Page 308 of Valentino

There’s a weirdness in the air, as if I knew what was going to happen before it did, and yet I still had to go and see it with my own eyes.

My mind takes me back to the day we met.

“What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“The one with the ponytail.” He gestures to her with his chin.

So many memories, all good…and for years.

Fuck this, just stop.

Don’t put yourself through it, he doesn’t care so why should I?

I turn the radio on to distract myself, a song plays.

My mind is skipping between timeframes, jumping forward and back between memories.

Song after song, flashback after memory. My mind is not my friend today, continually trolling through the carnage of my past.

“You see her.” Carlo points to a blond girl as he takes a drag of his cigarette. “Bet you ten dollars I can get her naked.”

“She’s at least twenty-five.”

“All the better.”

The memory makes me smile, we had such fun….

Then today, to see him in ankle chains and the handcuffs. Confirmation of what I already knew, I wouldn’t survive jail. Not even for a day.

How does it feel to be restrained like that?

My heart constricts.

And I shouldn’t care, because I hate him…. I hate him so much for what he did.

The sound as he was punched, the way the air was knocked from him.

How often is he beaten?

My eyes close, fuck.

I hit the dial again with force, searching for a song to take my mind somewhere else.

“You left me,” he whispers through tears. “When I needed you the most…. You left me.”

My fingers tighten around the steering wheel with white-knuckle force, and the automatic wipers come on as it begins to sprinkle rain.

The cut over his eye…. Who did that?

Where the fuck is Lombardi’s protection for him?

Another lame song, I hit the button.

“And here is Sam Tompkins’s version of ‘How to Save a Life,’” the radio announcer says.

The song begins, and I swallow the lump in my throat as I listen.