.” She beams like I’ve given her the correct answer, while all I can do is wonder if she means it, because I’ve never met a horse in person, but something tells me I’d be nervous about it.
Eventually, dinner winds down the way dinners do when you’re having a good time.
Quinn and I exchange numbers. Lillie demands a solemn promise that I will visit Poptart this week.
Dorian shakes my hand again when we leave and tells me, “It was a pleasure, Stella,” and somehow, he makes me believe he might actually mean it, which feels like a significant achievement given that the man apparently runs a criminal empire.
I’m in the middle of thanking him for the meal when my phone buzzes in my purse. I pull it out to find a weather alert. Wind advisory: gusts up to 18 mph expected in your area beginning at 9:00 p.m.
My stomach drops. It’s almost 8:30. Thirty minutes.
“I have to go,” I announce in a tight voice.
“I need to get home. The wind is picking up… I need to go.” I can feel it already.
The tightness in my chest. The cold creeping into my fingers.
I have thirty minutes before the world gets loud and pushy, and my apartment is miles away from here.
What if it starts early? What if the app is wrong? What if—
“My place is closer,” Tristan tells me. He’s calm and even. Basically, the opposite of me. “Ten minutes from here.”
I look up at him, trying to piece together a simple statement when my mind is beginning to fracture. “Your place?”
“It’s on Dorian’s property. Sturdy walls. No amount of wind could knock them down.” He says it like it’s the most important selling point. Honestly, for me, it kind of is right now. “You’ll be inside before nine.”
My hands are already starting to shake, but he’s here. His place is ten minutes away. Ten minutes I can do. “Okay,” I agree. “Let’s go.”
I notice as he leads me to the SUV that he didn’t bother telling me it’s just wind. He asks no questions that might waste time. He only opens the car door, waits for me to get in, and closes it behind me before getting behind the wheel.
I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t going through it. Somehow, miraculously, he made the noise in my head go quiet again.