28
It had been entirely too long since he'd seen her last.
And Jason couldn't help it: he was desperate to see her again. He was constantly distracted, and his preoccupation was sadly visible to those around him as well. He'd lost count of how many times Spinelli had to discreetly nudge him back to reality during meetings or how often Johnny had cracked jokes at his expense.
It was almost better when he and Elizabeth weren't speaking and instead only randomly spotting each other around town. Because at a distance, he could handle the lack of contact. Now, however, the memory of her was fresh in his mind from that late-night pizza dinner at Benedetti's. He remembered how bright and expressive her eyes were, he remembered the warm, healthy glow of her skin, the texture of her silky hair, the sound of her laugh, the dozens of secret little smiles she had, one for every occasion, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand.
And he couldn't get her out of his mind.
As if that wasn't bad enough, he kept flashing back to their first true night as husband and wife at the Greystone just before her kidnapping, when there was nothing left between the two of them, no barriers but instead only skin and sweat and the sound of her shallow breathing afterward. He hadn't been able to get enough of her then, either.
He still held his opened but untouched bottle of beer balanced on his knee, passing his thumb over the peeling label, and it had been nearly half an hour since Johnny had offered it to him in the first place. They were at his place in Johnny's massive entertainment room, and the boys were playing Counter Strike or Halo or one of those video games that mimicked the realities of his own profession far too much for him to find any amusement or recreation in it.
But if Jason was preoccupied, then so were the two young men he had no choice but to count as his closest friends for the past several months. And they were preoccupied with him, and that was never a good thing.
"…Stone Cold?"
He didn't hear him.
"Stone Cold!"
Jason glanced over in annoyance. "What?"
"You hungry? The Interloper and I were about to order pizza. Pineapple and jalapeño."
"The little wife turned us on to it," Johnny added, rapidly jabbing the red button on his controller as little CGI men fell to their knees in a shallow pool of blood. "Hey, get the cheesy bread, too. And tell them to send extra parmesan cheese and crushed red peppers."
"Why don't you order it?"
"Because I'm playing."
"So am I!"
"But I'm winning," he corrected. "How about it, Jason? You in?"
He lifted a shoulder in reply. "Fine. Order me one without any of that stuff on it."
"You are so white bread," Johnny muttered, drawing a horrified squawk from Spinelli as he slew his character. "There. I win because you have no player anymore. And that's why you have to go order."
He was grumbling as he climbed to his feet. "Fine. Lousy thin-skinned non-bullet-impervious CGI combat fighters…"
Johnny glanced up at his mentor as Spinelli scrounged around for his cell phone. "Hey, Jason."
He only barely heard him. "What?"
"You want me to get you another beer?" he offered, gesturing to the bottle he held. "That one's gotta be flat by now."
"I'm fine."
"Oh. You, uh, wanna play a round?"
"When have I ever wanted to play a round?"
"Good point," he muttered. "Do you, er, have anything you need me to take care of today?"
Jason shook his head. "No."
A long silence stretched between them until Johnny threw his hands up in the air. "Okay, are you pissed off at me or something? Because if you are, I'd much rather you yelled at me or knocked me around instead of zoning out like this. Is this about that lunch date I had with Elizabeth? Because I promise, nothing happened."
Jason stared at him. "What?"
"I had a taste for Mexican food so I went down to the grill but all the tables and booths were taken," he defended himself. "She was sitting alone and invited me to join her and we just ate, that was it. I mean, I know I flirt with her every chance I get but that's just to razz you – I'd never actually do anything about it. You don't try to bed your friend's wife; it's just common sense and decency."
Jason closed his eyes. "I don't care if you talk to her, Johnny."
"Okay, good. Because, just for the record, I'd never want to dip my wick in your well anyway, so to speak."
The corner of his mouth curled downward. "Just shut the fuck up."
"Seriously, Jason, what's got you all pissed off?"
"Stone Cold is missing his Fair One," Spinelli interjected sagely. His mentor's eyes remained closed and he didn't dignify the boy's remark. "Her presence soothes the savage beast, and without her calming light-"
"Knock it off, Spinelli."
"I was just trying to be poetic," he mumbled, flopping down on one of the overstuffed armchairs. "Food'll be here in half an hour. Maybe that will cheer our Stone Cold up. Nothing else has."
"Her presence soothes him?" Johnny repeated with a puzzled look. "I thought you said he was angry all the time when they were married."
"Dude, when is he not angry all the time?"
"Good point."
He was going to kill them. He was going to kill them both and drop their barely-pubescent bodies in the harbor. And then maybe he'd do a little dance. There was always a slight possibility.
"But, seriously, I think our Stone Cold has matured into…only slightly sub-par boyfriend material," Spinelli got out, cringing as if he expected Jason to leap up and throttle him for that remark. "He's not as angry all the time anymore."
"Personally, I credit us with that," Johnny announced as Jason struggled to keep his eyes closed and ignore them. "We broke his spirit. His angry, violent spirit. I'm actually kind of proud of us."
"And we've been doing a good job of keeping him away from the fermented beverages," Spinelli pointed out. "Around the time of the infamous D-Day-"
"D-Day?"
"Divorce Day," he whispered loudly. Jason cringed. "Around that time, I sneaked into his penthouse and cleaned out his wet bar and gave it all to the Goddess. She hid it under the floorboards where she and the Little Mister Corinthos Sir keep their chocolate."
"Why not just pour it down the drain?"
Spinelli balked. "Are you kidding? He had single-malts older than I am."
Johnny nodded sagely. "Got it. You can't throw away liquor like that and live with yourself afterward."
"Exactly," he replied. "And since then, he's been imbibing less. And that's a good sign."
"He get liquored up a lot around the little missus?"
"According to the Fair One, Stone Cold needed a glass of something stiff every night before they went to bed."
Jason winced at that. The only reason for that was so that nothing else got stiff when he and his wife went to bed. But of course, he'd have taken out his gun and shot himself twice in the head before admitting that to the boys. They'd never let him live it down.
"Her father and brother aren't big drinkers," Spinelli was saying. "Her dad's a surgeon and her brother's a pediatrician; they were always careful to stay away from the spirits and indulged them only on special occasions. So the Webbers never had much liquor in the house…except for her mother, who hid wine everywhere and would often be falling down drunk at eleven o'clock in the morning while her dad was at the office."
"Charming."
"And the Webbers are all pretty soft-spoken, too, in general," he added. "They can be shrill at times, but normally when they're having one of their spats, they go about it the passive-aggressive, back-handed remarks kind of way. So Elizabeth didn't get yelled at much as a kid and never did any yelling herself, a communication style drastically different than the one Mister Corinthos Sir and our Stone Cold are used to."
"Hell, I've heard Michael hollering for his dad to come get the phone when I call in sometimes," Johnny said. "Even that little kid's got a pair of lungs in him."
"Mister Corinthos Sir says he gets it from his mother."
"Ah."
"So anyway, that was why the Fair One found herself a little out of sorts when she joined our Harborview family." Spinelli shrugged and swapped his phone from hand to hand, idly playing with it. "And Stone Cold's anger scared her sometimes, but I do remember that she had her own way of calming him down. It was fascinating to watch. Like those animal specials on Animal Planet."
Jason groaned. Great. Now he was being compared to fucking lions or hippos or orangutans or whatever the hell else kind of animal made regular cameos on that station.
And just when he was contemplating getting up and schooling those two little shits that loved nothing more than to talk about him like he wasn't even in the room, something hit him on the shin. When he opened his eyes and looked down, he saw it was the bottle cap from Johnny's beer.
"Jason." Johnny arched a brow and actually looked serious for once. "Look, if he's right and you're once again miserable because you're thinking about the little wife, then you need to put an end to it. For your own good. And of course for ours, because we kind of rely on you to be at the top of your game, which you can't be if you're mooning over her."
Jason scowled at him. "Yeah? And what the fuck do you know, y-"
"Go see her."
He stopped. "…What?"
"Go see her," Johnny repeated as Spinelli nodded along. "What's the point of staying away if you're driving yourself crazy doing it? Go see her and tell her how you feel and put it all out there. At least then you'll know where you stand."
"And that's what you always tell us to do," Spinelli added. "You say that if we ever have a personal problem that is affecting business, we have to take care of it first rather than put it off at the expense of our work, which will surely suffer. So go see the Fair One."
"I don't think she'd lock the door on you and call the cops," Johnny pointed out. "Because if her mood while we were talking over lunch was any indication, she wouldn't be averse to seeing you again."
"Do it, Stone Cold."
"Look, if you get up now and walk out of here without another word to go see Elizabeth and lay it down, then Spin and I will forget this ever happened and we promise to never say 'I told you so' or tease you about it afterwards."
He stared at them for a long moment, deliberating over whether or not to believe them because they had never yet missed an opportunity to tease him about anything, and finally decided, the hell with it.
Johnny smirked as he watched his mentor hop up from the couch, grab his leather jacket, and head out of the room. He reached for a deck of playing cards and motioned Spinelli to sit on the floor for another game.
"Sweet. More food for us."
Spinelli took the cards from him and cut the deck to shuffle it. "You said it."
