Mafia

An offer I couldn't refuse

All my life I was sheltered, not in a way that made me feel smothered or anything, but my parents were so determined to shield me from the evil of the world that at some point it got tiring. I don't know the whole story about why my parents left Italy to begin with; they keep telling me they did it in pursuit of the American dream, but I know there's more to the story, something they're not telling me.

My dad is like any Italian male; proud, temperamental, fueled with testosterone and as much as I hate to admit it, a sensuality that only Latin men possessed. He's a very social man, welcoming and greeting everyone with open arms, but whenever his past is brought up he gets quiet and closes off and I can't help but think that something awful must have happened that he doesn't want to remember. When my family came to the U.S close to three decades ago and settled in little Italy, the mob was already well established and for them to be able to live there and start a business there they had to make a deal. A certain amount of money was to be collected by the mob every week; some called it "rent" or "taxes", others called it protection-money, point is my parents was aware of this fact and as soon as they started making money at the restaurant, they paid the mob like everybody else in the neighborhood.

That's how I first met Luca, I was seventeen at the time and working in the restaurant after school, I was saving up for college and I liked the fact that I earned every penny and didn't have to rely on my parents if I wanted to do something with my friends. I always split half my paycheck into two separate "accounts", one was for college, the other was for everything else I needed as a teenage girl and if I got tips then those went into the teenager account. One day I was switching between hostess and waiting tables and Luca walked in. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, he was younger then, 24 and working as a henchman for the Sicilian mob that controlled a smaller area of little Italy and he was there to collect the protection-money that my parents had paid faithfully for decades at the time. My mother was in the kitchen with my aunt, my cousin Tony was working the bar and my dad was at the farmers market buying fresh groceries to restock the pantry with.

I still remember the way he looked that day, he was wearing black dress slacks with a blue button-down shirt, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and those dark expressive eyes had been so filled with history and knowledge even then. He had the most perfect bone structure I had ever seen, and god he was so tall, of course I was only seventeen and well aware that I was having a very bad crush on this man that could have walked right out of my darkest fantasy.

Nothing had changed about that fact, five years later and three years apart and he was still the lead actor in all of my darkest fantasies, and it wasn't until the moment he'd strolled back into my life and ripped away the foundations for what I'd thought was the rest of my future, that I was able to accept that.

"This conversation isn't over yet" His voice in my ear still rang through my mind thirty minutes later when Luca walked me into Vincente's, his hand on the small of my back as he guided me through the stylish Italian bistro in a part of Little Italy I rarely spent any time in. I hadn't realized until now, but unconsciously I'd been avoiding that very part of the district because I knew that I might end up running into Luca at some point, and the staggering realization of just how much he'd been able to affect me even when we weren't together was almost too much to handle on top of everything else.

Luca's cousin Vincent and his wife Lindsay owned Vincente's, a couple that I'd envied since the first time I met them. They adored each other, they had the kind of love I'd always wanted, passionate and reliable and back in the day when I was still young and naïve, I'd imagined myself having that same kind of love with Luca. Our relationship had been plenty passionate, and I worshipped the earth Luca walked on, but the reliable part had never really been in the picture. Luca was always so secretive, wanting to keep me out of his business, separating his personal and professional life, but that was never enough for me. The last time I'd seen Lindsay, the now twenty-five year old blonde bombshell from Upper Manhattan had been heavily pregnant with their first child, a girl I remember and she'd had that pregnancy-glow that only made her more of an ethereal beauty then she already was.