"It was a clip-on, Claudio, at a funeral for the police chief who had covered for both our families more times than I can count. The man had no respect."
A pause and then I hear Charlotte's voice in the background, muffled, asking who's on the phone. Claudio says something to her I can't catch and then a door closes and the background noise changes. He's moved to another room. Giving us privacy. The fact that he moved instead of telling me to call back means he already knows what this is about.
"The bartender," he says.
"Savannah."
"You've corrected Leone on her name. You've corrected me. You'll probably correct Aurelio next if you can get past the nurses."
"She has a name. People should use it."
Claudio is quiet for three seconds. When he speaks again his voice has shifted from irritated brother to concern.
"What's happening, Emilio?"
I sit on my bed with the phone against my ear and stare at the ceiling and try to put words on the thing that's been building in my chest for five days.
The gym this morning. Her fists on the pads, sweat running down her neck, the way she looked at me when I asked what my smile meant and said haven't figured it out yet with the honesty of a woman who could have lied and didn't. The shoulder brush on her way out. Her body against my arm for half a second and then gone, and the ghost of that contact burning in my skin six hours later.
And now I'm lying here at eleven p.m. with a hard-on that won't quit and a brain that won't shut up and a woman three doors down who probably sleeps like a Goddamn baby.
"She's in my head," I say. "Not the way women usually get in my head. Not just the sex thing, though that's there and it's bad, Claudio, it's really fucking bad. But the thing that's keeping me up isn't how she looks. It's how she holds that bottle cap, and how observant she is. Fuck me, and how she bit her nails down to nothing in that apartment and hasn't stopped even though she's safe now. She doesn't believe she's safe. She doesn't believe any of this. And I want her to. I want her to trust it. Not for the intel, not for Leone. For her."
The silence on the other end goes long enough that I check the screen.
"Claudio?"
"I'm here."
"Say something."
"Charlotte didn't trust me for weeks. She counted ceiling tiles and checked exits and slept with one eye open in rooms I'd personally secured. Trust with people who've been through what they've been through isn't something you earn by being kind. It's something they decide to give you when they're ready, and nothing you do speeds that up."
"That's not advice, that's a lecture."
"It's the same thing, you just prefer one word over the other." Another pause. "And Emilio, don't fuck her until you're sure it's a choice she's making with clear eyes and not a response to the situation she's in."
"I'm not going to..."
"You are. Eventually. I can hear it and I could feel it through the wall this morning when you came back from the gym vibrating at a frequency I haven't felt from you since we were teenagers. Charlotte noticed too. She looked at me over breakfast and said your brother is in trouble and I said I know."
"Charlotte said that?"
"Yes, and Charlotte is right."
"She scares the shit out of me."
"She scares the shit out of everyone with her mind-reading voodoo shit that’s seemed to blossom to life now that she’s happily settled in and knows everyone." His voice changes again. The careful edges pull back further, and underneath is the brother.. The kid who grew up beside me and knows me the way no one else does. "Brother just... listen."
"I'm listening."
"If she's the one, you'll know. Not because of how you feel, but because of how she changes the room when she walks in. Charlotte rearranged my whole head. Alexandra did the same to Leone. It's not about the woman being special in the abstract. It's about how they remove barriers you’ve built and allow your brain to just chill."
"When did you become a poet?"
"When Charlotte told me my emotional vocabulary was on par with a toddler and I should do better."
I laugh. The sound is too loud for eleven p.m. in a concrete building. A guard grunts and shuffles past my door, probably startled.
