11. In Pursuit Of The Heart
11
IN PURSUIT OF THE HEART
Dahlia
The Present
New York City
I pull my arm back and clutch the key against my middle, unable to look him in the eye. A beat passes before I notice his hand closing and slowly moving away.
We stand there, unmoving, unspeaking, lost in whatever memory has just sent a bolt of lightning down our spines.
I know I should say something but I can’t. My tongue goes lame and language evades me. Without a word, he turns and leaves the kitchen. I hold my breath for the full sixty seconds it takes him to walk through my home and out the front door. When I hear it close behind him, I exhale and slump against the island, my own weight suddenly too much for me to carry.
I reach for my phone to call someone, but who? There isn’t anyone.
The only person in the world who I want to talk to right now has just walked out the door and I don’t think I can get him back; I don’t even know who he is anymore. Whoever inhabits that body now isn’t my Alejandro.
Mine died in the fire.
D amiano Vellucci.
Twenty-eight-years-old, third generation Italian-American, born and raised in New York before he was sent to Sicily for eight years when he was seven years old. He returned fluent in three languages, with a slight accent he can’t quite shake, and a deep understanding of what it means to have “a family business.”
Aside from Lyss, whom I’ve known my whole life, he’s my closest friend in the entire world.
The driver leaves us on the corner of Park and 34 th right outside a hideous brick monstrosity the city has the nerve to call an office building.
Damiano gets out first and walks around to open my door. As soon as I step out, he says, “I don’t think this is a?—”
“Shut up, Damiano.”
He presses his lips together and accepts defeat. “All right then…”
He trails after me and drops the heavy, white fur coat on my shoulders. I put a cigarette between my lips but the wind makes it impossible to light the end. By the time it catches fire, we’re already inside the lobby of Rian’s office building which has a strict no-smoking policy.
The security guard Wally and I have serious beef. He rises from his seat and opens his mouth but before the words can leave his lips, I snap at him.
“ Fuck off, Wally.”
I walk right through the glass security gates whose sensors trigger the doors to swing open. However, I don’t have a badge for the building or a visitor’s pass so the alarms start ringing like a bank safe has been cracked open. The elevator doors open and Damiano and I step inside. Made of reflective glass, I watch as six different versions of us blink back at me, my face obscured by cigarette smoke and Damiano with his light blond curls windswept and tousled. We look as poorly matched as water and oil and yet I couldn’t imagine my life without him.
We met around the same time Lyss and I met Rian at The Empress last year and took to each other immediately. There was a brief moment in time where the chemistry might’ve been sexual but all it took was one drunken kiss last May for us to realize anything more than a sibling-like relationship between us would not only be blasphemous but deeply incestuous.
Whereas Li and Rian are childhood best friends, his acquaintance with Rian started when they played on the same football team in high school and again in college. Damiano owns the building The Empress calls home along with a few other smaller properties downtown but his portfolio is mostly filled with warehouses and factories.
An incessant jingle announces our arrival to the fortieth floor, and I step out into the foyer, Damiano close behind.
Despite my abhorrence for all things modern and lifeless, even I can admit how beautiful the foyer is. It’s exactly what modernist design should be; sleek, clean lines and bright colors accentuated by natural lighting. None of the cold, brutal austerity that often exists in 21 st century design lives here. The floors are a soft honey color and the front desk is an elegantly designed wood and marble peninsula, the dream of any receptionist who craves both privacy and style. Behind the front desk, the walls are painted in alternating shades of sand and pearl white. All of it is tied together by an abstract chandelier and a fully furnished sitting area off to the right.
The receptionist whose name I always forget leaps out of her seat upon seeing me. “Mr. O’Neil is in a very important meeting and doesn’t want to be interrupted. Wait! Miss. Rosario?—”
I walk right past her. “Really, is that why he’s not returning my calls?”
I make a beeline straight for the boardroom, and Damiano almost catches me by the back of my coat but I’m too quick. I storm through the frosted glass doors and Rian stops midsentence.
“Am I interrupting?”
I do a quick sweep of the room and recognize the four men sitting at the oval conference table. An assistant, two managers, and Rian’s right hand man and COO—Brendan Kennedy. Confident in my assessment that this afternoon’s meeting isn’t as dire as Rian’s assistant made it seem, I tilt my head in the direction of the door.
“Out,” I instruct everyone in the room.
Rian fixes me with a leveled look and empty expression. His voice is uncharacteristically cool when he says, “I’m in the middle of a meeting.”
I take my coat off and drop it on the back of a nearby chair. Then I take a final drag from my cigarette and drop the sizzling bud into a nearby cup of coffee. “I can wait.”
Brendan hisses through his teeth and gets up. “We can finish this later.”
I flash him a smile. “You’re so sweet.”
Brendan and I don’t like each other. He’s as sexy as he is menacing which is a shame because such a pretty face should’ve never been wasted on such a rotten personality.
“Bite me, Dahlia.”
“With pleasure.”
All four men file out of the room, and Damiano hovers awkwardly in the doorway. “I’m just gonna?—”
“Are you useful for anything ?” Rian asks.
“God put me on this earth to be pretty and good with my mouth, not to play watch dog.”
Rian gets up as if to approach the door, and Damiano sprints away, leaving us alone inside.
His jaw tightens and he waits a moment before turning to me. “Don’t ever storm in on one of my meetings again.”
“You haven’t answered my calls in three days.”
“I was busy.”
“Busy avoiding me. We need to talk about this.”
Rian wanders over to the window and leans against the side table there, crossing one leg in front of the other. “What exactly is there to talk about? The fact that your ex is Alejandro Narvaez or how he has no intention of letting you go?”
“We broke up a year ago?—”
“Not the point, Dahlia. Do you have any idea how much history our families have? How much history we have?” he asks. “Aside from the fact we’ve been friends since college, my family’s position in Barcelona is single-handedly supported by his. I doubt he’ll take kindly to the man who’s fucking the woman he’s in love with.”
I’d be more offended by his statement if something hadn’t just clicked in the back of my mind. “You’re the other Irish family.”
It’s been ages since I’ve thought about it or since it’s come up in conversation but years ago, I remember Sandro was allied with the Walsh and Collins families. The memories are vague, especially since I wasn’t privy to much of the family operation back then, but I recall how much of an issue it was because there was already an Irish family in Barcelona; one that Alejandro was closely tied to. In fact…
“You were the one who gave the call.”
His brows furrow. “What are you talking about?”
“Almost three years ago…you called Alex and warned him about something. About him being followed.” I remember as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. Can remember the weight of the kitchen knife in my hand and how it felt to plunge it into human flesh. “I was there. You saved our lives.”
Rian doesn’t recall immediately but when he does, his back straightens and he pulls away from the table. “That was you?”
I nod. Unsure of what to say next, I await his reply with trembling hands I tuck under the desk. Rian walks over and sits across from me, eyes startlingly blue and lost deep in thought. Fleetingly, I’m reminded of Diego and how his eyes are equally as striking in color. His are darker, more oceanic in color while Rian’s reflect the brightness of the sky.
After what feels like an eternity, he finally speaks.
“You need to be absolutely sure.”
I’m not sure what he means at first.
“You don’t know Narvaez the way I do. You don’t know him as an enemy. I saw the way he looked at you—the way you looked at each other ,” he says. “I’m not going to put the future of my family on the line if this isn’t real. Because he’s going to fight for you with everything he’s got, and I need to know if I’m fighting back.”
“What are you asking?”
“I’m asking if you want this.”
“I already told you. We broke?—”
“A year is nothing, Dahlia. Nothing. He’ll wait a lifetime for you if he thinks he has a chance; it’s who he is. Narvaez won’t give up.”
“Alejandro had his chance to fight for me and he didn’t.”
I just don’t have the capacity for this right now.
The memory runs through me like a curved blade, piercing every vital organ in pursuit of the heart. But I don’t let it reach that far.
“He gave up on me a long time ago. He just hasn’t realized it yet.”
Alejandro
M om and Dad’s place is just as I remember.
A little overgrown, a little unkempt, but such is to be expected when it hasn’t been visited in over a decade.
I dust off their bench and almost sit down when I remember their names should be carved into the wood somewhere. I drag my fingers along the top and feel the engraving buried under layers of green paint. Removing my keys from my pocket, I chip away at each lacquered layer until I get to the wood underneath. Once their names reappear, I tuck the keys into my pocket and sit down, satisfied with my handiwork.
My childhood was spent all over the place but the early years we spent in New York before Lettie was born still live at the forefront of my memory, as vibrant and ephemeral as the day they happened. We never had much cause to come all the way out to Queens, especially as deep as Middle Village, but for the years we lived here, Mom and Dad made the trip every spring.
They met Mom’s freshman year of college. Dad was a sophomore guide during freshman orientation and always said that the earth moved beneath his feet the moment he laid eyes on her. In that moment, he said he knew she was the one. Except, she already had a boyfriend.
Mom could never get through the story of their first year together without dissolving into a puddle of giggles so intense Dad would usually have to stop halfway to give her a glass of water and some ice. She’d laugh herself into a dizzy spell that turned her cheeks red and made her short of breath. I’m not sure how much the ice and water helped but it never deterred Dad from telling the whole story.
He played the long game. Frank, Mom’s boyfriend at the time, had become Dad’s mortal enemy. He’d done all sort of underhanded things to sabotage him. Frank was a sophomore transfer and an honor’s student so they were in most of the same classes. Dad would wait to be the last one to hand in his assignment so he could switch out Frank’s papers with something absurd and illiterate which got him reprimanded by professors on more than one occasion. Frank was also a track runner so Dad paid his roommate to put staples in the soles of his sneakers. Not too many just enough for there to be an uncomfortable, prickling pain whenever he ran.
Mom’s favorite was what she’d called the Dulcolax Dilemma of ’86. Frank was obsessed with Dr Pepper but was the only person in their friend group who drank it. So at parties, someone always made sure to have a bottle just for him.
Well, Dad had had enough of waiting around for Mom to dump Frank so he took matters into his own hands.
By dumping an entire bottle of Dulcolax into the Dr Pepper.
And his plan worked for the most part. Until the party ran out of Coca-Cola and Frank, ever the generous fellow, offered to share his Dr Pepper with everyone. Within a half hour, the situation had become dire. Explosive was Mom’s favorite word. Dad eventually had to fess up to what he’d done when Mom went to take a sip of the soda and he slapped the cup out of her hand.
I never minded that he was a little crazy, Mom had said once. In fact, it was flattering. No one had ever gone to such extreme lengths for me before.
By spring of her freshman year, Mom had already decided she was going to break up with Frank but was insistent on not dating again for a while. When Dad found out, he invited her to a friend’s party out in Brooklyn, convinced that if they spent an evening alone together, he could win her over. The party was a ploy—they’d show up, spend an hour there, before Dad would claim he “wasn’t in the mood” to be around crowds and suggest they get something to eat before heading home.
Only problem? They got lost.
Deeply and catastrophically lost. They ended up on the wrong train going in the wrong direction and took the wrong transfer which took them all the way to the heart of suburban Queens where they thought a bus heading west might bring them back to Brooklyn. Eventually, they gave up and Mom, determined to get out of her sky-high heels, took a break and sat on a park bench.
They stayed here talking until the sun rose. And years later after they had already been married, Mom brought Dad here to tell him she was pregnant with me. Deciding enough time had passed since his escapades in college, he told her all about the grief he caused poor Frank and Mom laughed until she couldn’t anymore.
I don’t think of them often. I try not to. All it does is remind me of the fact Dad isn’t here anymore and Mom is somewhere else, equally out of reach.
All week I’ve felt off balance. Then again, it’s been years of this unsettling sensation, like the entire world has been thrown off its axis and I’m the only one who feels the difference. When Dahlia entered my life, some of that stability had returned, but not all—only enough to distract me.
I sit in the cold for hours, watching children drag their sleighs up and down snowy hills and adults making snow angels without a care in the world. The last night in Barcelona before Dahlia left runs on a loop in my mind without reprieve. I relive every word, every sharp intake of breath, every glossy-eyed gaze. Where did we go wrong? Where did I go wrong?
Dahlia and Rian O’Neil? I’d rather fucking kill myself than have to suffer through another moment of them in the same room together.
She was so conscientious of him and his needs, so gentle and aware as she cleaned his wound and put a bandage over the graze on his arm. I knew immediately that whatever existed between them was much more than the mindless hooking-up Dahlia implied. And as soon as the realization hit me, I was seized by the fiery grip of white-hot panic. My mind and senses shut down, and only my fight or flight instincts remained. The voracious need for survival consumed me and I’ve spent the last few days plotting all the ways Rian O’Neil could be killed with as little inconvenience as possible. Unfortunately for me, the O’Neils and the Narvaezes have history going back decades, not to mention Rian and I share a warm acquaintance that, if we were regular men, might be confused for friendship.
Lost deep in thought, I hardly notice my phone’s been ringing for the last five minutes. The sound is smothered by the insulated layers of my coat pocket and when I reach for it, three missed calls blink back at me. When Dahlia’s name reappears a split second later, I answer on the first ring.
“Be at my place in an hour…please.” The last word is an afterthought.
Dahlia hangs up before I can say anything else.