Page 48 of Forbidden Surrogate

Peter shrugs. “I don’t mind it.”

“Really? You like randomly leaving for Pittsburgh? Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

Again, the men in my family remain disturbingly nonchalant about their romantic lives. Maybe our family is too big and crazy for them to have a powerful drive to breed and populate the earth, but outside of fulfilling their immediate needs, these men are downright uninterested in relationships. Or starting families of their own.

I guess I used to be like they were – too cynical about the world to give a shit about having a baby or starting a family. Ironically, falling in love with a man I wasn’t married to is what changed everything for me. I didn’t try to keep it a secret when I should have, and I paid the price.

“I don’t need a girlfriend to stay satisfied,” Peter says, clearly trying to get under my skin with his gross guy-response.

“Ew.”

“What? It’s true. Plus, if I had a girlfriend, I couldn’t stay up with you tonight and listen to you bitch about your problems.”

“Is that your plan?”

“You seem like you need a friend,” Peter says with a shrug. I hate feeling like he pities me, but I shouldn’t hold his moments of kindness against him. Nobody outside our family knows that Peter is a teddy bear deep down. Mikey might have the giant scar on his face and the missing eyeball from the botched job in Pittsburgh a decade ago, but Peter has the sharp angular face and features that make strangers’ blood run cold.

He doesn’t look like the stereotypical Sicilian from the movies, but if you go back to Italy, you see many men witha similar appearance to my cousin – copper hair, eyes like a Siamese cat, and a prominent Roman nose.

“You need a girlfriend way more than I need a friend,” I mutter, not trying to bethatItalian cousin, but slipping into the role effortlessly regardless. When you’re cooped up the way I’ve been for the past few months, gossip becomes your lifeline.

“Is that what you said to your brother?”

“I intervened,” I say simply, hoping that Peter doesn’t pry into my activities. I might need to use the same strategy on other members of my family, and I would rather keep some of my secrets.

Peter chuckles, not taking me seriously in the slightest. “What do you mean by that? You set him up with a black woman?”

“Something like that.”

Peter’s visceral reaction fills me with rage. I suppress my outward response, but make no mistake, I feel the bitterness tightening in a firm knot at the base of my stomach. If they didn’t all think like this, I could be with the man I loved. If they didn’t all think Italian blood gave us some sense of superiority over other people, I wouldn’t have to worry about his skin color and he wouldn’t have had to worry about mine.

If I were anyone else except Angela Taviani, I could have escaped my husband and instead of living in this humiliating captivity, I could be with the only man I met who understood my passions in life.

“No thanks,” Peter says, affirming my belief that his visceral reaction to interracial relationships is disgust. “I don’t care to taste the rainbow.”

I tell myself I’ll hold back from making any accusations that might land me in an unpleasant argument with an arrogant Italian man, but I can’t help myself. Luigi and Delphine taught me something: I have more power than I realize.

“You’re so racist,” I say to Peter without hiding my scorn.

He scoffs at me indignantly. “What? You wouldn’t fuck a black guy.”

He doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know why my ex-husband took a mallet to my feet.

“You’re racist. Period.” I want to stay in control here, especially because I’m pushing myself to stand up to a man who could destroy me – like all the men in my family. They’re proud of the fear they inspire.

“I don’t like the way you responded right there,” Peter says calmly, but with underlying malice in his tone as he continues accusingly.. “It’s a suspicious response.”

“What’s suspicious about me being with a black man?” I’m pushing him again, and my heart races with fear that I’m slowly gaining control over.

Peter’s next words slam into me like a brick. The ugly reality of the world I live in as the member of a “proud” Italian family.

“You don’t seem like the type to be into thugs.”

They think there are tiers and levels to hatred, but all the bigotry and bullshit leads to the same place. The pain in my body. The pain that separates me and the man I love.

“The man I slept with wasn’t a thug,” I say in a low voice that barely contains my anger. “He was the lead dancer at my ballet company and a beautiful man.”

He doesn’t know how rare it is to find a man in the dance world who doesn’t prefer other men. Devin grew up with parents celebrated on Broadway who encouraged his interests. When wemet, skin color didn’t factor into the equation. At least not for me. I thought I could live in a dream world where we loved each other and it didn’t matter.

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