Page 74 of Promised to the Don of Naples
I closed my eyes, felt his mouth follow his hand down. I felt his fingers travel over places I'd never properly touched myself—because the convent teaches that those places are shame, and my mother died too soon to undo the convent.
That night, inside Luca Moretti's room, with the rain beginning to fall on Posillipo, I unlearned shame.
The first time he touched me there—I drew in such a deep breath that the air didn't come back right away.
"Breathe, bella."
"I am breathing..."
"You're not. Breathe."
I breathed, and he went on.
When he entered me, slowly, with his forehead resting against mine, I cried.
Not from pain. I cried over the stupidest thing in the world—over my mother.
I thought of my mother in that exact second, for the first time in ten years without guilt. I thought of her as a woman, not as a mother. I thought that maybe she'd been through this once, with my father when he was young, before the house became a fortress. I thought that maybe this was the thing she meant byone day you'll need this, amore mio—not the dagger.
Something else: courage.
Luca saw the tear run down my temple and stopped.
"Bella?"
"Keep going."
"You're crying. Should I stop?"
"Keep going, Luca. Keep going."
He kept going. And I let the tear fall.
And at some minute I can't pinpoint, I stopped crying, stopped thinking of my mother, stopped thinking of anything. Imet my own body for the first time in twenty-three years, and I liked it.
I came—it was the first time I'd ever gotten there—I said his name.
I didn't mean to. It came out on its own.
He came right after, collapsing onto me, with the full weight of his body, without ceremony, his forehead at my neck and his breathing broken.
I wound my hand into his hair, and we stayed like that.
The two of us wordless, for about ten minutes...
LUCA MORETTI
She fell asleep first.
I rolled onto my side, head propped on one elbow, watching her sleep.
Her wet hair spread across the pillow, her mother's emerald earring still in one ear—the other had fallen out somewhere in the room. Her mouth half-open, one hand on my chest, right over the Mors potius macula tattoo.
I thought of all the women who'd slept in that bed over twenty years. And I thought how not one of them had laid her hand on that exact spot of my skin.
Not the way she had.
Pericolosa.
