"I mean it,piccola.”
Her eyes are wet, and she doesn't look away from me, and then a moment later, she nods.
The air between us changes so fast I feel it happen, a current flipping over from grief into something else entirely.
I reach across the table and take her face in both hands, and she comes up out of her chair to meet me, and I kiss her like I've been waiting to since Capri, since the boat, since long before either of us would've admitted it.
She makes a sound against my mouth that undoes something in my chest completely.
I stand, and my arm goes flat across the table. Everything on it, plates, the jug, the glasses, goes crashing to the stone floor in one motion. Neither of us even flinches at the noise.
I lift her onto the table.
Her legs come around my waist, ankles locking at the small of my back, and she pulls me in by the collar with both fists, holding on like she means to keep me there all night. Fine by me. I'm not going anywhere.
She's laughing and breathless and pulling me down by the shirt, and I go, kneeling on the bench, then the table itself, working her dress up and off over her head until there's nothing left between us but skin and lamplight and the sound of the water outside. Her hair comes loose across the wood. Candlelight from the sideboard throws gold along her collarbone, down the length of her, catching on the small mole at the back of her neck when she tips her head back and lets me look.
I trail my mouth down her throat, her chest, the soft plane of her stomach, memorizing all of it again even though I already know every inch by heart. She threads her fingers into my hair and holds on.
I settle between her legs. My hands go flat on either side of her ribs, and I look down at her spread out under me, mine in every way that's ever mattered, and I have to know.
"What are you?” I ask. Not a question exactly. A demand, quiet and certain, the only kind I have left in me tonight.
She doesn't hesitate.
"Your wife," she says.
23
NICO
The rain hitsthe windows behind her head, and I stay where I am, on my knees, her thighs open around me, her answer still hanging in the air between us.
Your wife.
Two words. I've heard them a hundred times, from priests, from clerks, from men who wanted something out of me and used the title to grease the ask. From her mouth, tonight, they knock the air clean out of my chest.
I press my mouth to the inside of her knee and start to pull back. "Give me one second," I say. "I need to get a condom.”
"No." She catches my jaw in both hands and hauls me back up over her, like she doesn't trust me to make it to the door and back. "Stay."
"Piccola, I don't have anything on me down here. I need a condom. Give me two minutes."
"No condom." Her eyes are dark, wet at the edges, crying under cover of the storm. "I want you. All of you. Nothing between us.I'm your wife, Nico. And you're going to fuck me like I'm your wife."
I go still over her.
I've been careful about this, and she just took the choice out of my hands like it was never mine to guard in the first place.
"You know what you're asking."
"I know exactly what I'm asking."
Cazzo.
I kiss her instead of answering, and she opens her mouth for me the second our lips touch, like she's been waiting all night for permission to stop holding anything back. The house is airless tonight, the storm outside pressing all that heat back down through the open windows, and her skin is already damp under my hand, a fine sheen of sweat gathering at her throat, at the small of her back where my palm settles. I take my time with it. My hand slides up the inside of her thigh first, slow, memorizing her, and I feel her shiver under my palm before I even get where I'm going.
I kiss along her jaw, down her throat, and settle my mouth over the pulse hammering there. She fists both hands in my hair and drags me lower, down over her collarbone, over the swell of her breast, and I take her nipple between my teeth and bite down just hard enough to make her gasp my name into the rain-loud room.
