Stripped Down Read online

  Stripped Down

  Eden Butler

  Chelle Bliss

  Contents

  Foreword

  Johnny

  1. Johnny

  2. Sammy

  3. Johnny

  4. Sammy

  5. Sammy

  6. Johnny

  7. Sammy

  8. Sammy

  9. Johnny

  10. Sammy

  11. Johnny

  12. Sammy

  13. Johnny

  14. Sammy

  15. Sammy

  16. Johnny

  17. Sammy

  18. Johnny

  19. Johnny

  20. Johnny

  21. Johnny

  22. Sammy

  Epilogue

  About Eden Butler

  About Chelle Bliss

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © Bliss Ink LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, including electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  Published by Bliss Ink, Chelle Bliss, and Eden Butler

  Published on July 23rd 2019

  Edited by Silently Correcting Your Grammar

  Proofreader by Julie Deaton

  Cover © Lori Jackson Designs

  Foreword

  “Then love is sin, and let me sinful be.”

  —John Donne

  Johnny

  St. Mary’s Catholic School for Young Women

  New York, NY

  May 2007

  I wore my sin like armor. It fit me—all those lies. The sneaky, shitty things I did but pretended I didn’t. All the low-down, dirty things I saw fit to manage for my own devices because it needed to be done or because it felt damn good to do it.

  Being who I was, living the life I did, in the family I did, sin and the weight of it were the least of my worries. It never bothered me—not the drinking or the gambling. Not the violence or the stealing. Most of that shit happened because it was expected, having a father like mine. He did the work his father had done. He ran the family. I would too one day. I’d worry about that weight of all our sin when I was an old man. If I got to be an old man.

  But stepping into my little sister’s school for what felt like the hundredth time that semester, I swore that weight got heavier with each step I took. It all came down to her, Samantha Nicola, the source of my greatest sin.

  “Johnny?” my cousin Dario called behind me as I walked through the hallway next to the cathedral. There was a crowd of girls, some of them in the show my kid sister, Cara, had organized for their senior program. All of them sporting the matching red collared button-ups and gray plaid skirts just on the too-short side to be acceptable by St. Mary’s standards.

  I nudged Dario in the ribs when he stared a little too long at May Phan, making him lose his grip on the box in his hand.

  “Jailbait,” I reminded him.

  “Sixteen ain’t jailbait when I’m only six months older.” Dario shrugged.

  “Her father or brothers wouldn’t see it that way, asshole.” He pulled his attention away from the girl when I slapped him in the back of the head and pushed him through the doorway at the end of the hall.

  “Finally!” Cara barked as we entered the room, her frown not lessening when Dario handed over the box.

  Jesus, she was a pain in the ass. Graduating or not. Kid sister or not, Cara could be an ungrateful shit.

  “Where’s the box with the blue robe?” She glared at our cousin as if she thought he had a clue what she meant, then she shifted her attention at me. “Well?”

  “Cazzo, Cara, how the hell…” I shut my mouth when two nuns came through the door and narrowed their eyes as they spotted us. “Sister Maria, Sister Agnes,” I greeted, betting the grin I’d shot their way for the entire month I’d been shuttling Cara around and keeping my eye on her after school hadn’t worn out its welcome. By the low blush the younger sisters gave me, I guessed I was still in their good graces. “Forgive my language, but my sister…” I nodded to Cara, who’d dropped the box to the floor and dumped out its contents. “You know how worked up she can get when things don’t go her way, si?”

  The women smiled, hiding their expressions behind their hands when my kid sister cursed under her breath.

  “Asshole,” she said, tossing a roll of ribbon at my head.

  I caught it with one hand, dodging a second roll as she stood. “What?” I asked.

  “There was another box. A smaller one. We need it. I put it on top, so I know it was in here.” She glared at Dario, who was facing the door, nodding at May when she leaned against the wall, motioning for him to follow her out of the room. “Hey, pay attention.” When our cousin stepped toward the door, Cara flicked the bottom of his ear and he flinched.

  “Fu—” he started, stopping himself when Sister Agnes moved past him. “What’s your problem?”

  “For your information, Dario,” Cara said, not bothering to lower her voice. “May Phan is a horrible cocktease, so you can forget about getting into her panties.” She pulled him away from the door and pointed down at the empty box. “Where’s the little white box that was inside this one? It had the blue robe. We just had it altered. It’s for my Mary’s costume. We need it.” When Dario tilted his head, looking lost, Cara inhaled as though it took everything in her not to scratch out his eyes. “The Virgin Mary? Blue for the Virgin, you chooch. The program is about great women in the bible, and Mary is the finale. We’ve already rehearsed Esther and Eve. Today we’re doing Ruth, Sarah, and Mary. I need Mary’s robe.”

  “Can’t you just…” Dario swung his hand at Cara’s uniform, pointing at her red collar before he shot a glance back toward the door. “I don’t know…improvise?”

  “You think the Virgin should wear red?”

  “It’s just a school program,” Dario said, his gaze moving around the room when the small crowd of girls stopped to watch him.

  “It’s our senior program,” Cara explained, her mouth tightening. “The Virgin can’t wear red. Besides, I put the box in there myself. I know it was in there.” She pointed to the box on the floor, stamping her foot.

  Several of my sister’s classmates hadn’t returned to their jobs. They glared at Dario like he was clueless and insulting, so I stepped in, slapping a hand to his shoulder to quiet him before the asshole dug himself into too deep.

  “Go check the car,” I told him when Dario laughed at the frown still pulling down Cara’s mouth.

  Once Cara was in a mood, it lasted for-fucking-ever. I didn’t need the headache, and I knew the sisters here didn’t either. Cara shot Dario daggers as he went out the door.

  I did my best to distract her, picking up the costumes and fabric to move them back into the box. “So, what about Ruth or Sarah? Can you dress either one of them now and practice while Dario looks for the missing costume?”

  “We could,” she said, tipping her chin at a younger girl carrying a box of programs to a table near the back of the room. “But the girl playing Sarah is home with the cramps. And our Ruth… Well…” Cara stopped, her eyebrows drawing together as she looked around the room. “I don’t know what happened to her…”

  “Who?” I asked, pulling out my Blackberry when it vibrated in my pocket. I was only half listening to my sister. I
was more concerned with the phone number flashing across the screen. I’d called it before, many times, but being at St. Mary’s and getting distracted by my kid sister and her friends had put me off my game.

  “Did you hear me?” Cara asked when I slid my phone into my pocket.

  “No, sorry, rella. Who are you looking for?”

  She lowered her shoulders, grabbing the ribbon from my hand before she chucked it into the box. “I said Sammy’s missing. She’s playing Ruth, and I thought she’d be back by now, but…”

  A flash of Samantha Nicola’s face shot to the front of my mind, and everything else went out of it—the girl calling me, Dario trying to fuck some cocktease, Cara and her bitchy attitude. When it came down to it, I was a hypocrite. I gave Dario shit for messing with a high school girl, when I’d been looking a little too hard at one all semester. If I was honest, I’d had my eye on her since we were kids—a girl that nobody on this planet could touch.

  Cara didn’t elaborate, and her silence pissed me off more than it should have. Hated that shit. Hated more that she went on ignoring me as I watched her. I copied her hand-motion and got her attention. “The fuck does that mean?”

  “Johnny…” she whispered, rushing closer, her attention shooting around the room. “Oh my God, you can’t say the F word in here.”

  “Tell me,” I said, ignoring her. “What did you mean about Sammy? You thought she’d be back by now but…?”

  Cara shrugged, nodding to two more girls who came into the auditorium. One was dressed in a costume made up of brown fabric secured around her head with a leather cord. “It’s just that when Sammy does confession,” Cara started, adjusting the girl’s headpiece, “it typically takes forever.” She stepped back, looking over the costume, tightening the belt before she glanced at me. “You know how she is. Niece of a priest. Heading for a convent after college. She’s all…super… um…Catholic, I guess.”

  How could I not notice? It was respectable. Admirable how the girl kept herself focused. How serious she was when her uncle performed the mass and offered communion. Our papa and her uncle, Father Patrick, had been friends for a long time, and Sammy was always there, in the background, the small spot of color brightening everything gray around her.

  I liked to tease her and had since she’d hit fifteen and the modest little dresses her uncle made her wear started fitting her curves tighter. She was still pious. Still gave nothing away, but when you looked at women as hard as I did, even high collars and hems hitting the knees couldn’t hide much.

  At seventeen herself, the shy, awkward, little girl Sammy had been was gone. She wasn’t sweet and soft anymore. There were curves to her body now that I shouldn’t have noticed but couldn’t keep my attention from. There was a pout to her mouth that tempted and teased as her lips moved slowly in silent prayer. The girl did nothing to tempt me at all, and still, I found I couldn’t keep from watching her, wanting her.

  “She is,” I finally agreed. “Very Catholic.” I knew what I’d offer was a mistake before I made it. The words should have stayed in my mouth, where they belonged.

  Sammy wasn’t my friend. We were barely friendly to each other, but there had been long nights when her uncle came to visit Papa, when my father was feeling bad about one thing or another and needed his friend, not his priest, that Sammy got dragged along.

  She pretended to read most visits, politely declining Cara’s invites to go to parties or fund raisers my little sister organized for the museum our family owned. Opting instead to sit out in our courtyard with her nose in a book. I’d watch her, unable to keep myself from the temptation of her thick lips, oval face, exaggerated cheekbones, and the long, curled lashes that hit the tops of her cheeks as she read.

  I’d try to pull her attention away from her books. She’d ignore me but still blushed like some wild fever had taken over her body. Until one August morning that I didn’t flirt, and I suppose she’d expected it.

  “Nothing inappropriate to say to me today?” she’d asked, not looking up from her book.

  I couldn’t fight the smile that pulled against my mouth. She’d noticed more than I’d given her credit for. Sammy was smart and shy, but she wasn’t oblivious to my flirting.

  “No, bella,” I told her. “Not today.” I’d leaned down into my chair, holding the crucifix around my neck between my fingertips. “Today, we remember my mama.”

  Even without looking at her, I knew Sammy was watching me. It was the first time she had. I liked the silence. Liked her attention even more.

  “Was she beautiful like Cara?” she’d asked after a while, like that question was the simplest out of the bundle of many she had in her head.

  “Yeah,” I admitted, glancing at Sammy, unable to look away from those green eyes when I caught her gaze. “She was.”

  There was a second when Sammy studied me, pulling her bottom lip under her teeth like she wasn’t sure if what she thought was stupid or if she should ignore me completely and get back to her book. But something in her eyes shifted, those light green flecks glinting as she watched me.

  Sammy leaned toward me, pulling at the locket around her neck. “Mine was beautiful too,” she said, showing me a picture inside the locket. She smelled like rosemary, and I caught a whiff of the scent from her hair when I moved closer to hold the locket and look down at the image. She wasn’t wrong. The woman in the picture was beautiful—dark hair and olive skin like Sammy and a sharp, straight nose that matched hers. But the girl next to me had a square chin and tip at the end of her long nose, not angled like her mother’s.

  “She was beautiful,” I finally told her, still holding the locket as I shifted my gaze to study her face. “Nowhere near as beautiful as you, though.”

  Then the blush returned to her face.

  Never should have started that shit.

  I knew better.

  Sammy had a plan. She had a goal, and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with me and the sinful armor I wore like a badge of dishonor.

  Didn’t seem ready to end it, no matter that I was eighteen and she wasn’t. No matter that she would spend her life in the order, a bride of God.

  I couldn’t touch her.

  But damn if I could keep away from her.

  “If you’re busy,” I told my sister, pulling out my phone as a distraction. “I can go and find out what’s keeping Sammy.”

  “Yeah,” Cara said, her tone dismissive as another of her classmates stood in front of her, decked out in her costume, this one lavender and white. “Good luck. You can try to see if Father Patrick is still in the rectory. He might have seen her.”

  I nodded, still pretending to look at my phone as I turned to leave the room. It took five full minutes before I found Sammy, and after I did, there would be a few more dings in my armor.

  For a while, I wore them proudly.

  The library was empty when I found her. She had a spot; I knew that. I had caught her twice in the past month sitting in the farthest window seat in the darkest corner of the old library when I took calls I didn’t think the good sisters of St. Mary’s would appreciate hearing. The first time, Sammy had heard everything I said—every “fuck you” and “you son of a bitch!” Her cheeks had turned four shades of pink, and I’d spent a half hour trying to convince her I wasn’t the devil sent to corrupt her.

  Fuck that. Yes, I was.

  The second time, she’d fallen asleep against the window during a storm as Cara sat for a makeup exam. I’d only agreed to keep an eye out for my kid sister while our papa was out of the country on business. He hated to miss her last month of school. He hated even more missing all the work she’d done on the exhibits and fund raisers she organized at the museum, practice for when she took it over after college, so I took up his slack.

  Watching Sammy doze off against the window made up for the hours I’d spent lugging boxes of costumes and racks of chairs from the storage room to the gym. I’d tugged off my jacket and put it over her as she slept and just sat acr
oss from her, standing guard, though I didn’t know why I’d done it. Aside from the fact that she was too damn beautiful to explain. Even more damn beautiful when she slept.

  It wasn’t hard to find her now.

  Sammy had bent her long legs, her skirt draped over her knees as she faced the window and her arms curled tight together. Those huge green eyes were wide, unblinking, puffy, and red as she stared out of the glass. My stomach dropped as I watched. Some primitive drive hustled me closer to her as if I had some misplaced need to murder whoever made her cry.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, the question coming out like a demand. “Who did this?”

  For a shy, saintly girl, Sammy was cool. She didn’t jump at my question. One slow glance in my direction and then she turned back toward the window. “You should go, Johnny Carelli.”

  Wasn’t sure why that did something to me, her saying my full name like that, as though she liked the way all those letters moved around on her tongue.

  Sammy didn’t straighten when I sat on the window seat next to her. She didn’t pull away from me either. She seemed too distracted by whatever had taken root in her head, like nothing else mattered but whatever it was that consumed her. There was a look in her eyes that seemed familiar to me, something that moved shadows around those green and hazel flecks in her irises. The longer I looked, the clearer the realization came of where I’d seen this expression before—in the mirror staring back at myself. It was guilt, plain and simple. But what on earth had someone like Sammy done to feel guilty about?