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The air leaves my lungs in a single breath as I pull away. I touch the choker around my neck, feeling the rose studded with rubies in the center of it. One day. I say to myself. One day.
***
“What happened?” I frown when I find Rafaella pacing back and forth in the kitchen. “Did you count the towels wrong again?” I tease, because the last time I caught Rafaella walking around the house like a dizzy turkey was when she sent the wrong linen listing to Luigia.
Although I am mocking, the desperation was valid then and would still be today, the head governess does not tolerate mistakes on her watch.
The table for our lunch is already set on the island, confirming the first thought that crossed my mind when I woke up: I have become lazy. I just don't wake up in time for breakfast anymore.
Rafaella stops her anxious walk to look at me, and her blue eyes tell me that whatever happened is a little more serious than a scolding from Luigia.
“Tizziano?” I ask, feeling tension spread throughout my body. My friend opens her mouth, but no sound comes through, and it's impossible to stop the worry from settling like a stone in my stomach. “Rafaella, you're scaring me.”
Rafa raises her hands into fists to the height of her abdomen, closes her eyes and lets out a long exhale before opening them again.
“Sit down,” she asks, and it's obvious that this makes me even more nervous, but I obey, going around the island and sitting on one of the stools.
I expect Rafaella to do the same thing, but she remains standing in the same exact place. Her tongue moistens her lips before Rafa lowers her head.
As soon as her gaze rises to meet mine, she bites her lip and looks away. The sequence of anxious gestures raises my concernto the point of making my heart race. What kind of news could leave Rafaella in this state of apprehension because she was the messenger?
My head spins as my brain works, searching for some potential reason and one I've never thought about before explodes all of my anxiety levels at once. I stop breathing as each of my internal organs is hit hard with the realization of what receiving this news would do to me.
“Is he getting married?” I ask, preferring to rip the band-aid.
I always knew none of this would last forever, but I never expected the confusion spreading through my bloodstream at the prospect of Vittorio's marriage ending this phase of my life.
I almost laugh at the irony that only minutes have passed since I woke up feeling grateful for it. Rafaella blinks before frowning.
“What? Who will get married?” She asks, looking genuinely confused.
“The Don.”
“No!” she denies it and the emphasis with which she shows that this is an absurd idea drains me of tension as if I were a balloon flying through the air as the it wooshes out of me. “Per la Madonna, Gabriella! No!”
“So, what's about to give you a stroke?” I ask, and Rafaella swallows hard before reaching into the cupboard under the kitchen island and pulling out a stack of newspapers and magazines.
My eyebrows come together when I find no sense in so much apprehension about something that has already become commonplace. Even the maids had lost interest in spreading the articles about Vittorio and me around the house. When Rafaellaplaces the stack of papers on the plate in front of me, however, I understand. This is, without a shadow of a doubt, an indigestible lunch.
I feel the change in my own face as my brain assimilates the image on the newspaper's cover. It's a photograph from yesterday afternoon on the yacht. I look away for two seconds, swallowing the bitterness that seeing the moment I thought was so special printed in a headline leaves in my mouth.
In the image, dressed in nothing but a green bikini, I am pressed between a wall on the outside of the deck and Vittorio's body. He's wearing black swim trunks, his lips are attached to the curve of my breast and his hands are one on my ass and the other, clearly tucked between my legs while my head is tilted up and my lips are open. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that I was in the middle of moaning.
Using my thumb, I lift just the bottom right corner of the stack in front of me to see that all the covers show different moments of the same story. Deciding that I don't want to see photo by photo is easy. I turn my face away, pinning it nowhere for several minutes before looking back at Rafaella.
“Thank you for not hiding it from me.”
“Gabi, I'm so sorry,” she says quietly, the redness taking over her eyes announces that my friend is about to cry even though my own eyes are dry. I shrug.
“It's no big deal.” I give her a small smile, but this time, the fake movement feels like dragging barbed wire under my skin.
“Like hell it isn’t!” Rafaella contradicts me, serious. “He didn't have that right!” she says and makes me laugh awkwardly.
“He's the Don, Rafaella. You, better than me, should know that he has the right to do whatever he wants. And they're justpictures,” I lie to her, even though I realize that apparently the admissions I made this morning have left me incapable of doing the same to myself. It's like a switch has been flipped and suddenly I've become hyper-aware of every little gesture for the benefit of others rather than my own. “They are not the first and probably will not be the last.”
“These are different, they are intimate.”
She insists, as if she feels she needs to explain to me why I have the right to be hurt by Vittorio's actions, even as I repeat in my own head, over and over again, that I don't. I try to stop the unwarranted feeling of betrayal creeping under my skin, because the only thing responsible for it is my own fantasies.
