Carlo

I’d seen Bianca walking around campus as if she was lost, never fitting in after all this time. I’d only ever heard of her dating the one guy, Ben, who broke up with her when she wouldn’t put out, and I’d only seen her with one friend, her roommate Erika, who worked with her at Two Sheets.

Unlike Erika, Bianca was far from friendly. It felt like as soon as we stepped into Two Sheets, she headed in the opposite direction. Alessandro says it is because she’s stuck up, the kind of person who thinks she’s better than us. But how would he know if he’d never spoken to her?

If anything, Alessandro was the uptight one. If some girl didn’t grovel to him twenty-four seven, he concluded that she wasn’t the kind of girl we should hang out with. He made too many assumptions about people. Sometimes I wondered if we were even related—he was too fucking judgmental.

Dad said her dad, Paul, used to go to high school with him. He said he was a mess when they were kids, and it seemed as if things hadn’t changed. Paul was drunk when he came into the bistro, shouting and making a racket, and it only got worse as the night went on.

Dad hadn’t wanted Paul to take Bianca back to the dorm. He even offered to do it himself, and he never drove—he had a driver do that for him. But Paul insisted on having two espressos to help sober him up some, and Bianca defended him by saying he was fine to drive. I hoped she was just saving face and not a chick who was too damn proud to admit her dad had a problem.

A serious one.

Paul made a fool of himself, and part of me felt sorry for Bianca. Hearing his stories made me realize why she was the way she was—it seemed they were always on the road when she was growing up, never staying in one town long enough for her to bond with anyone. All Paul’s stories were about different towns in different states, and I noticed the more he talked about them, the more Bianca sipped on her wine.

The whole night was painful, but Dad had wanted to help out an old friend. He was way too generous… which was why he and Mom always fought. 

Dad was having breakfast with Paul this morning at the hotel, which dad was staying at, to put him straight and make it known he was no fool. He’d done his homework before they met, and with the help of his driver, Rik—who I suspected was a lot more than just a driver—figured out that Paul wasn’t an inventor. Instead, he was someone who had some bad people chasing him. There was no way Dad was going to invest in a lie, but he was willing to help a friend out. 

Our grandparents, God rest their souls, came to New York with only a dime in their pockets. They worked hard to achieve the one-bedroom apartment Dad was brought up in, but Dad was teased for being poor and even more for being Italian. Paul had been his one friend, someone who never made him feel like an outsider.

I could understand Dad’s loyalty, but there had to be a line. 

Paul’s ideas were ridiculous. He wanted to create an app where you could buy anything and get it delivered anywhere in the world. We already had that—it was called A****n. Then he started talking about a dating app… nothing new there. None of his so-called inventions made any damn sense.

I reached out to touch Bianca’s leg, hoping she would stop feeling uncomfortable with the way her dad was behaving. Also because she was fucking hot. She didn’t seem to mind—she didn’t move away or tell me to stop.

I never knew what was under those baggy shirts and sweatpants she always wore around campus. 

She was hot.

Fucking hot! 

I wanted a piece of her so badly. I could barely resist putting her on the table and sucking her pussy for dessert. I bet it would have tasted so sweet, much better than the zuccotto. And that photo she’d sent…

“What you dreaming about?” Adolfo asked.  He slumped down in the chair beside me, and the way he collapsed into it reminded me of Paul last night.

“Bianca,” I admitted.

He put his hand through his long hair, which was in dire need of a good cut. It reminded me of something Dad said last night before dinner.

“Remember last night when Dad said you looked like some gigolo?” I asked, laughing. Dad didn’t appreciate Adolfo’s new waves. He said it reminded him of Fabio, the famous model, and not in a good way.

He smirked. “Yeah, I took it as a compliment, even if he didn’t mean it as one. As for Bianca, you’re wasting your time. She may look all sweet and innocent, but she’s a tough nut to crack. One I’m not sure we should even be messing with—you saw the look on Dad’s face.”

He was right—Dad had been keen at first, but by the end of the night, he said we should keep as far away from her as possible.

“Since when do you listen to Dad?”

If anything, Adolfo was the most stubborn one of us three. He did what he wanted, whenever he pleased, with no thought of consequence to anyone or anything.

“True, but you can’t fucking mess with Dad. Besides, you really want to go messing with a girl with all that on her plate?”

Dad warned us after they left dinner that whoever was after Paul could lead us to get caught in the crossfire somehow if we were involved with Bianca.

“Yes and no. Some part of me wants to protect her and get to know her. I’m fed up with playing with girls who only want one thing.”

“To get some of the Russo cock?”

“Exactly! I thought women were supposed to be smarter than us. You would think this damn list of rejects you thought of would have stopped them from lining up. I really felt bad for Sarah.” She’d been the first one to be labeled as a “reject.”

He stood up, waving his arms. “Don’t be all dramatic, Carlo! It’s too early for this shit. Besides, when did you get all sensitive?”

I laughed, following as he got up to leave for the kitchen. “The day you started listening to Dad.”

“Touché. But we shouldn’t be playing with fire, no matter how hot she is.”

“I didn’t say we should go put a ring on her finger. But there’s nothing wrong with trying something new, and I think Bianca could be what we’ve been missing. Anyway, we don’t always have to do things together.”

He shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t get how we’re related, let alone brothers. We agreed to come to Yale to have fun, no settling down. Remember what happened last time we let a woman come between us? We nearly lost it. I don’t want history to repeat itself again, do you?”

Thinking of that incident made me realize that Alessandro had been gone a while.

“Hey, where’s bro? He should’ve been back from his run ages ago.”

Alessandro was the only one of us with a consistent workout routine. Dad sometimes questioned if he was Italian, because the man was punctual and too organized. He even knew what he was going to wear on Friday the following weekend. He was obsessed with order, I think because of his frustration with life, from having his heart broken once.

“Dad wanted him to meet him for breakfast so that they could talk to Paul,” Adolfo said as he stuck his head in the fridge, desperately looking for something to eat. “What the fuck?! Alessandro has taken over the fridge with all his health food smoothie shit!”

“There hasn’t been anything in there since Wednesday when Alessandro claimed he was fed up of going to the store and doing everything around the apartment,” I explained, then went back to the Alessandro subject. “Why him?”

“Because he’s the sensible one, and if things get a little heated, then he’s the one who’ll be able to calm Dad down.”

I wondered if Bianca would be there with them at breakfast. Even if she was, Alessandro wouldn’t make a move. He was even more picky about women than he was about his food.

“I guess I better go to the store,” Adolfo grumbled as he headed to his bedroom to put some clothes on.

I could join him at the store… or go and spy on the breakfast meeting. Then again, there was nothing to spy on. Alessandro wasn’t interested in Bianca. But Adolfo, if left to his own devices, would only buy whatever he was interested in eating, which was always junk. I decided that there was only one thing to do, and that was to go the store with Adolfo.