Page 41 of Savage Daddy
The deposit cleared the loan. The work would break my hands—possibly my spirit.
I didn’t know what I was going to do.
The door opened.
Tonio leaned in, filling it, and he didn’t say anything about the books or the numbers or the dog who wasn’t supposed to be here. He just set a koulouraki down on the corner of the desk, on a square of waxed paper.
“Can’t wait for later,” he said. Low. Just for me.
And I felt the heat go straight down through me, and I blushed fiercely.
Later. We had important business later.
Thedaywasdoneand the bakery was empty. Tonio had made me promise that morning that I would take time away from everything—just half an hour—to go through a few . . . details.
He’d asked me to think of questions about our dynamic to raise, so I’d done it, writing them on the back of a flour-order docket.
So after we locked the door and killed the front lights and the ovens started their long tick down into quiet, I set two coffees on the marble and I took the docket out of my apron and I unfolded it and I read.
“Tell me what the dynamic is to you,” I said. “So I have it clear in my head.”
He’d settled across the bench from me with his coffee, sleeves still up. He didn’t grin.
“It’s me holding the things you carry,” he said. “When you let me. The big ones and the small ones. What you eat. When you stop. Sometimes what you wear. Your sleep. Making sure you’re kind to yourself. And helping you find the Little person inside you. She wants to play. To feel safe. To express herself. I want to nurture her. That’s the whole of it. Everything else is detail.”
My face was hot. I kept my eyes on the docket. “So . . . what it isn’t.”
“It isn’t me deciding I own you.” He said it flat, no heat, like he was reading off a docket of his own. “It isn’t a thing you can’t stop. It isn’t me making you small because I want you small—it’s me holding the line so you can put down the part of you that’s been holding it alone, and only because you asked. Take the line back and I let go. Every time. No argument.”
I wrote nothing. The pencil sat in my hand. I went to the next question and my voice came out fine, level, the boss voice, and underneath it everything was shaking.
“Does it make me weak?”
I asked it looking at the docket. Not at him. I couldn’t have asked it looking at him.
He was quiet a second, and when he answered, his voice had gone lower, the careful low that wasn’t a tactic, that I’d learned was the truth coming up out of him. “It’s the opposite of weak,” he said. “Katerina. Look at what it costs you to hand a person the flour. I’ve watched you—you can’t take a roll without parsing it. You carry this whole place on two hands.” A breath. “Handing someone the weight on purpose, knowing exactly what you’re doing, choosing it with your eyes open and knowing you can rip it back any second—that’s not weakness. That’s the bravestthing I’ve ever watched anybody do. Soft is a thing you’re strong enough to be. Most people aren’t.”
I had to put the pencil down because my hand wasn’t steady.
“There needs to be a word,” I said, to get us off it. “I read that. A word that stops everything. A—”
“A safeword. Yeah.” He nodded. “You pick it. Something you’d never say in the middle of it by accident. Something that meansstop, all of it, now,and I stop, no matter what’s happening, no matter how far in we are.”
I thought about it. And the thing my tired stupid head landed on, of course, the thing my whole life had brought me to, was the pastry.
“Kataifi,” I said.
He didn’t laugh. I’d half-said it to be funny, a small acid thing to take the weight off, becausekataifiis frankly ridiculous. The, fine shredded dough you coax for hours, that takes forever and falls apart into a thousand useless threads the second you rush it or grip it too hard. It was a joke. It was also, I realised as I said it, not a joke at all.
He didn’t laugh. “Say it again.”
“Tonio—”
“Say it again. So it’s in your mouth. So it’s real and you don’t have to find it under panic.” He held my eyes across the cooling kitchen. “Kataifi.”
“Kataifi,” I said. Twice. Once for him and once for me, and somewhere in the second one it stopped being funny altogether.
Then I said the thing I’d written last and almost crossed out.
