Sweet Release (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance) (3 page)

Rex didn’t answer, just nodded. He was sitting up, gathering the sheet a little to hide his arousal from the new alpha in the room.

“The rules are clear, Rex,” Mike said. “I saw you there when Jarome laid ‘em out. Up. Out. You’re done here.”

“Come on, dude,” Rex complained. “I didn’t do anything. Tell him, Ella; I didn’t make a move, I didn’t touch you!”

“No,” I said, “but you did way overestimate yourself. Good thing you’re not a carpenter. I recall you said it was eight inches? Your house must be real wobbly.”

Mike’s face went much darker, and a vein on his temple showed his pulse visible getting faster.

“Come on, Mike,” Rex said. “You know, I was just kidding around is all. This is a guy’s place, you know? I was just treating her like one of the guys is all.”

The behemoth in the room took a step forward, and leaned his fists on the table. “That so? In that case, Rex, you want me to jerk you off? Just one of the guys, right?”

Rex recoiled. “I didn’t mean… look, I’ll go, okay? It won’t happen again.”

Mike shook his head slowly. “Nope. Jarome was clear. One strike. This was it. You’re out.”

Rex’s face reddened, and he tensed. “You can’t throw me out, asshole; I pay my dues.”

“Take it up with Jarome, then,” Mike said evenly. “His place, his rules.”

“Shit,” Rex spat. He looked at me, and I held my hands up. No answers here.

Mr. Mike straightened, and folded his massive arms over his massive chest. He looked like he might just tear out of that shirt any second. What was it even made of? Some space-age material you could stretch across a room, I assumed. He waited, patiently. After a moment, he started tapping his foot, staring Rex down.

Rex eventually got the message. With a huff, he got off the table—clutching the sheet to him in his sudden modesty. I wondered if I should leave him to dress—if Mike and I both should—but Mike didn’t move, so I didn’t. We watched as Rex carefully dressed himself.

At the door, the oily prick turned and sneered at both of us. “I’ll have your jobs. Shut this place down. You guys don’t know who I am; my brother works for the city.”

“Gosh,” Mike said, sympathetic, “if he heard what his brother was up to, trying to get a happy ending in a legit venue like this one, that’d be real embarrassing for him, then, wouldn’t it?”

Rex spat something foul, and then stormed off, slamming the door behind him.

I let out a long breath. “Wow. That. Was. Fantastic. I’m Ella, by the way. Robinson. Pleased to meet you. Thanks for that.” I stuck a hand out.

He took it with a hand big enough to nearly swallow mind whole, though in fairness that pretty much describes half the hands on the planet. “Mike Frazetta,” he said. That voice. Oof. Hit me right in the gut. A smooth bass that I felt in the air between us. “Rex was a lost cause anyway,” he went on. “Jarome told him he didn’t have the chops, but the guy can’t take criticism, didn’t believe it.”

“He certainly couldn’t cut it on my table. Good thing they pay in advance.” I smiled. “Well… crisis averted. So… how long have you been working here?” I knew, of course, but I had minutes to kill and would have been happy to listen to Mike talk for hours.

“I got out Saturday,” he said. Then he scratched the back of his head self-consciously. “Out of school, I mean. I’m a trainer.”

“That’s what Jarome said. Welcome on board. I guess I’m no longer the newbie, huh?” I winked at him.

“Didn’t you start last Thursday?” He asked. There was amusement in his big brown eyes, though.

“Two days before you did,” I agreed. “Which gives me seniority, by anyone’s reckoning.”

Mike chuckled, and nodded his head. “Yeah, okay. I’ll buy it.” He looked around the room, and then back at the door. “Well… I should let you get back to work.”

“Yeah, I need to clean this mess up.” I waited for him to leave, or say good bye, but when he didn’t do either of those things right away I snatched what I thought was a tiny loose thread of opportunity. You don’t play, you don’t win. “I’ve got a lunch break at one,” I said. “Don’t really have any friends in this town yet, so… care to grab something cheap with me?”

I didn’t know why I even asked him. I hadn’t been out with a guy once since my divorce. And I wasn’t sure a guy like Mike was the right type for me. Maybe I should settle down with an artist type. But then again, I’d gone for the straight-laced, suburban dad type once before, and it hadn’t exactly worked out for me.

He looked like he might, for a second. But, he ultimately shrugged, and jerked a thumb toward the world outside the door. “Ah, maybe some other time. Got a few guys to work with, so…”

“Okay,” I told him, hiding my minor disappointment. It wasn’t like I was ready to date someone anyway. Not that I had invited him on a date. I mean, not like a real date, anyway. “No problem. Well, next time some jerk asks for a handy jay, I’ll be sure to flag you down and maybe we can talk some more.”

Mike laughed at that, bobbed his head, and chuckled as he left the room.

The rest of the day was blessedly uneventful—thank God—and I left with about eighty bucks in tips in my pocket, which made this day, in my book, a net win. I was also pleased to have found out, even though it had been tense and a little embarrassing, that Jarome really did have my back in there. Zero tolerance; he meant it.

And then there was Mike.

I smiled. Well. I had myself well established into step four. It could have been jumping the gun a little, but…

Maybe I was ready for Step Five: Start airing out that broken heart, and give someone the chance to prove everything He-who-shall-not-be-named taught you about men wrong. But, don’t go crazy.

But was a guy like Mike really the right kind of guy?

Michael

She was an odd bird, I was thinking, after work, waiting for my parole officer to finish with whatever other ex-con she was dealing with before she saw me. Ella Robinson. Coo-coo-ca-choo. Except Ella didn’t look like anybody’s mom I knew. She was cute. Too cute for the job. I wondered what she’d been thinking, getting herself into a place like the gym. Not that Jarome put up with anyone’s shit; he’d been serious about his zero tolerance policy and had terminated Rex’s contract the second he heard what he’d pulled.

Still, Jarome’s place, or any other gym known for training up fighters of one kind or another, tended to attract a certain type. They were my type, granted, and I never woulda done what Rex did in there but… there was probably a reliable statistic is all I’m saying. Guys like me ran hot, all that extra testosterone maybe, and while Jarome didn’t put up with drugs on his turf there were a couple guys—Rex included—that he suspected might be using steroids. Time would tell, and he knew what signs to look for.

Funny thing is, Ella hadn’t seemed to shaken up by it. She had some mettle in her. It made her cuter, somehow, little fireball in her workout clothes, skinny but not like the girls these days that get that way by eating salads and swallowing cotton balls or lived on cleanses and whatever diet was hot. No, Ella looked solid. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was a fighter herself; lean muscle and punch. I wondered what was hiding in that cute little body besides fight.

Not that it mattered. Who was I? An ex-con with nothing to my name except that little room over the gym that wasn’t exactly the place you took a lady friend. Not that I wasn’t grateful to Jarome for it—I was, it would take years to pay the man back for his kindness—but to a girl that had her shit put together I was probably more eye-candy than anything else.

At least I had that going for me, though.

Annemarie let her parolee go, and looked me over from the door, like any other woman would. Except she didn’t care to flirt with me. All professional, this woman. I’d met her twice now, and she didn’t take shit from nobody either. “Michael,” she said. “Good to see you. Come in.”

She was a roundish black lady with a crop of red curls on her head that bounced when she moved. Couldn’t place her age, but she was mature. She had a way about her—like somebody’s mother; ready to discipline, but compassionate enough to see you for who you were, not what you’d done. I liked her okay.

We sat down on either side of her overfilled desk, a mess of papers, folders, and sticky notes that made me wonder just how many cases she had besides mine. In this city, probably a lot. There was a little plastic up on my side, the kind you piss in for a drug test. I didn’t mind. Just the cost of doing business like this.

“So you’re working with Jarome Tyson?” She asked. I’d filled out her papers in the waiting room.

“Yeah. Good gig. Great guy. Took a chance on me.”

She nodded slowly, and looked at the second page. She raised an eyebrow. “Living there, too?”

“Room upstairs,” I said.

“I understand you have the option to stay with family,” Annemarie said. She looked at me over the rim of her glasses.

“I could,” I said. “Tony would take me; my brother. But, I don’t think I wanna get too close. Breaks my heart but… you know.”

Annemarie sighed, and put the clipboard down. “I do know. I’m pleased to see you making progress and distancing yourself from a potentially bad element. How are you finding the outside world?”

“It’s not bad,” I said. Probably sounded weird; like prison was any comparison. “I’m getting used to it.”

“It takes time to adjust,” she said, “but it seems like you’re well on your way.” She gestured at the piss cup. “You know I have to ask. Just to the line, then screw the cap on. Don’t wash it, just wash your hands afterward and put it in the plastic bag and seal it. We won’t have to do this every time, but I do have to report the results.”

“No problem,” I said. “I’d rather pee in a cup than a prison stall.”

She let me do my business in the bathroom, and a few minutes later I came back with the little baggie sealed. She filled out a label and pressed it to it and set it aside; might as well have been leftovers from somebody’s lunch.

“So,” she said after that bit was done with, “speaking of your family; have you had any contact from them?”

“My brother’s called a couple times,” I told her. “I didn’t answer. I can’t put him off forever, you know. But… I gotta do me right now.”

Her curls swayed as she nodded sagely. “Wise choice. And Officer Pembry?”

The name made an angry spark flicker in my stomach. We both knew what was up. I’d made my case to Annemarie when we met. She’d taken it in stride. Fact was, though, whether Pembry set me up or not was, as she called it, an immutable element of the past that I wasn’t likely going to be able to change and that she wasn’t in any position to investigate or act on whether she believed me or not. The best thing was to move forward.

“Nah,” I said. “Haven’t heard anything.”

“Good,” she said. “If you do, you tell me about it. It’s not just my job to make sure you keep to the straight and narrow; I’m here to help you reintegrate into society. I want to see you succeed out there.” She said this like a warning. In the end, our relationship was clearly defined. She gave me the benefit of the doubt, but didn’t forget where I’d been for the past four years.

“Yes Ma’am,” I said. “Believe me, I’m on that path and staying there.”

“See that you do,” she said. She stood, and walked me to the door. “I’ll see you on Thursday. Marcus? Come on in.” Just like that, she was on to the next.

I left the office relieved. It would get easier, I guessed; not that Annemarie was hard to deal with but she was one step removed from a cop and cops still made me nervous. Every time I saw a cop car on the street, or saw a uniform, my adrenaline pumped a little, and I had an instinct to walk the other way. Not every cop in the city was crooked, of course. But at least one of them was.

Officer Jason Pembry had set me up. I knew it because he was the last cop to have his hands on me before his partner found twelve grams of weed and six ecstasy pills stashed in my clothes. The man had some sort of obsession with my whole family—he’d been on Tony for years, but Tony was too slick to get caught doing anything so he’d moved on to me when he saw the chance. He just knew that if he could get one of us, we’d give him the big break he needed to start digging up dirt on Don Luchese, the local Mob boss. He was crazy.

Thing was, he wasn’t entirely off the mark. The Frazettas and the Lucheses went back, all the way back, to Italy. Our familys had come over together and, yeah, they were part of the Mafia network back in the day. Luchese was technically associated with the Mafia but he wasn’t what you normally think of as a mob boss, and I certainly never worked for him.

But my brother Tony did, and my father and uncles had. That was enough for Pembry to get me put away.

All that, though, like Annemarie said, was in the past. Behind me, where it belonged. If I kept dwelling on it, it would haunt my future and all I wanted now was to start over. If I could do that, maybe I could be worth a girl like Ella.

I wondered if she had an open spot tomorrow. Would that be okay? She’d asked me out to lunch, basically. Which could have just been lunch, I guessed, but seemed more like a date. Or something like it.

But I hadn’t gone, so, we weren’t dating. So surely a massage was fine. Plus, I really was sore. Jarome was a monster; a brilliant, talented, effective monster, but a monster all the same. I was in knots. Plus, prison wasn’t exactly a spa. I had some left over tension from four years on a hard mattress to get rid of. And that’s what massage was for, right? So, it was a perfectly legitimate reason to see her again. For a massage, that is. I wasn’t a creeper like Rex.

My phone rang as I got on the bus back toward my part of town. Courtesy of Jarome. How Tony had gotten my number, I had no idea and didn’t want to know, but within a few hours of getting the thing turned on—just a cheap, prepaid flip-phone, no bells or whistles—he’d started calling. Man had resources, I guessed.

If I ignored it again, he’d just call later. That was the thing about Tony—the man had an endless, implacable patience. He was known for it, and for the way he could calmly break a man’s arm in just the right place that it would hurt like hell but heal up perfectly. Or, never work right again, depending on why he was breaking and arm in the first place.

Yeah, Tony was a stone cold killer. I knew it, he knew it, the Don knew it… but he was still my brother.

I grit my teeth, and answered the phone.

“Hey! Mike! You don’t call, you don’t text… you got out three days ago, brother. Why I haven’t heard from you?”

“Hey, Tony,” I said, quiet to keep from bothering the people around me. “Yeah I been… busy. You know, getting out, getting a job, place to stay… a phone.”

“So I see,” Tony said, impressed. “Well, now you got all that, you gotta come to dinner, catch up with me. When are you coming?”

Shit. “I’m real busy, Tony… I don’t know when. Maybe a couple weeks.”

“What, they working you twenty four hours or something? the gym closes at ten; you know I eat late anyway.”

Of course he knew I was at the gym. Tony knew everything, if he wanted to. “Yeah, well… I’m working hard. Plus I can’t eat pasta that late at night; you know, gotta keep trim.”

“I make a mean caprisi,” Tony countered. “Come on; come see your older brother. We’re family, Mikey—I miss you.”

If he did, I was probably the only person he had feelings of any kind for.

“Plus,” Tony went on, “I gotta talk to you about some stuff.”

“Is it about the Business?” I asked.

Tony scoffed on the other end of the line. “Mikey, come on. I knew you just got out, what am I, stupid?”

“If it’s got anything to do with it, Tony, I don’t wanna hear it,” I said anyway. “I’m doing my own thing, okay? Just… just let me do my own thing for once.”

“Look, Mikey,” Tony implored me, “come on. We’re family. It’s just dinner, that’s all. Millie Scapone could be here… you know she likes ‘em convicted. A little post-slammer slammer?” He sniggered at his own joke.

“Jeez, Tony; okay,” I relented. I’d probably regret it, but with Tony giving in was the only way to get through. “I’ll come to dinner. But no Scapone girls; not even Millie. God, especially not Millie.”

“Yeah, she’s got those big teeth,” Tony agreed. “Probably chew your junk up like a horse.”

I sighed, smiling despite myself. Talking to Tony on my own phone, without a line of other cons waiting behind me, or a ticking timer between us, was nice. Not because it was Tony, exactly; just because it was on our own terms. Another one of those little bits of freedom you just take for granted till you don’t got it anymore.

“How about Friday night?” I asked. “I got the weekends off if I want ‘em.”

“Friday night. It’s a deal. Hey,” Tony said before I hung up, “listen; I’m really glad you’re out, brother. It’s good to have you back.”

I did hang up then, with a short good-bye. I didn’t like the way he said that. Good to have you back. I didn’t like it at all.