Donatella, not knowing what was going on between us, called him from the doorway on Damen. She sounded surprised at how quickly he seemed to agree. By the time we got back to the block Tonio was already there, parked where he could see the curb and the new glass and both ends of the street at once, and he’d come up out of the car and across the sidewalk to meet me with his hands already reaching, his face already changed—the soldier up in his eyes where I could see him now, since I knew, since there was no more pretending the killer wasn’t there under the baker’s hands.
He held me on the cold sidewalk and looked at me over my head, scanning, and then he walked me inside and locked the door and pulled the front lights and stood with his back to the new glass the way he does, the wall, between me and the dark.
“You’re safe,” he said. “I’ve got the door, I’ve got the curb, I’ve got it. Nobody gets near you.” His thumb traced my jaw. “And later—later we’re going to have some fun, you and me, because you’ve been good all day and I want to hear about your morning, and because I’m not going to let a photograph turn this house cold.”
I should have been frightened. Part of me was. But the larger part of me, but the part we’d been working on together, felt only this: he was here, and he would protect me.
The safety of it was enormous. It went all through me, warm, total.
“Come here,” he said, and the voice had changed—gone down into the soft-steel, the one with no hurry in it. “Into the kitchen. Where it’s warm.”
I went. The under-counter light was the only light, gold and low, the ovens long cold and quiet, the radio off. Olimpo was a gray heap across the doorway to the storeroom, one amber eye tracking us, an opinion already forming.
“Undress for me,” Tonio said.
Just that. Easy. He leaned back against the marble bench with his arms loose and his eyes steady, and he watched me, and the watching was the whole of it. I felt the day still on me—the salon shine, the prosecco gone soft and warm in my blood, the bag with the black lace in it that I’d carried home and not mentioned, the green lace I’d taken off at noon in a salon bathroom and replaced with my own daring, my own choice, just to see.
Just to see.
I undressed. Slow, because he was watching slow, because it felt like an event. The sweater. The jeans. And then I stood at the marble in the thing I’d bought, the black, the scandal, the crotchless set I’d picked with my own hand and paid for with my own money and grinned at my own nerve while Donatella whooped—and I watched his face when he saw it.
I could see him fighting his delight.
“Now,” he said, low. “Now that’s interesting.”
He pushed off the bench and came toward me.
“I picked the green,” he said. He said it gently, almost sadly, like a man reading a figure that doesn’t reconcile. “Didn’t I. This morning. I held it out, and I told you. Under everything. All day. Every minute, out with Donatella, the salon, all those people — and you’d feel it, and you’d think of me.” He stopped a foot from me, and his eyes went down me, that inventory look, that count-and-keep look, except now there was a discrepancy in the ledger and he’d found it. “And you said you’d be good.”
“I said I’m always good.”
“Mm.” He started to circle me. Slow. Behind me, the heat of him at my back, then the other side, taking me in fromevery angle, the black lace, the bare of me it left framed and offered, humming low in his chest the whole way around like a man appraising. “You took the green one off,” he said, from somewhere behind my ear. “Somewhere out there, today, you took off the thing I chose, and you put on this.” His hand came up and brushed the strap on my shoulder, one finger, and I shivered. “You bought this for me, didn’t you. You went out, in the middle of my morning, with my lace on your skin, and you stood in some shop and you picked this out, knowing—knowing exactly—what it’d do to me when I saw it.” He came back around to my front, and his eyes were dark and his voice had gone to silk. “You disobeyed me on purpose. Just to see what I’d do.”
I lifted my chin.
The prosecco was still in me, gone warm, and the day’s wonder, and the new thing he’d opened up in me that I was only just learning to play with—the mouth on me loose now in this new direction, the brat I’d never once been allowed to be surfacing under his hands like the Little did, like everything did with him.
“Maybe I did,” I said.
He went very still. And then he nodded. Slow. The way you nod when a number you suspected gets confirmed.
“Hands on the marble, then,” he said. “Both of them. Flat.” He stepped back and let me see him decide it, the way he let me see everything. “Let’s discuss it.”
The marble was cold under my palms. I went down over it the way my body had learned the shape of—palms flat, weight tipping forward, the bench at my hips—and the black lace I’d bought for myself sat exactly the way I’d schemed it would when I picked it off the rack, framing me, offering me, leaving the heart of me bare and open in the gold light.
His hand came to rest on the small of my back. Warm. Heavy. The scarred work-rough palm I’d watched all day every day.
“This is what you wanted,” he said. Not a question. A figure confirmed. “All day. The lace, the disobedience, the wait for this. You planned the whole thing.”
“I don’t plan,” I said, into the marble. “I improvise.”
His hand came up, and it came down.
Not hard. A placing. A beginning. But I yelped, and the yelp came out with a moan braided through it that I had no say in, the sting blooming across the curve of me and turning, fast, the way it always turned now, the heat running down to pool low and molten where his hand could see exactly how I felt about all of it.
“That one,” he said, conversational, almost fond, “is for the green you took off.”
The next landed.
