infected | giorgia

Wrinkling her nose, Giorgia put the fig back. The tomatoes were bad, the skins already wrinkling faintly, the figs were worse. Perhaps the old lady who had grabbed a half dozen of them just as she’d walked into the store had no sense of smell, or any taste. She could smell things others couldn’t, things that could turn her stomach, like the smell of death that seemed to have lingered in her apartment for weeks – mice under the floorboards or in the walls maybe. Still, didn’t take a super sense of smell to catch the sourness rolling out of the fruit as she fig squished too far in her fingers.

She looked down the aisle, frowning before she headed for the peppers (passable) and then the eggplant (good). This place had never hit the sweet spot. The first time she had come here – before she’d gotten the apartment, before she’d started cooking like she was Roxana, feeding the five thousand (or just her boyfriend) – the figs had been rock hard. Her heart had been just the same, the shell building up around it like a pearl inside of an oyster, something glittering enclosing the pain. It had still ached from time to time, the pain drifting down to her ribs. If she hadn’t been who she was she might have worried that something was wrong, but their kind didn’t get sick, they just steeped in their emotional pain instead.

By now she was used to scouting around anything that reminded her of Patrick, like the overrated beef tenderloin he’d tried to impress with at their dinner parties, and the bottles of imported beer. Giorgia gathered what she liked, hesitating over the racks at the checkout before she grabbed a pack of bubble gum and added it to the scatter of items on the belt. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had any, but she could almost taste it in the back of her throat. Maybe it was time she felt like a kid again instead of an overworked grown up who’d fallen asleep on the couch a half dozen times in the last couple of weeks. Dio, she needed to stop. A home made meal tonight, eight hours of sleep, and just a single day of working from home before the weekend, then maybe she’d feel human.

The night was cool when she stepped back out of the store. It had started to get chilly in the last couple of weeks, soon the snow would be on the ground and she’d be almost nostalgic for the warmer winters in New Orleans. Almost. New Orleans would have meant Emiliano, and worse, Patrick. They could be snowed in here for a year before she really considered crawling home with her tail between her legs. For now, she’d enjoy the bite in the air as she walked home and curling on the sofa with a bowl of pasta. Maybe in a few weeks she’d put up Christmas decorations, making the apartment really feel like home. A tree set in front of the window, its lights a beacon.

Giorgia smiled before she caught herself. She wasn’t about to look like a lunatic here, not in the town where she was supposed to be the face of the legal system. Sniffing faintly, she brushed her knuckles under her nose and crossed the street. Two blocks to home, a single yard between her and the boy as she crossed the road onto the sidewalk he was limping along. She winged a brow at him, glancing down as she went to pass him. Nosy anywhere else, but here everybody seemed to look at each other long enough for it to feel intrusive. ”Scusi,” Giorgia murmured. She lifted a hand, as though she could wave away the fact she’d been staring. ”I wasn’t staring. I was … sorry.” Her voice grew more apologetic as she started to walk away, her head down. She was lost in her thoughts, rudely looking through him, above him as the dark hair tickled at her memory the same way the gum had.

Tagged: JASPER ROMERO * Word Count: 681
Translate: Excuse me

There were parts of New Orleans where civilised people didn’t go. Outside of the tourist spots, in the poorer neighbourhoods where Emiliano’s people could get their claws into the desperate and degenerate. Every now and then the chief of police would call a conference to announce to the gathered journalists that they were cleaning up the streets, but it never happened. A hundred years from now those cess pits would still be there. Foolishly Giorgia had believed that Mystic Falls could never be like that. She almost laughed out loud at the thought, but sneered at the guy she’d apologised to instead. This town might pretend that it was perfect, but there were problems here just as bad, things that would chew you up and spit you out if they had the chance.

A hollow feeling grew in the pit of her stomach. Somehow Roxxi had flourished here with her cop boyfriend, but it felt as though she’d lost something by coming here – something more than her failed marriage that was. Pat had done most of the hollowing before she’d even bolted out of New Orleans. This town was trying to finish it off in tiny increments. She was Giorgia Agnelli though, she didn’t have to let it. The name – and the double barrelled Malloy she needed to carve away from it in the legal sense – meant something, although this rude little brat didn’t know it.

Drawing herself up, changing her grip on the bag of groceries she held, Giorgia snorted and turned back around towards him. He should have just taken her well meant apology. ”Oh, I saw what was right in front of me,” she promised, her voice not carrying an ounce of apology now. Her lips pinched into a thin line, the green of her eyes going cold and flat as ice. She’d have hoped that he was like most other people in this town, as least polite on the surface, but the sharpness in his voice had cut her.

He wasn’t done either. Giorgia moved back towards him, feeling her hackles rise. She wasn’t about to half turn here, but she didn’t need to. Years of training from her father had left her physically able to deal with a man his size – no matter what he might be – and years in the DA’s office had given her a sharp enough tongue to tear a strip off him the same way he’d tried to with her.

”I was being polite, but I supposed you wouldn’t recognise that,” she said snippily. Her fingers squeezed the handles of her grocery bag tighter, just in case she was going to need to swing it at him. ”What was your issue with it? You don’t want someone seeing what you’re up to out here, or you just don’t like women? Or … maybe it’s just me you have a problem with, why don’t you tell me, hmm?” Giorgia crooned sourly. He hadn’t had a problem with throwing her apology back in her face in the first place. Undoubtedly he wouldn’t have a problem with continuing to throw his venomous little darts at her either, a man with a mouth like that rarely did.

Tagged: JASPER ROMERO * Word Count: 532

The snap of the kid’s voice was like a bone breaking – sharp and shocking, leaving Giorgia sucking in her breath. Instead of reacting outwardly she went still, her mouth twisting into a thin line. Men like Emiliano believed they could speak to people that way and have them take it. She was doing that, she deserved better than to be spoken to as though she were nothing. Her eyes narrowed at him, snapping wide as the gold glow glimmered in their dark depths.

”You don’t get to tell me what to do,” she told him through bared teeth. Her own eyes glowed with that inner light, a golden glow, as though both of them were innocent. There was a big gap between having taken a life and being practically saintly though. Giorgia knew that what she’d done for her step-father in the courts for years had robbed her of any sort of a halo. No matter how far she tried to run from him now, how much she tried to rid of life of those dark smudges of his innocence, she would never be able to say she hadn’t been wading in that cess pit. Not like her sister. Roxxi would’ve bitten out an Italian curse at him, then strutted away, but she definitely wasn’t her sister.

His hand came up, hiding those eyes like he was trying to disguise what he was. Giorgia frowned, pulling her bag in against her stomach as though it were some sort of a shield instead of the weapon she’d almost turned it into. He’d made his point, had proved that he was a misogynistic asshole, but physically she was getting mixed signals. What the hell was going on with him? He wasn’t drunk, not with his eyes glowing that way.

”Please?” she questioned, her brows rising. ”You can’t be a complete ass and then beg for forgiveness. It doesn’t work that way.” After years spent under Emiliano’s thumb she knew how manipulation worked and this guy had flipped far too fast for her liking.

Taking a step back, Giorgia shook her head at him. Like she was about to tell him exactly where she was going. After her first major case from the DA’s office had followed her home she’d been more careful. She couldn’t have someone invade her space again like that, she couldn’t defend herself against another. Her frown deepened as she tried to push the muddy images of what had happened from her mind. ”I can’t help you. You really want help call 911, or head to the sheriff’s station. It’s about five minutes that way. I’m sure they’ll love to help when you shoot your mouth off at them the same way you did me.” Guys like him didn’t stand up against guys their own size, they went for who they thought was smaller and weaker, unluckily for him she didn’t see herself as either.

Tagged: JASPER ROMERO * Word Count: 486