I stiffened and shifted my eyes away from him. “Why does it matter? I thought we were starting over.”
“Because I don’t want the past to determine our future.”
Future.
Is that what I was looking at with Magnus? A future together? The idea seemed ludicrous to me, but I couldn’t ignore the flare of excitement that went through me. What if I could have what the other men in my life had with their partners? Would I finally be a part of a real family?
I lowered myself back down to Magnus’s chest. No way I could look him in the eye while I told him about all the shit I’d done in the past. Maybe this would be a good thing – maybe Magnus would finally realize who he’d really asked to stay. He’d come to his senses and I could go back to being the brash, untouchable Dante. He was a hell of a lot easier to be anyway.
Yeah, I could do this…the sooner this thing with Magnus ended, the sooner life would go back to normal.
Chapter 16
Magnus
“Not sure where to start,”Dante murmured, his breath skating over my chest. I could tell that talking about himself was the last thing he wanted to be doing, but I didn’t want to call the whole thing off.
Because I needed Dante to see that he was more than how he saw himself. But I couldn’t fight a battle against an enemy I knew nothing about.
“You mentioned Brazil…is that where you’re from?” I asked.
Dante nodded.
“You don’t have an accent,” I pointed out.
“My mother moved to the US when she was in her early twenties. She met my father who was Italian American and they got married. He died of a heart attack when I was seven.”
“Were you close to him?” I asked.
“Yeah…he worked as an engineer so he was always busy, but he always made time for me. He helped me with my homework, took me to ball games and fishing…typical father son stuff, I guess. After he died, my mom decided to go back to Brazil to be closer to family. She’d discovered she was pregnant with Aleks a couple weeks after my dad died.”
I waited patiently for Dante to continue since I guessed he was trying to gather the strength to re-visit a time in his life that clearly hadn’t been pleasant.
“She met my stepfather a few months after we got to Brazil. She’d gotten a job as a receptionist at the auto plant where he worked. They got married about a month before Aleks was born.”
“Did you like your stepfather?” I asked.
“I never really got the chance to, I guess,” Dante admitted. “I could tell from the first time I met him that he didn’t like me. I heard him and my mom arguing about me a few years into their marriage. My mom wanted to know why he treated me the way he did and he admitted to her that he hated having to live with the proof that she’d been with someone else…that she’d loved another man before him.”
I quelled my anger at that. “How did he treat you?” I asked.
Dante shrugged. “He ignored me mostly. I tried early on to do things I thought he’d like…like get good grades, keep my room clean, that sort of thing. He never commented when I did something right, but I never heard the end of it when I messed up. I finally figured that if fucking up was all I was any good at, I should do it all the time.”
There was no humor in his words. “What about Aleks? Your stepfather must have seen him as a reminder of your father too.”
Dante shook his head. “It was different with Aleks…probably because he could pass Aleks off as his kid. He even legally adopted him…gave him his last name and everything.”
A name the bastard hadn’t been willing to share with Dante.
“My mom stopped working when Aleks was born, but we still had a good life. We weren’t rich or anything, but we lived in a decent neighborhood, there was food on the table each night. But then my stepfather got hurt on the job and he couldn’t work anymore. His disability check wasn’t enough to pay for the house we were living in and we ended up losing it. Then his check got cut off all together after the company accused him of purposefully hurting himself to go on disability.”
Dante’s fingers trailed over my hand which was resting on my stomach. He began linking and unlinking our fingers.
“What happened after that?” I prodded.
“We ended up moving to the favela…it was all we could afford. My mom began cleaning houses for rich people.”
“What about your stepfather? What did he do?”
