Tino was pretty certain he’d been hopelessly in love with her since he was a broken twelve-year-old looking for an excuse not to give in to the void and become an emotionless shell like so many other sex products.
Sometimes he had a hope of being more to Brianna than a dance partner. Even before this past weekend, he’d tried for the impossible. When Romeo’s release date was set, Tino took off the band and threw it at Mary, telling her he’d paid his dues.
So Mary threatened to use Carina instead.
Which was all kinds of fucked up.
But Tino had been in this business too long. He didn’t doubt Mary was fucked up. Most of the sex slaves had parents selling them. That was how it all worked.
In fact, he was almost positive the only reason Mary agreed to have Carina in the first place was to use her like that. To get the Morettis back for stealing her away from her family like a Brambino trophy. Mary probably planned all along to sell the don’s only grandchild.
Except Tino showed up and made life easier for everyone.
So Tino still had the fucking band on, now for Carina instead of Romeo, and the truth was he was probably going to die with it on. Shot in some back alley doing thug work with Nova or by some pissed-off husband who stopped fucking his mistress and came home early.
Tino got back in the shower and washed again, quickly, because he knew he had been in there too long already. When he got out, he dressed with the clothes he’d brought into the bathroom—underwear, jeans, a long-sleeved shirt because there was no heat. As warm as it was this past weekend, the temperature dropped fast, and one of the last cold spells of spring showed up.
Tino and Nova refused to put money into Frankie’s house by installing something permanent, so all they had to combat the cold was a fuckload of space heaters. Nova wasn’t one to complain about temperature, and Tino got the added thrill of Mary freezing her ass off when she was up here during the winter. So he never minded the cold either.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Brianna complained when Tino came out of the bathroom. “I can’t believe you survived winter without heat again.”
“That’s what we do. We survive.” Tino crawled into bed with Brianna and pulled her tight into him. He rolled them both over so that she was curled into his side. She had on sweatpants and one of those cutoff dancer’s shirts, so her midriff was bare. He slid his hand across her smooth, hard stomach and buried his face in her hair. “Tired.”
She reached back and ran a hand through his wet hair. “How tired?”
“I just wanna hold you tonight.” Tino kept his voice low, because he didn’t know if everyone in the other room was listening. “Can you gimme that?”
Brianna was quiet for a long time, suddenly tense in his arms before she whispered, “I thought maybe you’d let me take care of you like you took care of me the other night. Let me repay the favor.”
“You don’t wanna do that,” he argued with her. “Not with me. Not yet.”
Maybe if Mary was out of his life. Maybe if that bitch hadn’t been lying in the same place Brianna was now just a few hours earlier. There were a thousand maybes, but Tino was certain that Brianna didn’t want to jerk him off.
She just didn’t know it yet.
“If you don’t want that, maybe we could do something else. My mother took me to get birth control when I turned sixteen and—”
“Minchia.” Tino groaned and rolled away from her, because fuck if he didn’t want to. It made him hard almost instantly. He really wished she hadn’t told him that, but still he said, “Brianna, no.”
“What is wrong with me?” Her voice was choked with emotion.
“Nothing.” He looked at the darkened ceiling to avoid her gaze. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Ever since the E, you’ve been weird. You avoided me all day at school. Do you regret it?”
She leaned in to kiss him, like she was testing her theory, and he couldn’t help but flinch away.
Stupid soft-bristle toothbrush.
Tino was going to beat Nova’s ass tomorrow.
“I bet if I was one of your girlfriends from the raves, you wouldn’t mind kissing me. You probably wouldn’t stop me from touching you either.”
“Probably not,” Tino agreed, because they knew what he was, and Brianna didn’t. It made sense to him, but when Brianna sat up in bed and looked at Tino in horror, he realized it translated really, really badly. “Wait—”
“I’m so stupid,” she whispered as the tears rolled down her face. “I thought this weekend was more than the drugs to you.”
“It was more,” Tino countered. “I wanted to hold you because you matter to me. What’s wrong with that? I wanted to smell your hair and feel you against me. Maybe I’d make you feel good and listen to you fall asleep until you make those little purring sounds.”
“Holy shit,” she snapped at him. “Are you telling me I snore?”
“No, it’s like—” Tino searched his mind for the right word. “A baby bear. A cute baby bear. I like it.”