21. Danielle
— ? —
Danielle
The last night in Sicily comes too fast.
We’ve fallen into a rhythm over the past week - mornings cooking together, afternoons walking through the groves or down to the coast, evenings by the fire talking about nothing and everything.
It feels like a glimpse of a life we could have, a parallel universe where there are no estates or expectations or the weight of four hundred years pressing down on every moment.
Tomorrow we go back to the real world.
Tonight, I’m standing at my bedroom window, watching the stars come out over the sea, and I’m thinking about what I want. Not what I should do, or what makes sense, or what protects me from getting hurt. What I actually want. A knock at my door.
“Come in.”
Niccolo opens the door but doesn’t enter, hovering at the threshold like he’s not sure he has permission. “I was going to make tea. Do you want some?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bring it up.”
“Or-” I hear myself say, before I can think better of it. “Or I could come down.”
Something shifts in his expression. Hope, maybe. Or caution. “If you want.”
“I want.”
***
The fire is dying in the main room, just embers now, casting a soft orange glow over everything. Niccolo makes tea while I curl up on the sofa, and when he brings the cups over, he sits at the other end, leaving a careful distance between us.
“One more night,” he says.
“I know.”
“Are you ready to go back?”
“Not really. You?”
“Definitely not.” He takes a sip of his tea. “This week has been… I don’t have words for what this week has been.”
“Try.”
“Peaceful. Real. Like we finally had the space to just exist together, without all the noise.” He sets down his cup. “I don’t want to lose that when we go back.”
“We won’t have to.”
“Won’t we? The restaurant, your family, the distance - we can’t exactly stay in this bubble forever.”
“No. But we can choose to protect what we’ve built here.
Make time for it. Prioritize it.” I set down my own cup and turn to face him.
“That’s what I want, Niccolo. Not the estate or the galas or any of the things that pulled us apart before.
I want this. Quiet nights. Honest conversations.
You, actually present instead of buried in obligation. ”
“I can give you that.”
“Can you? When we’re back in the real world, with all the pressure and expectation-”
“I can give you that,” he repeats, more firmly.
“Because I’ve learned what happens when I don’t.
I’ve learned what I lose.” He moves closer, closing some of the distance between us.
“These past eight months have been the hardest of my life, Dani. Watching you build something without me, wondering every day if you’d ever let me back in, trying to prove that I could be different.
I’m not going back to who I was. I can’t. It would kill me.”
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself.”
“It’s not pressure. It’s clarity.” He reaches out, his hand hovering near my face. “May I?”
I nod. His fingers brush my cheek, gentle and questioning. I lean into the touch, and something inside me unlocks - the last bit of resistance I’ve been holding onto, the final wall I built to protect myself from wanting this too much.
“I missed you,” I whisper. “Every day. Even when I was angry, even when I hated what you did - I missed you so much it felt like a physical ache.”
“I know. I felt it too.”
“I tried to stop. I tried to cut you out, to convince myself that I was better off alone, that the restaurant and my family were enough. And they were enough - they were good, they were important - but there was still this hole where you used to be.”
“Dani-”
“I don’t want there to be a hole anymore. I want-” I stop, the words catching in my throat.
“What do you want?”
“You. I want you.” I meet his eyes in the firelight. “Not the version of you who belonged to everyone else. Not the title or the name or any of that. Just you.”
He closes the remaining distance between us and kisses me. It’s different from the kiss in the restaurant - softer, slower, without the desperate hunger of two people who’ve been starving for months. This is deliberate. This is a choice.
“Are you sure?” he asks against my lips.
“I’m sure.”
“We can wait. If you need more time-”
“I don’t want to wait.” I pull back enough to look at him. “I’ve spent eight months being careful, being cautious, protecting myself from getting hurt. And it worked - I built something good, I found myself again. But I don’t want to be careful anymore. I want to be brave.”
“Brave how?”
“Brave enough to choose you. Even knowing you could hurt me again. Even knowing there are no guarantees.” I touch his face, tracing the lines I’ve memorized over years of loving him. “I want to choose you with my eyes open this time.”
He makes a sound that’s almost a groan and pulls me onto his lap, and then we’re kissing again, deeper this time, his hands in my hair and mine on his shoulders and the fire crackling its last warmth into the room.
“Upstairs?” he murmurs.
“Yes.”
He stands, lifting me with him like I weigh nothing, and carries me toward the stairs. My room or his - it doesn’t matter anymore. None of the careful boundaries matter, because I’ve decided. I’ve chosen. The rest is just details.
He takes the steps two at a time without jostling me, and I laugh into his neck at the sheer ridiculous romance of it - aristocrat carrying the province cook through a Sicilian rental like we’re in someone else’s novel.
He sets me down in the doorway of his room, where the shutters are half-open to the sea and the air smells like salt and distant citrus.
“Last chance to change your mind,” he says, hands framing my face. “I mean it, Dani. We can go back downstairs and finish the tea and pretend this was just a good night.”
“I don’t want tea.” I hold his gaze in the dim. “I want you. Eyes open. No pretending.”
Something in his expression cracks open - relief, hunger, reverence.
He kisses me slow and deep, walking me backward until my knees hit the bed.
We undress each other without rush: my sweater over my head, his shirt buttons worked open by my fingers, my bra unhooked with a patience that feels like worship.
When I’m down to underwear and he’s bare-chested in the moonlight, he goes to his knees on the tile and presses his mouth to my stomach.
“I’ve imagined this,” he says against my skin. “Getting you alone somewhere that wasn’t haunted. Having time. Having you choose me instead of surviving me.”
“I’m choosing.” I thread my fingers through his hair. “Now get up here before I start overthinking.”
Before he puts his mouth on me, he spends long minutes just mapping my body with his hands - the freckle at my left hip, the scar on my knuckle from a kitchen burn, the soft place under my breast that always made me ticklish.
He names them under his breath like a man reclaiming inventory that was always his.
“This one,” he says, kissing the burn scar. “You got this the week before we met. You told me on our third date and I wanted to kiss it then.”
“You should have.”
“I’m kissing it now.” He does, thoroughly, then moves higher.
“And these-” his palms cup my breasts, thumbs brushing nipples until they tighten “ - I’ve drawn these from memory on the backs of foundation agendas like a man losing his mind.
Do you have any idea how many meetings I sat through half-hard thinking about getting you alone? ”
“Tell me.”
“All of them.” He pinches lightly, watches my mouth open.
“Every single one after you left. I’d look at Charlotte across a room and feel nothing but nausea, and then I’d think about your laugh in a kitchen and I’d have to excuse myself.
That’s what eight months of earning looked like from the inside - wanting you in ways I wasn’t allowed to ask for yet. ”
“You’re allowed now.”
“I know.” His smile is crooked, almost shy. “It’s terrifying.”
He stands, smiles - real, boyish, the smile from the vacation house years ago - and tips me onto the mattress.
He peels my underwear down and tosses them aside, then shoves his own trousers off.
For a moment we just look: my body soft from restaurant work and stress and the slow return of appetite; his leaner than he was at the estate, shaped by months of showing up instead of sitting still.
His cock stands hard between us, and when I reach for him he catches my wrist and kisses my palm.
“Not yet,” he says. “I want my mouth on you first. I want to take my time earning the sounds you make.”
“Niccolo-”
“Please.” The please undoes me more than any command. “Let me taste my wife the way I should have every week we lost.”
I nod.
When he finally embarks on the path downward, he takes detours - open-mouthed kisses along my ribs, a bite at the soft of my belly that makes me yelp and then moan, his shoulders shoving my thighs wider with an arrogance that somehow feels earned tonight.
By the time his mouth returns to my cunt I’m already shaking, already soaked, and he groans like a man tasting water after desert.
“Sweet,” he mutters. “Always so sweet here. I used to joke that you seasoned yourself. Remember?”
“I remember you being an idiot.”
“An idiot who learned how you like it.” He proves the claim: flat tongue, then a pointed flicker over my clit, two fingers pumping in a rhythm that has me lifting off the bed. “There. That’s the tempo. That’s the one that makes you grab my hair and forget your own name.”
I grab his hair. I forget more than my name.
The room narrows to wet heat and the scrape of stubble against my inner thighs and the filthy encouragement he pours into me between licks - that’s it, feed me, use my mouth, choose this, choose me.
When the first climax takes me, it leaves me laughing and crying at once, ridiculous and free, and he stays put through every tremor until I tug him up by the ears.