Page 90 of Valentino

“You’ll be well paid,” I tell her.

“Always am,” she replies sadly.

“Good night, Eli.”

“Night.”

Click….

ANNA

I lean up against the headboard, phone in hand as I pretend to scroll through Instagram. I’m looking at the pretty pictures of holiday destinations, but my mind is miles away.

What the hell happened today?

Starting from the moment I woke up, everything was off. It was if the world had tipped into another timeline, triggering events that just don’t seem real.

It started with Val coming in to wake me up, before seeing my vibrator, to him storming out to get away from me with an erection. The thought of me masturbating turned him on and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it.

I get a vision of us in my kitchen, his hand around my throat…and the way it made me feel. We had a moment, one of those perfect moments in time where things just fit and everything feels right.

But then we got interrupted, the police turned up with all types of accusations. They announced that Val is the King of Cocaine, a man who runs one of the biggest organized crime syndicates in the world, and then accused him of burning Carlo’s house down.

And the weird thing is…. Nothing that they said shocked me.

It was as if I already knew.

All I really wanted was for them to hurry up and leave so that I could go back to having his hand around my throat…. To feel his erection up against my stomach.

And what does that say about me and the life I live, and the friends and company I keep?

I frown as I realize how fucked up this is because that’s not even the worst part of the day.

Carlo’s wife came to visit me at work.

He was married.

She told me that he never cared for me at all, I was just a pawn in his scam to get close to Francesca and Giuliano so that he could murder them.

Which makes sense, I know he did do that. Still, it hurts to hear that he loved someone else the whole time he was in my bed.

She threw my equilibrium so much that I stormed home, so blinded by anger that I forgot all about our current situation. Or what the police said or who Val is supposed to be…. And somehow me forgetting it, made him forget it.

It was as if we slipped back in time, and he turned back into the man I once knew.

The boy I loved.

At dinner he was playful and sweet, sentimental and funny, and he had my parents eating out of the palm of his hand. My heart on his puppet string.

Then he kissed me, and just for a moment it was perfect. The world stopped spinning, the birds started chirping, and everything I ever wanted flashed like a movie before my eyes.

But then…he remembered who we are and we slammed straight back into reality.

His sentimental heart from earlier turned to ice, his affection for me was replaced by lust.

I felt it. The change in him was palpable.

Poignant.