Long Burning Embers

From the Manor, Robert drove through the residential part of town, past the old neighborhoods and cul-de-sacs that long stood the test of time, to the new builds, cheaper housing on the outskirts that the Harrington family had erected. They were nice houses, two stories with a garage and a garden, but uninspired and uniform in nature, they lined the street in dizzying fashion, like a dialog box stuttering across the screen on an old Windows ’95. Robert perfectly understand why they were built like this, it was cost effective, but personally he preferred his architecture to have a little more oomph and awe.

It didn’t take him long to reach the Minotti home. Besides the closeness, there wasn’t a street or backroad in Azure Rocks that Robert didn’t know. Yet still, he waited, parked outside their house for at least ten minutes after he arrived. There was a car in the drive way, though he couldn’t be sure that it belonged to Dario, but if Mallory’s husband worked 9 to 5, Robert would expect him home at any moment. That wasn’t really why he waited. He waited because he knew that Mallory’s reaction would be anything but kind and welcoming.

Mallory Campbell-Minotti was tough and uncompromising but it was precisely that strength of character that had attracted Robert in the first place. He’d never sought out women who would simply submit, though there were plenty of women that would have followed him into bed based on his reputation alone. No, he liked his women to be capable and intelligent, able to stand on their own two feet even when they were standing by his side; those women made for the best lovers, but unfortunately, they also made for the worst ex’s since they knew exactly how to bust his balls.

Another ten minutes passed without incident. Robert grew weary, knowing that he couldn’t wait all night. Alone in the car, his thoughts turned to other matters, the secret that threatened to cost him his newly created business and tear his family apart. He wracked his brain, trying to think of a way to outmaneuver Myles Zurbrugg. He knew there had to be away. He just had to think of it like any other negotiation. It wasn’t the first time some company called him to a business meeting, and smugly presented an unbeatable offer only for Robert to defy their expectations.

Nothing came to him now though. His frustration grew, and rather than simmer in the car, he got out and walked over to the house. Securing Dario’s construction company to do the work on the Amusement Park would boost his spirits he decided as he stepped up to the front door and rapped harshly on the door. He focused only on his impending victory, ignoring the bitter, painful memories of his teenaged break up from Dario’s wife.

“Hello, can I hel- OH HELL NO!”

It was striking how much the dark-haired brunette looked like her younger sister, right down to those piercing frosty blue eyes. There were noticeable differences though if one knew where to look, such as the extra wrinkles that creased her forehead and around her lips, from a life time of furrowing and frowning. Her breasts were a little bigger too, and though her body was still curvy, a career in administration and helicoptering around her children had led to her letting her figure go just a little.

His eyes traveled over her body in a matter of seconds, a skill he’d perfected over the years. Getting the lay of a woman’s land proved especially fortuitous in this instance, since he only got a brief glimpse before the door was almost slammed shut in his face. He flung out a hand and held the door open, his strength beating Mallory’s with ease. It would have been simple to **** the door open and push his way in, but he didn’t, he just kept her from closing it any further.

“Mal, please. Can I come in?”

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to keep away.” She kept a hand on the door, ready to shut it the moment he let her. “I don’t want to hear your apologies, Robert.”

“I’m not here for me, I swear it. Zack sent me,” he said, appealing to her familial loyalty. “Honestly, I’m not even here for you. It’s Dario I need to speak to.”

“Well, he’s not here. He asked if he could go out to a bar with some the new laborers from work and I- Why am I even telling you this?” She shook her head, irritated at how he’d wormed his way into a conversation already. “He’s not here, so just go away.”

“Will he be home soon?” Robert asked. “Please. If I don’t do this now, I’ll just have to come back later. Is that what you want? To be worrying day and night about when I might appear next?”

He was directly attacking her need to be in control, and she knew it. Yet the possibility of the unpredictable Robert Ravers showing up at her house without fore notice or warning was her personal idea of hell. With deep ****, she relaxed her grip on the door and stood back, allowing him passage into her home. She bit her tongue, swallowed her pride and ignored how wrong it felt, like she was giving permission to Dracula.

Closing the door behind him, Robert observed the seating room he’d just entered. It was admirable and a little creepy just how tidy and pristine the room was. Not a single cushion or curtain crease was out of place. Symmetrical bookcases stood on either side of the unlit fireplace, and picture frames lined the mantle, five in all. One stood precisely in the middle, two flanking it on both sides, perfectly angled inwards to mirror the others. Picture perfect as it seemed, Robert thought it was a little sad; so organised and not at all lived in.

“Since we do have some time to kill, perhaps we should talk?” Robert offered.

“No. My son, Dominic, is supposed to call me in exactly seven minutes.” She folded her arms and kept her distance. “He always calls me, every night, at this time, to tell me about his day.”

“To report in, sounds more like,” Robert muttered, while taking another look around.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” Robert cleared his throat.

The Ravers patriarch stepped closer to the fireplace and surveyed the photos closer, just to whittle away the time until Dario returned. The first that caught his eye was her wedding photo, where the pair stood in a forest clearing beneath rays of sun that burst through the canopy of leaves, though he could tell that it most certainly wasn’t Silver Lake Park. They were wrapped up in each other’s arms, a staged embrace with their heads turned towards the camera. Her new husband, a swarthy dark haired man, as broad as expected of a man who spent his life building, beamed, the grin distorting his entire face with happiness far greater than she showed. Mallory was smiling too, a quiet, triumphant smile, less pleased with her choice and more pleased with herself.

All of the other photos were the same. There were no photos of every day life, of daily happiness captured in the moment. They were set pieces, constructed with every member of the family posed and positioned for the camera. Dario, and a young boy that Robert could only presume was Dominic, shared the same grin in every photo, while Mallory bore the same self-satisfied smirk in each. A young girl, Mia, Robert guessed, refused to smile. She glowered outwardly, telling that it had been a fight just to get her to sit for the picture. Yet, in the end, she did sit, her mother winning as always.

Several minutes passed and the phone rang. Mallory answered quickly and put on a happy voice.

“Hello, Minotti residence. Oh, hello, Dominic. I thought you’d forgotten to call.”

Her son replied with surprise, and Robert checked his watch, noting that the call had only been a minute off the seven mark that Mallory had anticipated.

“Just a little. I just worry when you don’t call, but I understand if you got caught up studying.”

Robert raised his eyebrows, although his back was turned to Mallory so she couldn’t see. A young man like that, Robert figured, should be using their Spring Break to unwind, not studying.

“Oh, she did, did she? Honey, it’s unwise to be distracted by your girlfriend with finals just around the corner.”

He felt bad for the boy, although Dominic reminded Robert a lot of Mallory. She too had been laborious and dutiful in her youth, seeking her parent’s validation through a job done well, although their parents had never pushed Mallory like she did to her son.

“Fine, fiancée, although until she walks down the aisle it’s all the same. And that won’t be until after graduation and you’ve settled in at your father’s business. There’s plenty of time for second thoughts.”

Neither of her parents had ever taken much of a hand in the love lives of their daughters either, Robert knew this from firsthand experience when he dated Mallory as a teenager. It was enough that Zeke had taught his girls how to take care of themselves, and everyone in school knew it.

“I know she’s a nice girl, we’ve had this discussion before. But you’re a handsome, smart young man. You don’t have to settle for the first nice girl you might think you want to marry.”

Robert glanced over his shoulder and noticed Mallory’s eyes flicker towards him too. Hurriedly, she continued on her conversation.

“Let’s not talk about it now. Tell me about your day.”

With a sigh, Robert turned towards the bookcase. There were a lot of medical textbooks and several on business and management but by far the most common topic was parenting. Parenting babies, parenting toddlers, parenting teens, and beyond. It was obsessively excessive, and the sheer quantity made him reconsider his own parenting, but he would have hated to have the kind of relationship with Heather that Mallory had with her son.

“Oh, okay, well if you already have reservations. No, no, it’s okay, you can tell me all about it tomorrow. Same time, okay? Good. I’ll talk to you then. Bye.”

Watching, Robert saw her put down the phone. Her cheeks were red, puffed out in anger, though he couldn’t be sure if she was irritated at her son’s fiancée for stealing his time, or just irate that the call hadn’t lasted as long as she’d hoped.

“Can we talk now? Or will Mia be calling too?”

Mallory folded her arms again and scoffed. “I keep telling Mia to call like her brother, but she never does. Even still, I’d rather sit in silence than talk to you.”

“Is that really necessary? I’m planning on getting into business with your husband. Wouldn’t it be better if we could get along?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“If we just talk. Or scream if you wa-”

“No, I mean, you aren’t going into business with Dario.”

“What? Oh, well, that’s really up to him though, isn’t it? When he hears my proposal, I think he’ll find it really quite lucrative. If all goes well, we could be in business for years.”

“It’s not going to happen because I won’t let him.”

“Won’t let him? Zack told me that you relocated to Azure Rocks because his previous business failed. Do you really think that letting your personal feelings keep your husband from making money is smart?”

Mallory ground her teeth together.

“So now you’re calling me stupid?” Before Robert could reply, she continued. “And for your information, we came back to Azure Rocks to be closer to my family. And good thing we did, so I could put up Monica in the guest room after you destroyed her marriage.”

He breezed past the insult, focusing on the deal to be made, sensing that the entire meeting would be pointless if he couldn’t convince his ex-girlfriend. “I’m not saying that you’re stupid, Mal. Just that we need to look at this objectively. This could be a great opportunity for Dario, to set him and Dominic up for life. Can you really afford to turn it down just because I broke up with you almost twenty five years ago?”

“That’s why you think I’m upset? Just because you broke up with me?” Mallory shook her head with exasperation.

“Well, yes. What other reason would there be?”

“Hmmm, how about the fact that during the time we were together you never touched me? You never made a move, never even broached the subject, and then, after we split, rumors abound about you hooking up other girls. Not just one, multiple! One from Azure Rocks, one from Green Hills, two from the capital, girls all over Bluestone County landing in bed with the great Robert Ravers. From the sounds of it, there wasn’t a single girl that you turned away. Except for me.”

“That’s what’s been bothering you all these years?!” Robert rubbed his forehead, but he could have kicked himself. “You think I didn’t make a move on you because you weren’t worth it?”

“Well what else was I supposed to think Robert? Everything was going fine between us. We were happy, and then you turned around and dumped me. You said it wasn’t working out, and then I have to hear through the grapevine about your exploits. For god’s sake, Robert, my own sister had to tell me that you had been fooling around with the older sibling of one of her friends. It’s quite clear that you dumped me so you could so sow your wild oats. I mean I knew you were charming, you’ve always had a reputation for being a flirt, but this cult of personality that formed around you, proclaiming you as some kind of god started directly after we broke up.”

“That’s not true at all. I really did care for you Mallory, honest. Breaking up with you was one of the hardest things I ever had to do until I divorced my wife. The truth is I knew what I meant to you, and I knew that if we kept being together, we would have sex. Not just sex, that I’d be your first. You’ve never been a romantic, but you’ve always been serious, and if I did that, I know you would have seen it as a commitment. And I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to lead you on, and toy with your feelings, only to let you down later. I cared for you Mallory, but I had realized I wasn’t in love with you.”

It was heart wrenching for the grown man to relive the dilemma of his teen self, and he could see it was just as hard on Mallory, the tears beginning to weigh down her lower lashes. But he owed her this conversation, a conversation he should have had back then. In many ways, he was the cause of the hardening of her personality, but not for the reasons she believed.

“I thought I was being noble, breaking up with you, rather than taking our relationship to the next stage when I knew we were ultimately incompatible. I don’t regret the decision, it was the right choice, but I was a dumb teenager. I thought it was easier to put an end to it and move on as quickly as possible. But that was wrong. I should have taken the time to sit down and explain the situation. I made a mistake, but I’m not the villain that you think I am. What we had was real…it just wasn’t enough.”

Mallory pulled a tissue from a nearby box and dabbed at her eyes. “How do I know you aren’t just saying this all now just to close his deal?”

“Because you know we were mismatched,” Robert retorted softly. “I could never have been the husband you wanted; safe, conventional and frankly boring, if I could be that man, I’d still be married to Brooke. Surely you see that for yourself, Mal?”

“Dario is not boring.” She glared at him.

“Sure. That’s why you’ve spent the last twenty five years with a stick up your ass because we never had sex.”

“Don’t say that. You know I hate when people say that.” Mallory shuddered, as Robert remembered that she always got annoyed when Misty called her ‘ole stick in the butt’.

But Mallory and Misty had never gotten on well, their personalities just too far apart. Mallory and Monica got along better since the middle sibling occupied the middle of the road. There was tension even there though, since Monica, even at a young age, found Mallory to be tiring, and Mallory resented how often their parents let Monica’s antics skate. Mallory had always been the good child, well behaved and dutiful. For her reward, her sisters got all the slack, while she was simply expected to do the right thing.

“And you lost all rights to talk about my ass a long time ago,” she continued.

“I can’t believe you held onto this for so long. You should have just told me,” Robert insisted. “We could have just fucked and cleared the whole thing up.”

Suddenly the house felt very empty. A ticking clock could be heard from two rooms away. Her breath caught in her throat as she became acutely aware that there no one else around. She was all alone with Robert Ravers, a situation that hadn’t been true since high school. Her children were at college and her husband was out with his co-workers. Whatever happened right here, right now, no one would ever know.

“W-what?” Her brain lagged.

“I said, we could have just fucked and-”

“Yes, I did hear you the first time, I just…” she trailed off, thinking of why this was a bad idea. “You said you didn’t want to toy with my feelings. So why are you doing it now?”

“When you might have misconstrued it as something more. I never said that I didn’t want to have sex with you, or that I couldn’t.” Robert clarified as he took a step closer to her. “We’d be on the same page. One and done, just a cathartic, therapeutic fuck to wash away our skins and set the world to right.” He stepped closer still. “The only reason not to do it is if it no longer matters to you, if you love your husband, if he satisfies you. After all, he isn’t boring, right?”

He was right in front of her now. Her eyes darted towards the door. “He could be home any minute.”

“That’s a reason to be quick, not to stop.”