Page 3 of Falling for the Enemy

"Liam, stop." Autumn grabs his arm and gently pulls him back. "Matteo is my neighbor. Can you be nice, for once?"

As it turns out, the answer to that question is no. Liam looks at me like he wants to grind me into a fine powder. "You got bad taste, Autumn. Shitty friends, shitty neighbors—"

"Shitty brother," Isabella adds.

I'm glad she said it and not me. "Listen, I'm just here to have a few drinks, Gallagher. I saw some fighting and I came to check it out. If I knew it was a family squabble, I wouldn't have come over, but I got a soft spot for damsels in distress. Sue me."

His lip snarls upward. Liam doesn't look pleased, but he backs down. "C'mon, Autumn. We gotta go."

"I told you, jackass, she's not going with you," Isabella cuts back in, restarting the argument that got them in this place to start with.

Liam turns his fiery rage on the blonde and towers over her. "Listen here, slut, just because you want to be out in the clubs looking like a hooker doesn't mean my sister will be. It was probably her friendship with you that convinced her to come out looking like this," he thumbs back at Autumn.

Frankly, I'm kind of digging the slip dress. It's very vintage. "Guys, maybe this isn't the place to—"

"Shut it, Vitale," Liam roars without turning in my direction. "Stop calling my sister. Stop texting me. Stop inserting yourself into my family's life."

Autumn takes a quiet step backward. I see her eyes flick in my direction and then toward the exit. While the two of them call each other names and fight to see who has the biggest dick among them and who's the worst influence, we make our escape.

In the Las Vegas night air, my heart soars. I've dreamt of this day for months, maybe even years. This is everything I've ever wanted. Autumn grabs my hand and pulls me toward another building. "Come on," she grins, "before they figure out we left."

I attend church with my mother whenever she asks. She's a good Catholic and she goes often. I have an iffy relationship with God and in times of great distress, I've been known to pray. But right now I'm not in distress, I'm on top of the world. So I'm sure God is surprised to hear from me.Thank you. I know we should talk more and I swear I'll see you on Sunday. But thank you for making every dream I've ever had come true.

Indeed, as Autumn pulls me into Cloak & Dagger, I can't imagine my life ever getting any better than this.

AUTUMN

Matteo is breathtaking. We sit in the darkest booth at Cloak & Dagger sipping on spiked lemonades and giggling. Maybe it's the smoke in the air. Nicotine mixes with the telltale scent of something stronger. I almost feel like I'm getting secondhand high to the smooth sounds of Dean Martin.

"How do you wear these things?" Across the table with my foot in his lap, Matteo starts removing my heel. My protests are feeble. "They're very pretty, but they seem like torture devices." The second he slips my shoe off and starts massaging my foot, I vow to never wear a heel again.

I am lost to the sensations of the booze and the company. He makes me feel good and the noxious fumes in the air filling my lungs aren't that bad either. "They're an attractant," I tell him with a lazy grin. "Men worship at the altar of a beautiful calf."

Somewhere in the back of my mind is my father screaming. He's saying stop, this is a Vitale, you shouldn't be letting him touch you like this. My father warns me about my virginity and the way that this looks. He says to think about the paparazzi and how they would spin a photo like this. But what do I care? Virginity can mean so many things.

When I was younger, my father used to freak out when I held hands with a boy. In high school, he lost his temper when I was caught kissing a boy under the bleachers during a football game. He said that that was how rumors spread about loose girls. Liam was quick to back him up. While my brother could do no wrong, I could do nothing right.

The world is full of rules and they change for everybody. I grew up in a household where a subset of rules existed just for me because I was a girl. My brother could have his sexual dalliances, but God forbid a man touch me beneath the skirts or even think about slipping his hand under my shirt. Something like that was strictly forbidden. I was precious cargo to be saved for my husband.

My husband was a matter of family debate from the moment I was born. He would be a strong man with a commanding reputation. Marriage to him would lift our family name. Love? Who cared if Autumn loved her husband. She would come to love him in due time. I wasn't meant to fall for the men I met at school or pass out favors like candy because I was tarnishing the Gallagher brand. They had one card to play and it was me. If their ace of hearts turned out to only be a seven of clubs, what would they do then?

I liked to imagine that Matteo's family didn't buy and trade women like that. They probably did, but in my fantasies, he wanted me for me and not for what my family could give him.

"Do you hate the Gallaghers like the rest of your family?" My words have a touch of drunken slur to them and I vow to imbibe water from this moment on. I want to remember this night for the rest of my life; it might be the only night of freedom I ever have again.

Matteo's fingers work the arches of my feet like a dream. He wears a charming smile as his hooded eyes watch me appreciatively. "Your brother, perhaps, but he seems like a tool. What's his deal with your friend?"

Liam and Isabella have a textbook's worth of history. She's the kind of woman that my parents are afraid of me becoming but the kind that my brother falls in love with because she falls at his feet fast. "They're the on-again, off-again type, but last year he got her pregnant. She didn't keep it." He demanded that she take no other lovers and he would take care of her and the baby for life. Isabella said that she was too young to be Liam's lifelong mistress. They had been 'off' ever since.

"Her body, ya know?" Matteo says with a shrug. "Politics," he trails off.

It's gray area for a lot of us. We never really quite know what to do in a situation like that. It all comes down to when it happens to you. "Isabella is a wild card. She doesn't know when to quit drinking a lot of the time. So if you hadn't shown up, who knows how it would have ended between her and Liam."

Matteo begins to unstrap the heel on my other foot, placing it gingerly by its partner. His fingers dig into the skin as he seamlessly moves from one foot to the other. "Why are you friends with someone like that?"

Normally that would be a tough question, but in Isabella's case, it's got an easy answer. "Usually I wouldn't tell just anyone this story, but I feel safe with you, Matteo. I don't know why." Maybe it's the liquor talking, but something about being with him makes me feel warm. "Some friends and I snuck into a club for my sixteenth birthday. We were dancing and having fun until the owners caught us. They dragged us into the back room and there were five of us and two of them, but we were just little girls and they were 6'5", big dudes. They said they were gonna call the cops and two of the girls started crying. Then one of the owners says he'll give us a pass since is the first time we've ever done something like this. But only if we, you know, if we blow them."

Blood boils in my veins like this was yesterday. I remember the two girls crying even harder. I remember a chill racing down my spine. "It was my idea to go there because I thought we wouldn't get caught, so I stepped up. I said I'd do it. I said don't make them pay for what I got us into. It sounds a lot braver than it actually was because I didn't even know I was crying until I felt hot, wet tears fall onto my shirt."