Page 73 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
“I told everyone you were mine to keep them from looking too close,” he says, his voice rough, only for me even with a hundred people listening. “I never expected it to be true. You were supposed to be a story. You turned out to be my whole life.”
And I say my half. That I came into his world braced to be used and thrown away, the oldest story on the Strip, then found instead the only place I’ve ever belonged. That I spent my whole life keeping a packed bag and a clear exit, that he is the first thing I ever chose to stay for, eyes open, on purpose, mine. That the fake became real because it was never as fake as either of us pretended.
Then the old priest Yelena produced from somewhere says the words. Sevastian slides a ring onto my finger with hands that finally steady when they touch me. The bands are plain gold, no stones, chosen together at a counter like ordinary people while two armed men browsed watches. He kisses me in the last of the gold light while the desert that started all of this in blood holds its breath around us, and everyone we love makes a sound like a dam breaking.
After, there’s a long table in the dusk, strung with lights. Kir gives a toast in Russian that makes the old men pound the wood. Tasha catches the bouquet without leaving her chair, one-handed, mid-conversation, then looks at Roma, who studies the tablecloth like it owes him an explanation. There’s cake with a layer Yelena fought the caterer over, and won. And on the head table, between the candles, there’s an eleven-dollar bottle of sparkling wine that nobody opens and nobody explains, sweating gently, invited.
The fake is real now. In front of everyone. Forever.
He takes me home that night to a room full of candles, and what happens there is the photograph of the first night, developed in negative, the same image turned all the way to its opposite.
I remember the first time. A stranger’s apartment, his money stacked on my nightstand like a receipt, his marks on my hip, and that man, that beautiful terrifying stranger, getting up after, walking to the door, walking away from me like leaving was a thing he still knew how to do. I remember lying there after, wrecked, used, electric, asking the dark what I’d just gotten myself into. Two strangers, a transaction, a man halfway out the door before I’d caught my breath.
This is none of that.
There’s no money anywhere in this room. First time in the whole history of us, and neither of us points it out. Some milestones you only mark by walking past them. There’s no door he’s measuring with his eyes, because the man undressing me now has nothing left in the world he wants to flee. He knows the worst of me and the whole of me. He is here anyway, slow and certain, his ring on my hand, our child between us.
He undresses me like he has all the time there is, because he does. He takes the silk off me piece by piece in the candlelight and looks at me the way he looked at me coming down the aisle, like the seeing itself is the thing he wants. I’m huge with his daughter and I have never felt more wanted in my life.
He puts his hands on the swell of me, reverent, then lower, and I arch into him the way I have always arched into him, greedy, unashamed, because wanting him was the one thing about this that was never fake, not from the first night, not for one second. He kisses his way down my body and takes me apart with his mouth first, unhurried, thorough, my fingers loose in his hair, my new ring catching candlelight every time my hand tightens.
When I come it’s long, slow, a swell instead of a break, and he stays right there through it, easy, patient, until I have to pull him up by the hair because I want my husband inside me when the next one builds.
The wanting is the same. The pull between us is exactly what it was that first night in the cheap apartment, the same heat, the same helpless gravity. Nothing about how much I want him has changed.
Everything about what it means has. That first time, the heat was all we had, two strangers burning because there was nothing underneath to hold us. Now the same fire has a whole life builtunder it, and it doesn’t feel like less. It feels like the difference between a match struck in the dark and a hearth.
We come together slow, me astride him because of the bump, his big hands at my hips helping me take him in, inch by inch, both of us watching where we join in the candlelight like it’s news, like it hasn’t been a war and a wedding getting here. Where the first time was a wildfire two strangers set just to watch it burn, this is a thing built to last, unhurried, certain, every touch a sentence in a language we both finally speak.
He moves in me careful of the baby, careful of all of it, his mouth at my throat where my pulse goes, saying my name,Cynthia, soft, no edge left on it anywhere. I take everything he gives me and give it back. There is no wall between us to come down, because we already took the last of them apart with our own hands, and what’s left is just this, just us, just home.
He rocks up into me slow until slow stops being survivable, until I’m grinding down to meet him with my hands braced on his chest, on the stars, on the cathedral, the whole inked map of him mine now by law. When I come it’s with his name in my mouth and his hand laced through mine on the pillow, the same pillow, no cash beside it this time, only him.
He follows me with a sound I first heard in a cheap apartment a lifetime ago. Mine now. All of it, till death, past it. And when it’s over he does the thing he could never do on the first night.
He stays.
He gathers me back against his chest, careful of the bump, his hand spread over the place our daughter is turning lazy somersaults. He does not get up. He does not reach for a door. He does not put one inch of distance between the moment andhis own heart. He just holds on, his breath slowing against my hair, the candles guttering down around us, the desert silent and enormous outside the glass.Mrs.Volkonskaya,he tried out earlier, against my ear, in front of everyone, just to watch it hit me. It hit. I have a family. It has a name. I took it on purpose.
I lie there in the dark, tangled up in a man I once watched kill someone in the sand, married to him now, carrying his child, and I wait for the old feeling, the one that has run my whole life, the part of me that scans for the exit, that keeps the bag packed, that knows wanting things is how you get hurt.
It doesn’t come.
For the first time since I was nineteen years old, I am not braced for the floor to fall out. I’m not waiting to be punished for being happy. I’m just here, in the warm dark, his heart going steady under my ear, his daughter kicking against his palm, and the future, which has been a threat my entire life, has somehow turned into a promise instead.
“What are you thinking?” he murmurs into my hair, half asleep.
I think about the desert outside, the same sand, death turned to this. I think about an empty chair with white roses on it. I think about a packed bag I’m never going to need again.
“That I’m exactly where I want to be,” I tell him. The truest thing I’ve ever said, and there’s no one making me say it, no story to sell, no cover to keep. Just me, choosing it out loud, one more time, because I can.
He presses his mouth to the top of my head, and I feel him smile against my hair, the terrifying man gone soft as anything in the dark. We lie there tangled and unafraid while the candles burndown to nothing, the desert keeping its quiet watch, the same desert, holding us now instead of hunting us.
It started here, in the dark, in blood. A year ago I peed behind the wrong bush and met the love of my life over a corpse. They can put that on my stone decades from now, when all of this is long since dust. I’d stand by it.
It gets to keep going here, in the warm, in the light, for as long as we get.
That’s the whole miracle of it. Not that the danger’s gone. It never fully will be, not in this life. The miracle is that I stopped running from the thing I wanted long enough to find out it wanted me back.
