16. Danielle
— ? —
Danielle
The restaurant is empty.
Everyone left an hour ago - the last customers lingering over espresso, Talia yawning her way through cleanup before heading home, the kitchen staff finishing their stations and slipping out the back.
I told them all to go, that I’d lock up, that I wanted to work on tomorrow’s menu in peace. What I actually wanted was silence.
The summer rush is over, and we’re settling into the steadier rhythm of autumn.
Locals who come every week. Families celebrating birthdays. Couples on dates, leaning across candlelit tables like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. I watch them sometimes, those couples, and I wonder what they’re fighting about when no one’s looking.
I wonder if they know how easy it is to lose something you thought was permanent. I’m wiping down the counter when the door opens.
“We’re closed,” I say without looking up.
“I know. I saw the lights on.”
Niccolo’s voice makes me go still. He’s been here almost every night for months, but always during service, always in his corner, always with the careful distance we’ve both maintained.
He rarely comes after closing. I look up.
He’s standing just inside the doorway, hands in his pockets, looking uncertain in a way that reminds me of the man who used to bring me flowers at the restaurant where I worked, before any of this.
“What are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t sleep.” He moves further into the room, stops at the counter that separates us. “I saw the light and I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I can go.”
“No, it’s-” I stop myself. It’s what? Fine? It’s not fine. Nothing about this is fine. “Sit down. I’ll make coffee.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want coffee, and it’s rude to make it just for myself.” I turn toward the espresso machine, grateful for something to do with my hands. “Besides, you look terrible. When did you last sleep properly?”
“Define properly.”
“More than three hours.”
“Then… a while.”
The machine hisses and steams, and I focus on the familiar rhythm of pulling shots, frothing milk, not thinking about why my husband is standing in my closed restaurant at eleven o’clock at night looking like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
I slide a cup across the counter to him. Our fingers don’t touch.
“Thank you.” He wraps his hands around the cup, and I notice the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his jaw. “How’s your mother?”
“Better. She walked to the end of the street yesterday. First time since the surgery.”
“That’s good. That’s really good.”
“Yeah.” I take a sip of my own coffee, watching him over the rim. “What’s really going on, Niccolo? You didn’t come here for small talk.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, staring into his cup like it holds answers he can’t find anywhere else. When he finally speaks, his voice is rough.
“I went to the Castellani gala last month.”
“I heard.”
“You heard?”
“Talia told me. Apparently word travels fast in certain circles.” I set down my cup. “She said you gave a speech. About me.”
“I told the truth. Finally.” He looks up at me.
“I should have told it years ago, Dani. I should have stood up in front of all of them the first time anyone whispered about you and made it clear that you were the best thing that ever happened to me. Instead I stayed quiet. I let my mother set the narrative. I let you face it alone.”
“Yes. You did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.” I come around the counter, drawn by something I can’t quite name. Not forgiveness - not yet. But something. “I’ve known you’re sorry for months. You’ve shown me every day. The restaurant visits. The work with Emil. The recipes with my mother. I see you trying.”
“But it’s not enough.”
“I don’t know if enough exists.” I stop a few feet from him, close enough to see the way his breathing has changed. “I don’t know if there’s any amount of sorry that fills the hole you left.”
“Dani-”
“You want to know the worst part?” The words come out before I can stop them, months of holding back finally breaking through.
“I still want you. After everything. After the silence and the neglect and walking into that house to find you holding another woman - I still wake up reaching for you. I still dream about the way it used to be. I hate that. I hate that you still have that power over me.”
He sets down his coffee and stands, and suddenly we’re too close, the counter no longer between us. “I never stopped wanting you. Not for a single moment.”
“Wanting isn’t the problem. Wanting was never the problem.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you keep showing up and being patient and doing all the right things, and part of me is waiting for you to give up so I can stop feeling like this, and part of me is terrified that you will.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“Why not? I gave you nothing. For months, I’ve given you nothing. I won’t talk to you, I won’t forgive you, I won’t even let you explain-”
“Because you’re worth waiting for.” His hand comes up, hovering near my face but not touching, asking permission. “You were always worth waiting for. I was just too stupid to realize I needed to fight.”
I should step back. I should put distance between us, maintain the wall that’s kept me safe for the past five months.
But I’m so tired of the wall. I’m so tired of pretending I don’t feel anything when feeling is all I do, every single day, a constant ache beneath my ribs that won’t go away no matter how hard I try to ignore it. His fingertips brush my cheek.
The touch is barely there, a whisper of contact, but it goes through me like electricity.
Five months of careful distance, and this is what breaks it - not grand gestures or speeches or any of the things he’s been doing, but this.
His hand on my face in my empty restaurant with the espresso machine still steaming behind us.
“Dani.” His voice is rough, barely controlled. “Tell me to stop.”
I don’t tell him to stop. I close the distance between us instead, and then we’re kissing, and it’s nothing like the careful reconnection I might have imagined.
It’s desperate and hungry and years deep, all the loneliness and anger and want pouring out at once.
His hands fist in my hair. My back hits the counter.
I’m gripping his shirt like the floor might tip.
He tastes like espresso and the particular salt of a man who hasn’t slept, and the sound I make into his mouth would embarrass me if anyone else were left in the building. His tongue slides against mine. I open for him like I’ve been rehearsing the yes for months and only now found the stage.
“Fuck,” he breathes against my lips. “You kiss like you’re punishing me.”
“Maybe I am.” I yank his shirt free of his trousers and shove my hands up warm skin, over the ridged line of his ribs, nails scraping just enough to make him hiss. “Maybe you deserve every bruise.”
“I do. Christ, I do - don’t you dare stop.”
His mouth finds my jaw, then the hinge of my throat where my pulse is hammering like it wants out.
He sucks a mark there like he’s trying to stamp a claim back onto a body that walked out of his house with its ring left on the counter.
I tip my head to give him room and hate myself for the gift.
His hands drop to my waist, then lower, gripping my ass through my skirt and hauling me up onto the edge of the stainless counter so my knees bracket his hips.
Plates rattle in the stack behind me. Somewhere the espresso machine ticks as it cools. The restaurant smells like lemon cleaner and residual garlic and us - heat and want cutting through the professional quiet.
“You’re going to leave fingerprints,” I manage, already breathless.
“Good.” He noses under my ear, voice gone velvet-mean. “I want you feeling this tomorrow when you’re plating lunch specials and pretending the man in the corner booth is just another customer.”
“I never pretended that.”
“No.” His palm slides up my bare thigh, under the hem of the skirt I wore for service, fingertips tracing the soft inside until they meet damp cotton. He goes completely still. “Dani. You’re-”
“Don’t say it like you’re surprised.”
“You’re soaked.” The words come out wrecked, almost reverent.
He rubs me through the cotton, slow and filthy, watching my face for every flicker like he’s studying a blueprint.
“Is this what five months of careful walls does? You stand here pulling shots for me with your cunt already aching under your chef’s composure? ”
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
I kiss him hard enough to bruise and roll my hips into his hand in answer.
He groans like I’ve hit a nerve, hooks the cotton aside, and drags two fingers along my bare slit - slick, shameless, unmistakable.
The first brush over my clit makes my head fall back against the hanging rack with a soft clang of copper.
He does it again, then again, gathering wetness and spreading it like he’s glazing pastry.
“Listen to that,” he murmurs. “Dripping on your own prep counter. If your line cooks knew what their chef sounds like when she’s about to let her husband ruin her next to the pastry case-”
“They won’t know. Because this isn’t becoming a story.”
“It’s becoming something.” He sinks one finger into me, then a second, curling against that spot that makes my vision short out. My thighs jump around his hips. “Feel that? That’s you taking me. That’s months of polite nods cracking open. That’s you still mine under all the distance you built.”
“Wanting isn’t ownership, Niccolo.”
“Then tell me to take my hand away.”