Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (21 page)

He frowned. “Okay?”

“Yeah.” She smiled and pushed the rest of that sudden badness away. Her super-hot boyfriend was sitting across from her. “I just want to jump you.”

That turned his expression around. He tossed his napkin on the table and lifted his hand to signal the server. “Good plan.”

~oOo~

When they were ready to leave, they went to Nick’s table. Angie stood first. He met them several steps from the table.

“Hey, shrimp.” He kissed her cheek. “Joey.” He shook Joey’s hand, but the look he wore as he did made it clear that they weren’t friends. For the thousandth time, Tina wondered what had happened between them and what had been said at that dinner.

By the time that greeting was over, the men around the table had all stood, and they nodded at Tina, and then at Joey. Nick came around the table and greeted them both, with a kiss on the cheek for Tina and a warm embrace for Joey.

“It’s good to see you both. I had intended to send over a Moscato with your dessert, but I see I’ve lost my chance.”

Hearing Joey’s habitual throat-clearing before he tried a sentence, Tina tamped down the urge to speak for him.

“Thanks for…thought, Nick. …Next time.”

“Of course.” To Tina he said, “Give my good wish to Genie.”

“I will. Thank you.”

As they left the restaurant, Tina had the uneasy feeling that there had been danger all around them through their entire meal.

~oOo~

Sitting naked on the side of his bed, Joey pulled her between his legs and slid his hands up the outside of her thighs. “…Love these.”

She combed her fingers through his silky hair. “The fishnets? Good. That’s why I wore them.”

His hands came over her hips and ass, and his fingers hooked into the waistband of the tights. “Off.” He tugged, and she shimmied, and down came the tights and her panties with them. He worked them all the way down to her ankles, and she balanced herself on his bare shoulders as he helped her step clear.

Before he cast them aside, he put her panties to his face. “Mmmm.”

“Perv,” she giggled.

Grinning, he took another whiff and tossed them away.

He wasn’t wearing his tank—he hadn’t used it all night and hadn’t even brought it into Dominic’s—but it was on his nightstand, waiting. She tilted her head in its direction. “You should put the cannula on.”

“Want…” He closed his eyes, and she knew he was trying to form the sentence ahead of time. That didn’t always work, sometimes the words dissipated before he could speak them, but when there was something important to say, he gave it a shot. “Hold you. Just us. Then…air.”

He sighed, and Tina understood the meaning in that sharp exhale of his precious breath. He’d wanted his words to be more graceful when he’d said he wanted them to be so close.

People thought Joey’s intellect was impaired because of the way he spoke. He’d told her as much, and she’d seen it for herself, the way people who didn’t know him well changed their speech patterns as if they were talking to a child. Sometimes, people raised their voices, as if their volume would make his words come more easily.

People were stupid. Self-centered and thoughtless.

But Joey wasn’t. He was smart and curious, and he had a sharp wit and a keen eye. When she’d pointed out how much he noticed around him, he’d told her that people ignored him so much that he had lots of time to look around.

She didn’t have to wonder what it was like to be so mentally acute and thought so mentally dull. He’d told her: it sucked. Moreover, and worse, he’d explained, it was hard not to believe what everybody else did. After a while, with no one to share his thoughts with, those thoughts had stopped seeming so worthwhile.

Which was why they wrote to each other so often. Joey could shine that way. Even when words came slowly, they came eventually, and he could say all he was thinking before he hit ‘send.’ Sometimes, he sent her the most beautiful messages of love—not flowery or ultra sappy. Just words that said exactly how she made him feel, exactly why he loved her.

Tina felt like all those wonderful thoughts in his handsome head were for her alone. Like only she had this perfect, complete Joey. Because his thoughts were written down, written to her, they were hers forever.

She pulled the dress up over her head and tossed it away. Then she undid her bra and sent that flying as well. As naked now as he was, she straddled his lap and wound her arms around his neck. His hard cock pressed against her folds, and they both moaned at that, but neither made a move to escalate things just yet.

He held her tightly and rested his head on her shoulder. “Wish…had words.”

“I don’t need them. I have you.”

He leaned back and met her eyes. “I… …a-a—” His jaw clenched, and he stopped and collected himself for another try. “Admire. I admire you.”

It seemed an odd word, maybe not the word he was going for. She cocked her head, trying to understand.

But he seemed happy with that word. He admired her.

“Okay…thank you.”

“Because…school. And RTC. …Your mom. …Everything.” He shook his head. “Can’t say it.”

He had said enough; she understood. He was impressed by the things she did. By her accomplishments.

Moved, she kissed him. “Thank you. I admire you, too.”

When he twitched like he wanted to shake that idea away, she caught his head in her hands. “I do. Every day you work harder than anybody else I know to have the life you want. You can’t take
anything
for granted because the most basic things in life are hard for you. But here you are, having a life. That is a warrior’s strength. It’s more than admiration. You
astound
me.”

As he stared into her eyes, she could see that he was conflicted, as if he were trying to decide whether he could truly believe her. She tried to put into her eyes the truth of the words she’d said. He did astound her.

When he kissed her again, she knew he believed her.

She also knew they were done talking.

~ 15 ~

Halfway through the summer, and the construction season, Pagano & Sons was having one of their best years ever—absolutely their best year since Luca had taken the helm. The success of the Colonial Shore Market Square, as both a build and as a business center, had washed P&S in a warm glow of esteem. They were packed to the gills with work, they were routinely being asked to submit bids, and they’d been offered some jobs that hadn’t even been bid out.

Joey and his brothers had been putting in long hours all summer, staying in the office late, well after the crews had clocked out, putting together bids, working out schedules, ordering equipment and supplies, hiring new crews, all of it. Here in the middle of July, they were already scheduling work into next spring.

After a couple of years of cutting corners, during which their father’s secretary, who’d worked for the company for decades, had retired and they’d let the position go empty, they’d hired two new secretaries to handle the work Mrs. Ponti had done on her own all those years.

In the time without an office staff, the brothers had shared administrative duties, with John and Luca taking calls forwarded to their cells, since Joey wasn’t able to handle phone contact. He’d taken on the paperwork and appointment setting, folding it into his job scheduling.

He’d needed the time back so he could get out of the office before seven or eight every night, when his days started at the gym by five and at work before seven every morning, but he’d found it difficult to let that work go and trust Marie and Nikki to handle it.

Luca and John, on the other hand, had been more than happy to lose the phone calls.

Marie and Nikki were young—earlier twenties, both of them—and didn’t seem serious to him. He couldn’t complain about their work, once they’d been trained, but he didn’t know. He supposed he was simply used to an old lady with a beaded chain on her glasses sitting outside his office.

Besides, he was pretty sure Nikki rolled her eyes behind his back at the way he talked.

Around lunchtime, while Joey was still simmering after a frustrating attempt to explain what he needed done with a submission packet, he saw Luca’s truck pull up, and John’s truck right beside it. He smiled—his brothers coming back to the office at this time of day meant they’d gotten takeout for lunch. He hoped it was Chinese.

Trey climbed down from the passenger side of John’s truck, carrying a cardboard flat with—yes!—bags from China Temple. Excellent.

After six months of working with a nutritionist, he had figured out how to eat the kinds of things he wanted to eat and integrate that into a reasonable diet. When he’d been in his twenties, before the shooting, he’d eaten—and drunk—whatever without thinking about it, without real consequence to his body. Every now and then he’d do a couple of days with nothing but protein shakes and supplements, and he’d worked out hours at a time, and he’d called his ripped physique proof that he was doing it right.

But it had been a shit way to treat his body, Joey now knew. These days, he was about as fit as he thought he could get, which was nothing like how he’d been. But he wasn’t embarrassed to be shirtless anymore, and his body felt healthier. Excepting his lungs, of course—yet even they were stronger. Evan had struck the point again and again that the damage to his lungs could be overcome, that lung capacity wasn’t static, and Joey was seeing that it was true.

He still needed oxygen to fuck Tina, though. She had managed to turn it into something almost sexy, but it frustrated him. He wanted to be able to roll and flip and fall off the bed, to ravish her, to fuck whenever and wherever the mood struck, but he was always tethered to the damn tank—and sitting or standing up, because he had better control of his breathing when his chest was upright.

A few months earlier, he’d thought he would never have sex again in his life, and what he had with Tina was the best he’d ever had, period, even with their limitations. He knew he shouldn’t take that for granted, and he didn’t. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted everything.

His brothers and Trey came into the office with lunch. Marie was already clearing off the conference table, and Nikki grabbed a roll of paper towels and a stack of paper plates.

As they set out the cartons, Joey noticed Trey finding surreptitious ways to check out Marie and Nikki. They were hot, no doubt—so hot that Luca and John had both been squeamish the first time their wives had visited the office since they’d been hired. Trey had been dazzled all summer.

Joey nudged his nephew, who blushed at being caught. “Good day?”

“Yeah. Uncle John took me out on the…um…” He turned to John, who only waited, his eyebrows up expectantly. “Um…Becker! Becker job, and Luis let me use the air hammer. That was cool.”

Joey chuckled. When he was about Trey’s age, he’d started doing summers here, too. Even being a gopher was cool on a job site. Most days, anyway. The way the guys talked, the many different kinds of work going on, all of it was fascinating.

This summer, Trey had been working in the office almost exclusively; that had been Carlo’s foremost demand when he’d finally agreed to let him skip engineer camp and work at Pagano & Sons for the summer. He was still doing adventure camp in August, but otherwise, he was a working stiff, doing fifteen hours a week at minimum wage.

Not quite fifteen yet, Trey had been gobsmacked by the amount of his first paycheck.

Today, despite how busy they were, there hadn’t been any office work at all they could give him, so rather than send him home or have him in the office playing on his phone, John had taken him out for his round of site checks.

John had been spending a lot of time with Trey lately. They went out on their boards and caught a few waves before work a couple of times a week. John and Luca had taken him camping a couple of weekends as well. It seemed that Trey had become the new family project, while Carlo continued his struggle to figure out how to be a father to a son whose will was as strong as his.

As much as Carlo and Trey were clashing, Carlo was deeply worried that Trey would carry out his threat to move to Nick’s side of the pews. He was far too young now, but this was the age when a seed like that got planted and grew deep roots. So Carlo had agreed to back off and let his brothers work with Trey.

He would still listen to his uncles. Right now, his father was his enemy.

That was breaking Carlo’s heart, Joey knew. But he couldn’t seem to get out of his own way.

Halfway through their lunch, John’s phone pinged. He read the new text and said, “Joe, you’re going to Boston this afternoon, yeah?”

He was; he had an appointment with Carole. He nodded.

“Think you can swing Trey home on your way? I need to get back out to the Howe job.” He shoved the last half of his eggroll into his mouth and stood up. “Some asshole drove the backhoe into its own hole.”

“You need me?” Luca asked.

“Nah, I got it. Joe, you got T-man?”

“Can’t I go with you?” Trey asked John. “Not on the clock. Just to see?”

John stopped gathering up his lunch leavings and considered their nephew. “Yeah, sure. Stay out of the way, okay?”

Beaming like he’d won a great prize, Trey nodded. Joey thought maybe they were seeing the third generation of Pagano & Sons right then, in that face-splitting grin.

It wasn’t what Carlo wanted for his firstborn son, but it had to be better than the other Pagano business.

~oOo~

Six months in on his ‘Whole New Joey’ plan, he thought it had been pretty successful. Certainly, his life was better than it had been in the eleven years since the shooting—and in some important ways, it was better than it had
ever
been.

He was down to quarterly checkups with Dr. Turillo. The neurologist only wanted to see him twice a year. He now had only monthly check-ins with Evan, his physical therapist, and Gayle had slowed down his speech therapy to twice a month, though there hadn’t been any real improvement of his aphasia. That simply wasn’t going to get any better.

Carole, however, still wanted to see him every week. He didn’t mind. Although he’d hated the thought of seeing a shrink, he’d come to like these weekly sessions. Carole and Tina were the only people in his life who were patient with his speech, who really listened to him, who really saw him, and Carole was the only person he could say truly anything to, without worrying about how it came out.

It was hard work. She wouldn’t let him write anything out, so some of their sessions were spent entirely on one small issue or idea while he tried to make the words he needed. Sessions became layered over each other, taking weeks to express one thing fully, but he kind of liked that. It gave him time to think and mull things over, and he usually ended up changing his idea midway through.

On this day, toward the end of the session, Carole sipped the last of her sparkling water and asked, “I’d like you to think about something. We can put some time into the question next week, but give it some thought meanwhile. How do you see the people in your life?”

“Please?”

“We’ve worked a lot on your feelings about not fitting well in your family and how you’ve felt set aside, especially since you were hurt. But we’ve also talked about your feeling that Tina focuses too much on your challenges. Your brothers and sisters see you too little, and your lover sees you too much. Do you agree with my assessment of your feelings?”

Joey nodded slowly, waiting for the bomb to drop. She had a point she was working up to, and he didn’t think he was going to like it.

“So I’d like you to think about how
you
see
them
. What’s important? What’s not? How is that different from the way you perceive them perceiving you?”

“Don’t… …un-understand.”

“Would you like to say that again?”

Joey sighed. Carole wanted him to use the word ‘I’ in his sentences, but he had trouble getting sentences started that way. ‘I’, short as it was, was one of the hardest words for him to get all the way out of his mouth. It was just another thing that slowed him down, and he was slow enough as it was, but she was steadfast on the point.

“… … …
I
don’t understand.”

“Think about it this week. How do you see your loved ones, and do you want them to see you differently from the way you see them? Where is the disconnect?” She checked her clock. “That’s it for today. We’ll work on that next week.”

~oOo~

Joe sat on a bench in the courtyard of Carole’s building, too spun to return to his Jeep, or to go across the street to see Tina. He felt like his shrink had pushed him off a ledge and said,
I’ll be by next week with the net
.

He still didn’t understand what she wanted him to think about, but understanding felt very close, and dangerous as fuck. It
loomed
over him. How did he see his loved ones? What did she mean? He saw them. They were…people. Brothers and sisters. Nieces and nephews. Stepmother. The woman he loved. He saw their strengths and their flaws. They pissed him off. They made him laugh. He loved them all. They were part of him.

Do you want them to see you differently? Where is the disconnect?

What the holy rolling fuck did that mean?

He thought his family didn’t see enough and Tina saw too much. Yeah, that had been the topic of several weeks’ worth of sessions, working all that out.

What did he want them to see—or not to see?

Him. Just him.

He sat for a long time on that bench, and the question spun in his brain, not seeming to find anywhere to land. He didn’t understand.

Except one thing. He understood one thing: why Tina saw too much. Why that held him back.