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Enzo’s brow furrowed. “What is?”
“All of it.” Fiore threw his arm aloft at his drawings. “How stupid would these look on your walls?”
Enzo glanced to the drawings and back to Fiore. “Not at all.”
Fiore scoffed. He thought of the capriccio Enzo had offered him, so long ago it seemed, and how then he’d feared it would seem silly in his own quarters. How foolish he’d been then. He flung out his hand toward the bed. “How absurd would that be in your bedchamber?”
“Our bedchamber,” said Enzo.
Fiore rolled his eyes so hard they ached.
He regretted it at once. Not for the pain in his skull, but for the silence that fell in its wake and the way Enzo worried his scarred lip between his teeth.
Fiore’s own lips parted for he knew not what. No apology could suffice, not after he’d thrown everything Enzo had done for him back in his face, but—
“We still haven’t created your chambers at Ca’ Scaevola,” Enzo said. “Perhaps you might like a nautical design? One which would suit what you have here?”
Fiore stared at him. No mere words could begin to express all his regret for his own behavior and all his gratitude for Enzo’s continued efforts to understand his wild moods.
“Or,” Enzo continued, “if not here in the city, then we might construct new quarters for you in the countryside. There’s more room to expand out there. We could build an addition to the villa, all your own design.”
Fiore knew not what to say. His mouth opened regardless. “You have a villa?”
“Yes.” Enzo blinked at him. “Didn’t I mention…?”
Fiore shook his head.
“Oh,” said Enzo. “Forgive me, I ought to have said something.”
Another wave of regret washed over Fiore’s heart. For Enzo to apologize when it was Fiore who’d wronged him—
“It’s near to Giovanna’s,” Enzo explained. “But it’s all my own. So you needn’t worry about my family interfering—not that they would, but I know you’re concerned, so—”
Fiore caught Enzo by the hand.
Enzo fell silent.
“I don’t need my own room at your villa,” Fiore explained. “Or at Ca’ Scaevola. I just…” He trailed off. He knew not what he needed. At the moment all he wanted was for Enzo to hold him.
And as if Enzo could hear words he hadn’t spoken, he raised Fiore’s hand to his lips and kissed his knuckles. He kept that hand cradled between his own as he knelt before him.
“You don’t have to decide what to keep just now,” Enzo said. “Or where to put it all. We can store everything at Ca’ Scaevola until you know what you want to do with it.”
What he ought to do, Fiore knew, was turn his back on the lot and let Corelli sell or toss or burn whatever she saw fit. But the thought of leaving behind everything he’d poured his heart into, carving out a small slice of the city to make his own and fill with whatever brought him comfort, filled him with stupid, short-sighted, unbearable melancholy. Everything he held dear here would hardly take up even a corner of Enzo’s bedchamber. Still, he realized even as he scolded himself, that meant it wouldn’t burden Enzo to tuck it way somewhere in the enormous palazzo for a little while. At least until he could think properly.
“I’d like to keep the frame,” Fiore heard himself say as he gazed on his whaleboat bed. “Not the bedding. That’s due for a change anyway. But the frame…”
Enzo glanced over it. “Agreed. And the hook as well?”
Fiore hadn’t dared consider the hook worth keeping.
A handsome rosy tint bloomed over Enzo’s sharp cheeks. “I do have some fond memories here.”
Fiore’s mouth twitched in something like a smile. Still close-lipped and thin but far more sincere than what he’d worn on deck just moments ago. He leaned in and gave Enzo a kiss.
“The hook as well,” Fiore said when they parted.
The strength of Enzo’s arm and his ingenuity sufficed to extract the hook from the wall. More care was taken with Fiore’s drawings—more care than Fiore thought they deserved, anyway, but Enzo insisted on treating them thus. All were laid into Fiore’s sea-chest atop its own treasures and what shirts and sundries had been locked away inside it when Carlotta came for his clothes. Then Enzo donned his mask again, swung the sea-chest over his shoulder, and carried it up on deck.
