Heaven and Hell (Heaven and Hell #1)(21)
I buckled up. Sam turned the ignition and the car came to life.
I sighed with deep content and I did this audibly.
Sam burst out laughing again.
I bit my lip to stop myself from doing anything (else) stupid as Sam backed out of the spot, still chuckling and my mind turned to Celeste’s advice because I was getting the distinct feeling I was not holding anything secret.
I pulled myself back on track when we were away and I did this by asking, hopefully casually, “Uh… Luci, that is, Luciana owns five cars?”
“You can call her Luci, I’ll say it before she says it and when she meets you, she’ll definitely say it.”
This was a somewhat weird comment but I had no time to decipher it or ask because Sam kept talking.
“And yeah, she owns five cars. She’s loaded. Her parents are loaded, she’s a trust fund baby and, on top of that, before she hooked up with Gordo, she was a model. A successful one. You see her face, you’ll probably recognize her.”
Oh man. I wasn’t sure that was good.
Sam went on.
“Sayin’ that, about ten seconds after you get over it, you’ll see she’s not a Luciana, she’s a Luci.”
“How is she a Luci?” I asked.
“She’s a Luci because, regardless if she’s sittin’ beside a catwalk at a fashion show in Milan or sittin’ on your deck, drinkin’ a beer, she always acts like she’s sittin’ on your deck drinkin’ a beer.”
I felt my heart flutter because I liked that he liked that because I was the kind of girl who knew all about sitting on a deck drinking a beer and not the kind of girl who knew what it was like to sit beside a catwalk at a fashion show in Milan. And I felt slightly less nervous because I liked that Luci was like that. It was only then I realized that part of my anxiety was about meeting Luciana, going to her party and being amongst her set which was not my set.
But the way he described her, at least she was.
“So, uh,” I started cautiously, “what does she get in your face about?”
“The better question is, what doesn’t she get in my face about?”
I looked from the view of the road, the brilliant blue of the lake stretching out on one side, sharp rises of green mountains dotted with gray stone on the other, to Sam.
“Sorry?” I asked as a prompt.
He glanced at me then back at the road.
“She’s an only child. Gordo was like a brother so she thinks of me as her brother-in-law. Before we lost him, they didn’t have kids. She loves kids and since she can’t have her own and won’t be an aunt any other way, she’s counting on me and she’s impatient.”
I found this open declaration intriguing for more reasons than the fact it was an open declaration.
Before I could say word one, not that I had any clue what to say, Sam kept going.
“She’s desperate for me to hook up. I’m thirty-five, she’s known me five years, Gordo’s been gone one of those. She’s spent that time concentrating on me.”
“I get this,” I said softly, because I did but not for the reason Sam thought I did and I knew the reason he thought I got it because, at my words, there was an intense pulse coming from Sam that hit the air of the car. I powered through the pulse and continued, “My friend Missy lost her husband in a car crash. Sudden. They’d been married less than a year.” I looked out the side window and kept sharing. “I never saw her cry. That was a long time ago and I still have never seen her cry. But she had a full-time job and still, she volunteered for, like, seven charities, went for every promotion going and enrolled in night classes to get her MBA. All this time, she’s never slowed down. She’s done anything she could do to concentrate on anything other than losing Rich, what that meant, dealing with it and moving on. Now she’s a Deputy Director of one of those charities she volunteered for. It’s her life. It’s been years and she hasn’t even dated.”
I told Sam this but what I didn’t tell him was one of the charities she went all out for was me.
By this time, I’d been married to Cooter for five years and there wasn’t much of me left. All my friends had said things, done things, I’d noticed the looks and they all avoided Cooter like the plague and not because he made it clear he didn’t like my friends around the house or me spending time with them (both of which he made very clear), but because they hated him for what he was doing to me and, by that point, they hated him so much they couldn’t be responsible for their actions or their words if they had to spend too much time with him.
But, after Rich died, Missy had approached me three times, each increasingly more assertive, to discuss what was happening to me or, more to the point, what Cooter was taking from me. Finally, I had to lay it out that Cooter and I were just fine, not perfect but happy and I’d done this in a way that was not mean or ugly but definitive.
After that, none of my friends said things or did things (but I still noticed the looks). And, sitting in that Lamborghini, it hit me that they didn’t probably because Missy warned them I was living the dysfunction and, until I got my head out of my ass, there was nothing they could do.
And I got this too. I loved them all enough to know that, even if a man had stripped away most of what was them; I’d take what was left rather than pushing something that might mean she’d take away anything I could get.