Old Flame: Dante’s Story by Sam Mariano

12

Colette

Makingcupcakes gives me something to do to pass the time once we get home, but having Dante stand against the counter with his arms folded over his massive chest sets my nerves on edge. Despite his claim that I had too much wine while preparing and eating dinner, he opened another bottle as soon as we got home.

I grab my glass and take a long swig as my gaze is tempted toward him again. I see him shift out of the corner of my eye and I want to investigate, but I do my best to pretend he’s not here. Replacing my wine glass on the counter, I resume scooping cupcake batter into the paper-lined cups.

Dante moves too obviously in my direction and I can no longer ignore him. I look up at him as he tips the wine bottle and refills my glass. My gaze drifts to his strong arms—a real weakness of mine. Now that we’re home, he’s taken his dinner jacket off. He has the white sleeves of his dress shirt casually rolled up to just below his elbow, his strong, lean arms on display. I can see the pronounced veins in his forearms and I want to reach out and trace one with my finger.

I sigh, my heart and mind teaming up to torment me with memories of those strong arms wrapped around me, making me feel more secure than I ever had before.

And God, how I missed him when I first left. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I loved him so much, I craved the life I saw us having, and I knew I could only have it with him. Dante isn’t like other men. He’s not replaceable.

I surprise myself and him by asking quietly, “When you came to the flower shop that day, why didn’t you warn me?”

He sets the wine bottle back on the counter and plugs the cork into the mouth of it. “I did,” he says, simply.

My eyebrows rise and I drop the spoon in the bowl, turning to look at him. “Excuse me? No, you did not.”

“Yes, I did,” he answers calmly. “Not explicitly, but all the information was there, you only had to put it together. I swore to you I’d never set foot in the flower shop again after you left, so my presence there alone should have been enough to make you alert. The fact that I knew you were engaged should have told you I’d been keeping tabs on you, and the fact that I asked you not to fucking go through with it and to come back to me should have painted the rest of the picture. I wanted you back, and you knew it, but you told me to go away. You made your bed, Colette. I’m sorry if it’s uncomfortable.”

“That’s not—I don’t mean telling me you want me back. Any normal ex could say that and it wouldn’t mean, ‘if you don’t come back, I will murder your fiancé.’ That’s where you needed to be much more explicit.”

“More explicit?” he demands, his dark eyebrows rising. “You knew what you signed up for, Colette. For Christ’s sake, we were going to get married! Apparently that’s something you’ll sign up for with more than one person, but not me. It meant something to me. For better or fucking worse, that’s the promise, right? But you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain.”

“We weren’t married, Dante. We weren’t even formally engaged!”

“You knew my intentions,” he states, not accepting that defense. “We talked about getting married, we talked about the family we were going to have together, we bought this fucking house,” he says, looking around at it resentfully, almost like it became his prison once I left it. “We had a life. We had a plan. We had a commitment, and you walked away from it.”

“You let me,” I remind him, quietly.

“You were young,” he states, flatly. “I thought it was a mistake you needed to make. I thought you’d realize it was a mistake and come back home. I thought you’d make it right and we could get back to how things were.” Shaking his head, he says the meanest, most upsetting thing he has ever said to me. “You disappointed me.”

I grab onto the counter’s edge to keep myself steady, but my heart freefalls out of its cavity, hits every rib along my rib cage, and splats somewhere on the floor of my stomach. “You really put all the blame on me, don’t you? It doesn’t matter that I was afraid, or that I had a legitimate reason to be—”

“Legitimate reason, my ass. You should have trusted me. I know I handled the situation like an asshole, but I thought you knew me well enough to know I’d never lay a hand on you in violence, let alone kill you. We weren’t Mateo and Beth, we were Dante and Colette. Entirely fucking different people. Entirely different relationships. You left me over something Mateo did. How fucking fair is that?”

“Fair?” I demand, wide-eyed. “You all but accused me of being inappropriate with Mateo on the day Mateo killed his girlfriend for cheating. You acted like you caught us in the act when all I was trying to do was comfort a grieving friend! Where the fuck was my mind supposed to go, Dante?”

“It wasn’t just cheating, there was more to it with Beth. Shit you didn’t know because you didn’t bother hanging around long enough for the dust to settle. Once shit got real, you couldn’t get out of here fast enough.”

“Yes, because I wanted to live!” I stare at him, wide-eyed, not understanding how he still isn’t getting it.

“Because you didn’t fucking trust me,” he says.

“With my life? No, I guess after that, I didn’t,” I admit, shaking my head. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Beth trusted Mateo—”

Not letting me finish, he seethes, “Beth trusted Mateo? Mateo trusted Beth and she turned out to be a fucking rat.”

That knocks the wind right out of my sails. “What?”

Dante shakes his head, looking off irritably at the kitchen cabinets, then back at me. His dark eyes flash with fury and he says, “She didn’t just sleep with someone else, Colette. She slept with a cop. She tried to take Mateo down. Tried to turn fucking witness and get him put away. What was he supposed to do, huh? She knew what he would have to do if he found out. That bitch gave him no choice but to kill her.”

My heart beats faster than it should when I’m standing still. I search my memory for some sign that she was trying to turn on Mateo, something she might have said that struck me as odd, but nothing surfaces. “I don’t…” Looking back at Dante, I ask, “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Because my whole fucking world was in chaos, Colette. My brother was heartbroken, we had a mess with the cops on our payroll since we had to deal with one of them—everything went to hell because of what she did. I had a lot on my plate, and I didn’t know I had a time limit on how fast I needed to report back to you with all the information to keep you from abandoning ship.”

“But I asked—you said, ‘does he need another reason?’ when I asked, like it was just the cheating.”

“Even if it was just the cheating bullshit, it would have been enough,” he says, not at all apologetic. “Selfish fucking assholes who are more than happy to reap all the benefits during the good times but cheat when shit gets hard deserve to die. I make no apologies for that stance. But you weren’t going to cheat, so it wasn’t your fucking problem—or so I thought.”

“I did not cheat on you,” I state, carefully. “That’s the problem, right there. You say I didn’t trust you, but you’re the one who didn’t trust me. I didn’t want to die over a misunderstanding. I would have never cheated on you, but I don’t know how sure you had to be that I was doing wrong. If you walked in on me, naked in bed with another man pumping inside me, then sure, fucking shoot me, because it would never happen. But if hugging your brother when he’s mourning a loss—as far as I know, at least—is over the line for you… then we have a difference of opinion, and given the penalty is death, it was an irreconcilable difference.”

“I don’t know why you think we’re so fucking sloppy we kill people if we aren’t sure they’re guilty,” he states. “It wasn’t a guess that Beth fucked someone else, it was a documented fact. We don’t carry out executions on a hunch, Colette. We’re a little more fucking diligent than that.”

“Well, you wouldn’t tell me anything, Dante.”

“It was business. It was none of your concern.”

I shake my head, turning back to the bowl of batter and carefully picking up my spoon. “It was my concern,” I inform him. “I didn’t mind playing along with your chauvinistic bullshit as long as I knew, at the end of the day, you really respected me and viewed me as a partner, an equal. And I thought I knew that—until Beth happened, and all of a sudden, I didn’t rate high enough to get any answers. None of my loyalty mattered, my actions with Mateo were suspect even though I had a completely normal reaction. That was bullshit, Dante. Lay all the blame on me if that’s what you need to do, but it’s bullshit. You could have handled things a lot better. You could have been more communicative, more open. You could have treated me like your partner that you were so damn committed to rather than treating me like someone untrustworthy, someone who had better be careful not to step the wrong way and piss you off. I was afraid of you, Dante. I wasn’t afraid of you before.”

Folding his arms over his chest again, he falls silent, glaring across the kitchen while I fill the rest of the cupcake holders. Once I’ve finished, I take them over and pop them in the oven. After setting the timer, I return to my wine glass, grab it, and chug the whole thing.

Now I kind of wish I hadn’t decided to make cupcakes, because I am drained. All I want to do is go climb into bed and wake up tomorrow to find it’s my wedding day and all of this was a dream. I won’t even get married. I’ll call Declan and tell him I can’t go through with it, then I’ll find Dante and tell him not to kill Declan because we’re over. Once everyone is safe, I’ll change into casual clothes and go to the flower shop. During the slow times, I’ll find a new apartment to live in all by myself since I let my last lease lapse when I planned to move in with Declan, and I’ll start saving up money to travel alone to the places I went with Dante. I’ll see what the world looks like alone, and hell, maybe I’ll never come back to Chicago, because the more geographical distance there is between myself and Dante Morelli, the less the chances of him retrieving me.

Trying to marry someone else was my mistake. Maybe he would have left me alone forever if I hadn’t tried doing that.

I knew he was the “if I can’t have you, nobody else can either” type when I started dating him, so really, this is my fault. I should have taken him more seriously. I shouldn’t have tried to move on because I knew he was crazy.

I am basically the one who killed Declan, and for that, I deserve to pay.

And pay I will, in the grossest way possible. I’m a prisoner in the home of the man I never stopped missing, but I can’t love him anymore.

Forced to be here, but unable to be with him.

Torture. This is going to be torture.

Perhaps it’s what I deserve.

Putting the now-empty wine glass down on the counter, I look up at Dante’s handsome face, still stony with aggravation. My cheeks feel warm from all the alcohol and I need a shower to wash this day off me. “Will you take the cupcakes out if they’re done before I come back down? I need to take a shower and change out of this dress.”

Dante nods, and I head upstairs without another word.