The Guzzi Legacy Vol 1 - Bethany-Kris Page 0,1

associates of his father, was Gian. He didn’t see his father’s French-Italian side of the family enough to speak anything with them. “I can see.”

“I’m not like them,” Corrado said.

Father Gene raised a single eyebrow high as he leaned forward to rest his clasped hands on the desk. “Why would you say that?”

He’d been ready to spill his secret, to admit why he was, in fact, struggling between life and business. The reason for his lack of a decision, and his waffling.

“Corrado?”

He swallowed hard and stared down at his hands again. “I stopped coming to confession at fifteen because I had sex.”

The priest sat back in his chair. “Oh.” And then, the man added with a laugh, “That’s not a reason to stop confessing, it’s a reason to confess, Corrado.”

“With another guy,” he added lower.

That quieted Father Gene.

Corrado shifted in the high-back leather chair the longer the silence dragged on. “That’s partly a lie. I had sex with a girl before that, but—”

“I understand,” the priest murmured.

“This is not ... our way.” Corrado shrugged. “I hear what people say—inside this church, and outside, about people like me. In business, it’s a weakness. Here, it’s a sin. Except I can’t be different, and so, I don’t fit in.”

He’d always been this way.

At first, Corrado didn’t know what to label his sexuality. In high school, the only gay kid he was acquainted with—at the time—got treated like a second-class human. Because he liked girls, too, that helped to keep his attraction to guys under everyone else’s radar. He kept it to himself because if that was how people behaved with someone at school, what would happen outside?

And then a new student came in—a guy that Corrado watched from afar as he navigated the terrain of private, Catholic school. He wasn’t sure what clued him in about the fact the guy was more like him than the other students, or even the one gay student in their school, but it happened.

Corrado learned a lot about himself from that. Bisexuality was fluid, and hard to explain to someone who wasn’t like him. Being with a guy didn’t change the fact he still liked the way the girl’s legs looked in her skirt from the school down the road. Except to everyone else, it seemed like they didn’t get that.

Gay was gay. Straight was straight. There was no in between. That’s what people said.

Corrado was right in the fucking middle, trying to figure out what it meant, and what he should do. Stuck between a culture his family was deeply ingrained in that told him he would never belong—he couldn’t be—and the choice of disappointing those around him when he didn’t decide what they wanted for him.

He couldn’t win.

Guzzis always won.

“Corrado, if you want me to say sex before marriage is not a sin, I can’t do that,” the priest said, dragging him from his thoughts.

“It’s not the sex that worried me.”

The man across the desk smiled softly. “No, I imagine you worried about the other bits.”

He shrugged.

“If you want me to tell you homosexual attraction is not a sin, then I can’t do that, either,” the priest murmured.

Corrado let out a hard sigh, and readied to stand from the chair. The meeting was pointless. This wasn’t news. He hadn’t expected to get a different answer than the one he had.

He should have known better.

They all thought the same thing:

He was wrong.

He didn’t belong.

He was different.

And because he was a Catholic, and the son of an Italian mafia boss, his problem was on a more prominent display for him about just how much he didn’t fit in anywhere. He couldn’t explain that to those around him without giving away his secret though.

“Sit down,” Father Gene said.

Corrado passed the man a look. “I think we’re good here, yeah?”

“If you didn’t notice, allow me to point out to you what you missed about my statement,” Father Gene replied, pointing a finger at the chair. Corrado sat his ass back down because he didn’t have a choice, honestly. “I treated the sin of sex before marriage with the same tone and respect as I did homosexuality. Because sin is sin. And sin, no matter who is doing it, is all the same. The thing people seem to forget is that we do not get to weigh one sin against the other to bolster our own sanctity and pureness, Corrado. One sin does not trump another—sin is sin.”

The man shrugged, adding, “And we are all sinners. That is what