“Am I not good enough for you?”
I make a show of looking him over. “Pierre is prettier to look at.”
Untrue. But it’s enough for Dante’s smirk to falter just a bit, which is a small victory.
“And here I was just trying to check in and make sure you were settling in all right,” Dante chastises as he slides the bowl through the grate.
“Finally remembered I existed?”
“How could I forget?” he quips back. “You’re the sole reason my mother has been meticulously torturing me these last few days. All of which could have been avoided if you’d only behaved yourself back in Brooklyn.”
I cross my arms, a deadpan expression on my face. “Oh, how awful for you.”
“I’d take the cell any day.”
“All right, let me out of here, and we can swap,” I reply brightly.
Dante pretends to consider this. “Tempting. But I do recall you threatening to kill me, and I’d rather not take those chances.”
“You called me a sexual deviant.”
“Oh, in that case, it’s all terribly justified then.”
I glare at him. At some point he got close enough to the bars to have pressed himself against them. Almost his entire head fits through the gap.
I wonder if I might be quick enough to wrap my hands around his neck before he can pull away.
“Why are you here?” I bite out instead.
“To see if you were in want of anything.”
There’s a moment when I merely blink at him. He can’t really expect any other response than: “Iwantto go home.”
“Ah, good. You haven’t gone insane yet,” he smiles cheerily as if this is somehow good news to him. “I was worried the lack of social interaction would melt your brain a bit.”
“Pierre has been very good to me.”
Dante takes a step back, reaching into his back pocket, and chucks something through the bars toward me. I awkwardly scramble to catch it before it can hit the floor. “But does Pierre bring you gifts of classic literature?”
I examine the title on the front of the small dictionary with alarm. “‘Talk dirty like an Italian’?” I read.
“I’m interested to see if you have it in you to curse out my mother in her native tongue next time.”
Flicking through the pages, I blanche at the lists of increasingly vulgar swear words and their Italian translations. “This isn’t what I would call classic literature.”
“What are you talking about? I studied that thing more extensively than Shakespeare,” he begins to back away, hands in his pockets. “Happy reading. Oh, and the highlighted ones are my favorites.”
The positive thing about my little book of Italian swears is that the next time Dante visits, I have a greeting readily prepared.
“Ehi, testa di cazzo.”
Unfortunately, this seems to have the opposite of my intended effect.
Dante merely grins at me through the bars in a way that is infuriatingly disarming. “Did you just call me a ‘dickhead’?”
“Do you prefer,figlio di puttana?”
He laughs at this, a warm sound that rumbles from his chest. “Son of a bitch. You really have it out for my mother.”
