A Love Most Fatal (Morelli Family #1)

20. Nate

20

NATE

Because fighting isn’t enough, they want me to be good with guns. Vanessa swung by my room after morning training to tell me to get dressed to go out. Leo then drove us to a private, indoor shooting range where they unloaded five boxes of different guns on a table and handed me a pair of ear plugs and glasses.

“You don’t get these in the real world,” Vanessa says. “But hopefully in the real world you won’t be shooting inside a concrete building.”

Leo laughs in a way that tells me this scenario is more common than I would like to believe.

“Do you have a gun?” Leo asks and I don’t mean to wince, but I do. I think my face has been in an uncomfortable grimace since we walked in the door.

Mary takes a bite out of an apple from where she perches on the counter. “Have you ever held a gun?”

“Yes.’’ That’s a lie. I’ve held many laser guns, but I don’t think that’s what they mean.

“You’re a teacher, shouldn’t you have one?” Leo asks.

“Now that’s a hot button topic,” Vanessa mutters, and before anyone can follow that thread, she holds a pistol out to me. It’s black and smaller than I thought it would be. As to not look entirely horrified, I take the gun from her, my fingers ghosting across the back of her hand as I do.

It’s heavier than I thought it would be. I don’t even hover a finger over the trigger.

Vanessa holds up what I recognize from video games as a magazine and a box of bullets.

She jerks her head towards one of the bays and I follow her there holding the gun at my side. Is it illegal to walk with a gun out in front of you? Or is it more just common safety, like how you hand scissors to your neighbor in class? Wait, are there laws about gun safety that I need to know before shooting a gun?

“Here.” Vanessa presses a few bullets into the magazine’s sleeve and hands it to me to do the same. It looked easy when she did it, but it hurts my fingers as I try to push metal bullets into their metal case. She loads a second magazine while I finish mine.

“These are .22s.” She holds up one of the little bullets. “They’re not the best, but they’re good to learn with. Could kill someone under the right circumstances.”

I gulp and pluck the bullet from her hand to add it to my now-full case.

“Great. Now put in a magazine and load the gun.”

She makes it sound so easy, and after a moment of messing with it, I guess it is. I have the clip in place and am working on pulling back the hammer when shots fire in the bay next to us making me jump. It’s just Mary shooting a much larger handgun than the one I’m holding, with what looks like a very casual amount of focus on the target in her lane. Her shots slice the center of her paper to bits, nonetheless. Makes it look rather easy.

“This is the safety.” Vanessa points to a little switch where my pointer finger can reach. I slide it down and then back up into place.

Vanessa turns away from me and messes with a couple of buttons on the stall’s wall and suddenly a tall sheet of paper drops down ahead of us. It’s a target with one big striped circle in the middle and four smaller ones at each corner.

“Shoot it,” she says and steps back.

“But I don’t?—”

“Just try,” she says.

I don’t know anything about holding a gun aside from what I’ve seen in video games and movies, but I raise the gun shakily in front of me and take a big breath. There’s nothing inherently scary about this thing. Other than the possibility of blowing up, or misfiring, or any number of possibilities my mind is readily supplying me with right now.

I don’t know where to hold it, but I lift my arms and try to look down the top of the barrel to the target. My eyes have a hard time focusing and I might be going cross eyed, but before I can overthink it more, I pull the trigger.

Nothing happens.

“The safety,” Vanessa says.

Right.

I flick the safety down again, return my arms to their position and pull the trigger before I can work myself up about it.

It’s startling the way my wrist jerks backwards with the recoil on this little gun, and I gasp when a hot piece of metal hits my arm. I almost think I’ve been shot, but when I look down, my skin is unmarred, and I see a little metal case drop to the ground beside me.

“Very natural,” Vanessa says. I hit the paper at least, but just barely. There’s a hole in the white space surrounding the targets, not actually within one. “Now, what did you learn?”

Vanessa is no teacher, but I recognize the pedagogy of the exercise. She’s the natural.

I swallow and look down at the thing. “I have to tighten my wrist more.”

“Try that.”

I do, locking my wrist so that upon pulling the trigger, it doesn’t get jerked back as much. It works, marginally, and the bullet pierces the paper in the farthest ring of the big target. Not my intention, but at least it’s in a target.

I look back at Vanessa for more instruction and she nods. A couple of bays down, Mary and Leo are firing round after round of shots at their targets. I understand why we need the ear plugs; it sounds like the thunder.

“Hold it up again.”

I do as she says, holding the gun like I had the last two times and look out at the paper. I try not to jump when Vanessa comes up beside me, so close that her mouth is near my ear. Her hands come on my shoulders. “Relax these.”

I inch them away from my ears and can’t help but tighten my abs when her hand ghosts over the front of my shirt.

“Tighten here,” she says. “And stand up straight.”

I follow her directions, adjusting my stance and posture with every firm touch of her fingers on my body. She’s so close that I can feel a hot breath on the bare skin of my neck.

I clear my throat.

“Good,” she says. I’ve got goosebumps up my arms that I pray she cannot see.

“Now aim and shoot.”

I take a deep breath, steadying myself, and then pull the trigger. It goes almost where I want it, much closer to the middle than my last attempts at least.

“Good. Empty both magazines, and then we’ll move to the bigger guns.”

Vanessa stalks off in her clopping heeled boots to Mary’s bay, leaving me with my homework and the feeling of her hands lingering on my torso.

I blink away my lewd thoughts and raise the gun again.

I feel beyond strange in my new clothes, but I will not deny that I look. . . hot in them. A man measured my whole body a few days ago, and when we came back from the shooting range today, I had a whole new wardrobe filling half of the walk-in closet. Dress clothes, semi-formal, business casual, and even exercise options are hung up or laid out in the drawers. There are five pairs of new shoes, too, all which fit great and probably cost more than any shoes I have ever once owned.

In preparation for our first interviews, I put on a fitted gray button-up and pants that were hanging next to it. I thought maybe they were too small at first, but when I looked in the mirror, I realized that, no, this is just what clothes look like when they fit me.

I look like a new person.

There’s a light knock on the door followed by Claire poking her head inside.

“That looks handsome,” she says and comes in fully. She’s much sweeter than her daughters. Mary, especially, bears little resemblance personality-wise.

Ranger circles at her feet until she picks him up and scratches his neck. Spoiled dog.

“Thanks,” I say. “For all of it, I mean. The clothes, and the compliment.”

“Thank the girls,” Claire says. “They’re the ones with the style.”

I look in the mirror again and nod.

“The hairdresser is here,” she says. “Come on down when you’re ready. I’ll have her cut Leo’s first.”

“Great, um, thank you.”

It still feels wrong accepting all this treatment from them. First living in their huge house, now wearing hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes picked out just for me and getting in-house haircuts? I need to remind myself that I didn’t choose this. It’s not like I’m asking to be here and mooch off them, more like living in a house of criminals was somehow the safest of my choices.

Claire takes Ranger with her on her way out, leaving me alone in the room to assess myself in the mirror.

The hairdresser is a young woman named Anette who smacks gum and chatters with Claire and Mary about people I’ve never met. She pulled a stylist’s chair from a closet I’d never peeked in and she leans it all the way back so she can wash my hair in the sink, talking all the while.

She then uses the pedal on the back of the chair to raise me up and down while she snips pieces of my hair seemingly by vibes only. Leo’s hair looked good when I came downstairs, which is the only reason I’m not more concerned by her practices and lack of focus.

“You have good curls,” she says. “You Jewish?”

“No. But thank you.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No,” I say.

“The dog is his, though,” Mary says. Anette looks long at Ranger who’s sleeping in the dog bed Claire bought him for downstairs. He’s lightly snoring—it’s not his fault, he’s old.

“Cute dog. I’ll cut his hair, too, if you want.”

After twenty minutes of spritzing my head with a spray bottle, cutting the sides with an electric trimmer, snipping at the top, and snapping her gum, she gives me one last long look and nods. Various creams are applied, which all smell fantastic.

“Here.” She hands me a handheld mirror and, maybe it’s because I’ve only been to Great Clips for the last decade, but I didn’t know that my hair could look like this. Smooth on the sides, not cut too short, and softer than it has ever, ever been. No frizz. I think this must be how Vanessa feels every morning when she wakes up perfect.

Leo walks back into the kitchen, where Anette, Mary, and I are still quiet, assessing my Steve Rogers level transformation. “Oh shit.”

“I think I see it now,” Mary says, squinting.

Anette spits her gum into the trash. “The dog next?”

The strangest of all of the strange developments of late is that, somehow, Vanessa and I have fallen into a routine of watching movies together after everyone’s gone to sleep. This came about the night of the pool party when, both of us not being able to sleep, gravitated to the leftovers in the fridge. She was already on the couch eating a piece of cake and, after a quiet moment, invited me to sit. Another action movie played on the TV.

We watched in relative silence, but when she said, “Same time tomorrow?” as casually as she might ask for my coffee order, I gave a dumbfounded yes.

We’ve had five of these movie nights now, and tonight I sit on the couch beneath a massive soft blanket, eating chopped watermelon from the same big bowl as Vanessa, each of us with our own fork. Her hair smells like coconut conditioner and we both have these lime green eye masks beneath our eyes.

I let the watermelon dissolve on my tongue as the action movie plays out on the screen.

“I like this one more than five,” she says. “But eight is the best.”

“I support your opinions, even though you’ve never been more wrong.”

Vanessa laughs through her nose and drops her fork into the now empty bowl of red juice. I offer some of the popcorn, but she shakes her head.

Her cheeks and forehead are lightly pink from time spent in the sun on sites today, and with no makeup on, I can see that smattering of freckles I imagine will only get darker as the summer goes on.

I have an absurd urge to rub my thumb across them. I keep my hands to myself.

Vanessa pulls the extra blanket from beside me and drapes it over her lap, getting comfy. Action movies must be the great unifier because this time two weeks ago she could barely look at me and now we’re sharing a blanket.

I’ve been here a month and I’m already getting complacent. Too comfortable.

“Have you figured out who’s trying to kill you?” I ask, though I know the answer.

“Lots of people want to kill me,” she says. “But no, if you’re asking if it’s safe to leave yet, it’s not.”

There’s no use complaining about it, so I slouch down on the couch and lean back. “At least your sister has cool kids for me to hang out with.”

“They are cool,” she agrees. Her eyes are slightly closed but she cracks them to say the next part. “I think my godson is obsessed with you.”

“That’s because I taught him the joy of fractions and PEMDAS this year.”

“Ah, PEMDAS.”

“By the way, your brother-in-law is a total dick bag,” I say, then rush to clarify: “Cillian, not Sean.”

Vanessa snorts. “A dick bag, you say.”

I throw a piece of popcorn at her, and she laughs louder.

“He is . Told me he thinks I have bad intentions.”

“And do you?” Her head is tipped back on the throw pillow as she speaks, her dark brown hair tucked into a braid on her shoulder.

“Yes, I’m thinking about taking what I’ve learned and starting my own mafia. I would invite you, but I think it should just be teachers.”

“Bummer,” she says with a click of her tongue. “Well, that’s just Cillian. He’s protective, is all.”

She looks beyond sleepy, so I don’t try to press my point that the guy has weird vibes and, further, is probably into her.

Her eyes slip shut again and after a couple of minutes, I feel her toes wedge beneath my leg.

“Do you want to lay out?” I ask, ready to move, but she’s already asleep.