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She pushed herself up with her elbows. “Thanks, Tristan.”
I sat down beside her on the bed and handed her an ibuprofen with a glass of water. She took it gratefully.
“I’m sorry about last night,” she said sheepishly. “It’s not a great excuse, but I was drunk.”
“I’m the one who should apologize,” I replied. “I should’ve waited until...maybe I shouldn’t have invited you over.”
She cocked her head as she looked at me, her brown eyes narrowing. “I like being here,” she said. “But maybe we should actually talk before we fuck.”
“Never heard of that,” I replied with a smile, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at her face, trying to focus on her words rather than the way her disheveled hair framed her face, making her look even more enticing than before.
“Let’s get the obvious out of the way,” she said, accentuating words with her tongue against the inside of her teeth as she took a swig of coffee. “The wedding? When are we doing it?”
“You’ve decided to go through with it?”
“I don’t see how I have much of a choice,” she replied, her voice almost breaking. The way she talked about this made my stomach churn with nerves. It was obvious she wasn’t thrilled about it, and I didn’t know what I could do to change that. “We both need to do what’s best for our families.”
“What about what you want?”
“Does it matter?” she said, looking away from me. “I know how this works, Tristan. I’ve been around my father and his capos all my life. The men get the money, freedom, as many women as they want. In exchange, the wives get everything they want. Trips to Rome every year, a nice house on the hill, private education for their children. As long as they don’t question their husbands.”
She was right. That was the way it was for our family too. I just didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to promise her that it wouldn’t be that way with me, but I didn’t know. At one point, when I was just out of high school, I had told my father I never wanted to get involved in the business. Now I was getting married for the business.
I didn’t like making promises I couldn’t keep.
“You don’t think it starts with love?”
Adriana laughed, a bitter sound that made my heart turn over in my chest. Something was wrong here. She’s terrified, I realized.
“We aren’t talking about love, Tristan,” she said. “And you know that as well as I do.”
“I know you’re scared,” I said carefully. “What were you picturing?”
“When I thought about getting married?” she asked. “Honestly, I never imagined myself in an arranged marriage, Tristan. I always thought I’d find my own love, someone who would sweep me off my feet and make me feel like the most important person in the world. But it doesn’t matter. I know what my role is here. I’m not stupid and neither are you.”
“And what if I want more than honor and duty?” I heard myself say, which felt immediately foolish.
The way she was looking at me made my blood run cold. Not with hatred or animosity, but with utter sadness.
“I don’t think you do,” she replied. She placed her coffee cup carefully on the nightstand, then crawled over to me, the blanket falling down and away from her body.
At some point during the night, she had taken off her dress and was wearing nothing but her panties, and the vision of her crawling across the bed to me…it was fucking sinful. I was trying to be a good guy here–partially because I knew she didn’t want this and partially because her dad was a dangerous motherfucker–but there was no way to stop myself from looking at her gorgeous body, her breasts hanging beneath her, her hips swaying as she moved.
I blatantly checked her out, practically drooling.
She didn’t seem to care about that.
Instead, she was ready to keep pressing me. “You’ve been asking me a lot of questions, but not really saying anything. Say something.”
“I don’t know what you want to hear,” I said. I felt powerless and off-balance, unsure where to begin with words that had been bottled up inside for so long. “I wish I could just say that we don’t need to do this... “
“But we do,” she took my face in her hands. “You can’t back out now, and neither can I.”
“I’ll be nice to you,” I said. “Not just get you things, but...I’ll be there, really. You won’t be lonely, Ade.”
“Stop talking like that,” she said, her eyes welling up. I reached out and brushed her tears away. She leaned her face into my touch, her breath quivering for a second. “I know how marriage works, Tristan. I know what my role is.”
She looked at me with such sadness in her eyes that my heart almost broke. I could see that she was on the verge of breaking down, and I wondered if I should pull her into a hug–but before I could move, she lowered her head and pressed her lips to mine. She wrapped her arms around my back, kissed me harder and deeper than I ever thought possible.
