Vanni: A Prequel (Groupie Book 4) Read online

  My throat tightens. Yes, I suppose I could, but there is no way. Not now. I shrug. “Like Donald said, it isn’t a whole lot of money. I’d rather have it in the bank than gamble it on some kind of what if.”

  She nods as her features relax on her face. I can tell she’s relieved that I won’t be pursuing a career in music, but I really can’t understand why. Like being a waitress in a New York City bar was any more secure.

  It’s a moot point, so I decide to let the subject drop.

  We compromise on dinner out by stopping in Cynzia’s, where I pick up my check and schedule. “You can take more time if you need it, Giovanni.”

  I know Santino must be concerned. He actually got my name right.

  “I’m fine,” I assure him. “Everything is done anyway, and sitting around that quiet house is driving me crazy. I could use the money, man,” I finally admit, which softens old Santino even more.

  “Fine. I could use some help tomorrow. Dinah’s due any day, so she finally took her maternity leave.”

  “I’ll be here with bells on,” I promise.

  “Just the hairnet!” he calls after me.

  It’s after nine o’clock in the evening when we return home. I carry our leftovers in a greasy flat box, which won’t fit inside our loaded refrigerator.

  “Can’t we give this back to the church or something?” I ask Lori, but she shakes her head.

  “It’s perishable. Speaking of church, who is supposed to be here tomorrow when they come for Susan’s things?”

  “Shit,” I breathe as I bring my hand to my forehead. I had completely forgotten.

  “I’ve got a late shift tomorrow,” she says as she finally finds a spot for the storage container full of our leftover pizza. “I can do it.”

  I smile at her. She really has been my rock through this whole troubling period. I know there are no words to tell her how much that means to me. “Thanks, Lori.”

  She stands to her feet and slides her arms around my waist, linking her hands behind my back. I bend for a kiss. “You taste like wine,” I mutter against her lips.

  “So do you,” she whispers back.

  I lift her easily into my arms, cupping her ass with both hands as I bring her mouth to mine for a more thorough exploration. She shudders against me. “Let’s go to bed,” she begs.

  “Let’s stay here,” I offer instead, depositing her on the kitchen table. Her eyes widen as she stares up at me.

  “Vanni,” she says with a slight shake of her head.

  “Why not?” I ask as I pin her to the table with my weight on top of her. “Who’s going to stop us? It’s my house,” I finally say out loud.

  She tries again. “Vanni. That’s just the vino talking.”

  “Then let’s listen what it has to say.” I bury my face in her neck, dragging my mouth along her sensitive skin.

  I don’t care if it’s the wine, frankly. I just need to feel something. I’m tired of feeling so fucking empty. Everything flows through me like wind through a dead, hollow tree. My hands are urgent as they slide up her body. It is such a warm body, so smooth under my palm. I rise to a standing position above her, keeping my eyes on her face as I peel away my shirt, which makes her lick her lips in anticipation.

  She’s mine now and I know it. I can’t help but smirk in self-satisfaction as I crawl in between her legs for one of the best meals available to me on that table now that lovingly prepared Italian feasts were no longer an option. I spread her legs even wider before one of my large hands holds Lori open, to study her under the bright light. My tongue finds her clit easily and she writhes around me as I work my magic. Each cry gets louder than the last. It gets me so pumped. I feel so powerful, like a genie, there to grant her every wish.

  I roll her onto her stomach and I take her from behind. I don’t ask for permission. She’s begging me to fill her, and I’m more than happy to oblige. It’s all I want to do. Blood pumps through my body as I start to feel something again, finally. Sure it’s something titillating, something naughty, but it almost has to be. Like jumping out of a plane or riding a bull, it’s an adrenaline rush to push back at some of the boundaries I had always accepted.

  By the time I come I utter a warrior cry.

  We spend another night on that tiny, cramped sofa in the living room. I know I’ll have to buy bedroom furniture again, considering I had decimated every single piece it in my bedroom upstairs. I’d destroyed the bedroom itself, which poses the question of what other rooms I can use going forward. The master bedroom on the ground floor is the largest of the three, but I wonder if I’m even capable of moving anything into Susan’s room after all her things are gone.

  I’m glad I picked up a shift at Cynzia’s. The busy shift keeps me hopping all afternoon. I figure old Santino told everyone about my Aunt Susan, because the customers tip me handsomely all day long. My wallet nearly bursts a hole through my pocket by the time I head home.

  When I open the door, I smell a glorious aroma from the kitchen. I smile as I head straight for the back of the house, where Lori prepares our meal. I slip my arms around her waist and bend to kiss her neck. “This is an unexpected surprise.”

  She smiles wide as she turns for a kiss. “I was here all day, waiting for the church to pick up your aunt’s stuff. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah,” I nod as I peer over her shoulder to see what she’s cooking. “What smells so good?”

  “Roast chicken, garlic potatoes and steamed broccoli.”

  I laugh. “I think that’s the healthiest meal ever prepared on this stove. It may go into shock.”

  “I can cook all that other stuff,” she says. “I can make anything.” She spins around into my arms. “But I thought it may bring up too many bad memories. I know I’m just a pale substitute for the real thing.”

  I hold her tight. “You are no substitute.”

  She gives me a happy smile as she pulls me closer. “We can have a new start, Vanni. Your house. Your future. Our future,” she corrects awkwardly, hopefully. I’d never thought about a future I’d share with somebody else before. Right now it sounds damned good. I reward her with a deep kiss. She melts against me for a long, sweet moment before I push her away with a smile.

  “Feed me first, woman,” I tease, which makes her giggle.

  I head over to the table in the corner. I avoid looking at the kitschy salt-and-pepper shakers on the table. Aunt Susan collected them. She had a whole shelf devoted to them in the china cabinet in the formal dining room. She would rotate them out on a weekly basis, almost like a ritual. “It’s the only way I’ll get to enjoy them all,” she’d say when I poked fun at her for it.

  Now looking at them reminds me of all I don’t have, which is something I’ve been trying to avoid like a bad habit after the last eleven days. I take them from the table and head straight for the china cabinet.

  Only I discover as I pass through the swinging door to the formal dining room that I no longer have one. “Lori!” I holler.

  She runs in behind me. “What?”

  Her sweet voice does nothing to calm me. “Where’s my aunt’s furniture?”

  “They picked it up.”

  “What does a church need with a china cabinet?” Then it dawns on me what is also missing. “Where are the salt-n-pepper shakers?”

  She seems reluctant to answer, sensing my darkening mood. “The people from the church. Susan wanted to give them something to remember her by. She assigned them all.” Her eyes fall to the ones in my grasp. “She wanted you to have those.”

  I look down at the Laurel & Hardy figurines. We had spent many Saturday afternoons watching these shows after I came to live with her. I remember how her laugh was always so clear and true, full of life. It was contagious. Eventually I laughed more because her joy was infectious, rather than the slapstick comedy on the screen.

  My throat tightens as I glance around the bare room, left only with portraits on the wall. “Where am I supposed to put them? Christ,” I say, empo
wered by the forbidden word. “What else did they take?”

  For some reason I had believed they would only take the things from her bedroom. The clothes she would never wear. The bed where she drew her last breath. I know now this is just wishful thinking, as if it will make her absence sting a little less if I have fewer reminders.

  “They took what was on her list,” Lori offers feebly. “Didn’t you read it?”

  I glare at her before I turn down the hall and open the door to Susan’s bedroom. It’s completely empty. From the wide-open closet door, I know that everything is gone from there too. Pictures on the wall, even the drapes. It’s all gone. “Well, they certainly didn’t miss a spot, did they?”

  She touches my arm. “It was what she wanted for you. A clean slate.”

  I wrench from her and stalk to the living room. I flip on the light to see in clear detail what all had changed. Her recliner is gone, that I see right away. The sofa is present and accounted for, though, as is the grandfather clock. “I told them we needed the sofa still, until we get some furniture of our own. The grandfather clock she wanted you to have. Said that her father bought it, and she wanted to keep it in the family.”

  I nod as I turn to the wall opposite the window, where I had spent summer after summer learning the piano.

  Only nothing is there, except for the outline of the upright piano the sun had burned into the ages-old wallpaper. No piano, no metronome… it’s all gone. “Where?” I grit between my teeth.

  “She wanted the church to have it.”

  I spin on her. “Susan? Or you?”

  She drops her hands to her side. “You don’t even know how to play, Vanni.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “Then what is the point?”

  “I don’t know who I am without her, okay?” I hurl one of the shakers against the wall, where it demolishes into dust on impact. It only takes me a second to realize that I can’t replace it. I can’t replace it and I can’t replace her. I drop the other one to the hardwood floor, where it cracks in half. I grab my coat from the peg on the wall and slam out the door.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  I sit next to Tony at the bar where we nurse our beers. I’m on my third, but I’m not numb enough yet. I know I have to keep going. I signal the bartender, a cute black girl with mocha skin and hair that bounces in spiral, ebony curls around her face. She wears color in her hair, a vibrant purple. It catches my eye whenever the light hits it. “That money’s not going to last forever, Tony,” I tell my friend.

  “No, it won’t. You gotta be smart about it, Vanni.”

  I snort as I tilt my bottle for another chug of beer. “Are you saying I should invest?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. Invest in you.” Off my look, he expounds, “School, dude.”

  I shake my head. I had never been a great student before. I can’t imagine all this time away helped matters at all. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “That’s easy. What do you want to do with your life? And don’t say rock star. I’m serious.”

  I offer a helpless shrug. “There is nothing else to say, Tony. There never has been. I honestly can’t see myself as anything else.”

  He heaves a beleaguered sigh. When you’re kids, best friends will support you if you want to fly a unicorn to the moon. As adults, most friends prefer to keep their friends grounded in reality. I know I’ve tested this to the breaking point with Tony. “And you’re willing to gamble every dime you have on seeing if you can be one of the small percent of singers who actually make it, is that it?”

  “No,” I say softly. I had buried that dream when I had buried my aunt. “But if you ask me what I can plug into its place after years of targeting just one bulls eye, I’m afraid you’ve got me stumped.”

  “No Plan B, right,” Tony says. “I can still get you into the mail room. It’s not much, but it’s a start. It’s a future,” he adds, though the concept of future has definitely lost its sheen over the past dozen days.

  I kill my beer and reach for the other. I’m finally numb enough. “Might as well,” I slur at last.

  Lori takes the news of my new career well. In fact, she is relieved. “That’s where Tony started, and look where he is now. It could mean big things.”

  I caress her hair with my hand. “He has an education under him.”

  “You can, too. I was looking around at some of the city colleges. Your money could go a long way there.”

  “That’s great. But I have no idea what I’d be studying for.”

  She shrugs as she runs her fingers along my chest. “You can figure that out as you go along.”

  I scoff. “Yeah, and what if I spend tens of thousands of dollars only to figure out I still can’t figure it out?”

  “A degree still means something. The time won’t be wasted. Future employers will take it as a sign of dedication and commitment. It will open doors no matter what you want to do.”

  I swear to God, all I can think about is how I can’t see how some business degree would help me be a singer. My mind has decided not to pursue my dream, but the message hasn’t made it all the way to my heart now. It’s just too soon, I assure myself.

  I guess I need mourning for that, too.

  I pull Lori to me and get lost within her kiss so I don’t have to think about anything else.

  It takes a few weeks for me to start my job at McKinley, Donnelly and Roth, the financial consulting firm in a gleaming Manhattan skyscraper in the financial district. It’s in the mail room, like Tony had said. I wear a white button-up dress shirt and slacks, while I run around to all different floors of the company daily. My long hair doesn’t pose a problem for this job, which, as an entry-level position, usually held by students and fresh-faced graduates anyway. Tony did warn me that I would have to cut it eventually if I want to be taken seriously, especially by my boss, Stu Plimpton.

  Stu isn’t any older than me, but he has the Ivy League education behind him. He’s a proper button-down corporate climber, who clearly wants to run the business one day. He’s a by-the-book kind of guy, who takes particular glee in showing me who’s boss on a regular basis.

  I suspect he’s not a very happy person. He’s rail thin, with thick glasses and comb-over before he’s thirty. But there’s a smirk on his face whenever he corrects me, as if that position of power is the only thing he has in the world to elevate him. I take it in stride most days, but it’s clear he thinks I’m stupid. If I dare say anything to Lori, she brings up the whole college conversation again.

  “People will take you as seriously as you take yourself, babe,” she says, before she launches into another conversation about my hair.

  She buys me clothes now. I’ve almost completely disappeared from the guy I knew mere months before.

  Still not sold on college, I keep my job at Cynzia’s nights and weekends. I owe him my loyalty, sure. But part of it is that I know who I am there. The guy who stares back at me through the perfect mirrors in the men’s bathroom of McKinley, Donnelly and Roth is a stranger to me. I don’t know him, and I don’t understand him. I’m not sure I even like him. He swallows a lot of shit for a little bit of money and a whole lot of hope that one day it will all be worth it.

  After a month of working in the city, even that old hair net starts to look like a long lost friend.

  Things are changing fast. Thanks to the windfall from Susan’s life insurance policy, I’m able to fill the house with furniture of my own. Lori helps me, since I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. She’s thinking long-term, what kind of furniture would be practical for our future, something with quality and nothing too trendy.

  I fight her only once. I want a platform bed. I know that the king-sized model won’t fit in the upstairs bedrooms. There’s only one room to fit it, and I haven’t been able to walk into it for weeks.

  Lori suggests that we tear down the wallpaper and paint it. She hopes that by making it into a new room entirely, we�
�ll exorcise any lingering ghosts.

  Truth is I no longer feel Susan there anywhere, and haven’t ever since all her furniture and belongings were taken away. That’s part of the overall problem. The me I used to be is fading just like her presence, like wisps of smoke in the wind. I don’t know who I’m becoming, but I it’s clearer by the day I don’t like this guy. I have less and less in common with him as I watch him scurry from Brooklyn to Manhattan, running around like all of the other rats in the maze. When Stu gives him a dressing down every other day, for not following some procedure in which he’s never been versed or trained, he stands there and takes it–a pawn in someone else’s chess game.

  I drink more heavily these days. I’m so exhausted when I walk home from Cynzia’s nightly that all I want to do when I get home is eat, drink till my eyes cross and fuck Lori like we’ve never fucked before.

  In many ways, she’s the only way I know I’m still alive. When I’m inside her, I’m not Old Vanni or this new mutated Vanni. I’m a god, the star of the show, the one who controls her like a puppet on my strings, making her scream because she can’t help herself.

  That comes to mean more to me than the booze.

  Despite our active sex life, our relationship strains simply because we never see each other, and the rare times we do, she’s nagging in my ear about college. She wants me to quit Cynzia’s and pursue a degree that could get me promoted in the company.

  The only problem is that I don’t want to be promoted. I don’t like the assholes at work, who drink a gallon of coffee to get through hectic days and frenzied nights, working late to make other people rich. They in turn treat everyone around them as rungs on their own private ladders. Even Tony looks about ten years older than he really is. Talking to him about anything is useless. He’s done his time with the likes of Stu and advises me to just cowboy the fuck up and soldier on. Then he parrots what Lori tells me, all about planning for the future. It’s like they share the same brain some days.

  But I don’t want some crappy fifty-hour workweek doing the same crap, and swallowing the same shit, day after monotonous day until I can retire with a gold watch and neat little pension in exchange for all my years of service. In exchange for my life. Supposedly I’m laying bricks with each frustrating, unsatisfying day, where every sacrifice I make in the moment will serve me in some far-off future I can’t even picture. It’s like I’m waiting to live, and I have a long way to go until I see these seeds I’m planting grow into something even remotely gratifying.