Oops, My Online Ex Is the Mafia Don novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Hi, Bee

Siobhan fights the man who was nightshift, refuses to marry him and walks out, only to find his uncle feeding coins into her father's fountain, calling her by her secret pen name.

I didn't say hi back.

I said, "No."

He raised one eyebrow.

"No what?"

"No, you are not nightshift. Nightshift sells olive oil. Nightshift has a bad back and a cat named after a saint."

"The cat was my grandmother's."

My knees went loose.

I put one hand on his desk so I wouldn't sit down on his rug.

The cat was real.

I had sent that cat a birthday card emoji.

"You," I said. "You let me tell you about my period cramps."

"You told me about them. I didn't let you. You don't wait for permission."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Talk like him."

He came around the desk, slowly.

Up close he smelled like cedar and coffee.

He was taller than any man I'd ever written.

"I am him, Bee."

"Don't call me that. You don't get to call me that."

"All right," he said. "Siobhan."

That was worse.

He said my real name like he'd practiced it in the dark.

"How long have you known it?"

"Long enough."

"That's not a number."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

I wanted to slap him.

I wanted to cry.

Mostly I wanted to go back fourteen months and never answer the first comment.

"Fourteen months," I said. "Every night. I told you about my mother. I told you things I never told Bernie."

"I know."

"And you were a Don the whole time."

"Not the whole time," he said. "The first night, I'd been one for about four hours."

I didn't know what that meant.

I didn't ask.

I picked the check up off his desk and held it out.

"Take it. Ninety thousand. The rest in monthly payments, it's all on the letter."

He took the check.

He looked at it for a long moment.

Then he tore it in half, and in half again, and dropped the pieces in his wastebasket.

"That was my apartment," I said.

"I know what it was."

"Then why?"

He didn't answer.

He picked up the letter, read every line of it, and set it down square on the blotter.

"It's a good letter."

"I don't want a book review. I want an answer."

"Saturday at four," he said. "Or your father's markers go back on the street on Monday morning."

"Back on the street. What does that mean?"

"It means I stop holding them, and other men collect."

"You'd do that to him?"

"I'd rather not."

"That's not a no."

"It's the truth. You asked me for that once, at two in the morning."

My face went hot.

"You don't get to quote me at me."

"You quoted yourself. You had your cousin read it to you on your father's sofa, probably."

I stared at him.

He held my look and didn't smile.

"Is someone watching my house?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

He paused, and I watched him decide not to tell me.

"Since it mattered," he said.

"You are unbelievable."

"You used to say I was the only believable man on the internet."

"I was wrong. I'm a writer. I make things up for a living, and I still couldn't make you up."

That landed somewhere.

His jaw moved under the beard.

"Tell me why," I said. "One real reason, and I'll think about it."

"Not today."

"Then no."

I picked up my purse.

"I'm not marrying a man who tears up my check and won't say why. I'm not marrying a man I've known for ten minutes."

"Fourteen months and ten minutes."

"Goodbye, nightshift."

I walked out of his study with my chin up and my legs shaking.

The old woman at the stove pressed a warm paper bag into my hands as I passed.

It was full of pizzelle.

I was too stunned to give it back.

Bernie had the engine running.

She looked at my face and pulled out of the gate without a word.

At the bottom of the hill she said, "Well?"

"It's him."

"Him who?"

"Nightshift."

Bernie braked so hard the pizzelle flew into the footwell.

"The Don is your internet boyfriend?"

"Ex."

"Shiv. Shiv. You dumped a mob boss in six hundred words."

"I didn't know he was a mob boss!"

"That was the whole point of the six hundred words!"

I laughed, and then I was crying, and Bernie drove one-handed and held my wrist with the other all the way down Lincoln Drive.

It was dark when we turned into Gladwyne.

There was a silver Lincoln in my father's drive.

My father's car was gone.

Every window in the house was dark except the kitchen.

A small man in a gray cardigan stood beside the fountain with his back to us.

He was feeding coins into the water, one at a time, and moving his lips.

"Who's that?" Bernie whispered.

"I don't know."

I got out anyway.

The gravel crunched under my sandals.

He dropped one more coin, watched it sink, and turned around.

He had neat silver hair, reading glasses on a chain, and a gold ring on his little finger.

He smiled at me.

"Evening, honeybee."

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