Page 18 of Mafia Queen
“She’s up here?” I have never been more delighted.
“Si.” He says it absently, running his fingers over my forehead, my bruised eye, my jaw and throat—touching me as if he’s rediscovering something he lost.
I find myself mirroring his appreciation in the same way. I touch the shape of him. The body I thought was cold and dead is warm and alive. The unattended beard on his cheeks, down his neck to the hair on his chest, and the shape I can feel through the shirt.
The way we trace each other isn’t sexual. Not at first. Initially, we are exploring in silent appreciation of everything we love and almost lost. It’s the first moment I’ve had to take in that the vacuum his death created is now full again.
“I want you to know something,” I say, unbuttoning his shirt so my fingers can discover what my mind is only now accepting.
“What is it?” he whispers, efficiently pulling off my T-shirt and leaving the scapular sticking to my skin.
He’s here. He’s really here. Somehow, I still can’t believe it. I won’t let myself. Even when I run my fingertips over his face, I’m afraid to accept it. My fear won’t let the facts stick.
“I don’t know when I stopped wishing you dead,” I say, gently touching the bruise over his heart. “But when I lost you, my life felt thinner…like someone had shaved half of it off. That was what it was like before you came. I was half a person, and I’m never, I swear it, never going back to that again.”
“You won’t, Violetta.” He takes my chin between his thumb and the crook of his index finger, holding it so tightly it hurts just enough to stab through the lingering sadness. “You won’t see my back the rest of your days.” He brushes my nipples with the backs of his fingers. “I’m only walking toward you or standing by you.”
“Or lying in bed next to me.”
A smile creeps up one side of his mouth. “Or making you scream to heaven.” He undoes my pants and slides them down, kneeling in front of me.
“Take me there.”
I don’t have to ask twice. Kissing as we pull off each other’s clothes, we’re two people with the same goal, falling onto the bed in a knot of limbs, exploratory grasps, and hungry strokes, like lovers at it for the first time. My legs wrap around his waist. I want every bit of my skin to touch every bit of his. To be so close we can’t be pulled apart. His erection slides into me as if we were always one body, temporarily separated.
“My violet,” he whispers into my shoulder. We’re on our sides, rolling across the bed, locked together chest to chest. “No one can take you. You’re mine. Only mine.”
“Yes.” The pent-up emotions of the last days have no name. They’ve been blended into a mass of pressure in my heart and their release sends tears streaming down my face. “Only yours.”
“Mine.” He exhales a short breath that cracks as if he’s also moved.
The power of his vulnerability pushes deep inside me, and I am engulfed in it. Overcome. The orgasm is a tsunami that’s beyond physical. It’s the inverse of every fear, every cry of despair, every ounce of rage I’ve been through, forced outward.
It’s exactly the heaven he promised, and it’s real, but when I come down from the overwhelming pleasure, Santino is still a ghost to me, and I am living in a world I don’t believe in.
7
VIOLETTA
Santino—or the ghost of him—takes me down to the kitchen and helps me into the nook as if I can’t do it myself.
The sight of Celia stirring a pot of soup is comforting. “They didn’t give me time to get much from home. Just a few pans and knives. I dumped all my spices in a bag. And what did I come into?” She waves her hand around the room. “An upstairs kitchen for a skeleton crew that came in and out. Men. Paper plates and a drawer full of soy sauce. The microwave…you should have seen it. Looked like something was murdered in there.”
She takes a bowl from the rack. Just washed. Then I notice boxes of new plates.
“And the one in the basement? Worse. Right next to a coal furnace. The smell.” She wrinkles her nose.
“Can you feed her instead of complaining?” Santino says.
“Cheese?” she offers.
“Please.”
“Anyway, I got it all figured out.” She opens the fridge for the parmesan. It’s stocked. “Armando got everything in no time.”
“Armando?!” I exclaim, looking from Santino to Celia and back. “He’s here?”
I haven’t thought about that warm, gentle, armoire of a man in days, and now his presence in the world is the exact news I need. I miss my prison of a home, where I was trapped by the man I fell in love with. I miss the ugly furniture and the big windows. I miss the pool and watching Santino swim in it. I miss my husband being my only problem.
