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Mariano

M y feet hit the pavement in even strides. The sun was out for the first time in days, and it was burning through the humid air. I pushed through it, feeling the tension inside of me burn away as if a fiery pit burned there.

As of late, the burning never abated fully. From my wife choosing to separate to prove something to her family...

To my wife keeping a dangerous secret from me...

To my grandfather, Everett, dying, and all the subsequent issues mamma’s sister, Charlotte, was causing…

To what my wife had asked of me, not to kill Iggy …

A constant tension seemed to throb underneath the surface of my chest, as if I had developed a new tic, and not even physical activity could silence it.

It drove me.

Sent me racing.

I stopped for a moment, wiping sweat from my brow, and stared in the distance.

Violet, or Viola as my wife called her, had organized a “girls” day for all the women.

They were eating at the place my old man had bought for mamma in town.

He didn’t care to be in the restaurant business, and the investment wasn’t all that profitable, but mamma loved the food, therefore it could bleed my old man dry of money, and he wouldn’t have given a fuck. He wanted it for her.

My wife was with the “girls,” enjoying time doing whatever the fuck “girls” do. Eating and gossiping about everything and nothing, it seemed.

My wife.

She had kept a dangerous secret from me. And I was starting to notice that, the longer she spent with my family, and the deeper in she went, she became more like my mamma and sister in ways that were not always panic-easing to the men around them.

When a woman was more curious about monsters than she was fearful of them…

I groaned, rubbing a hand over my heart.

My wife was making a mark on my hometown too.

Three nights before, The Road House held the celebration of life for Everett Poésy, known to his grandchildren as Gramps.

Sistine had dressed in a denim dress and white cowgirl boots, and her hair waved and fell over her shoulders. Not only did our time in Fiji make her glow, but it was coming from some place deeper. A deeper place that I knew meant she was in love with our life, with me.

“ Aspettare !” she had said, holding up a finger to me, rushing back to spritz some perfume on herself.

“Fuck me sideways,” I had muttered. My eyes had found a lot of women, but my eyes had never locked onto a woman so beautiful in my life.

My wife was, simply put, the most beautiful woman to me .

The village of open-mouthed fucking idiots at the local bar seemed to feel the same. All the men, some I had gone to school with, patted me on the shoulder all night long.

“Damn, bro. Your wife is gorgeous.”

Yeah, no fucking shit. I noticed this when I first set eyes on her. When I first married her to lock that vow down.

“Don’t fuck it up, Mariano,” Benji said to me, handing me a shot of whiskey.

We toasted to my grandfather, his picture on the bar, and then downed it.

“You do, you’ll have men rushing in line for a chance at her hand.”

“A fucking chance,” I had said. “The only fucking chance they’ll get is one at death.”

Benji laughed, as if to say… there goes Mariano again .

Some of these motherfuckers had no clue who we were.

Our family motto was only a saying to them, not knowing it meant something to us.

It meant our word was still good—it had value, which a lot of the world seemed to fucking forget the definition of.

Loyalty as well. Vows. Romance. Ruthlessness.

Whatever had meant something to men back in the day, and usually meant shit in the day we lived in.

Most of the men in town were harmless, at least when they knew I was involved.

We were all cool, but they knew I had boundaries, and they wouldn’t cross them.

Even when a woman wasn’t involved. My old man had taught us that.

We were men, and without boundaries, we would get trampled on.

A man doesn’t get trampled, and even if he’s close to it, he keeps his head held high in the dirt.

He stands like a man.

He dies like a man.

I had toasted to my grandfather again, shot the shot back. Growled low in my throat when I realized how the entire bar was watching my wife dance, who, only an hour or so ago, when we had first arrived, was worried that she was disrespecting the dead by dancing and laughing.

“Nah,” I had said. “This is what Gramps wanted. This was who he was in life.”

“ Va bene ,” she had breathed out, running a hand down her dress, itching to get on the dance floor.

If this town had handed me a beer and welcomed me, as Matteo was known to say, the town had handed my wife a glass of champagne in a mason jar and welcomed her in.

Everyone was in love with her. She was so fucking charming, even frogs would turn into princes at her feet—even without the fucking kiss.

I had unleashed her on the world.

One thing I knew for fucking certain, though. When they looked past her, they would see me. And as the world kept spinning, we would spin into each other, so deeply embedded that we would turn into one. The world wouldn’t see either of us unless they saw us together.

I’d shoved away from the bar and went to her, taking her in my arms. A slow song began to play, and we swayed to the sound of it, our eyes locked.

Her hands felt as soft as silk against the thin t-shirt I wore.

In this part of the world, we didn’t have to dress as we did in Italy.

T-shirt, jeans, boots…that was the uniform.

She kept running her palms over my chest, her cool fingers toying with my shirt, before she moved to my neck, stroking over my pulse.

“I don’t even know what to call this between us,” I whispered in her ear. “It’s consumed me. Fucking consumed me. Always isn’t even enough.”

Before she could utter a word, I leaned down and consumed her mouth. She tasted sweet, like sweet tea and almond cake with a hint of apple.

“My Annie,” I breathed against her mouth as she pulled away to catch her breath. My lips rested on her forehead as we swayed.

“Sing to me,” she had barely got out. Her nails barely scratched up and down my arms, causing goosebumps to rise. Viola had painted her nails a color that reminded me of the gem peridot, and they were almost neon in the dim bar.

So fucking small in comparison to me, but so fucking powerful. She could easily stick her hand through the steel walls of my chest and rip out my heart, when a man triple her size would die before he fucking touched me.

I quietly sang the song to her, leaning close to her ear. The song lamenting about fire and brimstone and hell without the woman he loved by his side.

Bomp. Bomp. Bomp.

My eyes opened to reality.

The sound of a car honking at me.

The sun. The humidity. My saturated clothes. The racing of my heart.

I shook my head, droplets of sweat flying in all different directions. I had been obsessing over my wife—she was a fatal fucking fantasy.

Our local preacher waved at me.

The tension eating me up inside.

I lifted my hand and forced my feet forward.

The restaurant where my wife enjoyed her day with the women was along the Cane River, and even though my feet demanded to go back, I forced them to move me deeper into town, where mamma and Babica both had businesses.

Mamma owned the ballet studio, and Babica had a boutique where she sold her designs.

I sped past the area, flying to the other side of downtown. Music floated out of a garage, its industrial-style doors opened, allowing sunshine through. I could smell the scents of fresh and old oil, along with diesel fuel, from down the street.

Mitch.

He was a mechanic and had opened his own shop years back.

I had spent a lot of time in his garage restoring my old truck.

I had left it behind with my wife at the restaurant.

She loved it. She loved how it bounced when I took her out to the cabins Gramps had in a more rural area of Louisiana.

She loved how the radio was old and had knobs that turn. The windows too.

My old man had given each of his sons a certain amount of money when we were still in middle school—close to reaching high school age. He told us we needed to find transportation. It wasn’t a lot of money. Just enough to buy some old fucking beater.

We all came home with trucks.

We worked on them together.

He had an old car that he fucking loved. He and Mamma still drove around in the growling monster.

All his sons still had their trucks.

There were times when I had brought my truck to Mitch’s garage and worked on it, separate from my old man and brothers.

My old man took it in stride, but looking back, it had wounded him.

I had even caught him eyeing Mitch with murderous intent on his face.

He never made a move on him, but it had felt close.

Between a remark Mitch had made about my old man and mamma causing too much trouble together, to Brando Fausti’s son preferring to spend time with his ex-best friend, it was too fucking much. I didn’t want to see Mitch get hurt, so I backed the fuck off.

Still, back then, it pleased me that something I’d done had hurt Brando Fausti.

He and my mamma had hurt me.

When Mamma had been taken by Olivier Nemours, and he’d crashed the car he’d stolen with her in it, she was a breath away from death. My old man shared her breath.

My old man and mamma were going to leave my sister and brothers, me, as orphans. Husband refused to live without wife, and wife refused to live without husband.

My hands went to my hips as I stared toward the dim garage, music floating out. “Take it…”