Chapter 5 I have a life

Her gaze, initially scanning the plate now halfway, met hers. There was an evocative silence, of those who became uncomfortable and who, unfortunately, appeared at the least propitious moment.

But always and on redundant occasions, there is something that pushes the pause away and turns the "endless" moment into terminable. A sound, some echo, some word. Something. And that something had come from upstairs.

The jarring ringing of a cell phone was heard from one of the bedrooms, followed by the quiet tone of a sleepy Luke's voice. A couple of cut phrases, and the occasional "hmp". The last thing was the click of the device when the call was cut off. A few steps came out of the room, going down the hall to the bathroom. After a minute of very brief silence, again those steps back to the bedroom and emerged towards the stairs.

"Looks like she got up on her left foot" Santino murmured.

She simply looked up at some point at the ceiling.

"I'm afraid so" she stated, trying to sound as serious as possible "Code eight"

She gave a short laugh. He returned the gesture with a barely visible expression of complicity.

"What is so funny?" Luke burst into the kitchen, the morning glow hitting his freshly washed face, his hair arranged in his carefree style, and a rough grin on his face that Hannibal would surely envy. He was wearing jeans and a gray shirt and a little frayed at the sleeves. He was holding in his right hand a red jacket that Santino recognized instantly; he had seen Alexa use it a few times.

"Ah ... good morning, Luke" She greeted him without getting up. The boy just gave him a scrutinizing signal "Do you want to have something for breakfast? Me..."

"No" he interrupted sharply. He handed her the jacket, with a gesture that could be translated as "Put it on and let's go." Santino didn't even turn around to see "I'll take you home. I have things to do"

Alexa sighed, took the garment from her, sheathed it over her blouse, and covered the details that she let her see. She got up going to him.

"At least let her finish her breakfast. You are not going to die waiting for ten or fifteen minutes" said Santino, with a low voice level, but firm enough to ignore it.

"Didn't you hear that I'm in a hurry?" Luke barely glanced at him.

An evocative and challenging gesture. And being his older brother, he was not going to pass it on.

"It's Saturday ... Where the hell are you going so early?"

"That's none of your business" The distant gleam in Luke's ice-cold eyes gave him an expression of suppressed anger.

Santino stood up, staring at his insolent, challenging grin.

There was a pattern, of seven or eight seconds, in which the eyes of both boys met in a silent duel, and if the proud glint of the eyes burned, there would already be a fire of biblical scales in the four streets around the mansion Lux. There were no words or anything else involved. To Alexa, that fraction of a minute seemed eternal.

"Luke," she said in a small voice, slightly breaking the visual and iron trance between the brothers.

She grabbed him by her arm, who only corroborated the girl's submissive expression with a dry growl. She opened the door. She came out first, pausing on the threshold and saying goodbye to Santino with a barely visible wave of her right hand.

She looked down at the floor immediately as Luke approached her. He was holding the door handle, ready to close it behind him. Something stopped him.

"Luke" Santino was looking at him with a stern expression that could well be compared to his father's. A sign that he had seen many times lately "Don't forget we have a visitor tonight. At least once in your life, it comes before dawn"

"Hmph... whatever he is" he snorted, haughtily diverting eye contact "I'll come if I can and I want to" he stopped and showed a crooked smile "I do have a life"

He turned around as if nothing had happened. Turning his back on her brother and the responsibilities from which she always slipped away with her typical impudence. It was not the first time that he perceived such a show of affection coming from his brother. It was a clouded manifestation of a feeling that over the past few years had grown into more than just a sibling rift.

Santino simply stood there, while the morning breeze hit him squarely on his face and the rays of the sun were already lighting up the streets and its surroundings, under the calm and cheerful blue of a sky without clouds or worries.

He mentally cursed the fact that everything, apparently everything seemed to be against him ... and that maybe there was some reason for it.

"I do have a life"

He heard Luke's voice echo in his head like a stubborn fly.

I would like to say the same ...

His tongue still caught the warm memory of that morning's breakfast.

Alexa ...

XXX

There are times when anyone feels beforehand - even before stepping foot out of bed - when he is having a good day or a bad day. You never know exactly what this is due to, but there he is, stubborn and firm not to turn away ... even if it is a simple premonition.

That was how the rest of the morning had passed, with the swaying of a suffocating and disappointing routine. Slow, very slow. Some damn way the span from ten in the morning to two in the afternoon ran with the speed of a half-century-old tortoise.

Barely when the bell of his wristwatch rang, striking ten o'clock, he had reached the entrance of that relic of a building that adjoined the main avenue of Kuri. That austere property in which he had spent the last five years, became his personal "dungeon", repeatedly making him think that the worst thing that could have happened to him was skipping four semesters of university due to his high grades.

To be considered the "genius" of the family was a chain shackled. A painful and cruel burden, which tore his life even more for the last two years, precisely. The year of the accident. It was then that, with his inexperienced eighteen years, he wondered how he might have been put in charge of ninety percent of the family business; At that young age, he still felt that the business chair in the management office was oversized, feeling small... very small. It hadn't been his fault that his father had thought of the irresponsible folly of driving drowned in sake on that stormy October night.

He hadn't missed much, except for the car, three-quarters of the fence in a rural field three miles from Kuri, and his father's knee. Five months tied to crutches, with a mechanical splint on his injured leg, complaining all damn day at home and while what? .. ah, well, that's what he was for, right?

Yes, right, that was the extraordinary year in which he was credited with that wonderful pair of shackles: responsibility and maturity. And at only eighteen years old, wasn't that amazing news? Something worth putting on one of the best front pages of Kuri's diary: "The young first-born of one of the most prominent families inherits the position of management, resigning everything without complaint" ... and written in block letters.

Life was always ironic. And God had a twisted sense of humor.

He thought this with suspicion, boredom, and anger that he never manifested. He had learned that it was not worth expressing even with a frown. He had never said or done anything against his father or his entire family (because the rest of the Lux were "bread with the same"), not even cutting everything he represented as "his own life." of him "of him. Three months before his father's jarring "demolition attempt" against that innocent bard, he and Hana would celebrate their first dating anniversary. Then things got worse. He stopped seeing her daily, reducing her outings or visits to weekends and only a couple of hours, before chaining himself back to her office.

The anniversary commemoration did not come. They argued about six times, two of them as two responsible adults and the other four were the painful ones and some retaliation from Hana. He did not deny it, he was right, what woman could bear to marry a company? ... or the manager of one. And one afternoon, just when he had planned to leave the office early (and he did) and surprise her with a bouquet of roses, the surprise changed the individual, being him ... and not because of a lanky bouquet, but because of the unexpected news of that Hana was dating a guy who had been with him in his last semesters of college. She didn't tell him, she didn't have to. Santino himself had checked from the entrance of the Inuzu house.

Then he stopped caring completely and ultimately that management and administration tasks ate up his time and ... his life.