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He’d stepped back, but maybe I could still reach him.
Matt
I clearly needed to take a step back for a while.
The way Francesca could crawl under my skin was worrying. How much of a dick did she assume I was to go around sleeping with someone else on our wedding night?
I couldn’t exactly shame her for her jealousy because I had felt the exact same thing when I saw her moaning in her sleep. She called out some other fucker’s name in what was clearly a sex dream, and if I had the ability to self-combust, that would have been the fucking trigger.
I was jealous of a fucking dream!
It was ridiculous, yet that fact didn’t make it any less true.
When it came to Francesca, rationality wasn’t even in my damn lexicon. Everything regarding her was all heart, and the unpredictability that came with it annoyed the shit out of me. Not to mention, it was new territory for me. I’d never threaded this line before in my life.
So there was only one option to try to control the chaos that was wreaking havoc in my chest and mind – taking a pronounced step back and getting a grip on my damn emotions.
How the hell was I supposed to do that if she was sleeping right next to me? I needed physical distance because right now, my body didn’t give a flying fuck about what was going through my mind.
It just wanted her.
To see her. To kiss her. To taste her. To claim her over and over again.
That’s why the separate rooms came in handy, but she was quick on her feet and left me without a way out. I wasn’t about to give her a gun. My death wish didn’t run that deep.
So the couch it was, paired with an open eye every time Max was off duty or sweeping the perimeter.
But what really caught me off guard was her gratitude. Her small and soft, deceiving voice that thanked me for the little things I had done. Whatever I had managed to hold up during the last part of that flight had melted under the poisonous sweetness of her thankful tone.
Fuck!
She was messing with my head big time.
I’d set things up at work in a way that I probably wouldn’t be disturbed during the whole two weeks of our honeymoon, if I could even call it that. Just a meeting or two in a couple of days, so not even that would be helping me get her out of my mind.
“I’m starving. Would you mind taking me to lunch somewhere in town?”
I’ll take you to the moon if you ask me with that voice.
She was playing me. I knew it and still didn’t mind falling for it one little bit. Keeping my tone neutral and one foot planted on Earth, I replied as if I didn’t care. “Sure.”
I’d been to Havana plenty of times before, always taking home a bottle or two of that disgusting rum Alison loved so much and some Cuban cigars for myself. The city wasn’t new to me, but still, I found myself debating on which restaurant I should take Francesca to, giving it more thought than it actually warranted.
I wanted to impress her. Ah!
We ended up going to a place in the center of Havana. “La Guarida,” the den. The food was excellent, as always, while the cozy atmosphere loosened both of us up. The few patrons that were here when we arrived left soon after, and we were left alone. Slowly, we fell into a comfortable conversation that largely contrasted with the animosity that had settled between us since I forced this marriage onto Francesca.
Her guard was down for some reason, and I found myself enjoying this side of her all too much.
We are similar, in many ways.
We are both close to our family, we have similar tastes in food, and we are both comfortable with this lifestyle.
The mafia was a strange world, and it was easy to fall into excess when you could have everything you wanted, practically without limit. You just needed to take it. That wasn’t quite my philosophy, and Francesca was on the exact same page. There were moral lines I couldn’t cross, and I was happy to know it was the same with her.
She was one of the exceptions, and the irony wasn’t lost on me at all.
Somehow, the conversation took a sharp left from business to a much more personal and intimate topic. Her father.
