16. — the thing about Chicago. #2
“Salvatore, please don’t make me spell it out to you. You’re a grown man. I’m telling you right now, you don’t want to have a conversation about what your daughter probably did in a bathroom with her boyfriend. Fathers don’t need the details, okay?”
He slumped deeply into the chair. “Unreal. Fucking unreal.”
“Is it? Did you even spend two minutes looking at your daughter whenever Nico was in the same room with her? Jesus, they’ve been sharing a bed since...like prom! And you basically said nothing about it, so whose fault is this really?”
“That’s unfair. I think I kept the conversation open and tried to let them figure it out.”
“Which is basically permission, so.”
He made a face.
Carina continued, “I think they’re in love.”
Salvatore scoffed at the idea.
His wife didn’t even blink. “That from the man who fell in love with a twenty-year-old that had paint stains on her Birkin, more money than she knew what to do with, and parents who told her no when she brought you home. Please.”
That one stung a little.
“And you know what, they really don’t owe us that information, if they are in love,” Carina told him.
“They are adults, whether you like it or are ready to admit it, or not. Maybe they’ve only just figured it out themselves, or they’ve known for a while, but that’s between them.
They’re young, and neither has very good impulse control.
Their frontal lobes aren’t even fully developed yet. ”
“Exactly, and you tell me she’s an adult. Do you not see the irony?”
“I see a father who’s terrified because the child he spent eighteen years protecting from the rest of the world has suddenly figured out there’s someone else in her life who wants to do that for her, as well.”
“He’s not me. He can’t possibly come close to the sacrifices I have made for her. He’ll never even know them.”
“He’s not supposed to be you, baby. If it’s real, he’s supposed to be hers. She gets to decide how that looks, you know what I mean? Add all of that onto the wall they probably came up against tonight, and—”
“Marco,” Salvatore interjected darkly.
“Yeah.”
That asshole only needed one word—his name.
“Forgive me for being concerned that they’re making choices they won’t be able to take back,” Salvatore grumbled.
“Aren’t those choices theirs to make, though, consequences and all? Is it the choices that they’re making, or does it bother you more that you aren’t getting to protect them from making them in the first place?”
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t have one.
Life should be getting a lot easier for Francesca, and Nico, if Salvatore were being honest. Both motherless children from too young of an age to even know the difference.
Constantly held apart from their peers because they couldn’t find a place there.
Exceptional in so many ways, but also broken in more than one, as well.
Had they not suffered enough? Paid a dozen times over for sins that weren’t even their own?
He only wanted to make it right. No one else would.
“This should be the easy part of her life,” he said after a quiet moment. “And in his. I tried. I was trying to make it that way.”
Carina shrugged one shoulder. “Who says it won’t be?”
“Well,” he replied, gesturing wildly at nothing in particular, “I can’t say this whole situation speaks great of what’s to come, babe.”
“You don’t know that, and there you are, it’s almost sad. It’s nearly three in the morning, and instead of fucking your wife to sleep like you should be doing to distract yourself for a little while...you’re sitting in the dark, in absolute knots, because your daughter won’t pick up her phone.”
“Carina, that’s out of line.”
“No, it’s the truth. Nobody said you had to like it, Sal.”
He covered his eyes with a trembling hand. “Tell me what to do here, then. Tell me, and I’ll do it.”
“Do you really want me to do that?”
“What, help me?”
“No, tell you the truth.”
He took a second; thought about it. “Yeah, someone needs to.”
“Don’t say I didn’t give you the choice. You know, a while back, I told Frankie something about her co-dependency with you.”
His head cocked sideways, hand dropping. “Excuse me?”
“In the hospital, after the accident.”
He just shook his head, eyes widening while his expression screamed what does that matter?
“I don’t even think she took it to heart. And if she did, she probably didn’t care. You’re her best friend. You are the king of fort-building, Sunday treats after church, and the only person she always knew would still tell her she was loved, no matter what.”
“Are you trying to make a point here?”
“Two, actually,” she returned, smiling sweetly.
His irritation with her spiked.
“One—you’ve got a bit of your own co-dependency that I think you should leave at the door where she’s concerned, too.
You always knew that you were all she had at the end of the day, and you treated her accordingly.
You need her to need you, Salvatore. Because if she doesn’t, then doesn’t that mean you failed, too? ”
He blinked, his mouth opening to...do nothing, apparently. Sal said nothing.
“Now say that back to yourself and hear how it sounds. I need her to need me. Say it.”
“Given the circumstances of our life, I think that’s unfair.”
“I don’t. Two things can be true. You can say you’ve fostered this trauma-induced bond between the two of you, and that the circumstances that brought you to it existed.
They are both true. It still doesn’t make what you’re doing right, especially if you, as the adult between you, can recognize it while she’ll still have a chance to develop a sense of self away from it and you.
Maybe she won’t listen to me, because she can’t hear it through the sound of her own thoughts, but you might. ”
The muscles in his jaw twitched.
“And now it kind of feels like you’re trying to pick a fight,” he uttered.
“Two,” Carina said never missing a beat, “is really going to piss you off, lover.”
He practically glowered now.
“History is staring you in the face every time you look at Nico. You see me, you see yourself, you see Delilah and the things you never got to have. You see Giorgio, and the man you never wanted to be. All that history stares back when he looks at you. It’s probably a punch to the gut to know that Frankie doesn’t see any of those things at all.
So, now this child you’ve made your entire life is slowly becoming that same thing for the someone you can’t even wrap your own feelings around.
How are you supposed to begin to understand hers where he’s concerned? You haven’t even unpacked your own.”
“I don’t want to talk anymore.”
She snorted softly. “Right, of course you don’t.
But here’s the thing, and it’s the important bit, so you should probably let me get to it: they don’t know any of this.
The real reason you’re so scared, everything that came before them, and what life could look like if you weren’t standing between them and the bullet...
they don’t know. And maybe they shouldn’t, that’s probably not for me to say. ”
He pushed the chair back from the desk, done with the conversation. Except he didn’t stand, because Carina pointed one French-tipped nail at him that kept him rooted to the spot.
“Don’t you move,” she warned him.
“It feels a lot like you’re saying I’m not healthy or good for my daughter, doesn’t it?”
“I can’t help what you hear, Sal. I’m not the one projecting.”
“I’m starting to think all that therapy you did a few years ago—”
“You’re just mad that you paid to make me self aware enough that I’m the looking glass you hate to see coming sometimes, baby.”
His foot tapped a beat to the floor. “Are you just mad at me that I didn’t come to bed?”
“I don’t need you in bed. I can get you anywhere, Salvatore.”
Goddamn.
“And even after telling you all this, here’s what I know for sure,” Carina said as she stepped further into the room.
Her footsteps padded across the floor while she continued speaking.
“You will be the first person she calls or comes to see when she understands the whole picture currently staring her in the face. I promise you. Because all she’s ever known is how you love her and that you’ll fix it. She needs that—you’ve made sure of it.”
“Stop.”
She did, right beside his chair.
He’d really meant to say something else—stop saying that thing; it hurts me. His frustration, at everything including her, simmered.
“You’re not close enough to make up for the things you just said,” he told her.
Carina let out laugh and promptly fixed the issue.
“When she does come back,” she murmured as she pushed his chair out further and straddled him without warning, “I suggest you start treating your daughter like the adult she needs to learn to be, as a lesson for you both.”
He tipped his jaw up, meeting her gaze straight on.
“So someday,” she whispered, leaning down to kiss his jaw as her words fell across his skin, “she doesn’t have to run back to you to fix the things she’s fucked up for herself and be told you love her while you do it.
Is that what you want her to think love is?
She will never be strong or capable enough to look at that boy you’re so scared of and tell him she doesn’t need him—she wants him. ”
He grabbed her waist tightly. It had to sting a little.
“The two feel a lot a like,” she told him, unbothered, and gazes locked, “we both know that. But one is not the same as the other, and you’ve lived enough of a life to know the difference.”
Salvatore kissed Carina hard enough that she bit him in response. Only three times in their marriage had she bitten him during intimacy, drawing blood, and each time led to the same thing. Just like now.
One of his hands flew up to catch her throat, stopping the second nip of her teeth against bleeding flesh that would surely come. She only laughed a breathless gasp at the roughness, otherwise unconcerned.
She said it, after all. He was a monster. Just not hers.