Page 91 of Mafia Bride
“My Z’s tried. I’m not good at it.”
“Did I ask you if you were good at it?”
“Did I ask you why I was promised to you? And did you answer? No. Did I ask what I was traded for? And did you answer? No.”
I expect him to drive me to my knees and tell me what he’ll do to me the next time I demand answers to questions he doesn’t like, offering a tersely worded referendum on the destruction of my body with his cock, and my skin tingles with anticipation.
“I’ll explain it to you,” he says instead. “All of it. I’ll answer everything.”
I’m suddenly ramrod straight in my chair with a string of questions lining up in my mouth.
“Really?”
“Si.” He nods definitively. “When you ask perfectly in Italian, and can understand the answers without telling me to go slow.”
I flop back down. That was as good as saying he’d never tell me.
“We will work on it every night.” He does not mirror my disappointment or register my opposition, because the king has decided, and that’s all there is to it.
“Fuck this,” I grumble.
“SantoDio, that mouth.”
“I’ve heard you say so much worse, DiLustro.”
He laughs. It reminds me of the day on Flora Boulevard, in a good way, before it all went south. How discussingThe Iliadmade him laugh out loud. How he kissed me beneath a crystal blue sky. How beautiful we were for a moment.
It’s not much different than now. He may not kiss me, but I can feel the phantom of his hand on my cheek and it’s close enough. I wish I could bottle the feeling of not being afraid of him, but can you ever save the absence of a thing?
When—having made his decision—he gets up and pats my shoulder as he walks back into the house, I sigh, knowing for sure that the absence of him cannot be bottled and saved for later.
* * *
Every night,for four nights that are a mirror of the nights I spent wallowing in the knowledge that I wasn’t who I thought I was, I wait in the lounge chair for my husband to finish his swim and sit by me with a towel over his shoulders.
He tells me who I am now by teaching me how to speak to who I’ve always been.
He starts with the rhythm of the accent—the music of it; where it happens in the mouth and the heart. He laughs when I sound like Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, and shakes his head in disappointment when I sound like I “have a mouthful of apple pie and hot dogs.”
We laugh, and I don’t feel bad about it.
On Saturday night, it’s crazy hot. I put on a dowdy suit, despite having several better ones now, because I can’t let our Italian language lessons go pear-shaped when I start to think I can really make some progress.
Santino’s late, and even after the sun goes down, it’s still hot as a dog’s mouth. Putting down the vocabulary book he’s gotten me, I decide to wait in the pool just as I hear his car pull into the driveway.
The water is a few degrees cooler than a bath, so I slip in without hesitation, putting my head under and coming up face-first so my hair slicks back from my forehead.
When I open my eyes, he’s already at the other side of the pool, toes curling against the edge.
Without a word, he dives in. I swim to the side and drape my arms over the ledge behind me, watching him take two laps, moving through the water with the swift efficiency of a shark. He pops up at the end, wipes the water off his face and looks at me with my back to the wall, and I’m pinned in place. He’s injected me with some sort of paralytic, like a spider immobilizing his prey before diving under, and popping up right in front of me.
“You came into the water with me tonight,” he says after clearing the water from his lips.
“It’s hot out.” I shrug, missing the point entirely.
He comes closer, leveraging his hands on the ledge on either side of me. I’m trapped, but not afraid.
“It was hot last night, too.”
