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Enzo felt an urge to apologize for making himself rather too at home. But he had more pressing matters to consider if Fiore insisted on shaving. Standing for a moment or two was well enough. Standing for anything approaching the quarter-hour mark, however… “Might you sit down?”
Fiore served him a shrewd glance. “Would that be medically advisable?”
Enzo had a feeling he’d hear a lot of that phrase from Fiore over the next few days. “It would be, yes. Lest your entrails tear through your stitches and spill out.”
Fiore blinked at him. “Very well.”
Enzo fetched his chair.
Unfortunately from his seated posture Fiore could no longer reach the basin or anything else up on the stand. Fiore considered this for a while, doubtless a longer while than usual thanks to the anodyne thrumming through his veins, before looking up to Enzo again.
Enzo held out his hand for the razor. “If I may…?”
A smile crept across Fiore’s perfect lips. He handed it over.
Enzo had a decade’s worth of experience shaving himself. He’d never employed a valet and had looked after his own needs at university. While he had considerably less experience shaving others, he possessed steady hands and had grown accustomed to manipulating sharp blades with precision.
Even so, the absolute trust in him that Fiore displayed by handing over the razor and baring his throat was certainly something remarkable. Enzo wanted nothing more than to rise to the occasion, however menial. Such trust deserved ample reward.
Fiore waited with perfect stillness as Enzo stropped the blade, lathered up the brush and plied it to his skin. No part of him so much as twitched whilst Enzo slid the razor across his face—save his eyes, which fixed upon Enzo’s face and followed him with the smile that couldn’t grace his lips. For his part, Enzo didn’t breathe easy until he’d washed the lather away and found no nicks beneath.
“Wonderful,” Fiore declared as he ran his knuckles down his newly-smooth cheeks. “If you ever tire of a life of leisure, you might make an excellent barber.”
Enzo accepted the compliment with a smile.
“Now then,” said Fiore. “If we’re to live under medically-advisable abstinence, however shall we pass the time?”
“Reading, perhaps,” Enzo suggested. “What books do you have?”
Fiore raised his brows.
Belatedly, Enzo realized he’d never seen a book in all his visits to this very room. He supposed such luxuries lay rather above Fiore’s touch. Few could claim the privilege of an ancestral library stocked full of tomes. A flame ignited in his cheeks as he tried to amend for his solecism. “Or maybe a gazetta?”
A wry smile wound its way up Fiore’s cheek. “More likely. I’m afraid I don’t keep much around that doesn’t get drawn over.”
Enzo followed his gaze to the wall, where indeed more than one of the sketches pinned up thereupon bore the printed lines of a gossip rag beneath the red-chalk form of a muscular masculine nude.
“One of Artemisia’s other models,” Fiore explained. As if half to himself, he mused on. “I should bring you to the book-binders district when we go out on the town again. We might find something more to your liking there. Or to mine,” he added with another languid smile.
Enzo made a mental note to have Carlotta bring over some novels from Ca’ Scaevola’s library. “What sort of stories are to your liking?”
“Oh, you know,” Fiore scoffed in that tone Enzo had begun to suspect meant he didn’t want his words to sound quite so earnest as they truly were. “Adventures. Sword-fights. Revenge. Gentlemen of our predilections.” This with a knowing glance at Enzo that sent his heart into a temporary arrhythmia. “And yourself?”
Before Enzo could reply, a knock fell on the chamber door.
All the pliability the anodyne had brought to Fiore’s form left it in an instant as he lurched upright and whipped his head toward the door. In a voice whose indolent calm belied his evident anxiety, he called out, “Who goes there?”
“Dr Malvestio,” came the muffled reply.
“Enter,” Enzo said without thinking.
He realized his error all too late, as Fiore’s face drained of blood.
~
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fiore tried to swallow his fear and bitterness in the same breath. It almost worked.
