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“Of course, tonight! I know you’ve been shot other times!”
He pauses, then his gaze grows slightly distant, like he’s doing some kind of mental tally. Until this point, he hasn’t even paused once to make sure he’s alright in the rush to get me back here. God, he was making me fucking tea without even stopping to let the adrenaline wear off enough to see if he was injured!
But then his gaze sharpens with clarity once more, homing in on me like I’m giving off some kind of Elio-attracting beacon.
“I’m good,” he says simply. “Or, I will be once you drink your fucking tea.”
Relief pours through me, makes my muscles sag. The violent shivering is finally subsiding a bit. I lift the cup and take a sip.
The heat of it is nice, but the taste is not what I’m expecting. I swallow, then cough slightly.
“What is this?” I rasp against the little bit of the tea that went down the wrong tube.
“Some herbal shit.”
“Herbal?!”
“The amount of stress hormones that just dumped through your system do not need additional caffeine.” He looks thoughtful in a pissed-off sort of way. “If you want something else, I’ll get you wine. Or whisky.”
“No, no. This is fine. What is it?” I ask, taking another sip. I don’t normally drink herbal tea. So often it just feels like a flavourless, watery version of what tea is supposed to be.
Maybe this is how Elio feels about my Irish breakfast compared to his espresso…
He doesn’t answer me or move until I take another sip. As if satisfied that I’m actually drinking some of it, he goes back to the kitchen and returns with the box of tea bags and holds it up between us so I can see the name.
“Snoozy Time Tea?” I say, squinting at the curly, cursive font. “What am I, eighty years old?”
“Like I said, no caffeine. It’s supposed to be soothing.” Elio looks at the box then back at me. “Plus, I like the cat on the front. Reminds me of you.”
There actually is a cat on the front. A cartoon one, with ginger fur and giant blue eyes.
“It’s wearing pyjamas…”
Elio just shrugs his good shoulder.
“So? You wear pyjamas.”
Apparently a snoozy, tea-guzzling cat has got my tongue because I can’t come up with a retort to that. I have to hand it to him – he kind of has me there. The blue pyjama set the cat is wearing actually looks a lot like some of the ones I’ve worn in this very house.
I take another sip of the tea to avoid continuing this absurd conversation. Maybe we’ve both fucking lost it, talking about a cartoon cat when men have died tonight.
When one of us could have died tonight.
I keep on drinking the tea and Elio keeps on watching me, arms stubbornly crossed like some kind of supervisor, the cardboard box of tea bending under the force of his curled fist. There’s a tension in his frame. A bristling energy that makes me thing he wants to be doing something else right now – maybe killing somebody, maybe touching me – but he’s holding himself back so that he can stand there and watch me drink the tea he made. Like his good little Songbird.
But I don’t have the energy to be anything else right now. So I drink my tea, and by the time I’m nearly done the large mug, I actually do think it’s helping. I’ve stopped shaking entirely now, and I feel warm, though very, very tired.
I look around weakly for somewhere to put the empty cup, but Elio is already reaching for it, his huge black hand passing in front of my line of vision and taking the dish from me. He brings it back into the kitchen, and I twist where I’m sitting to follow him with my eyes, staring at him over the back of the couch as he puts the used tea bag in a bin and the cup in the sink.
It’s a jarring image, shocking in how unnatural it looks. Elio, moving through the kitchen and doing such mundane tasks like that, throwing away a tea bag and putting a dirty dish in the sink. I remember what Valentina told me once about the Titone men never stepping foot in a kitchen, and here Elio is not only making me tea but also cleaning up after me too.
Even in the massive space, he still looks huge. And honestly, completely out of place. Like some stalking predator has stumbled into a forest cottage and is suddenly doing its best at pretending to be a human who lives there.
Have I domesticated him?
I’m an idiot for even asking myself such a question. If I had any real sort of control over him, he wouldn’t be using the threat of exposing my father to get me to marry him.
Marry him…
