Page 122 of Ruthless Daddy
He wrote it down.Tying—yes. Slowly. With words.Below it, in his hand,with the same care as every other yes.
I took the pen back from him and wrote, below his, in mine:yes.
We were quiet for a moment.
“Renaissance?” he said.
“Renaissance,” I said.
“Same word?”
“Same word.”
“That one we don’t touch.”
“No.”
I wrote it at the bottom of the page.Safeword: Renaissance. Full stop, in any mode, no questions, no penalty, no negotiation.He read it. He did not add to it. There was nothing to add. The word had done its job, in eight months, exactly never — and the fact that we had never needed it was the reason we needed it to stay.
He set the pen down. He pushed his chair back. He stood.
He went to the sideboard. There had been a small box on it that I had registered without registering, the way I had registered the decanter and the glasses, and he picked it up now and brought it to the table and set it down between us.
He opened it.
Inside was a band of soft worn gold. Thin. Light. Hinged on one side, with a small clasp on the other. It was the color of my ring. It was the color of my ring exactly.
I lifted my hand. The ring his mother had worn—the white sapphire, the gold worn flat at the bottom—caught the lamp.
“You had it made,” I said.
“From the same metal. Well, partly. The jeweler in Palermo. He used the offcuts from the band when he resized it for you.”
“Pietro.”
“This is the public one,” he said. “This goes around your neck. The ring is the one for the world. The collar is the one for us. Same gold.”
I could not speak.
He picked up the band. He came around to my side of the table. I tilted my chin without him asking. He set the collar against the front of my throat—the metal was cool, then immediately warm—and his fingers worked the clasp at the back of my neck, slow, careful, the way he had brushed my hair in his kitchen on a morning I had been too tired to do it myself.
It closed.
It fit the way a thing fit when it had been made for the throat it was on.
I touched it. The band was no thicker than the ring. The weight was barely a weight. But I felt it everywhere—at the base of my skull, in my collarbones, in the back of my chest where the breath lived.
He stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders. He did not move.
After a moment I picked up the pen.
I signed.
Angela Baggio.
The whole name. Both halves. The first and the second, the one I had given him in pencil eight months ago and the one I had given him out loud, in his bed, six weeks later, when I had finally been ready to say it.
He came back around the table. He picked up the pen. He signed under mine.
