Page 39 of Forbidden Property
It is so much easier to hate a racist than to love him.
“Don’t expect me to be impressed that you didn’t strangle me,” I say to Renzo, meaning it, but struggling to hide all the other feelings beneath my anger with him. He had no right to kiss me or touch me the way he did while we were trapped together and inspire all these confusing feelings in me.
He could have just knocked me up and left it at that. He didn’t have to have me perched open on the table with my legs spread open. We didn’t have to get to know each other. Renzo tricked me into this painful intimacy where he now wants to keep me and I can barely keep my head above water when I’m in the same room with him.
“I have had hundreds of opportunities to kill you or torture you and each time… I can’t bring myself to hurt you because I don’t see you as less than human at all.”
“What a glowing compliment.”
My biting sarcasm does nothing to stop my heart from racing anxiously. I would say anything to restore my control over myself, but nothing I can think of works. Renzo takes my hand and presses it to his lips which is the worst possible thing he could have done aside from…
“I love you,” he says again, slamming the final nail into the coffin with a damaging thud. I let out a loud, frustrated noise and slam the LSAT book shut, getting up from our otherwise peaceful study session and hustling towards the door. I need space from Renzo right now.
Of course, he doesn’t fucking get it. Renzo closes the distance between us easily with his much larger stride, grabbing my wrist and forcing me to whip around and face him with all my ugly emotions pouring out.
“LET GO OF ME.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to you!”
I turn on him and the adrenaline coursing through me takes control. With Renzo chasing behind me, I push the double doors to the dining room open and find very little air waiting for me outside. I just need to get away from him. Without looking back and without thinking at all aboutwhereI’m going to run away from Renzo in an isolated mansion – I run.
Chapter Nineteen
Renzo
She turns the corner and disappears for a few seconds before I figure out that Geralynn opened the door to the wine cellar. She’s never been down there and doesn’t know how far under the house it extends, but it’s a large enough room that she could get lost in the rooms of wine bottles.
I push the door open and call her name. No response. She’s hiding down there, preferring a cold damp cellar than facing me. With each step down the stairs, the tightness in my stomach becomes impossible to ignore. Is this what my father wanted me to learn? How to love someone?
Why did it have to be Geralynn out of all the women I’ve ever met? I hooked up with plenty of women in Italy who have walked runways in Milan, who owned major social media brands, and others whose families were so deeply involved in “the life” that it felt like we had the same childhoods.
None of them did to me what Geralynn has done with me. She has completely wrapped me around her finger and reminded me of emotions that I haven’t felt since I was a little boy and my father allowed me and my brother Gino to adopt our very own Italian greyhound. My mother refused to allow largedogs into the home and our dog, Ravioli, was the first time I ever felt love for someone who wasn’t my mother or my twin brother.
I loved Ravioli before I ever attached to one of my other siblings. I’m sure Geralynn would sink deeper into the basement if she heard this comparison but… what awakened in me back then was this profound sense of vulnerability that comes with love. The older I got, the more of the “grown folks conversations” my father allowed me to listen in on, the greater my vigilance became.
Look at what love has done to Luigi. Or Michael. Or any number of great men utterly defeated by giving their hearts to a woman. I’m in the dark, dim wine cellar with shelves and shelves of wine that I invested in upon advice from my family in Italy, and I know she’s somewhere down here hiding from me, preferring the possible company of rats to looking me in the eye.
I understand that I’m old-fashioned. That perhaps I shouldn’t have called her all those awful names. But Ilove this womanand I can’t live without her knowing and understanding that somehow, the time we spent together locked up has totally changed me.
“Geralynn, you have to come upstairs.”
My voice sounds dark and ominous in the darkness. I imagine her crouched somewhere like a little mouse, shivering and afraid of me. I can still follow the rules and love Geralynn. This doesn’t have to ruin our lives. Men have done it in the past. There were always rumors that this was the case with Aunt Viviana and the man she loved. He never married her, but to this day, she never speaks ill of him.
The rules are the rules, but I have to follow my heart. I’m not the eldest like Luigi, nor do I have Gino’s capacity to be the lazy one and stay out of the limelight by always underachieving. I need to earn my father’s respect and the respect of the rest of my family. I don’t want to grow old and feel ashamed of how I lived.
I can’t bear the thought of disappointing my father when I’m already just one of his extra sons. He only needed one heir. Nothing less than perfection would ever get my father’s attention. With Geralynn, I can be myself, but I can’t be so selfish as to put aside my entire family simply because I want to fuck some woman.
Even if I love her. Geralynn will understand…
“Geralynn?”
“Go away, Renzo! I’m stuck here until I have this baby and I think I’ll just… I think I’ll just live here.”
“In the wine cellar?”
I follow the sound of her voice, hoping that I can keep her talking so that I can find out where the hell she’s hiding down here. Either I’m close or Geralynn wisens up to my plan because she doesn’t say anything. I walk around the shelves slowly, listening for her breathing and hearing nothing except blood rushing past my ears – a symptom of my own adrenaline rush.
