Page 118 of Ruthless Daddy
“Pietro.”
“Yes.”
“This is—“
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
The couple at the bar had moved to a banquette. The woman sat down first and her partner sat beside her and she shifted, fluid, off the seat and onto the carpet at his feet, and he settled his hand at the crown of her head, and she closed her eyes. Nothing else happened. Nothing else needed to.
I thought about the kitchen table eight months ago. The pencil. The legal pad. My spiky scared handwriting in the margin:no public stuff. I do not want to be looked at.I had written it on the same line I had writtenI like sleep, and Pietro had read it and not laughed, and had drawn a small careful line under it in his own pencil and signed.
“The contract?” I asked. “No public stuff.”
“I’m not breaking it,” he said. He had read me, the way he read me. “I booked a room. Anything you don’t want anyone else to see, no one else will. The lounge is the frame. The rest of the evening is ours.”
I let out a breath I had not known I was holding.
“What is tonight, Pietro?”
He shifted the folder under his arm. He looked at me with a small private steadiness that I had come to recognize as the look he wore when he was about to give me something he had been carrying for a while.
“The family will marry us,” he said. “In a church. With Sal walking you down the aisle and Tonio crying and Dante readingsomething and Vittoria probably screaming through the vows. That happens in May.”
“And tonight.”
“Tonight we marry each other. In our language. Before the rest of it.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
He waited.
“Okay,” I said, behind my fingers. “Okay. Yes.”
He smiled—the rare slow one—and put his hand at the small of my back again, and walked me deeper in.
Hewalkedmethrougha doorway at the back of the lounge that I would not have noticed if he had not turned us toward it. A short hallway. Three doors. He stopped at the second one and opened it and stood aside.
The room was small. Lamp-lit. A low couch against one wall, a round table in the center with two chairs, a sideboard with a decanter and two glasses already poured. Someone had laid out a fountain pen, a bottle of ink, a stack of heavy cream paper. The paper looked like it had been waiting for me for a week.
I stepped in. He closed the door behind us. The latch made a small clean sound.
“You planned this.”
“I planned this.”
I touched the pen on the table. The barrel was a dark green, the nib gold.
Pietro set the leather folder down on the table beside the new paper.
He pulled out my chair. I sat. He sat across from me. He poured a half-inch more into one of the glasses—not for either of us yet, just adjusting it—and then he opened the folder.
The original contract was on top.
I had not seen it in months. I had not asked where he kept it. I had assumed it lived in the drawer of his bedside table, the way private things lived, but I had not asked, because asking would have required me to admit how often I thought about it.
He turned it toward me. Slid it across.
I put my fingers on the top page.
