Page 47 of Taunt Me (Dark Odyssey 2)

She looks like the goddess she is.

She rises to her feet and stands by her bed, bringing her hands together with the grace of a ballerina.

I glance at the book on the bed again and… remember it. It’s the poetry book she read to me in our time spent in the meadow. It was the first time I knew I loved her. It’s a different feeling to declaring a woman yours.

“I remember the book,” I state and the hint of a smile tugs at the corners of her mouth.

“You do?”

“Always baby. I remember how your eyes would light up when you read Tennyson.In Memoriam.”

She looks away and her gaze lands on the mirror. Another reflection is in there. It’s us. This is us ten years later.

“In memoriam…Be near me when my light is low, when the blood creeps, and the nerves prick, and tingle; and the heart is sick, and all the wheels of being slow...” I recite the verse I remember from the poem. I remember it for the way her eyes used to sparkle when she read it.

She looks back to me, surprise suffusing her beautiful face. Of course she would be shocked to shit that a mobster like me would remember such a thing. I’m surprised I remember too but over the years I carried pieces of her in my heart to remember her.

“Be near me when I fade away.” I continue and a tear runs down her cheek.

That stuck in my mind because I wondered what it would mean to fade away.

Over the years I think I came pretty close because the man I was even days ago was on the edge and at risk of losing everything.

I don’t remember much else of the poem. What I said though is enough to let her know what she means to me. She knows I’m not the romantic she probably deserves but what I thought counted was - I tried to be what she needed and I’m still doing it. I will still fucking do it because the look on her face says I’ve lost her all over again and she’s about to dish me that explanation she was going to give me yesterday.

“Gabriel Giordano, you will not fade away. You will be remembered long after you walk this earth. But you don’t need me to be near you to be a legacy, or a legend. Me though… I don’t want to fade away.”

“I won’t let you,” I promise her and I mean it.

She shakes her head though. “You can’t decide that.”

“I just did. I’m deciding it.”

“You have no control over what can or can’t happen. No one has.” She shakes her head.

My breath hitches and I want to tell her she’s wrong. I can’t though. “So, this is it?”

She nods slowly. “It has to be.”

“Why?”

Sadness comes into her eyes, tainting the shimmer of any love I may have seen in her for me. “I’m leaving this life behind, Gabe. I’m leaving this.” She waves her hand around and clenches, making a fist.

“Your family? You’ll leave them?”

“Not exactly. I mean I’ll be in touch. But in the sense that I may see them over the holidays if I choose to. Thanksgiving, Christmas day, a phone call here and there to check in on them but that’s all. It will be different for you. I …can’t see you at all.”

I bite down hard on my back teeth and feel my blood boil and start to simmer.

“Why the fuck not, doll?”

“Gabe… your family is known. I’m just going to say it. People know you as a crime family. You have enemies, you have friends that could turn enemies. I can’t be with you because of who you are and it’s not because I don’t feel the same way I always did about you. I don’t want to live my life in fear ever again.” Tears roll down her cheeks. She wipes them away and steels her spine and continues to explain. “I don’t want to live in danger, or live the next ten years of my life scared that something will happen to me. I’ll get taken, or someone will die. Or I’ll do something and it will cause death.”

My lips part to tell her I’ll protect her from everything, but I stop.

I can’t say it.

I can’t tell her that, because I can’t do it. I can try and I can die trying but I know the life she means. She wants the vanilla.

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