7. — pills and priorities. #3
Salvatore wanted to believe her. Carina, too. His best option did boil down to leaving the two kids alone unless something happened that required him to step in.
“What would it really hurt, anyway?” Carina asked beside him.
“Don’t even go there.”
She knew very well what it would mean.
The implications...
A possible in to Salvatore’s life for Giorgio.
“Ignoring,” Salvatore chose to say.
A snort came from Sissy.
Carina patted his hand again.
A horn blew, and the girls booked it to the field. Carina muttered something about not being able to watch as the teams faced off in center. This time, she used her fingers as a shield in front of her eyes, yet they were spread to peek.
Salvatore chuckled but found himself standing the second his daughter entered the middle fray.
Players used an arm’s reach to keep one another away from a ball that got shot back and forth between whoever happened to be closest. The clocked ticked down past thirty seconds remaining.
If the girls out on the field knew it, one couldn’t tell.
Larkin and the guys shouted. Nico paced the barrier wall with his arms crossed, and gaze locked in. Every so often, he tilted his chin up and yelled. Carina and Sissy both joined Salvatore to stand again, both now watching.
“What’s this about a party?” Salvatore asked Sissy.
“I don’t think she wants to go, but...” She trailed off with a shrug. “What if she does?”
He couldn’t answer. Nico started hollering, and everyone around them cheered loud enough to snap Salvatore back into the moment where he needed to be.
“That’s my fuckin’ girl!” Nico yelled as Frankie took the ball down field. “That’s my girl!”
Carina squeezed his hand painfully. It didn’t matter.
Frankie took a long shot with three seconds left on the clock, and she got it.
“I think she might have asked him to go to the party later, too,” Sissy added like it was an afterthought. “But it’s nothing.”
“Nothing,” Carina echoed.
Since when did these two even like each other?
This time when she came to the stands, Nico pulled her up into their section entirely. Frankie bolted straight for Salvatore and into his arms.
“You made it,” she said.
“You did it,” he told her.
That was more important.
He chose to let the rest go.
···
“Where did you put the keys to my Rolls?” Carina asked at the master bath’s doorway.
Salvatore, fresh out of the shower and combing through his dark hair peppered with gray, had to think about it. “Did you check my pockets?”
“And down by the front door. The hangers next to the garage door. Kitchen counters.”
“Sorry, you’re on your own.”
Carina sighed and stepped out of view from the reflection he could see in the mirror. “Did you hide them on purpose?”
Her question came from somewhere inside the bedroom. A space the two of them had only sparingly shared in over a decade of marriage. Even during the better, more tolerable points, the two rarely slept in the same bed together.
“Why would I hide your keys?”
“Because you want me to stay the night, hopefully.”
“Why are you so interested in finding your keys if you want to spend the night?” he asked, curious.
“I wasn’t going to assume.”
Salvatore laughed darkly. “This is your house, too, as you once screamed at me from the front steps while the neighbors practically took pictures, so you don’t need me to give you permission.
Something else you’ve repeatedly told me throughout the course of this marriage whenever you felt the need. ”
She ignored everything he said. “Wasn’t the deal that I stayed in the city until grad—”
Her words cut off as a drawer opened noisily.
“I fucking knew it,” she hissed.
“What are you bitching about?”
“And you put them with my keys, you bastard! Let me guess, not even thinking.”
Salvatore regretted his choice to bring Carina back to the estate, and he intended to tell her as much as he headed out of the bathroom.
She met him in the doorway with the items in question held high in the air between them.
The sight of the keys made him instantly remember where he had put them earlier when they got back from the game, like everything else in his pockets.
Including the orange prescription bottle for his Tylenol with codeine.
“What the fuck is this?” she demanded, rattling the mostly empty bottle and the dangling keys. “I knew you were using again. I could tell just by the way I had to look at you in the office that morning for you to get hard.”
She glared, daring him to deny it.
“Carina, a dead man would’ve been hard looking at you that morning.
Did you even look at the fucking bottle, or do you just want a reason to scream at me again?
Because if all you want is to yell and fuck, let’s get it over with.
That’s the best kind with you anyway. We both know we’re not gonna look at one another for at least two more weeks once it’s said and done, but I do not have the energy to fight you about something that doesn’t matter. ”
Her lower lip quivered. “Fuck you.”
Salvatore stepped forward, ready to apologize. Carina moved back accordingly.
“Seriously, read the bottle,” Sal urged. “It’s codeine, at a reasonable dose. Over the counter shit was not doing it for these headaches, Carina. I needed to be able to get up and focus on what I had going on lately. I’m almost out of the bottle, and I’m not refilling it.”
Like he had been there for some of her worst years, she too had witnessed things that Salvatore would rather not speak about. To anyone. A pile of shame grew between the two of them, each adding to it over the years. The first time they ever fucked, he’d been high.
So had she. Just not on the same things.
For a time, he couldn’t fuck her sober. That brought him more guilt for entirely different reasons.
“It’s just codeine,” he repeated. “I don’t even get a buzz. Sick, mostly. If I don’t eat something.”
Her laugh came out broken. “Yeah, that’s what ten years of sobriety will do for you. Weak.”
He smirked. “Please notice how I didn’t ask you for your years of sobriety, but you can just name mine right off the top of your head, darling.”
She eyed him, then, through lowered lashes and a semi-pout on her painted lips. “Stop doing that. I know what you’re doing.”
“Are you here or not here?”
“Here.”
Her tongue peeked out to wet the matte, nude liquid lipstick she loved so much.
A staple in her everyday routine. Like many other things.
No, the two of them had never been properly in love, or rather, they didn’t say it.
Lovers, on the other hand...and besides, everything that counted or mattered about Carina, he knew. He just didn’t always like it.
To be fair, neither did she.
“Here with me?” he asked, making her be clear.
Carina nodded quickly.
“Okay, then darling, or babe, it is, all right?”
“Got it,” she whispered.
“How many days?”
At that question, she folded her arms over the structured bodice of the salmon-colored maxi dress she wore for the day. “Are you always going to ask me that?”
“Until I feel like I don’t have to.”
“When will that be, Sal? You’ve asked it for the last ten years. Every single time we’re about to jump into bed together, you do this.”
“With good reason. How many days since you let someone else fuck you, Carina? It’s not hard. Answer the question.”
She refused to meet his gaze when she said, “Fourteen hundred, sixty-seven.”
It was always the fact she kept count that did it for him. He didn’t know what it said about him that he got off on how she counted the days, knowing he would want her to. At least, she always let him decide if it had been long enough that her penance could end.
“Thank you,” he told her, stepping close enough that with a tilt of his head, he could pepper kisses against her cheek and along her shoulder that lifted to find those very kisses. “Now get in my bed, and leave the fucking stockings on, woman.”
Carina grinned up at him slyly. “Oh, you noticed.”
“That you wore the only thing I like you wearing when you ride me? Yes, immediately. Stop playing. Just get what you came for, sweetheart.”