Her voice transforms the Aventador’s interior into something sacred.
Hell, no wonder she won. Little Miss Take isn’t just hiding behind words—she’s wielding them like weapons.
Emmaleen shifts, looking very vulnerable. A flush creeps up her neck. Then she sighs. “I told you it was nothing but an onion of existentialism.”
But she’s wrong. That’s not what it was at all. And that’s not what she said, either. She said… undergraduate angst about existence and… true love.
Her true love is for…words. Language. A certain precision of meaning that few people, save for myself—and in a wholly different way—typically appreciate. It was, to be quite honest, brilliant. Something in me needs her to know I understand just exactly what she’s created. What she just admitted.
“Terza rima,” I say.
She looks at me, nose scrunched again in that expression that makes her look both younger and somehow sharper. “What?”
“Your rhyming scheme. It was terza rima. ABA BCB CDC DED EE.” I tap my finger against the table with each letter, marking the pattern.
“How the hell do you know that? I mean, I get it. You’re rich, and cultured, and went to some fancy-schmancy school or whatever. But there’s no way you should know that.”
“My mother…”
Shit. Well, it’s too late to backtrack now. I never talk about Priscilla, not to anyone. Not even to family. But something about Emmaleen’s poem has cracked open a door I usually keep triple-locked.
“My mother was a poet.”
14
My mother was a poet.
Five words. Five impossible words that don’t compute with the man sitting next to me, all hard angles and calculated power moves. I blink at him, trying to process this information like it’s a corrupted file my brain can’t quite open.
Giovanni Bavga—crime lord, punishment enthusiast, designer suit aficionado—had a mother who wrote poetry? What, did she compose sonnets about breaking kneecaps? Villanelles about protection rackets?
His jaw tightens, and I realize I’ve been staring at him like he just announced he’s secretly a unicorn. The silence stretches between us, getting thinner and more uncomfortable by the second.
This is the problem with poems. They’re emotional crowbars, prying open doors that should stay locked. I didn’t want to recite that stupid scholarship piece. It’s too raw, too much like handing someone your diary and a magnifying glass. But seven demerits was too good to pass up, and now here we are, having an accidental moment of genuine human connection.
Gross.
“Your mother was a poet,” I repeat, like I’m testing the sentence for structural integrity. “As in, published? Or more of a ‘writes in journals that no one is allowed to read’ kind of poet?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. His hands flex on the steering wheel, and I catch myself staring at his fingers—long, precise, probably equally adept at signing business deals or, I don’t know, garroting people.
“Published,” he finally says, the word clipped as if he’s already regretting this whole conversation. “She taught literature at Carnegie Mellon. Poetry was her specialty.”
Well, that explains how Crime Boss Barbie knows what terza rima is. I’m about to ask more—because apparently I have zero self-preservation instincts—when he suddenly shifts gears. Literally and metaphorically.
“You have a gift,” he says, those green eyes flickering toward me for a half-second before returning to the road. “I like hearing you talk. Interesting things come out of your mouth.”
Um, what?
Is this a compliment? From Giovanni “Demerits-R-Us” Bavga?
I feel my face heating up like I’m thirteen and the popular kid just noticed my Lisa Frank notebook. Which is ridiculous because I’m an adult woman with student debt and trauma, not some swoony teenager.
“Your little dissertation on Mercury retrograde and Starbucks’ seasonal menu,” he continues, his mouth quirking into something almost like a smile. “The etymology of ‘the early bird gets the worm.’”
Oh god. He’s been paying attention. Like, really paying attention. To my verbal diarrhea. To the random thoughts that leak out of my brain when I’m nervous.
“Loved your theory about how Riverview’s architecture represents ‘capitalism’s death rattle in small-town America.’”