Page 15 of Brutal Legacy

I gripped my necklace tight between my fingers and closed my eyes. Well, that and my memories. I was the memory keeper, and if I didn’t house those precious moments, they’d be lost forever.

Alone, in the dark, I let the tears come.

4

GEORGIA

Then

“Make me something,” Tommaso pleaded, holding up a pink sequined bolt of fabric in front of the mirror.

I shook my head and tapped the ash off the end of my illicit cigarette.

“Your father would shoot you if he saw you in that,” I pointed out.

Tommaso pouted. “I would hardly show him. It would just be for me… and whatever in-the-closet rando I invited into my boudoir.”

“And yet, you’d still get shot at the end of the day. Babe, wait until you move to America, and I’ll make you whatever you want for Pride.” I held my pinkie up. “I promise.”

Tommaso sat and set aside the fabric. “I suppose you’re right. God, I can’t wait. Promise you’ll join me next year. You’ll get intodesign school, and I’ll be a hotshot businessman of some kind, and we’ll live together in a fabulous loft, drink margaritas for breakfast, and just be ourselves for once.”

I took Tommaso’s hand. Sure, it was the twenty-first century, but being the only son of a local businessman and pillar of the church, Tommaso had as much chance of being accepted as a gay man in our backward, uber religious little town as a devil worshipper had. “Sure. I can’t wait.” I gave him a wan smile. Would I really get into Parsons one day? I had no idea. Would my father let me leave Castel Amaro? Again, I had no idea, but I doubted it. Since my mother died, he liked to keep me close.

Just the idea of being left alone in the suffocating town I’d been born in was enough to make me scream. I couldn’t stand any of it. The gossipingnonnaswatching from their doorsteps, or the nuns from the convent on the hill. The local school system, whose books were as antiquated as their beliefs, or the fact that anything that wasn’t church, cooking, or farming was frowned upon. If it wasn’t for the internet, people like me and Tommaso would have perished of boredom long ago.

I lay back on my bed and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. Okay, it was supposed to be a smoke ring, but in reality, it was a puff of smoke that brought on a cough.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering learning to smoke. It’s gross.”

“Because my dad wouldn’t like it. I just need to push through… It has to get good at some point, otherwise, why would everyone be so obsessed with it?”

Tommaso peered out the window and down to the garden. At the end, there were stables where a procession of stable hands came and went each day, to his delight.

“You should ask the new boy to show you how to do it.” Tom turned a wicked smile my way. “He seems like he knows all about the kinds of things that would make your daddy angry.”

I sat up and followed his gaze.

Striding out of the barn, a pitchfork balanced on his shoulder, was the new boy. Elio Santori. Thecittaiolo. City Boy. He approached a pile of hay like it was trying to start a fight with him, stabbing it violently with the pitchfork.

“What do you mean?” I wondered idly.

He’d taken his shirt off and only had low-slung, ripped jeans on. His body was something else. He was nice to look at, I’d give him that. He even had some ink. I’d never seen a real tattoo before. In Castel Amaro, tattoos were akin to the Devil’s mark.

“I mean, that kid’s been through some shit, you can just tell. He’s trouble… a bad boy.” Tommaso wriggled his eyebrows suggestively. “I bet he’s a wild ride.”

“If you think so, go and try your luck.”

“I’m not the one he stares at like a juicy steak. He eye-fucks you every single time you walk past him.”

Heat flushed through me. “He does not.”

“He does. I bet my right hand you in your skimpy shorts, or that yellow bikini you wear to swim in out back, are what he pictures when he’s sleeping in the stables … jerking it hard and imagining it was you.”

I threw a pillow in Tommaso’s direction. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Why? Does it turn you on to think about it?” Tom grinned.

Yes.

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