6. Cassandra
— ? —
Cassandra
For a moment, neither of us moves.
My hand is on his chest, feeling his heart beat through the fabric of his shirt. His hands come up to cover mine, and we just stand there in the dark hallway of a house that hasn’t felt like home in months.
“Wait,” he says, and the word cracks something in me. I start to pull back, but he holds on. “Wait - not like that. I just - let me do this right. For once. Let me do something right.”
“Do what?”
“Stay here. Two minutes. Don’t move.”
“Antonio, it’s late…”
“Two minutes. I promise.”
I nod, and he’s out the door, and I’m left standing in the hallway in my dinner dress, confused and a little cold and not sure what just happened. I hear the car start. Headlights sweep across the window. And then he’s gone.
I should go upstairs. I should change out of this dress that’s been making me uncomfortable all night and put on something soft and pretend this evening didn’t happen. Instead I just stand there, rooted to the spot, waiting.
Five minutes pass. Then ten.
I’m starting to feel ridiculous when the door opens again, and Antonio comes through it holding a bouquet of flowers so big he can barely see over them. Roses, red and white mixed together, the kind I used to carry on runways in another lifetime.
“The good florist on Via Margutta is closed,” he says, slightly out of breath.
“I had to go to three different places. The first one only had carnations - carnations, Cass, I couldn’t bring you carnations - and the second one was closed, but the third one had these, and the woman said they were from this morning so they should last at least a week, and I know flowers don’t fix anything but I just - I wanted… ”
“Antonio.”
“-I wanted to do something. Something that wasn’t apologizing again, something that showed you…”
“Antonio.”
He stops. Looks at me over the top of the roses.
“They’re beautiful,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He hands them over carefully, like they might break, and I bury my nose in them because I don’t know what else to do. They smell like summer. Like before.
“I’m going to change,” I tell him. “Will you put these in water?”
“Of course. Yes. I’ll - yes.”
I press the roses into his arms.
Upstairs, I peel off the dinner dress, trading it for a silk robe that’s more comfortable than sexy, more me than performance. I take down my hair and scrub off the makeup and look at myself in the mirror - bare-faced, tired, thirty-two years old and not sure who I’m supposed to be anymore.
When I come downstairs, Antonio is in the kitchen, the flowers in a crystal vase on the counter, a bottle of wine open beside them.
“I didn’t know if you wanted…” He gestures at the wine.
“Sure.”
He pours two glasses and hands me one. We stand there in the kitchen, the same kitchen where we danced badly a week ago, and the quiet settles between us.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Anything.”
“Why did you marry me?”
He blinks, caught off guard. “What?”
“Why did you marry me? Not the story we tell at parties - the coffee shop, the balcony in Florence. I mean the real reason. The actual thing that made you think, ‘yes, this is the person I want to spend my life with.’”
Antonio is quiet for a long moment. He takes a sip of his wine, sets it down, picks it up again. I can see him thinking, sorting through possible answers, discarding the ones that aren’t true enough.
“You didn’t care who I was,” he says finally.
“Not - not who I was in magazines or on posters. The real me. The person underneath all of that. You saw him before anyone else did, and you…” He pauses.
“You weren’t impressed. I had to work for you.
I had to be better than the version of myself I’d been selling.
And that made me want to actually be better. Not just seem like it.”
“And now?”
“Now what?”
“Do I still make you want to be better?”
His face does something complicated. “Every day. Every single day, Cass. Even when I’m failing at it. Especially then.”
“Then why does it feel like I’m losing you?”
The question hangs in the air between us. I watch Antonio struggle with it, watch him try to find words for something he doesn’t seem to fully understand himself.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’ve been… there’s been something wrong for a while.
In my head. And I didn’t know how to talk about it, so I just - worked.
I buried myself in the film and told myself I’d deal with everything else later, and later kept not coming, and meanwhile you were here and I was there and the distance just… ”
He makes a helpless gesture. “I don’t have a good excuse. I don’t have any excuse. I just have the truth, which is that I’ve been a terrible husband and I don’t know how to fix it but I want to try.”
“Something wrong like what?”
He’s quiet for a long moment. “I don’t know if I can explain it yet. I just know that I’ve been… not myself. And you’ve been paying the price for that, and that’s not fair.”
It’s not the full answer. I can feel there’s more underneath, something he’s not ready to say. But it’s more honest than he’s been in months, and right now that has to be enough.
“I miss you,” I say. “I know that sounds stupid when we live in the same house, but I miss you. The version of you who used to come home. Who used to look at me like I was the most interesting thing in any room.”
“You are. You’ve always been.”
“Then show me.”
He closes the distance between us, moving slowly, giving me time to pull away. I don’t. His hands come up to cup my face, thumbs brushing across my cheekbones, and he looks at me with an intensity I haven’t seen in so long I’d almost forgotten what it felt like.
“I love you,” he says. “I know I’ve done a shit job of showing it lately. But I love you, Cass. I never stopped.”
“I love you too.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
He laughs - this broken, relieved sound - and then he’s kissing me.
It starts soft. Careful. Like he’s asking permission with every brush of his lips.
My hands find his shoulders, his waist, the familiar landscape of a body I know better than my own.
He tastes like wine and something underneath that’s just him, and I realize I’ve missed this. Not just the physical closeness, but the intimacy of it. The way it feels to be wanted.
“Cass,” he murmurs against my mouth. “Tell me this is okay.”
“It’s okay.”
“Tell me you want this.”
“I want this. I want you.”
He lifts me onto the counter and I wrap my legs around him, pulling him closer, and for a few minutes we’re just us again. Not the movie star and his invisible wife. Not the cold marriage slowly dying. Just Antonio and Cassandra, the people we were before everything got so complicated.
“Upstairs,” I manage to say.
“Yeah. Yes. Upstairs.”
He carries me, which is ridiculous and romantic and so much like the man I fell in love with that I start to laugh against his neck.
We make it to the bedroom without dropping anything or breaking anything, and he sets me down on the bed and looks at me like I’m the most precious thing he’s ever seen.
“Hi,” he says softly.
“Hi yourself.”
“I’ve missed you.”
“Prove it.”
He does.
He peels the silk robe off my shoulders the way a starving man unwraps bread, mouth dragging heat down the slope of my throat while my fingers fight the buckle of his belt.
The bedroom still smells faintly of the roses he carried upstairs on his clothes and the abandoned wine downstairs. His shirt hits the floor. The robe pools at my feet.
Cool air kisses my bare breasts a second before his mouth does, and I arch into the wet heat of it with a sound I haven’t made in months - raw, startled, hungry.
“Fuck, Cass,” he breathes against my collarbone. “You’re soaked already. I can smell how ready you are.”
“Don’t narrate the weather. Fix it.”
He laughs once, cracked open, and drops to his knees at the edge of the mattress. He hauls me forward until my ass nearly hangs off the bed, spreads me with both thumbs, and puts his mouth on me without any of the careful choreography he used to perform for cameras.
No teasing spiral. No pause for praise. Just the flat of his tongue dragging through my folds like he intends to taste every month he wasted.
My head tips back. My fingers knot hard in his hair.
“Antonio…”
“Say my name like that again.” His voice is muffled, filthy against my skin. “Like you’re furious and grateful in the same breath.”
“I’m not - ah - grateful…”
“Liar.” He licks a slow stripe from entrance to clit and grins when my hips buck. “You’re dripping down my chin and still pretending you’re not happy to have me here.”
“I’m happy to have your tongue. The rest of you is on probation.”
“I’ll take it.”
His tongue finds my clit and works it in tight, ruthless circles until coherent speech dies.
One finger slides into me, then two, curling against the spot that makes my hips jerk off the sheets.
He knows that map. The cold year didn’t erase it; it only made him desperate to redraw every line with his mouth.
“Look at you,” he murmurs, glancing up, chin glossy. “My wife. Taking my fingers like you’ll starve without them. Squeeze for me - yes, just like that.”
“Shut up and…”
“And what? Finish the sentence, amore. Tell me exactly what you need from me tonight.”
“Your mouth. Harder. Stop treating me like glass.”
He doesn’t treat me like glass. He sucks my clit between his lips and fucks me with his fingers until my thighs shake around his ears and I’m gasping nonsense into the dark.
When I come, it’s sharp and sudden, a broken cry punched out of my chest, and he rides me through it, gentling only when I yank his hair hard enough to sting.
He rises, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and I drag him down into a kiss that tastes like cheap wine and me.
I shove his trousers the rest of the way down. His cock springs free, thick and flushed, a bead of precum already shining at the tip. I wrap my fist around him just to feel him shudder, stroking once, twice, spreading the slick with my thumb.