Page 69 of Give In to Me
I take his hand.
My fingers lace through his. His hand is warm. Large. I hold it, and his fingers close around mine, and the contact is everything and not enough and exactly right.
I lift his hand. Turn it over. His palm is open.
I draw one last circle on his palm.
One circle. The one that started in an alley when I was eighteen and terrified. The one that lived on every surface I could reach. The one that stopped when he cut me loose and came back when my hands remembered who I’m. One circle, drawn on the palm of the man I love, in the room where I first saw him.
His fingers close over mine.
We stand in the third row of an empty lecture hall, hand in hand, shaking, and I’m Elsa Lively from Nebraska and he’s Luciano Salvatore from Florence and the distance between those two facts is zero.
He pulls my hand. Gently. Toward the aisle, toward the door, toward whatever comes after the last class.
We walk out together.
Epilogue
SHE SLEEPS WITH HERhand open.
Palm up, fingers loosely curled, resting on the white sheet between us. The ring is there—simple, a band of gold I had made in Florence by a man whose grandfather made rings for my grandmother’s generation, and who asked no questions when a Salvatore walked into his shop for the first time in thirty years and said I need something for a girl from Nebraska who won’t wear anything that weighs more than a promise.
It weighs almost nothing. She still touches it every few minutes, turning it with her thumb, the way she turns her circles. A new habit built on top of the oldest one.
Her breathing is even. Her hair is spread across the pillow—dark against white, the particular shade of brown that turns copper when the sun hits it, which I know because I’ve catalogued every version of this woman’s hair in every kind of light for the better part of a year and I’m not ashamed of this. I’m not ashamed of anything I feel for Elsa Lively.
Elsa Salvatore.
The name is twelve hours old and it still does something to the inside of my chest. Something that rearranges what I thought I knew about myself and doesn’t put it back.
WE MARRIED IN HER HOMETOWN.
I offered to bring her family to New York. I offered Italy. I offered Monaco, where a man I’ve known for fifteen years has a cathedral of black marble and rose petals that would have seated three hundred without crowding. She looked at me with those blue eyes that see everything I’ve built and everything I’ve buried and said, “I want to get married where my mama can walk to church after.”
So we came to Nebraska.
The church is white clapboard with a steeple that leans two degrees to the east, which the pastor says has been leaning since 1974 and will probably lean until the Second Coming. The pews hold forty. We used eleven. Her parents, Giuseppe, the pastor, a woman named Mrs. Hensley who plays the organ and cried through the entire ceremony, and a handful of people from town who have known Elsa since she was drawing circles on her mother’s kitchen table.
I stood at the altar in a suit that cost more than most of the cars in the parking lot, and Robert Lively walked his daughter down an aisle that was twelve feet long, and when he put her hand in mine his grip tightened—not a warning, not a test, just a man holding on to something for one more second before he lets go—and then he released her, and sat down, and his jaw did the thing that Elsa’s jaw does when she’s holding something in, and Martha reached over and took his hand without looking at him.
I understand, now, where Elsa learned to hold a man’s hand without making him feel held down.
Elsa wore white. Not a gown—a dress. Simple, cotton, with small buttons down the back that took me twenty minutes to undo last night, and I’ve disarmed security systems in nine countries and none of them tested my hands the way those buttons did. Shecarried wildflowers from her mother’s garden. She cried when she said her vows. I didn’t cry. I stood there with my hands around hers and the ring in my pocket and the pastor’s words falling over us like weather, and I thought: I was built to break things and I’m holding the most unbreakable thing I’ve ever touched.
I offered Robert and Martha a house. A new one—something large, something with the kind of foundation that doesn’t shift when the wind comes, something that would last them into whatever years remain. Robert looked at me over the dinner table with the same dark eyes his daughter has and said, “We’re content with what we’ve got, son.”
Son.
The word struck a place I didn’t know still had feeling.
Martha patted my hand. “The roof’s good, the porch is good, and I know where everything is. That’s all a person needs.”
So I bought the land. Three hundred acres surrounding their property, every parcel that bordered their fences, purchased through a holding company that’ll never trace back to a name that would worry a farmer in Nebraska. No one builds on it. No one develops it. No one comes close. Robert and Martha Lively will spend the rest of their lives in a house they chose, on land they know, surrounded by a perimeter they’ll never see and didn’t ask for, and their daughter’s husband—the son of a man called El Diablo—will make sure of it the way he makes sure of everything. Quietly. Completely. Without being asked.
We’ve our own place too. Twenty minutes from her parents, a ranch house on sixty acres that Elsa found on a website and called me at two in the morning to describe, her voice doing thebreathless thing it does when her circles are going fast, and I saidbuy itand she saidLuciano, you haven’t even seen picturesand I saidyou’ve seen it and that’s enoughand she went quiet for a long time and then she saidI love youand it was the third time she had said it and it still broke me the same way it did the first time, standing in a lecture hall with the taste of her name in my mouth like something I had been saying in my sleep for years.
SHE SAID IT LAST NIGHT. The fourth time.
