My trauma has a type.
“Where are my cookies, by the way?” he asks, derailing my spiral. “I’m the one who didn’t rough you up when I was supposed to. I feel like that earns me some cookies. The peanut butter chocolate ones are my favorite.”
Despite everything, the panic, the mortification, the fact that I’m having this conversation in a grocery store, I almost laugh.
“You want cookies?”
“I want an easier job, a vacation, and world peace. But I’ll settle for cookies.”
“What job? Stalking me in supermarkets?”
“Keeping you alive.” He says it casually. “You’re really bad at it yourself, so someone has to.”
I stand there, in the pasta aisle, having the most surreal conversation of my life with a man who was sent to threaten me six weeks ago and is now apparently my... bodyguard? Mob-appointed babysitter? How do we escalate this to me wrapped around his waist?
“You want to get milkshakes?” I ask, because apparently self-preservation is just a rumor I used to believe in. “Talk somewhere that’s not...” I gesture at the aggressive fluorescent lighting. “This?”
Enzo considers me for a moment. His whole face tilts, like I threw him off balance and he doesn’t hate it.
“Yeah, okay.” He grabs the marinara sauce and puts it in my cart like that’s a normal thing to do. “But you’re buying. You owe me.”
“For what?”
“For keeping your tie theft off the official family drama spreadsheet.”
Fuck.
There’s a diner two blocks away.
Not the one I go to with Saul. That one feels sacred somehow, part of our pattern, and it’d be wrong to imagine riding Enzo at that place. I have boundaries after all.
This diner we go to is impossibly older. Shabbier. Checkered floors and cracked vinyl booths and a jukebox that definitely hasn’t worked since before I was born.
Enzo slides into one side.
I take the other.
A waitress appears. Sixty years old. Zero fucks remaining.
“What can I get you.” It’s not a question. It’s a demand for information so she can leave.
“Vanilla shake,” Enzo says. “And fries.”
“Chocolate shake,” I add. “Also fries.”
She scratches it down and disappears without another word.
I love her.
We sit in silence. The kind that should be awkward, but my brain’s too busy wondering how long it would take him to crawl under this table and make me see God in a cracked vinyl booth.
I take the opportunity to catalog him the way I catalog everyone. The way I can’t seem to stop cataloging.
He’s built different from Dario. Less lean, more solid. The kind of body that’s been in fights and won most of them. His hands are big, scarred across the knuckles, the kind of hands that have done things I probably don’t want to know about.
But his face is almost boyish when he’s not trying to be intimidating. Long lashes. Full mouth. The kind of features that probably got him underestimated before people learned better.
“You’re staring,” he says.
