Chapter 20 #2
“And he,” he said, “is not the man who walked to the guest room. He is the man who walked into a cellar in Malta and put two rounds in the man who had laid hands on her, and walked her out, and brought her home, and has slept seven hours every night since.”
“Six,” I said. “Sometimes.”
“Six,” he agreed. “Sometimes.”
He turned the original contract over. He laid it face down on the table between us. He set his palm flat on top of it.
“I want to write a new one,” he said. “Here. Tonight. In ink. By the people we are now. I want to do it with you across the table, not me dictating and you nodding. I want you to write your terms first, this time. I want to see your hand on the page before mine. And I want this—this contract, here, tonight, the two of us—to be the vow.”
I looked at the new paper.
I looked at the pen.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s write.”
I wrote the first line.
Honesty. At all times. No games. No exceptions.
The nib made a small whispering noise on the paper. Pietro watched me write.
“That one stays,” I said.
“That one stays.”
I drew a small underline beneath it. Two lines. The same two lines I had drawn under it eight months ago, in pencil, on the page now face down between us.
Then I lifted the pen and I thought, for a moment, about the thing I wanted to write next.
I had been thinking about it since the vineyard.
I had been thinking about it, really, since Malta—since I had walked out of a powder room in socks and gone south on a sidewalk and not told anyone.
And before that, I had been thinking about it since the night Pietro had told me a lie in a glass house and watched me cry.
The shape had been there for months. The words had not arrived until tonight.
I wrote them now.
Nothing carried alone. Not a lie. Not a fear. Not a danger. Not a grief. Not anything. We carry it together or we do not carry it at all.
The pen stopped at the period.
I set it down.
I did not look up.
Pietro turned the page a quarter inch toward himself. He read it. I knew he read it because his breathing changed—the small audible draw of a man taking in something serious.
“Baby.”
“Mm.”
“Look at me.”
I looked up.
His eyes were wet.
“I lied to you.”
“I went alone.”
“Yes.”
“We both of us have made mistakes. We’re human.”
He picked up the pen. He turned the paper back toward himself. He wrote, below my line, in his neat hand: agreed. forever.
He drew a third underline beneath the whole vow. The way he had drawn a third underline beneath I like sleep on a different paper in a different kitchen in a different version of our life.
Then he put the pen down and slid the paper back to me.
“Next,” he said.
I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding. I picked up the pen.
“The orgasm rule,” I said.
He smiled.
“What about it.”
“It’s mine too now. It’s a game we play. You decide when, sometimes. Other times I do. Sometimes neither of us does and we just let the thing happen. It’s not a control. It’s a—a thing we both like.”
“Write it.”
I wrote it. The pen went easier this time.
Pleasure is shared. Asked for. Given. Sometimes mine to ask.
Sometimes his to grant. Sometimes neither.
Always honest. I underlined honest once, because I had underlined honest once already on the first line and I liked the way it linked the two clauses across the page.
He read it. His mouth did the slow corner-lift. He wrote, under it: I will make you ask. Sometimes. You will like it.
I laughed. The pen jumped. A small black blot landed on the paper an inch off the line.
“Pietro.”
“Truth in writing, baby.”
“That blot is your fault.”
“I accept the blot.”
He took the pen. He drew a small careful circle around the blot and wrote next to it, in tiny letters, exhibit A.
I was laughing for real now. This was the laugh of a woman who was writing her wedding vows with a man who had decided to put a blot in them on purpose so she would remember it later as a joke.
He turned to the second page. He turned the original contract over too, found the line he wanted, and slid the old paper next to the new one so we could read them side by side.
The old line was in pencil, in his hand. Holding is okay. Tying, not yet.
He read it aloud. The “not yet” sat in the room.
He looked up at me.
“And tonight?”
I felt the heat run from my throat down the front of my chest.
I had been thinking about this too. For longer than I had been thinking about the nothing carried alone line. Longer than I had been thinking about any of it. I had been thinking about it for months, in the slow private way I thought about things I had not yet decided whether I was allowed to want.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Write it down.”
He wrote it down. Tying—yes. Slowly. With words. Below it, in his hand, with the same care as every other yes.
I took the pen back from him and wrote, below his, in mine: yes.
We were quiet for a moment.
“Renaissance?” he said.
“Renaissance,” I said.
“Same word?”
“Same word.”
“That one we don’t touch.”
“No.”
I wrote it at the bottom of the page. Safeword: Renaissance.
Full stop, in any mode, no questions, no penalty, no negotiation.
He read it. He did not add to it. There was nothing to add.
The word had done its job, in eight months, exactly never — and the fact that we had never needed it was the reason we needed it to stay.
He set the pen down. He pushed his chair back. He stood.
He went to the sideboard. There had been a small box on it that I had registered without registering, the way I had registered the decanter and the glasses, and he picked it up now and brought it to the table and set it down between us.
He opened it.
Inside was a band of soft worn gold. Thin. Light. Hinged on one side, with a small clasp on the other. It was the color of my ring. It was the color of my ring exactly.
I lifted my hand. The ring his mother had worn—the white sapphire, the gold worn flat at the bottom—caught the lamp.
“You had it made,” I said.
“From the same metal. Well, partly. The jeweler in Palermo. He used the offcuts from the band when he resized it for you.”
“Pietro.”
“This is the public one,” he said. “This goes around your neck. The ring is the one for the world. The collar is the one for us. Same gold.”
I could not speak.
He picked up the band. He came around to my side of the table.
I tilted my chin without him asking. He set the collar against the front of my throat—the metal was cool, then immediately warm—and his fingers worked the clasp at the back of my neck, slow, careful, the way he had brushed my hair in his kitchen on a morning I had been too tired to do it myself.
It closed.
It fit the way a thing fit when it had been made for the throat it was on.
I touched it. The band was no thicker than the ring. The weight was barely a weight. But I felt it everywhere—at the base of my skull, in my collarbones, in the back of my chest where the breath lived.
He stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders. He did not move.
After a moment I picked up the pen.
I signed.
Angela Baggio.
The whole name. Both halves. The first and the second, the one I had given him in pencil eight months ago and the one I had given him out loud, in his bed, six weeks later, when I had finally been ready to say it.
He came back around the table. He picked up the pen. He signed under mine.
Pietro Scordato.
He set the pen down.
He looked at me across the paper.
The collar was at my throat.
The ring was on my hand.
The room was very warm.
He stood.
He held out his hand.
I took it.
He led me through a second door at the back of the small room and into a bedroom that was somehow both larger and quieter than the room we had left.
Low ceiling. Dark wood. A single lamp at a low setting.
A bed against the far wall that was wider than any bed I had ever slept in, with linen the color of old paper and a heavy duvet folded back at the foot.
A small fireplace with a real fire in it that someone had laid earlier in the evening and lit at some hour that made the wood already glowing by the time we walked in.
No window. The walls were thick. The door, when he closed it behind us, made the kind of sound a door made when it had been built to keep sound on the inside of itself.
We were alone.
We were finally, completely alone.
He set the leather folder on a small table by the door. The new contract was inside it now, the ink still drying, the two signatures fresh under the lamp. He closed the folder. He turned the lock.
He came to me.
He stopped in front of me. He put both his hands on either side of my face, the way he had on a morning eight months ago in his kitchen, and he tilted my chin up, and he leaned down, and he kissed my forehead.
The same kiss. Exactly the same kiss. The same place on my skin, the same pressure of his mouth, the same slow lift away.
The first time he had done it, the night I had signed Angela alone on a piece of paper in his guest room, he had stepped back from me afterward and said, very softly, not yet. We do this right.
But tonight, he did not step back.
He stayed.
He kept his hands on my face and his forehead against mine and he said, very quietly, in the same voice he had used that other night, the same exact register:
“Now, baby.”
I closed my eyes.
“Now.”
I felt it land—the small private flip, the same gesture turned inside out, the man who had walked away replaced by the man who would not.
His mouth came down to mine.
He kissed me the way he had been kissing me for eight months—slow, attentive, the lower lip first, the patient mapping of a man who had decided that this particular act was not something he was going to rush, ever, in his life.
The collar at my throat moved a fraction when I tilted my head up.
He felt it. His thumb came down and traced the gold along the front of my neck—once, slowly, end to end—and the touch went through me down to the floor.
“Look at you,” he said. Against my mouth.
“Pietro.”