He remembered when he was in Vegas a few months prior, and spent time with Reno Gabrini and his wife Trina. He remembered how wonderful their love seemed at that time. Reno and Tree, as Reno called her, seemed so good together. She didn’t take guff from him, and he didn’t take guff from her. But the love, the passion, was as vivid as a leaf in hand. Mick wanted that kind of love. He wanted it so badly that it pained him sometimes. But he was no romantic bleeding heart. He knew the chances of finding a woman like Tree, a woman who could love a hard man like him unconditionally, was as plausible as finding a genie in a bottle.
But then he met Roz. Rosalind. Mick leaned his head back, his eyelashes so long his eyes looked closed, and smiled with one side of his mouth upturned just thinking about her. He’d been thinking about her for the past three weeks. She was certainly different than Mick’s usual type. And it was a plus in her favor because his usual type, the models and the businesswomen and the socialites, never did shit for him. They turned him on sexually for a night, maybe even a couple nights, but then he wanted nothing more to do with them. And he was no kind lover. When he dumped them, he dumped them, and if they tried any tricks to get back with him he showed them better than he told them what kind of fucker he really could be. Because Roz was wrong. There wasn’t a kind bone in his body. None.
But the fact that she thought there was, and that he had been what she said was nice to her, made him feel some kind of crazy way. Maybe even some kind of happy way. Hell Reno Gabrini was a hard motherfucker too, and he had the love of a good woman. Mick didn’t see why he couldn’t find that kind of love too.
Barry Acker said that a good woman, the kind of woman who could make you laugh, was as good as gold. Roz certainly made Mick laugh. And although he almost blew it by attempting to turn her into a booty call, he believed they made amends. Because she was no bed action chick. She was no easy lay. She was definitely a keeper. What weighed heaviest on Mick’s mind had nothing to do with deciding whether or not he would keep her. It was more about whether or not, after she found out the harsh, cruel, true nature of his being, if she would want to keep him.
That was the crust of it. That was the heart of the matter. That was probably the real reason why no other woman had ever cracked his shell. Because, when it came to navigating those murky waters of the heart, Mick Sinatra was Pottery Barn fragile too. If Roz broke his heart, she was going to own it. She was going to have a piece of him no other human being ever had. And that shit, the idea that he could need a woman so badly that he was willing to be that vulnerable, scared him more than any gangster he ever faced ever could.
But even with all of that, he couldn’t stop thinking about Rosalind.
He liked that grit he saw in her. If somebody would have told him a month ago that he could even consider bothering with some struggling actress who’d been trying to make her dreams come true for ten years, he would have told that person to kiss his ass. He didn’t like unrealistic people who gave into fantasies and fairy tales and dreams that were never coming true. But he didn’t believe Rosalind lived in any fantasyland. He believed she was a sensible, practical girl, a realist to her core. She knew her dream might not come true. That was why she went to college, got herself educated, and now was able to teach acting to make ends meet. But she was willing to get out there and hustle and try anyway. She failed. But she tried. Mick loved her for that.
Then Mick frowned. He loved her for that? What the fuck was he thinking? This woman was turning him into some softie already and he’d only seen her once. He didn’t love her like that? He didn’t love her at all!
But he couldn’t get her off of his mind. Even as they approached the George Washington Bridge, and was about to make that journey into Jersey, Roz was still on his mind. Then he thought about her fears, and how she thought he might boil her like a lobster and eat her for dinner, and he was smiling again. And thinking about her smile, and her walk, and her beautiful face. And it suddenly felt inevitable. Inexplicable. But inevitable. He pressed the intercom button.
“Yes, sir?”
“We’re going to make a stop first.”
“Here in New York, sir?”
“Yes,” Mick said. “In Brooklyn.”
Deuce smiled. He didn’t understand Roz, but he liked her too. “Yes, sir,” he said, and headed in that direction.
Roz and Betsy walked slowly toward their apartment building. Roz had been at the acting studio all evening, and Betsy had been on another audition. She wasn’t selected, and she was pissed.
“But the walrus,” she said, “oh boy. They loved her! I told them I can play an ugly girl. Give me some makeup, geez, that’s all it takes. But they wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
“Because makeup is never all it takes,” Roz said. “Ugly isn’t a look. Ugly is a state of mind. I told you that. You go in there twisting your mouth and walking as if you have some affliction, you can forget it. That’s not what they want.”