Footsteps (4 page)

As he laved her bruises with his tongue,
Sabina felt him harden between her legs. He looked up at her,
smiling, and reached behind her to the table. When his hand came
back, he held his knife, and her pulse began to skitter. What was
this fresh horror now?

The knife was a simple, silver table knife,
but with a sharp point. It was scummed with hollandaise sauce and
egg yolk. James pushed the point lightly into the notch between her
collarbones. She could tell by the slant of his eyes that he was
watching her pulse throbbing in her throat. She could also tell
that he liked it. Oh, lord.

The worst thing she could do would be to
beg. She could show pain. She could show anger, resistance. Either
of these would please him—resistance only to a certain degree,
enough to make his play interesting. Either of them would cause her
greater pain, but that was not avoidable. But she could never
beg.

Luckily, it was not in her nature to beg.
She waited.

He dragged the point of the knife down
between her breasts, pushing firmly enough to scratch her skin, but
not enough to draw blood. Then he made a left—or, for him, a
right—turn and dragged the point over her left breast. When he
arrived at her nipple, he stopped and pushed harder, his eyes on
hers.

That hurt. That hurt a lot. Finally she
whimpered and shrank back, unable to stop. His eyes caught fire at
that, and took on the dangerous look of a bad boy pulling the wings
off flies. He pushed harder still, and she felt blood begin to
trickle.

His hips flexed under her. “Ah, yes,” he
purred. He took the knife away and cast it aside on the table, then
leaned forward and sucked her wounded nipple, drawing all the blood
from it he could.

He stood and pushed his dishes away from
behind her. Then he set her on the table, pulled her pants off, and
fucked her while her head lay in his half-eaten breakfast.

She made sure to come. She always had to
come.

Elsa rode with her head out the window the
whole way, her ears sailing and her jowls flapping, leaving long
stripes of drool on the side of the car. When Carlo turned onto
Caravel Road, she started to bark, with volume and vigor.

“Elsie wants to see sharks, too, Daddy!”
Trey had to shout over the dog’s ear-splitting din, but he was
hardly averse to shouting.

Carlo was going to have a little chat with
his baby brother. It was hard enough keeping Trey close by at the
beach without worrying that he’d go in search of sharks—which, in
fact, swam these waters occasionally. In all his surfing years,
he’d seen maybe three fins breach the surface, so he wasn’t worried
that Trey would actually find a shark. But he was becoming quite
worried that his three-year-old adventurer would get himself in
trouble looking.

Knowing that Elsa wouldn’t quiet until she’d
been freed from the car and could run off to greet the family, and
not in the mood to shout over her din, Carlo only met his son’s
eyes in the rearview mirror and smiled. Trey grinned back, his
bright, almost triangular smile so like his mother’s it caused
conflict in his father’s heart.

Jenny had been gone nine months, since the
night after Trey’s third birthday party. And Carlo had found the
place in his anger and betrayal where love and loss had been
killed. That was a good place, a place from which he could move
forward. Now he waited for the day when he could look at his
beautiful, adored child and see only Trey and not the woman who’d
given him nearly every physical feature—blond hair, green eyes,
that angular smile. Trey was Jenny’s doppelganger.

Shortly after she’d run off, Joey had made a
crack about whether Trey might not be Carlo’s. He’d meant it as a
joke, a stupid joke, Joey’s specialty, but Carlo had broken his
nose for him nevertheless.

Trey was his. He knew that was true. Jenny
had been twined around him when Trey was conceived and born.
Whatever had happened later, during that time, there had been no
room for anyone but them. So Carlo knew that Trey was his.

He also knew that even if there had been the
remotest chance that he was wrong, he was still right. They shared
more than a name, whether they looked alike or not. That child in
the back seat was his. Period.

He pulled up to his family home, behind
John’s pickup, Elsa by now so excited that she was almost bouncing
on the seat next to Trey, turning back and forth from the window to
his booster seat, licking him and then hurrying back to shove her
head out the window and bark at the people on the walk—Rosa, Joey,
and John. The gleeful dance of her hundred-and-fifty-pound body had
Carlo’s Porsche Macan rocking back and forth. He parked and let her
out first. She bounded onto the walk, and Joey patted his chest,
inviting her to jump up on him—which she did. On her hind legs, she
was nose to nose with his six-foot-tall brother.

Joey took it as his special mission in life
to see to it that everyone misbehaved as much as he did.

As soon as Trey was released from his
booster and had his feet on the ground, he ran over to his uncles
and aunt. Elsa had moved on to cuddles from Rosa, the youngest
sibling, and Joey dropped to a squat to accept into his arms the
tornado that was Trey.

“Hey, Three-peat! How’s it hangin’?”

Trey looked down and around at himself.
“How’s what hangin’, Uncle Joey?”

“Joey.” Carlo raised his voice just enough
to catch his brother’s attention. When he had it, he shook his
head, and Joey grinned with faux innocence. He looked back at his
nephew with the same puckish smirk.

“The sun in the sky, little bro. The sun in
the sky.”

“The sun doesn’t hang. That’s silly. It’s
faaaaaaar away in space.” He raised his hands high over his head.
“It’s a star that comes out in the daytime.”

“Well, you’re smarter than me, that’s for
sure. Wanna go in and see Pop-Pop?”

“Yeah! And sharks! Will you show me
sharks?”

Joey looked up at Carlo and gave him a
Who me?
shrug. Yeah. Great.

“We’ll have to see if we can find one.” Then
he picked Trey up and carried him up the steps and into the
house.

As Carlo opened the hatch to grab their
bags, Rosa and John both came back. Rosa, twenty years old and the
pampered baby princess of the family, wrapped her arms around his
waist. He turned and hugged her back, leaning down to kiss her
temple. “Hi, there. You good?” She’d had a big, angsty breakup a
month or so ago and had almost bailed on her spring semester at
Brown.

“Yeah, I’m okay.” She stepped out of their
embrace and raked her long hair back from her head. Rosa was always
doing something funky to the color of her naturally dark hair. Now
it had heavy blonde highlights, sort of the color of honey. “Might
not go back to the dorm in the fall, though.”

Their father had not brooked any discussion
of Rosa going to college far from home, so she was at Brown, barely
an hour’s drive from this house. She was the only of the brood to
have attended college after their mother died—only Carlo and
Carmen, the eldest, had attended before that—and their father
couldn’t stand the thought of his baby being far away. With the
allied efforts of her siblings, she’d wrested from him the
concession that she could live on campus. Giving up that
concession, Carlo thought, would quickly be something she’d
regret.

Carlo was seventeen years older than Rosa.
She’d been only nine when their mother died, and their father had
been a different man since. It would not be a stretch to say that
during those first years after their mother’s death, Carlo had
developed feelings for his baby sister that were more fatherly than
brotherly.

“Don’t make any snap decisions, Peanut. Give
yourself some time first.”

She gave him a little smile and a nod, and
he handed her Trey’s pack and duffel. Then she headed toward the
house, Elsa trotting behind her.

Carlo watched for a second, feeling wistful
at the thought that the little imp who’d never tired of carrying
home buckets full of broken shells, despite being born and raised
on a beach, was a grown woman. Or nearly grown, anyway. Depending
on one’s perspective.

He turned back to the hatch to see John
reaching in for the last of the bags. “Thanks, man.”

“No sweat. Forewarned? He’s on a tear
today.”

Carlo closed the hatch, and they followed
after their family up and into the house. “What kind of tear?”
Their father’s moods had become erratic lately. A ‘tear’ could be
anything from a high to a low, from hilarity to fury. He wasn’t
crazy, and he was certainly not dysfunctional, but he was
definitely fucking moody. Carlo thought it was due to spending too
much time alone. Their parents’ marriage had been stormy and far
from perfect, but it had been symbiotic, each completing the other.
Carlo Sr. on his own was a man missing a vital organ and feeling
that loss more, not less, with each passing year, especially as
their huge house emptied of their children.

Since Rosa, the youngest and last home, had
gone off to Brown nearly three years ago, the moods had been
markedly moodier. Their mother had been the family balance. Things
were off-kilter without her. Even eleven years later.

“Maudlin. Feeling his mortality, I guess.
I’d say you’re center stage today. You and Luca, if he ever
shows.”

Ah, yes. The old ditty about the
disappointing son who didn’t want his father’s legacy and the
disappointing son the father didn’t want to leave the legacy to. As
he opened the wide, heavy front door to the home he’d grown up in,
Carlo laughed. At least that one came with less yelling and crying.
“Let’s get him to the beach, then, and throw some raw meat in his
way.”

~oOo~

The Pagano house wasn’t directly on the
beach; Quiet Cove was a popular tourist destination in the summer,
and Teresa, their mother, had not wanted to be so close that
beachgoers would be tromping over her garden and crowding the
street in front of the house. And she’d wanted a garden, not a
sandpit, for a yard. So Carlo Sr. had bought her a house not quite
a mile from the shore.

It meant a bit of a trek when they headed to
the beach. When the kids were young, they’d walked it happily, even
carrying their boards. As soon as they could drive, of course,
they’d stopped trundling barefoot down and up the hill that was
Caravel Road, their wetsuits folded down around their waists and
their boards under their arms.

For more than thirty years, Carlo Sr. had
thrown a beach party on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. It
was a crazy weekend to throw a big party on a public beach, because
there were people everywhere, but that had been part of the
brilliance of it, too. What happened every year was that the entire
town of Quiet Cove, its residents and its tourists, ended up
partying with the Paganos, drinking beer out of cups emblazoned
with the Pagano & Sons Construction logo, loading up plates at
a table under a Pagano & Sons banner. It looked like the
Paganos owned the beach. It cost a fortune, but he’d made it up in
name recognition and goodwill. It was nice to have the Pagano name
associated with something good.

That was Carlo Sr.’s family role. To be the
good brother.

These days, Carmen, the eldest daughter,
second-born, lived in a little house right on the beach, with a
private swath of it to call her own. It was down some from the
crush of the public area, and the family met there, using her house
as a staging area for the big do.

This was the kind of crowd Carlo could deal
with—a cookout on a beach, people in bathing suits and board
shorts, wearing sunglasses and baseball caps, kids running around,
the air thick with the mingling aromas of sunscreen, seawater, and
cooking meat. Fuck tuxedos and shiny shoes. Standing in the middle
of the beach, warm sand between his toes and a can of beer in his
hand, wearing nothing but a pair of camouflage board shorts and his
Oakleys, watching Trey bury John and Elsa in the sand, the world a
cacophony of happy people—this was the world Carlo belonged in.

Right now, he was having trouble remembering
why he’d left it.

“Hey, Junior! Grab another tray of burger
meat from the cooler.”

Roused from his reverie by his father’s
gruff voice, Carlo said, “Yeah, Pop,” and headed over to one of the
several giant coolers in which the prepped meat was stored. Carlo
had been right that as soon as their father had been parked in
front of the grill on the beach, his mood would improve. Until dark
today, he would do nothing but stand at the grill, drinking beer
and flipping meat. And he would be happy all the day long. He’d
talk and bicker in good nature with whomever came by to do so.

At the moment, he was on his own. Carlo
brought the meat over and set it on the folding table set up near
the grill. His father nodded and took a drink of his beer. “Thanks,
son.”

“You bet. Need anything else?”

His father gave him a look, and Carlo girded
himself. “You see all this? What I built here—this is important.
This sustains our family. This wasn’t a mistake. It’s not a shame.
It’s an honor, to take this on.”