22. — can’t take that. #2
Nico sniffed hard, letting out a hard breath. “It’s not because you’re her father.”
“Then, what is it?”
“Maybe if I say the things I’m thinking, then that’ll make them real. And I don’t want the way I feel to be the truth. Because it isn’t, I’m just...”
“It’s a lot,” Salvatore filled in.
Nico nodded sharply. “Yeah. And if I said something I didn’t really mean, it’s too late once I’ve said it. It’s out there. I can’t take it back. Whether or not she’s heard it, or knows I said it, I do. I’ll know what I said about her. About my child.”
He had more self-control and maturity than he realized. Salvatore didn’t point it out. Just because these kids had moments of wisdom beyond their ages didn’t mean they weren’t still eighteen and nineteen at the end of the day.
“It wouldn’t be beyond the pale to just admit you’re not ready for this. I can take that from you and hold onto it for you. No one else needs to know, Nico. Just say it, so you don’t have to feel it anymore.”
“It’s irrelevant,” Nico said then, wiping at his face to clear it of tear stains for what Salvatore hoped would be the last time. “What I think, felt, it’s all irrelevant.”
“I don’t think—”
“No, it is. Before, the pregnancy wasn’t a thing yet.
I can’t care about something that isn’t even real.
When I handed her the Plan B, asked her to do it, and wanted her to, the baby didn’t really exist to me.
The way I looked at it, I was handling a situation that hadn’t come to fruition.
To her, it could. It was. I didn’t understand how she wrapped her mind around something not there, something...
I just didn’t get it. So, I let her feel the way she did and I felt my own. But that was then, and this is now.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think or if I’m not ready, because she’s pregnant, she’s keeping it, and it’s mine.
It’s mine. Of course, I want it. Yeah, I don’t know how to be a dad, but I’m gonna be one.
I want her. I literally tell her to marry me every fucking day.
I don’t say that because she asks questions I can’t answer unless she’s my wife.
I say it because I want her to be my wife! That’s what kills me here.”
Nico laughed bitterly. “I would marry her tomorrow if I could, and that has nothing to do with whether she’s pregnant or not.
That’s just what I fucking want. I wanted it the moment I knew I loved her.
I will want it until it happens. And I will want her long after I’m dead.
I want that, to call her my wife, because that means something to me and she’s the only one meant to be mine, and it has nothing to do with her being pregnant. I wanted it, always.”
Pursing his lips to keep from talking, Salvatore was grateful for the sudden buzz in his pocket as a distraction. He let Nico sit in his thoughts and contemplative silence, watching him lean forward on the couch to place his head in his hands while Salvatore checked the phone.
A text from Larkin waited: Girls on the property, boss man.
He knew which girls.
“Okay,” Salvatore said, clearing the thickness from his throat so he could put the fucking dad hat back on and handle the other kid in this messy equation. “Get yourself straight and fix your fucking face, because it’s showtime. They’re home.”
Nico straightened a bit on the couch, but he didn’t make a great effort to finish wiping the remaining tears that trickled down his trembling cheeks as the minutes passed. The item still sitting in his lap gained Salvatore’s attention just as he heard familiar heels entering the outside hall.
“And put that away,” Salvatore said of the item. “Get back to that later, huh?”
Nico didn’t respond. The small black box disappeared into his jacket pocket all the same. He leaned on the armrest of the couch as the footsteps neared the door.
Carina hesitantly showed herself in the doorway, instantly picking up on the other person in the room although she would’ve seen his vehicle in the garage. Parked next to Nico’s others, which he had never asked to have removed from the property.
“So,” she said, meeting Salvatore’s gaze with sadness radiating back to him, “I see that you know we have a situation.”
“Mmhmm.”
She nodded.
“Um...okay,” she added, as if surprised at his calm demeanor.
Carina finally stepped to the side to allow Frankie to show herself in the hallway.
His daughter glowered at the back of Nico as tears streamed down her face in heavy rivulets.
Still in the practice uniform provided by NYU and with her hair hanging loose, it looked as though her hands had been combing through the strands.
“Frankie,” Salvatore started to say.
She didn’t even hear him. Dragging her fingers through her hair, she snarled at Nico, “Oh, so we’ll go to Vegas, right, babe? Tacky fucking aisle. Isn’t that what you said to me? You’ll marry me and that’s the first thing you’re gonna do, right, baby?”
Both animals in the room scattered as the tension in the room changed to something far worse. Nico’s expression twisted from the taunting, but he stayed quiet. He didn’t even turn around to face Frankie.
“And then you what?” Frankie shouted the question, stepping slightly closer to Nico as she held her new team jacket. “You run to my father to rat me out!”
“Frankie, enough,” Salvatore snapped.
“Are you crying?” she asked, her tone curdling with disgust the closer she came to him. “Why are you crying? You don’t get to fucking cry right now, Nico!”
Salvatore barely had time to react to what happened next.
Frankie whipped that jacket at Nico as she came around the side of the couch fast. “No, you just left me standing there! And you’re fucking crying?”
Nico grabbed the jacket and deflected it at the same time Salvatore grabbed his daughter. Slinging an arm around her middle, he pulled her into the nearby chair.
“Frankie, that’s enough!”
She leaned around her father, pointing at Nico. “Fuck you!”
“That’s enough!”
That time, the entire room went silent. Frankie’s fight fled all at once, and she dropped into the chair with wide eyes up at her father at the same time his bellow echoed back to him. His throat ached from the volume of his shout.
Salvatore couldn’t name one time he yelled at Frankie the way he just did. He had made a great effort as a father to be different than the one which raised him. He wanted to be different.
Better. And he had been.
But goddammit...she needed that.
“You sit down, and you listen to me,” Salvatore told his daughter, forcing every word through clenched teeth while he locked eyes with her, “and you had better listen good.”
He kept her seated on the chair with a hand on both armrests. She pulled her legs up to her chest, soccer cleats dragging across the leather of the chair. Those cleats shouldn’t have made it inside the car let alone his house. He didn’t even give a shit.
“How dare you lay your hands on him or throw something at him,” Salvatore said, his tone making clear it was not a rhetorical question.
His voice edged darkly. No, he wanted her to sit there and sit with the choice she had made, knowing what she did about Nico.
She sunk further into herself, tears trickling and shoulders trembling.
“Maybe you’ve seen me rage at my wife and heard her call me everything but fucking God on a good day, but you have never, ever known a home where we hit one another.
And he has, so how dare you, Francesca Dove. ”
Her big, sad eyes stared up at him hatefully, but guilt swam heavily there.
“He did the right thing,” Salvatore continued, “by coming here and sitting down like a man to speak with me. He didn’t do the thing he wanted to do; he did what he had to. At least one of you knows the fucking difference between those two things because I sure as shit can’t say that you do!”
“Sal,” Carina called behind him.
He glared at his daughter, wishing she could feel a single drop of the disbelief and rage he felt over literally everything. At this point, it couldn’t get worse.
“Salvatore, she did what she had to, as well,” his wife murmured.
“No yelling; it’s bad for us...for the baby,” Sal said after wetting his lips.
He didn’t turn around, but he needed his wife to do the thing that they had agreed one morning in her bed together, because they were trying to be better.
“That’s what we said. And I gotta yell, so I need you to leave, please. Leave.”
“I’m not gonna do that. I’ve sat there, I’ve been her; I’ve—”
“Get out,” Salvatore uttered.
Her soft hiccup followed the echo of her fading heels.
Not once had he looked away from his daughter.
“I am so fucking disappointed in you!” Salvatore hurled at her.
She’d gone quiet during his exchange with Carina. In fact, her tears almost entirely dried up at she stared up at him, so unsure and sad and tortured.
“You could’ve come to me.”
She shook her head.
He nodded.
“You could’ve told me.”
Those tears started up once more.
“You lied to me!”
“I did not, Daddy!” Frankie cried, small and shaking.
“You did! I asked if you were being safe!”
“And we were!”
“That’s not a from here on out, right here and now type of question; it is all encompassing! If you are in trouble, I am your father! It is my job to—”
“St-stop,” Nico mumbled hoarsely from his seat. “S-she can’t t-take that from you. She can’t. I can take that from you, Sal, b-but she can’t.”