Page 43 of Give In to Me
And the girl from Nebraska who told his soldier she could walk home alone, who kept her back straight and her pride wrapped around her like the coat her parents bought with tractor money, that girl sits on the edge of her bed and presses her fingers to her mouth and feels the ghost of a kiss that’s four weeks old and still warm.
I’m going.
I know this the way I know my own circles, my own heartbeat, the weight of my father’s spreadsheet on a ten-year-old laptop. I’m going because he saidplease, and because I can’t stay away from him either, and because the translation of a napkin is still pulsing through my bloodstream like something alive.
Then I start getting dressed.
Because he saidplease. And whatever wall he built is coming down, and I intend to be there when it falls.
Chapter 7
HIS BACK IS TO ME WHENI open the door.
The office is dark except for the desk lamp, which throws a warm circle across his papers and leaves the rest of the room in shadow. He’s standing at the window, hands in his pockets, shoulders held with a tension I can see from across the room. The door was unlocked. I turned the handle and it gave, and now I’m standing in his office at eight PM on a Wednesday night, and he hasn’t turned around.
I close the door. The lock clicks behind me. I don’t remember locking it. My hand did it on its own, the way my finger draws circles, an instinct that lives below thought.
He still doesn’t turn.
The clock on his wall is ticking. I remember it from the last time I was here, from golden hour and a thesis argument and a kiss that I haven’t stopped replaying since. The clock ticked then too, patient and indifferent, counting seconds. It’s counting again now.
The office smells the same. Old books and that Italian warmth and starch and soap and him, always him, the scent that I catalogued in this room months ago and have been carrying in my memory ever since.
“You came.” His voice is quiet. Aimed at the window, at the campus below, at whatever he’s been watching while he waited.
“You said please.”
A pause. His shoulders shift. Not a flinch, not quite, but a recognition. An acknowledgment that the word cost him, and he knows I know it.
“Sit down,Elsa.”
My name. Not Miss Lively. Not the barricade. Elsa, in that low voice, with the Italian softening the vowels, and I walk to the chair in front of his desk because my body remembers the path from last time.
I sit. My bag slides to the floor. My hands find my lap, and my finger starts a circle on my knee, and I wait.
He speaks to the window.
“My father’s name wasn’t his real name.” His voice is different. Stripped. Not the lecture voice, not the careful sentences he uses to keep the world at arm’s length. This voice has nothing holding it up. “He had it changed. Legally. Then he destroyed every record of what he was born as. Every document, every witness. He killed people to erase his past, and then he built a new one.”
My circle slows.
“They called him El Diablo.” A pause. His hand comes out of his pocket, presses flat against the window frame. I can see the tension in his fingers from here. “He ran the Salvatore family in Florence. Not a business family. Not a name on a building. A crime family. The oldest kind.”
My heart aches at the way he’s dismantling himself brick by brick in front of a twenty-year-old farm girl who showed up because he saidplease.
“My mother was from a village outside Florence.” His voice drops. Lower now. Rougher. “She wasn’t his wife. She wasn’t his choice. He saw her and he took her, and that’s the most generous version of that story.”
My finger has stopped. Pressed flat against my knee. No circle. Just pressure.
“She had me. She named me Luciano, which means ‘to tame,’ which is either the bravest or the cruelest thing she ever did.” Another pause. His hand on the window frame curls into a fist, then opens. “She died when I was an infant. By her own hand.”
The sound that comes out of me is small. Involuntary. Not a gasp, not a word.
He hears it. His spine straightens, a reflex, the composure snapping back into place.
“Don’t.” Still facing the window. “Whatever you’re feeling. Don’t.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to feel.”
