“Isn’t this all kind of unexpected?” She licks her lips, then stand before me, her tits so nice and full. Her nipples still hard and ready.
I’m still sitting on the edge of my bed, and I wrap my arms around Emmy’s waist. She runs her fingers through my hair, and I inhale her.
“It’s fucking unreal, is what it is.” I laugh, squeezing her tightly. “My friends don’t know what to think. I’m never like this.”
“Your friends mean a lot you?”
“Yeah, those boys are my family. I trust them, completely.”
“You don’t have any other family? At all?” she asks.
I loosen my hold on her and look up. “None at all.”
“Your family ... they were in the mafia?” she asks. That’s when I notice her looking around my room with a discerning eye, really paying attention to the place I live.
“Yeah,” I say uneasily. “They were. But that’s not me.”
“This casino, this penthouse … it doesn’t come from that money?”
“Why are you asking?” I let go of her and rest my arms on the bed. “You digging here, Emmy?”
“Fuck you, Ace,” she says quietly. “I was trying to understand the place you come from, okay?”
She looks at me hard, unwaveringly. And I trust her, because isn’t that what love is? If I say she’s my woman, I’m gonna believe her good intentions.
Otherwise that makes me the sort of man I don’t want to be for her. A man like Grotto, who storms in and takes what he wants, bullies and threatens and withholds.
I don’t play that shit.
“What do you wanna know, Emmy Rose? For you I’m an open book.”
“Good.” She closes her eyes, exhales. “I can’t fall for you if you’re not honest with me.”
“You wanna fall for me?”
“I want a lot of things, Ace.”
“Name them.”
“This was supposed to be about you. Your life. Your fucking million dollar penthouse. It was supposed to be about me trying to figure out how in the hell a girl who serves drinks on your casino floor could fit into this world.”
I move back on the bed, resting my head on the headboard, and Emmy crawls toward me, straddling me as I begin to talk. She runs her hands down my chest, tracing my tattoo with her finger. In the space of a few weeks this woman has found a way to bring my past to the light.
It took five years and Grotto showing up for my friends to do the exact same thing.
“When I moved to Vegas, it was right after my Pops was killed. I didn’t see the murder, but I heard about it. And I knew those guy would come after me next. I took the cash we had in the house—which was a hell of a lot—and split town. Never looked back.”
“You miss it?”
“Loaded question, baby.” I run my hands across her perfect tits, rubbing her nipples with my fingers. “But of course there are things I miss. My ma’s spaghetti sauce and my sisters yelling at me to drive them somewhere. I miss the neighborhood.”
“But there’s other stuff you don’t want to go back to?” I feel the wetness of Emmy’s pussy against my thighs. Oh, this woman is making me insane.
“I did a lot of shit before I moved here, for my father,” I tell her. “I killed for him. And worse.”
“There something worse than death?” Emmy asks me, her eyes locked on mine.
“I think threatening people, putting them in a position to live their entire goddamned lives in fear is worse than death.”
“I agree with that,” Emmy says, frowning.
The air in the room is heavy, but it’s pushing us together. We’re going to the places I swore I’d never return. But with Emmy, I want to.
She opens her mouth again, her cryptic words revealing pieces of her past in ways that details never could.
“What is life if you live in a cage?” she asks.
“You know about cages?” I swallow hard.
“I know about feeling trapped. Feeling like you’re stuck.”
“You said you went to college though. That isn’t so stuck,” I answer.
“My parents had to die for me to get free. And that’s fucking twisted,” she says, shaking her head again. “It’s messed up, right? Life shouldn’t be that hard.”
She pats my chest, smirking. Like she fucking gets it.
“So what you’re saying, Emmy Rose, is that you never got to be a kid. Never got to play?”
“Doesn’t sound like you had much time to play either, Ace.”
“It’s actually Adrian. Adrian Genova.”
“Shit, that’s kinda nuts.” She laughs. Because I guess when you unload like that with another person, you get to a point where all you can do is laugh. Otherwise you’d drown in your fucking tears.