I shrug. “I don’t have anything more specific.”
“You can try the gym,” he finally says, looking at the screen of his cell phone. “Take the elevator to the third floor.” He waves his hand at the corridor as he sticks the phone to his ear.
I turn and head in the direction he indicated and find the elevator. When the door opens on three, there is a desk with another Asian guy who could be the last guy’s brother. “Hi,” I say as I step up to the desk. He lifts his face out of the book he’s reading and stares at me blankly. “Do you know if there’s a guy named Alessandro Moretti that volunteers here?”
Finally, something registers on his face. It might be curiosity. “Yeah.”
When he doesn’t elaborate, I ask, “Do you know if he’s maybe here? Now?”
He sets his book facedown on the desk. “He’s here.”
After another awkward beat, I lean on the counter. “Do you think maybe I could see him?”
He points to a staircase. “Up one flight. He’s in the basketball gym.”
I find out that’s not as easy as it sounded when I get up one flight and find a weight room first, and then a pool. I look around both places for someone who looks like they might belong here. I finally see an older Hispanic man who is probably a custodian coming out of a locker room.
“Um . . . hi.”
The man looks up at me and smiles. “Hello.”
Why am I nervous? I force myself to stop fidgeting. “Where is the basketball gym?”
“If you go straight through the women’s locker room,” he says, indicating the door just down from where we are, “you’ll find it on the other side.”
I catch myself worrying my lower lip and make myself stop. “Thanks.”
He smiles again and turns for the stairs.
I weave through the women’s locker room and push through the door at the other end into a gym with a running track on a mezzanine above it. There’s a group of four black kids shooting hoops at one end, and in the corner under the mezzanine is a guy in a wifebeater, loose black athletic shorts, and boxing gloves, punching a hanging bag. His skin shimmers under a sheen of sweat, and I catch my gaze wandering over the ripple of muscles in his arms as he lashes out at the bag, a blistering rhythm of hard lefts and rights. I’m not sure what that bag ever did to him, but he’s clearly intent upon killing it.
As my eyes trace the lines of the veins of his forearm, I realize I’m not breathing. Nothing is as hot as a great pair of man-arms, and these are some of the sexiest arms I’ve ever seen.
The problem is, they’re attached to Alessandro.
The whistle from the group of boys on the court breaks my daze, and I realize I’m on the edge of drooling. It also catches Alessandro’s attention. He turns, and when he sees me standing near the doors, his whole body tenses. After a long beat, he tugs off his boxing gloves, tossing them to the floor near the bag, and walks over. By the time he reaches me, I’m just about ready to bolt . . . or trace my finger down one of those arm veins, pulsing under perfect, sweaty skin.
What was I thinking, coming here?
He stops in front of me—out of my reach, I can’t help but notice—and his lips press into a line.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to slap you . . .” I tell him. “Unless you deserve it.”
“I think we both know I deserve it.” He looks at me a long time and I have to pull my eyes away from his. I’m just now remembering a person could get lost in his deep gaze. “Is there something you wanted?”
I shrug and run my fingers over the dark wooden door frame next to me. “I was in the neighborhood.”
That gets a flicker of a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Then I’m glad you stopped by.”
“Sorry I slapped you,” I blurt, not even sure where it came from, but as I say it, I know it’s true.
“I’m sorry I gave you reason to.” The skin around his eyes crinkles as he looks at me, as if he’s trying to see into my head. “Would you like to get something to drink?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
He gestures with a nod of his head back toward the locker rooms. “I’ll meet you at the central staircase.”
I nod and move back through the locker room in the direction I came. A minute later, Alessandro emerges through the door of the men’s locker room, a gray hoodie covering those amazing arms.
He motions with a sweep of his arm toward the stairs, and when we get to the first floor, he directs me into a small café there.
“Help yourself to whatever you’d like,” he says with a nod at the drink case.
I slide open the door and pluck a bottle of Diet Coke off the shelf. He chooses a container of Muscle Milk and we settle in at a table near the window.
He crosses one ankle over the other knee, then just looks at me for a long, uncomfortable minute. “When I left, you were waiting for the courts to award your sister custody,” he finally says.
“Yeah.” I’m not going to tell him that, for half of the time in between, I was in rehab. I don’t really remember much about it anyway, and even if I did, it’s none of his business. “I moved in with her about five months after you left.”
He nods. “You were happy there?”
“She and Jeff have always been great to me.” And that’s all he’s getting. His turn to answer some questions. “How did Lorenzo die?” And that’s it, I realize. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I need to know.
His eyes flash to me, dark and guarded, as he stiffens. It takes him a minute to unclamp his jaw, and when he does, his voice is low. “How much do you remember about Lorenzo?”
I remember he hurt me. I remember he dealt drugs. I remember he didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. “He was tough. I remember he hit Ms. Jenkins.”
Alessandro nods slowly. “He was thirteen when our father was killed in the 9/11 attacks, and he’d already been in trouble. Our father was able to rein him in, but after he was gone, and our mother became . . . ill, there was no one he felt accountable to. We ended up in juvenile detention because Lorenzo decided to rob a street vendor. It was a habit he never broke. He was shot and killed in Toulon, France, two years ago during a store robbery.”
“Were you with him?”
His face pulls tight as he shakes his head. “No. He left my grandparents’ shortly after turning eighteen . . . just a few months after we’d arrived in Corsica. We never heard from him again until we were notified he’d been killed.”
“Why didn’t you just move back with your mother when you got out of juvie? Why go to Corsica with your grandparents?”
He spins his drink absently with his fingers and I can’t help notice his hands. They’re strong and sure, and his fingers are long. “Our mother attempted suicide while Lorenzo and I were in juvenile detention,” he answers. “She had never been well after our father was killed. Her parents brought her home to Corsica to care for her.”
“Suicide?” That snaps me out of my sexy-hand daze. Did he tell me that? Back then? There’s so much I really don’t remember. I feel suddenly cold and wrap my arms around myself, shuddering at the memory that surfaces. “But she’s okay?”
He lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “She survived, but she’s never been the same.”
My guts are in a hard knot and I’m having trouble taking a full breath. This is all hitting a little too close to home. I shift in my chair and veer the conversation away from his mother and her botched suicide. “Corsica . . . Rome. That sounds pretty amazing. Why would you want to come back here?”
He hesitates a long second, and when I look up at him, his expression is guarded. “My life took an unexpected turn this spring. When I left training for the priesthood my—”
“Whoa! Back up a sec. The priesthood?”