Page 29 of It's Always Sonny

“Here, let me text you my number,” she says.

“You don’t need to—”

“I want to, sweetie.” She already has my number in her contacts from the itinerary, and she waits and watches as I pull my texts up.

“There it is!”

“Add me to your contacts.”

“Um …”

I freeze. I’ve forgotten how to talk, let alone where to press on the screen to add Lisa Luciano—hugger of huggers, the most maternal, nurturing, loving woman I’ve ever met—to my contacts.

She touches my screen and adds herself for me. “There you go. Now we can keep in touch! I’m sorry to run. Promise me we’ll have time to really talk, okay?”

All I can do is nod.

And because he’s like a shark and my emotion is the blood he smells in the water, Sonny approaches when his mom and aunts leave.

Talk about timing.

I’m feeling tender from the moment with his mother, so I don’t have time to repair the cracks in my walls when he comes over. He’s so tall and broad, and even though this cabin isn’t tiny, it doesn’t have space for the two of us, especially not with his lips quirking up. Sonny’s solar eclipse smiles are one thing. This small, almost uncertain one steals my breath.

“That was really nice of you to agree to help my family this week.”

I want to spit out a sassy retort, because I feel too vulnerable and exposed, like a deer in an open field surrounded by hunters. But if he finds out I didn’t know, then will he think I was actually as excited to see everyone as I pretended to be?

Was I really pretending?

“No problem, Santino,” I say. Calling him by his given name is my only power move here, so I take it.

But it was the wrong move. Rather than bothering him, using his name is like a billboard announcing I’m as thrown as he is. The uncertainty on his face vanishes, replaced by a confidence every bit as alluring and far more familiar.

He owns me, and he knows it.

So what do I do? I smile until my cheeks hurt—which they do almost immediately—because this is not my natural state. Even when I’m happy, I’m not a smiley person. I’m a smirky person.

“I’m glad to hear it’s not an inconvenience,” Sonny says. “I hope you have fun.”

“I think I’m supposed to say that to you.”

“I always have fun,” he says. “You know that.”

“Oh, I remember.”

“So you haven’t been able to forget me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Didn’t you?”

Why does he smile at me like this is delightful banter instead of a casual, totally meaningless conversation between two people who used to care about each other but definitely do not anymore?

And why do I hear Shakespeare in my head telling me the lady doth protest too much?

Shut up, Shakespeare.

I have to shut this whole chat down, because Sonny is relentless. He’s like a missile that can get past any defense system, and what’s worse is once he’s past it, you find you want him there. You want him to destroy the perfectly ordered infrastructure you’ve so carefully erected. You can’t wait for it to crumble.

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