Page 101 of Mafia Bride
“Hold this.” He takes a drag of the cigarette before handing it to me so he can peel the oranges.
Violence is like sex for him. And after great sex, he smokes.
“You enjoyed that,” I say.
“He shouldn’t have touched you.”
He smiles like the predator I remember from our first few days together, then leans over and—without him saying a word—I know what he wants.
I put the cigarette to his mouth, and he drags, eyes on mine as the smoke curls between us and the tip turns bright and hot.
Does he smoke a lot? No.
But if he only smokes after he’s violent, he smokes too much. He’s more dangerous than I ever dreamed, and I’m more aroused than I’m comfortable with.
“Open,” he says, holding out a blood-colored orange wedge. When I take it he leans forward, and with a twitch of his chin, tells me to put the cigarette to his lips. When he locks on it, I bite the orange and my mouth explodes with sweet juice.
I chew it and drop my hand when he lets go. He leans back and exhales before breaking apart the rest of the orange.
“Funny thing,” he says. “It’s exactly the same. Same houses. Same piazza. Same, same, same. But…” he takes a pause to feed me. “The closer you look? Different.”
I get more orange, and he takes the cigarette from me.
“Right there?” He points to some random corner. “That’s where I kissed Ilaria Scotti and that right there?” Another corner. “That’s where her mother almost killed me.”
“Her mother?”
“She came up right behind me with a dishtowel. Wrapped it around my neck. I realized later she used a dishtowel so it wouldn’t bruise.” He points the hot end of the now-stubby cigarette at me before taking a pull. “Smart. Her father would have just killed me.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“He was deployed in Kosovo.” He flicks the butt away. “Killing other people.”
My face must have shown my confusion, because he let out a little chuckle and picked up the second orange.
“Did they teach you there was a war in Kosovo? Or did you just learn to sing and salute?”
“Shut up.” I snap the orange right out of his hands, because I know there was a war in Kosovo, but I didn’t know it was in my lifetime or that Italy fought in it. I don’t even know where Kosovo is on a map. I’m not stupid, but I’m ignorant. I know nothing about anything, because I’ve been kept in the dark.
“I mean, you can’t blame me.” I rip skin off the orange as if it’s offensive. “Why should I assume there was a war no one tells me about?”
“There’s always a war,Forzetta.”
I barely hear him.
“Like I’m supposed to go to the library and look up every war? Maybe I should look up, ‘Was my husband’s mother an adult when she had him?’ or ‘Have I been sold into marriage by my dead father?’ This way I’ll know before you spring it on me.”
The orange is bald, vulnerable, the deep red of an organ carefully and bloodlessly removed from the body.
Santino puts his hand over mine and carefully takes the fruit, drawing my eyes up to his.
“You’re beautiful when you’re angry,” he says in English, as if he doesn’t want to be misunderstood.
“I was fine,” I say. “I knew how to live. But now I’m in this life and I’ll never catch up.”
“You will.” He slides his thumb into the hole at the top of the orange and breaks it apart. The membranes hold. It doesn’t bleed. “For the first question, you know she wasn’t. My mother was a child.”
“What about your father?” It was possible he was the same age as Santino’s mother, and I want to assume the best. Two kids experimenting. Not unheard of, and who even knew what the rules were anymore?
