Page 123 of Red Hot Harmony

“Why do you do that?” I asked, running both palms over my cheeks. “Why do you always assume the worst of me?”

Frank drew a breath, then pushed the door to the office open and dragged me inside.

I didn’t fight. I didn’t want Camille or Ally to hear me being a jackass, and as much as I hated confrontations at this point of my life, this one was inevitable and a long time coming.

No matter how much Frankie-boy liked to pretend he’d moved on and truly forgiven me, we’d never talked it out. We’d never had a conversation about Heidi and the fallout. We’d simply been dancing around this issue for years like two angry cats.

“Because you have a long history of fucking shit up without thinking about other people or the consequences, Dante.”

“I’m very fucking aware. You made sure of that, Frankie-boy!”

“Good.”

“Yeah?”

He strode across the room, his silhouette swimming against the dark backdrop of the sky outside the window. The smoke had finally reached Malibu, coating the mountains and filling the canyons.

“Come on,” I urged him. “Say what you wanna say, Frankie-boy.”

He spun to face me, hands at his sides, features hard. “For the longest time I hated you.”

“No shit,” I croaked.

“I hated you because you took the one thing I really cared about… Family.”

I wanted to dispute that I’d done no such thing, because Janet and Billy were his family, not that whore of a wife who spread her legs for everyone who winked at her, but I held my tongue since my argument wasn’t solid. After all, one got married to start his own family and I’d ruined that for him.

Okay, so the man had a point.

“I hated you so much that I couldn’t breathe sometimes,” Frank went on. “We had something, me and you. We had magic. The kind that doesn’t come around often, and you had to go and wreck it.”

I shivered, the cold hitting me on the inside.

“Why wasn’t that enough for you?”

The question hung between us like an invisible ball, unsure of which way to fly, who to hit first.

“I don’t know what you're talking about,” I muttered, still standing by the door.

“Stop fucking pretending, Dante. You had me, you had my parents, you had the entire fucking world at your feet, and you just threw it all away for a fuck.”

A spasm clutched my chest. Suddenly, my lungs were out of oxygen, and my vision forsook me.

I had to close my eyes to clear the blur, and when I returned my gaze to Frank’s, it wasn’t anger I saw.

It was loss.

As always, my reaction wasn’t adequate. Instead of asking for forgiveness, I laughed. Granted it was a wry, miserable sound. “I thought we were over this. I thought she was in the past.”

“She is in the fucking past, man!” Frank swiped a hand across the surface of his desk, everything in its way but a framed photo sliding to the floor with a crash. “But you and I, we’re not in the past. We’re still here and I’m tired of trying to put everything—all this history—behind because you won’t let me.”

I gaped at him, not quite understanding his meaning. “I won’t let you?” I couldn’t help but laugh again. “We don’t even talk.”

“Well, that’s the problem.” He paused, giving me time to compose myself before the next blow, then added in a harsh whisper, “I don’t want to do this alone. Not without you.”

It didn’t register right away.

The revelation.

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