Mr. Vincenzo | 18+

eleven

"I don't wish to probe but if what Aryanna said the other day was true, just how long do you plan on going casual, Vinny? There's going to be a day when you'd want someone for more than just sex."

I mock chuckled, filled myself another glass, and gulped it down.

"It's every day."

Wade didn't look like he was ready to hear that. He drank as if he wanted to wash down my words. I bet he'd have rare days when the woman he loved wasn't sleeping in his arms. Ava was everything wonderful for Wade and I'd be a liar if I claimed to not be jealous of a love like that.

"Did you eventually fall in love with Eveline?"

Cold rage flowed through my veins. I stopped stirring my glass.

"Is that why no one else could ever replace her even after so many years?" He said.

"Eveline Wilson is the one person I can never love, Wade. Not then and certainly not after."

I didn't know why I admitted that. I'd never spoken a word on Eveline, except all the lies I told Aryanna why her mother couldn't come to see her. Even that stopped when Anna just began to understand on her own.

Maybe it was the whiskey that was already getting to my head or perhaps, it was the presence of that one friend for whom I wasn't a ladder to climb on.

"What happened, Vincenzo?" Wade spoke carefully. "Even if you never loved her, I know the man you are. You'd have stayed with her, if not for anything else then for your daughter. Hell, when Ava gave birth to Eloise, I then thought that would have been the moment when you fall for Eveline, if you hadn't already before. I mean, just how can you not—" he stopped himself as if afraid to rip open a wound.

"You mean, how can a man not fall in love with the woman who brought his child to life?"

He nodded.

"Eveline wanted to abort Aryanna and she didn't tell me anything about it."

A look of shock and disgust crossed his features.

"She planned a one-day trip for her parents and I was a fool to think that was lovely. I was going to take an off from my part-time but she assured me she would be okay staying alone. I never would have known until it was too late but my coworker visited the same hospital and told me he saw my wife there."

The memory began playing before my eyes. "I panicked, thinking of all the worst-case scenarios. I rushed over however I could, asking the receptionist to hurry up and tell me what happened to my wife or my child. She read out that Eveline had an appointment for an abortion. She was six months along, Wade. I used to touch her stomach, feel my baby moving. A life, alive. If I was even ten minutes late that day, the only place I'd have seen my Anna would be in medical waste. In pieces."

Wade stayed quiet. Maybe he said something. I wouldn't know.

"The reason I got? It was her body Anna was going to ruin, not mine. So I had no say in it."

I needed alcohol to stay sane. It were the memories I had never spoken about. Speaking and hearing it back was amplifying the pain of everything.

"When she gave birth, nothing was magical, nothing was special. I could only feel for her the disgust she felt upon knowing the number of stitches she had,  the scar she was going to have."

The first feeding Anna had was packaged milk. Eveline refused to look at Anna and could only cry how me and my child had ruined her life. She was nineteen for god's sake, she said, someone who had dreams of her own. As if I wasn't nineteen with dreams of my own.