138 - We Can Work It Out

“Babes…”  Ton leaned in close, his nose all but disappearing into the satiny curtain of hair that shielded her ear.  “I’m gonna step out for a minute.  I need a smoke.”

He’d been trying to quit.  Dorothea didn’t like it, and he knew it wasn’t good for him, but this cigarette break wasn’t to feed a nicotine craving.  No, he needed the two seconds of escape from the chaos in the room. 

Jon and Petey had loud-ass family and friends. 

First there was David going off like a fog horn about how Petey was dressed for a funeral, not a wedding.  Then Obie and Richie started their habitual bitching back and forth at each other like an old married couple.  Next up, Rich and David were roughhousing with the younger boys, then, God Almighty, there was Gavin. 

Tony’s mom once had a Chihuahua who had bounced and yipped like that all the time.  He hated that dog.  Not that Gavin didn’t seem like a nice guy, he was just hyper and bitchy – or hyperbitchy.  Of course, the flamboyant beanpole was the only one who had managed to draw a genuine smile out of an oddly somber Petey. 

Something was up there, he suspected.  Jon didn’t seem much happier than Petey, and his head had been spinning since they got there, barking out instructions at the waiters to get drink orders.  Come to think of it, that particular table – with Jon, Petey, Petey’s family and Gavin – had been quiet the last couple of minutes…  He glanced in that direction.  Jon and Petey’s chairs were empty, and one other.  Henry, maybe? 

Wonder if they needed a smoke, too.

With a nearly imperceptible frown, Dorothea inclined her head and murmured, “Don’t be long?”

God bless her for not giving him the I-can’t-fucking-believe-you’re-leaving-me-here-with-your-parents look.  It probably helped that Matt and Desiree were at the table, too.  And Romeo.

Pop had been cool with their engagement and congratulated them both with a hearty hug.  His mom had been cool, too, in a different way.  She offered her muted best wishes and hugs, but it was all obligatory for the sake of ‘company’.  The smile didn’t reach her eyes, the hug was limp and, since then, she’d barely spoken to either him or Dorothea.   She chose to ply Romeo with candy and chewing gum from her handbag instead.

“I won’t.”  He stood and put a light touch to her shoulder, reminding her quietly, “I love you.”

Her features softened a bit, and how he loved being able to do that to her.  Lightly smoothing a hand up the back of his leg from knee to thigh, she mouthed, “Me, too.”

“Excuse me,” he said more loudly to his brother, sister-in-law and parents, lifting his jacket from the back of his chair.  “I’m gonna sneak out for a minute.”

Now his mother chose to speak.  “Are you going to smoke?  You’re going to end up with lung cancer if you don’t stop that.”

“He’s just about quit,” Dorothea was quick to leap to his defense even as she shooed him on his way, seeming to know he needed a breather more than a smoke.  With a quick squeeze to her shoulder, he slipped away, keeping his smile hidden.  She would enjoying blowing off a little steam by telling his mother how few cigarettes he’d had this week. 

Nodding to the security guy – Greg? – who was stationed at the antique door providing privacy to the private function room, he twisted the knob and stepped into the hall with a puff of relief.   Wrapping his fingers around the top of the newel post, he swung himself around the railing to hit the top step, sliding arms in the jacket sleeves as he began his descent.

He had gone maybe a couple of steps down the stairwell cut into the center of the third floor hallway when voices caught his attention.  Halting, head snapping up, he sought their source. 

There.  On his right, the opposite side of the stairs from the banquet room and near what he presumed to be a storage closet, were Jon and Petey, heads bent in conversation.  A few of Jon’s words floated in his direction.

“Goddammit, Petey, we’re not going back in there until you tell me what’s wrong.”

So there is something going on. 

Knowing well enough to keep his nose out of those kinds of conversations, Tony schooled his eyes straight ahead and aimed for the second floor.  Halfway down the staircase, he could make out the glass door and windows that surrounded see the designated smoking area that he’d spotted on the way up.  Looked like he would have some company in the frigid twilight – Petey’s brother was huddled up next to the balcony's railing..

“Jon, I don’t want to do this now,” Petey protested quietly from her position against the wall, her eyes darting to Tony’s dark head as it disappeared to the level below.  Anybody might overhear their conversation here, but Jon was determined to pick her brain before they could even order dinner.  “I overreacted to something I shouldn’t have.  That’s all.”

He palmed the side of her face and she saw the effort he was putting into keeping his tone easy when he said, “Stop fucking lying to me.  Back in the car, you looked like you lost your puppy.  If I'm responsible for that, then I wanna know."

Lying sucked.  She hated it almost as much as the game she was being forced to play.  This was why she eschewed social convention.  It did nothing more than perpetuate lies, even if you had no want to do so.  Petey didn’t want to lie to him.

Glancing furtively around Jon and down the stairwell, she saw that Tony was out of earshot.  “I’m sorry,” she said in a hushed voice.  “I never meant to lie, this just isn’t the best time to become an irrationally emotional woman.  Of course, with you, there probably isn’t any good time.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” His nostrils flared with resentment at her muttered afterthought.  “You think I don’t give a shit about how you feel?”

God.  No.  That wasn’t what she meant.  He just wasn’t a let’s-sit-down-and-talk-about-our-emotions kind of guy – anymore than she was that kind of girl.

“No, I don’t think that.”  Petey let her weight rest more heavily into the rich, burgundy wallpaper and folded protective arms over her chest.   Angling her chin with feigned attitude, she boldly met his eyes and owned up to her feelings. “Okay, short story is that I’m embarrassed about the wedding gift I was so sure you’d like but didn’t.  To be quite frank, I was so sure that you’d like it, my feelings were hurt when you didn’t.”

“What?”  Blonde eyebrows knit together with confusion and he butted a palm against the wall by her right ear, leaning his face in close.  “Why the hell would you think I didn’t like it?”

“It was written all over your face, Jon.”  No longer comfortable with the excessive closeness, Petey pivoted her head to get away from his glowering eyes.  The jaw clip holding her hair in place scraped noisily on the wall before going lopsided.  With a strangled sound of frustration, she pulled it loose.

He halted her when she reached  to twine the coal dark strands back onto her head.  “Leave it down.”

“No.  I don’t have anything else to do with the clip.”  Biting down gently on the plastic. she tucked it into her mouth and once again reached for the loose waves. 

Jon freed it gently from her teeth and put the hairclip in his pocket, where she knew it would eventually get broken.

What difference does it make?  It’s a five dollar piece of plastic.

“Wear your hair down for me.  It’s all wild and wavy, like we just had sex.”

What else was she to do?  Wrestle him for the stupid hair doodad?  It was easier to comply and move on.  “Fine.”  She fluffed the just-sexed look out with her fingers and made a move to circumvent his grasping hands.  “We need to get back to our guests.”

“Oh, no, little girl.”  Missing her hands and wrists, he slid an arm around her waist and tucked her into the crook of it.  “You’re not going anywhere yet.”

“Dammit, I told you what was wrong.  We have people waiting for us, Jon!”  She struggled, shoving at him and stopping just short of stomping her boot on top of his foot.  He managed to get his other arm around her and hauled her back against his chest. 

“But I haven’t told you what you really saw,” he gritted in her ear, barely dodging her right elbow as it sought to bury itself in his lung. 

“You can’t tell me what I saw, dumbass.”  But she could.  In minute detail.  Thanks to that damnable ‘photographic’ memory of hers, she could still see the displeasure settling into each individual crease on his face.  Then the slow, downward curve of his mouth and the polite façade he’d donned when uttering his courteous thank you.

“Cut that shit out.  Don’t throw your intellect at me, woman.  It will not end well.”

She quit flailing with one final thrust of her elbows into his gut.  The grunt of pain did little to soothe her battered and bruised ego.  “It’s not my intellect I’m throwing, it’s my common sense.  I saw what I saw, Jon.  You were not happy with those pictures.”

“No, you stubborn little wench…”  He interrupted himself to abruptly exhale.  He was hanging onto his temper by a bare thread, but he was doing it.  Petey was impressed, and a little flattered that he was trying so hard.  “I was totally infatuated with those pictures.  You took my breath away.”  His arms went from being a steel-banded prison to a lover’s cuddle.  “So fucking gorgeous you took my breath away.”

“That’s not the way it looked,” she protested, a little of the stiffness sliding from her spine at his breathy compliments.  Petey still didn’t believe him, but the flowery words were a healthy dose of salve to her pride.

“Probably not,” he agreed, thumb stroking the cashmere that blanketed her ribcage, “But there’s a reason for that.  I realized as I was looking at them, that there was somebody on the other side of that camera.  Somebody who was thinking of ways to make you look sexy as sin, and moving your beautiful naked body so that it was hot enough to melt the damn lens.  And I got…”  Jon sighed, bringing his chin to rest in the curve of her shoulder.  “…possessive, jealous, whatever the hell you want to call it.   I’m not that guy, Sugar, and I didn’t know how to deal with it.  I haven’t been there before.”

Petey was speechless.  Her badass husband-to-be was claiming to be jealous for the first time?  That wasn’t even possible.  She carefully executed a slow pirouette, stopping when she could place a hand on each pectoral muscle.  “Bullshit,” she whispered.  “I don’t believe you.”

“Swear to God,” he vowed, holding his right hand up while his left remained draped at her midriff.  “I’ve never felt like that before.”  Shrugging, he admitted, “Of course, I’ve never known that my woman was naked with another man, either.  If Dottie was, I sure didn’t see any damn pictures of it.  By the time I got halfway through the album, all I could think about was that photographer’s eyes molesting you, and I was dying to cover you up.  You're mine, Petey.  He had no right."

Any hurt feelings that may have been lingering, melted into a puddle of goo right along with the rest of her.  “Jonny…”  Tender hands skated up and over the plane of his chest so that her fingers could delve into his already messy hair.  “It wasn’t like that, and besides, Gavin was there the whole time.  He kept everything on a purely professional level.”

“I know that.  It makes the possessiveness piss me off even more, but I’ll get a grip.  I will.”  His determined grumble only underscored his embarrassment.  Sweet.  Jon Bon Jovi being sweet.  Was she dreaming?  She leaned her full weight into him, heart beating in her eyes.

“You’d better be careful, or I’m going to think you really love me.”

“Baby, there’s only so much humiliation I can suffer.”  The words were bathed with disgust.  “If you haven’t figured it out by now, you’re shit outta luck.”

She smiled, her heart swelling, and the teeny tiny wounds left upon it from this afternoon were magically healed.  Petey had gotten more emotion out of him in the past few days than she’d ever had reason to expect in a lifetime. 

The grumbly man who liked to play curmudgeon  had a sweet, loving heart.  He just kept it wrapped in prickly layers of barbed wire and jaded crustiness.  Lots of layers.  But it was so worth the effort of digging deep enough to get to it out.  So worth it.

Delighted with the treasure that had been revealed, Petey was still able to acknowledge he’d exposed his soft underbelly enough for one day.  This wasn’t his thing, and it was time to let him off the hook.

“So you do like my body then?” she asked invitingly, guests temporarily forgotten.

His eyes went to that familiar impassioned shade of blue and his voice fell to a seductive rumble, “Sugar, I-“

He never got a chance to finish the sentiment.  The closet door they’d been standing beside, swung wide – thank God in the opposite direction – with a muffled bang , and Daniel emerged.  His hawkish face was with contorted into a disgusted sneer, and his  long, stick-like fingers were curled firmly around a weapon.   

“I will not listen to your sexual escapades one more time,” he decreed with a haughty sniff, waving them apart.  “Step away from one another before I become violently ill at your perversions.”

Her first thought was that Greg and Rocco were fifteen feet away, on the other side of that door.  If she could only get their attention, Daniel would become a distant memory.  Taking a deep breath to scream bloody murder, her plan was thwarted when Daniel clapped a brutal hand over her mouth, only to be slapped away by Jon.

“Don’t fucking touch her, you twisted sonofabitch.”

With no more than a cursory glare at Jon, Daniel conveyed his menacing threats directly to Petey.

“Make no mistake Patience.  He…”  He tilted his head toward Jon, who had the stair railing at his back, while Petey was plastered to the wall opposite him.  “…is alive only because I allowed it.  This..."  He hefted the weapon, which she could now make out as a stun gun.  "...carries twice the power of the last one.  He shan’t be walking away this time.”

Taking a second look at the weapon, she identified it as an upper-end, high-voltage model. The case had been visibly cracked open and taped back together.  If Daniel had amplified the effect of the unit the least little bit…  His threat was not idle.   

“Oh," Daniel added, almost as an afterthought, "And neither shall you.”