Page 47 of Give In to Me
Getting better.
His reply:David?
Two letters too many. There’s an edge in that one word, even in text, even without tone or inflection.David?As in, is David the one feeding you. As in, tell me more about the boy who sits across from you in coffee shops and makes you laugh and carries your books.
A man who ran a crime family and built an empire and kisses like the world is ending, jealous of a boy who builds spreadsheets about smile frequency.
I shouldn’t find this as endearing as I do.
David brings me sandwiches. Martha sends recipes. Between them I’m being managed.
A long pause. Longer than any pause so far.
Good.
The same word. But this time it carries something heavier. This time it means: I want to be the one making sure you eat, and I can’t, and the fact that someone else is doing it’s simultaneously a relief and a problem.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into a four-letter word. This is possible. This is what happens when a girl from Nebraska falls for a man who speaks in single syllables and lets the silence do the rest.
THE MUSEUM IS HIS IDEA.
Tuesday after class, a note in my campus mailbox. Not under my door this time. In the small metal box in the humanities building that I check once a week for departmental mail and never find anything interesting. His handwriting. A time, an address, and two words:After hours.
I stand in the mailroom with the note in my hand and my heart doing something complicated, becauseafter hoursmeans empty. Means private. Means he’s arranged for a museum to be open when no one else is there, which is either the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me or the most terrifying, and it’s both, it’s absolutely both.
Seven PM. The street is quiet. The building is tall and pale and so beautiful it makes you want to whisper. A man I don’t recognize opens a side door, nods once, and steps aside. One of Luciano’s men. The wrong shoes are becoming a signature I could spot at fifty paces.
Inside, the museum is dark except for the gallery lights, which illuminate the paintings and leave the floors in shadow. My footsteps echo. The ceiling is high and vaulted and the air smells like old stone and climate control and history, and I’m walking through a building full of centuries-old beauty in my hemmed dress and my sensible flats and I’ve no idea where I’m going.
But I know who I’m walking toward, and that’s enough.
He’s standing in front of a painting.
I see him before he sees me, and I stop. Fifteen feet away, in a gallery lit warm against the dark, Luciano is looking at a painting with an expression I’ve never seen on him. Unguarded. Something caught between memory and longing, and I realize that he’s looking at this painting the same way I look at him.
He hears me. Turns. The expression doesn’t vanish this time. It softens, shifts into something that’s still open, still him, and my chest aches because this is new. This is Luciano without the armor. Just a man in a museum, in the dark, waiting for me.
“You came,” he says. Second time he’s said this. It’s becoming a pattern, and the pattern tells me something: he invites me to things and then is surprised when I show up, because somewhere in this man’s self-image, he can’t believe that anyone would choose to walk toward him.
“You keep being surprised by that,” I say.
Something loosens at the corner of his mouth. Almost a smile.
“Come here.”
Third time. Third context. The words are the same but the voice is different from the office, different from the desk. This voice is warm.
I walk to him. My shoulder brushes his. The contact is small, fabric against fabric, and it sends a current through me that I feel in my teeth.
We stand in front of the painting. It’s large, warm-toned, a landscape. I don’t know the artist. I don’t care. What I care about is the heat of his arm next to mine and the silence between us that isn’t tense, isn’t charged, isn’t loaded with all the things we can’t say. It’s just quiet. Comfortable quiet. The quiet of two people who have already said the hardest things and are resting in the aftermath.
“Nebraska sunsets look like that,” I say, nodding at the painting. “That gold at the bottom, where the sky meets the land. Mamacalls it God’s hour, but she would never say that in front of company.”
He doesn’t respond right away. His eyes stay on the painting, and I watch his profile in the gallery light, the scar at his temple, the line of his jaw, and I think about how I’ve been watching this face from the third row for two years and this is the first time I’ve seen it at rest.
“Florentine light.” His voice is quiet. “Before the river. The hour before sunset, the buildings go this color. Warm stone and warm air and everything turns gold.” A pause. His thumb moves against the back of my hand. “I haven’t been back in twenty-two years.”
Twenty-two years. Since he was fourteen. Since he ran. I think about the boy in the forest and the man in the museum and the distance between them, and I hold his hand tighter and I don’t say anything, because some things don’t need words. They need hands.
