Chapter Ten #2
They stepped outside and Hannah tipped her head back, smiling up toward the night sky. Antonluca did the same and found that it was snowing again. Light, airy, insistent flakes of snow spiraling down, dusting the flagstones in front of them.
“I’ll admit it,” Hannah said, sounding happy and tired. “I really was hoping it would be a white Christmas.”
“Come,” Antonluca said, not sure why his voice was so dark, so low. Or why that thing in him seemed to have no intention of letting go. “Let me take you home.”
And that word seemed to glow in the dark as it sat there between them. He couldn’t pretend he couldn’t feel it. He could see that she did, and he didn’t like this bizarre urge he had to…ask her straight-out if she felt at home with him.
He wanted to ask questions he wasn’t sure he wanted the answers to, and for no other reason than to simply dig his way deep inside of her and know her better.
It did not occur to him until right then and there, outside in the snow-dusted dark of a very early Christmas morning, that most of his life had been an exercise in keeping people at arm’s length.
Food was a distant art, when it came time to serve it.
The intimacy, for him, was in the kitchen when he’d played with ingredients and garnishes to make everything exactly right.
The people who then ate his food and felt some kind of kinship with him because of it were nothing to him.
He appreciated them. Of course he did. But that wasn’t why he did it. Or why he’d done it, he corrected himself.
But Hannah was different from that. Hannah, and Dominic in turn, were the only two people he had relationships with who he found endlessly fascinating.
His siblings were a duty, still. He would say he was fond of them, in his way, but that had never translated to any kind of closeness. The many people involved in his business ventures were useful, or they didn’t last long. That wasn’t the same thing as close, either.
He wanted to tell Hannah this, as he took her hand and led her to the Range Rover, and then fussed about with getting her coat into the car for perhaps too long as she settled in the passenger seat.
As if she didn’t know how to make herself comfortable in a vehicle.
As if he needed to fuss about her like a fool to show her…something. Anything.
Once again, he was acting like a teenage boy who thought he had to sneak his casual touches, but he didn’t. Hannah slept in his bed. The last he’d checked, she was even more voracious for his touch now than she had been before.
Because this need between them grew by the day.
Sometimes he thought it might block out the whole sky, and he wondered why that didn’t bother him the way it should.
She was the only life-altering drug he had ever allowed himself.
Tonight there was snow. And it was Christmas. And he would have told anyone who asked how little that meant to him, except…everything seemed different tonight.
He drove them back through the village, making his way over the hills toward the castle, and everything was silent. There were only the bright lights to mark the season as they passed. Everything was hushed. Still.
Expectant, he thought, and now covered in this soft snow.
He had that Christmas carol in his head, but this time, “Silent Night” felt different.
Beautiful, yes, but far more complicated than he’d given the song credit for.
He was too aware of the dark and of the distance between him and Hannah.
He was too taken by the lights everywhere, like emblems of hope.
Though he felt calm and bright, perhaps, within. Though he wasn’t sure he had a basis of comparison.
What he did know was this: he wanted nothing more than to reach across the console that separated the two of them. He wanted to put his hands on her—and he understood in that moment that sex was simply a wild, red-hot interpretation of this thing inside of him.
And more, that it was in some ways the easier version.
Because whatever it was that swelled in him, so big and wide he thought he might shatter, he could not name it. He could not fuck it away. He could not make her scream loud enough to drown it out.
Here in this car, in this quiet, sacred night, he could do nothing at all but sit in it.
And it only seemed to grow bigger and heavier as he drove them up to the castle and parked where he always did, on the cracked old stones in the ancient courtyard.
When they got out of the car, the night was, if anything, more hushed than before. It seemed at such odds with all that noise inside of him, and the insistent, silent snow.
He waited for Hannah to smile, or tip her head back again, or say something…
But she didn’t. She looked up at the castle and then she ducked her head again, and he had the strangest feeling that she was deliberately concealing her expression from him—though he couldn’t think why she would do such a thing.
Surely they had passed the point where she had to conceal her actual feelings behind a polite mask.
Certainly, even if she had to do such things at work to remain professional, she didn’t have to do it here.
Did she?
He followed after her as she walked into the castle, and once inside, there was no mistaking it. He could see her face in the lights of the entry hall.
She looked sad. His heart began to kick at him, hard.
Her eyes were overbright, and if he wasn’t mistaken, that was moisture he could see gathering there along the rims.
Antonluca decided, then and there, that what pounded in him, what swelled and grew too unwieldy and took him over like a wave, was temper.
Because it had to be temper. Because whatever was happening here, he couldn’t bear it.
“What is the matter?” he asked, and it was only when she jumped a bit at that, looking startled, that it occurred to him that his approach could have been a bit softer.
“Nothing is the matter,” she said. But she lied.
Because even as she said it, a tear formed and tracked its way down her cheek.
And that unwieldy weight inside of him shifted, hard. He nearly staggered under it. Instead, he reached over and scowled at her as he brushed that tear away from her cheek. He stared down at it, then at her, as if she had betrayed him.
Again, something in him reminded him. She has betrayed you again, and what will keep her from continuing?
“Why the hell aren’t you happy?” he demanded.
He had never heard himself sound so rough.
Hannah’s mouth dropped open and he saw a mix of reactions move across her face—but there was something sharper still in her gaze. He reached out again because another tear threatened, but she caught his wrist as he went to wipe it away.
“Why aren’t you?” she asked.
Her voice was barely above a whisper, yet Antonluca heard it everywhere, as if from on high. He could feel it drum its way deep into his bones, as if the noise inside of him had summoned precisely this.
A question like that.
A question that no one should dare ask, not of him. He wasn’t the one weeping in a castle. He wasn’t the one whose marriage had changed the entire course of his life, from a tiny rented cottage to a life of ease, and was still unaccountably sad on a holiday even he knew was supposed to be joyful.
“I am perfectly happy,” he told her, not managing to keep the note of arrogant astonishment—or perhaps it was straight outrage, now that he thought about it, because how dare she—out of his voice.
“I couldn’t spend all my money if I dedicated the rest of my life to the attempt.
I bought myself a castle on a whim. I will never have to want for anything, ever again, for as long as I live. ”
“That’s your portfolio. I wasn’t talking about that.”
It was as if he couldn’t hear her. Or he couldn’t stop, anyway.
“I raised not only myself, but each and every one of my siblings out of poverty,” he threw at her, his words like bullets.
“I created an entire corporate entity to make certain that they were taken care of for the rest of their days. I didn’t simply pull them from the street, I made them rich, too. ”
Hannah shook her head, still gripping his wrist, her tearstained face far too close to his. “You’re still talking about money.”
“I understand that your family has not treated you the way you would like,” he thundered at her, full now with a righteous indignation that he had been holding inside him for as long as he could remember.
Since he’d been a kid washing dishes. “I’m not discounting that, but it isn’t the same thing.
It is a privilege to have the space and time, not to mention the full belly, to worry about your feelings. ”
He had wanted to say that, to a great many people, for a very long time.
“But you are safe now,” Hannah replied quietly, her green eyes direct and sure.
“You have all the privileges in the world, don’t you?
Castles. Private jets. A whole empire. Ample time to dig into your own feelings without worrying about starving, I’d think.
So what about them? How do you feel, Antonluca? ”
“I don’t know what you mean. I am Antonluca Aniello. Why should I feel anything but perfectly fine?”
She dropped his wrist then, and that was how he realized that he’d forgotten she was holding it. Then she crossed her arms, and did not shift her gaze from his. Not even for a second.
“There are many ways that I might describe you, Antonluca,” she said in that same too-quiet, too-sure way. “But fine isn’t one of them.”