The Sun Will Rise | T Shelby

twelve

Thomas felt guilty closing the door on Angelina. He watched as she swallowed her pride and nodded in acceptance at his decline to help. He was angry, but he saw the disappointment in her eyes, that that had hurt him.

Truthfully, Tommy knew he had not made as much effort with Angelina as he should have. The fact of the matter was, the day they spent together in the countryside and the way he felt his insides buzz when she linked her arm through his terrified him to his bones.

He liked Angelina a lot. He liked the way she spoke, the way she carried herself and the way she was never afraid. The fact she was the most beautiful woman Thomas had ever laid eyes on was just a bonus.

However, Thomas couldn't go through with it. His heart had been broken by Grace and although he told himself he was fearless, falling for another woman with a risk of the same thing happening was one of the few things Tommy wasn't willing to gamble on.

The night he visited Angelina in The Marquis was the same night he'd shared three bottles of rum with his brothers, and it was safe to say he wasn't thinking straight. He wanted to see Angelina, that part was true, but the words he spoke were not.

The way he was made to feel when he saw Angelina sat laughing with a man he didn't know made him angry. He knew he couldn't have Angelina, but he despised even the thought of her with someone else, let alone seeing it with his own two eyes.

All of this, and yet Angelina and Tommy had only met a small handful of times.

Thomas had began seeing someone else, though telling Angelina that it was going well might've been a slight exaggeration.

The woman Tommy was seeing had met him by chance. He was walking home from The Garrison with a bottle of whiskey when a horse made him jump. He dropped the bottle on the ground, the glass shattering into tiny pieces and cutting a woman's foot as she walked by.

It hadn't been long, but the two of them had seen one another more times than Tommy and Angelina had, though he didn't think about this woman nearly as much as he thought about Angelina.

"Where is she?"

Arthur walked back into the front room and saw Tommy standing alone by the fireplace, a cigarette between his lips.

"She's gone."

"Why? She needed our help, Tom."

Thomas laughed, tapping the ash from his cigarette onto the floor.

"Arthur you are aware you're married now, aren't you? You've got to let her go."

Arthur sighed loudly. He knew his brother was right. He resented himself for thinking about Angelina so often when he was with his wife, but the more days that passed the more she was beginning to fade from his mind. Arthur knew that short chapter of his life was over, but it didn't mean he had to see her suffer.

"And what about you, eh?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I saw the way you looked at her in The Garrison that day, and I've seen the way you've looked at her every time since. Like you said Tom, I'm a married man, but you're not. As much as I hate to say it, what's stopping you?"

"She's a Santoro, Arthur. And a whore."

Arthur scoffed loudly, grabbing the cigarette from his brothers mouth and stubbing it out in the ashtray on the mantelpiece.

"And your ex-fiancée, she wasn't on our side either, was she?" He said, pressing his finger into Tommy's chest, "She's not a fuckin' whore, either. She's a million times the woman Grace was."