Page 46 of Forbidden Property
Gino laughs, implying with his tone that I’m dramatic for expecting my twin brother to maintain a relationship with me.
“Miss me?” Gino asks. “You could have called earlier.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Nicki told me you’ve been busy.”
I don’t know how much Nicki told him, but I hate the idea of anyone having any information that could lead to them tracking her down or hurting her.
“How much do you talk to Nicki?”
Gino is mentally agile enough to avoid answering my question directly. “Not much, honestly. I hear from her once in a while.”
“Heard from her recently?”
“I haven’t heard from her any more than I’ve heard from you,” Gino says. “Want to come out tonight?”
“I can’t.”
Geralynn’s baby bump is huge now and I can’t bear the thought of leaving her alone at night. Gino doesn’t know all of this, I assume. But maybe he talks to Nicki more than I think. I barely keep track of my sister, although I know she has kept track of me and Geralynn throughout this entire ordeal.
“Why not?” Gino asks.
I grunt. “I have a feeling you know why not?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you think I know Nicki couldn’t have done this alone?” I snap at my brother. He acts purposefully obtuse like we aren’t carved from the same hunk of marble, in eerily similar form at that.
“Nicki never told me how that ended up,” Gino says, playing innocent. I doubt that Nicki has kept much of this to herself. She must have gloated – I can’t imagine hernotgloating.
I stop him dead in his tracks. “I don’t want to talk about the baby.”
He knows. I can tell that Nicki updated him on everything based on the way he smiles in response to my statement. My siblings are nothing if not total nuisances. Gino waits a long time and then I hear a voice that sounds eerily like mine, reflecting the word back to me with terror that I simply don’t feel. “Baby?”
He knows. Again, the tone of his voice gives me all thei nformation I need. Luckily, he doesn’t sound judgmental about it, but his next question doesirkme.
“You’re going through with it?” he asks before I can respond, as if that were ever a question.
“Of course I’m going through with it.”
Gino can’t hide that this surprises him. Why should it? I signed a contract. If Nicki told him anything, then maybe she told him about the details of her sick little contract.
“With a black girl?”
I don’t want the judgment implied by Gino’s tone to bother me, but it does. I’m even more defensive than I would have been before I confessed my love to Geralynn and before I dedicated myself to becoming a better person for her. I want her to choose me at the end of this, because she gets to walk away with my money and the baby no matter what.
“Yes. With a black girl.”
“You called me the worst thing in the world when I brought home that mixed chick in Mallorca. And you poured a jug of your piss all over her while she slept.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you think that helps? Do you think that changes what you’ve done?”
Gino doesn’t sound angry, but he’s my twin brother and I know he shares my capacity to share his true feelings whenever he chooses. There’s a thinly veiled undercurrent of outrage in his voice. Is he really so angry about that biracial Italian girl? I poured a jug of my piss all over her because I saw her first. Ibought her that first drink. I wanted her and she still chose my brother. I might have made it about race, but truthfully… My brother stole my first chance to work Geralynn out of my system.
That’s what I thought at the time. The poor girl was only collateral damage.
