Chapter 10
GIADA
Afternoons in Ortigia feel like being held between two heartbeats. The sea hushes and the courtyard glows. Even the gulls seem to take their quarrels elsewhere.
I curl on the chaise with the linen throw to my chin and try not to watch the clock that tells me when Renzo will limp back from physio, wrung out, jaw locked, anger tamped down to something that makes the room feel charged.
He’s pushing too hard. I’ve told him so.
He only smirks and says, ‘I don’t do half-measures, bella,’ like that’s an answer and not a threat to his tendons.
Lately, it’s the silences that worry me more.
The way his eyes go distant when I prod at the shape of my past – my family, their lives, their desires. Even simple things like what they do for a living.
He sifts what he says like a jeweller grading stones, keeping the sharpest ones for later. I asked for the tablet he promised; he gave it to me with a smile and a kiss pressed to my knuckles that did not feel benign.
It holds a library’s worth of books, puzzles, language games. And as I suspected, it does not have the internet. No browser. No search. No easy answers. I told myself it was for my recovery. I told myself it was prudent. Today, it feels like another soft lock on a gilded door.
I read until the words blur and I doze.
The sleep is quick and hot, the kind that steals you without asking permission.
In the dream I’m not in Ortigia.
I’m barefoot on cold stone, a church smelling of lilies and sharp-smelling oil and candle smoke. A choir is singing the Kyrie as if the notes can sew time back together.
Someone is shouting – Run! – a woman’s voice, sharp and urgent, love and terror braided into one thread. I look down. My hands are wet. Red slicks my palms, sliding through my fingers like a sacrament I might not fully deserve.
I open my mouth but no sound comes. But I reach for it, frantically.
And the sound that drags me up from the dream is not mine.
It’s Renzo’s roar, rough and furious, ripped from somewhere primal. I’m already moving when my eyes open, knocking the throw aside, feet hitting cold tile, the world narrowing to the corridor and the door at the end where the therapist sets up every afternoon.
I burst in.
The therapist with kind eyes and soft hands is hovering with a resistance band and the kind of soothing voice that would have calmed me and does nothing for a man built to go to war.
‘Out,’ I say, breathless but firm. ‘Please. Give us a moment.’
The man hesitates, glances at Renzo, then nods and slips past me.
The door eases shut.
Renzo’s half-sat on the treatment table, chest heaving, cast glaring white against tanned skin and bruises. Sweat slicks his throat and his eyes are too bright. He looks like a storm ready to boil over.
‘You can’t keep doing this,’ I say, crossing to him. ‘You’ll tear something.’
‘I’m racing in a few weeks. I want my life back,’ he snarls, and it isn’t for me, not quite; it’s for God, fate, anyone foolish enough to hold the other end of his leash.
‘What life?’ The question leaves before I can soften it. I plant my hands on my hips, because anger is easier than fear. ‘The one where you bleed on asphalt and call it glory? The one where you make men jump when you lift a finger? The one where you decide who breathes near you?’
His mouth twists. ‘All of it,’ he grates, then reaches out, lightning fast to snare but surprisingly careful with it.
‘It’s what I know and what I love, what I’m fucking good at, and I won’t apologise for it.
’ His fingers close around my wrist and tug; I stumble forward, catching myself against the table, caught between his knees.
‘Renzo,’ I warn, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine.
‘That’s it. You want to soothe me, baby? Say my name again.’
I press my lips together to resist the fierce temptation to give him what he wants. And as if he knew my response would be to deny him, his lips twist.
Before his eyes rise to linger for an age on my wimple.
But then he cups the back of my neck, palm hot, thumb at the hinge of my jaw. It straddles hunger and cruelty. It’s a claiming, and I should hate it. Instead, every muscle from my scalp to my toes tightens as if remembering choreography.
‘You want to know why I’m fucking impatient, bedda? Because I want the life that includes this,’ he says, low and lethal, and pulls me down.
The first kiss… my first kiss as memory will permit, is a catastrophe.
Even with no basis to hang it on, I know it’s messy, wild, too much and not enough.
We collide. We breathe each other’s breath.
My hands, fuelled by a distressing dream and its own uncontrollable hunger, go useless for a second before they grow frenzied, clutching at his shoulders where the muscle flexes under sweat-slicked skin.
He tastes like sweat and oranges and relief.
He groans, an awful, beautiful sound that goes through my chest like a blade and hooks something soft behind my ribs.
And I free fall.
I don’t mean to. I’ve spent days arranging my virtue like flowers in an austere vase. He knocks it over with the tilt of his mouth and a simple, decadent slide of his tongue, and I’m scrambling for fallen petals that dissolve under my frantic hands.
His lips coax then command; mine answer with a hunger I can’t overcome and which I’m shocked to register is annihilating me this quickly.
This completely!
When he nips my lower lip, I gasp, and his hand fists in my wimple like a man at the end of his tether. He doesn’t pull. He holds it with his breath shuddering, restraint a miracle visible on his face.
It undoes me worse than force ever could.
I kiss him back like I’m trying to find the name he insists is mine at the back of his teeth.
I kiss him like I’ll be punished for it and decide I’ll pay when the angels come to collect.
I kiss him because the dream is still bleeding under my skin and he is the only thing in the room that feels solid and alive and mine.
He slows. He always knows when to stop before I break, as if some part of him is listening to a metronome in my pulse. He softens the pressure, breathes against my mouth, rests his forehead to mine.
‘Breathe,’ he says. ‘Just breathe, angel.’
I drag air in. It shakes on the way out.
My hands are still on him, one at the nape of his neck, one braced on the hard plane of his chest, and my body remembers a thousand unsanctioned things.
I feel his heartbeat under my palm like a drumbeat I know the rhythm of.
It terrifies and steadies me, this raw and daunting familiarity.
I pull back another inch. Then two as the room swims.
His eyes are heavy-lidded and bright, his pupils blown, his mouth kiss-bruised. It’s indecent, what looking at him does to me. It’s indecent, what I’ve done to him.
‘No,’ I whisper suddenly, shoving at my own treacherous ache. ‘No – this is wrong.’ I step back, fingers flying to trace the sign of the cross before I even think. ‘Forgive me,’ I mumble to heaven, to myself, to the woman in the mirror who keeps blushing like she’s on fire for something unholy.
He watches. The corner of his mouth crooks up; not cruel – amused, fond, wicked. ‘I’ll remind you again. You’re meant to be on a break,’ he says, voice husky with satisfaction. ‘From the nunnery.’
‘God still hears my prayers,’ I say, a little desperately. ‘And that doesn’t include—’ I falter, heat roaring to my face.
‘It includes the world,’ he counters. ‘Drink, sun, sea, laughter. Fast food, faster hands from a man who desires you. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, in case there’s an ambiguity, that man will be me and only me, bedda.
And most definitely hot, unhinged, and probably unholy sex.
As often and as hot and vigorous as you want. ’
‘I don’t want,’ I rush to say. It comes out breathless and unconvincing. Even my pulse calls me a liar.
He tilts his head, eyes narrowing with the kind of patience that’s new on him and infuriating on me.
‘You can pray the ache smaller,’ he says softly.
‘Doesn’t mean it will go away. And aches like that, ignored, just tend to get bigger.
’ His hands dig into my hips, pulls me closer until I feel the imprint of his…
his manhood. Sweet heaven. ‘And bigger.’
‘Stop. Please. I am trying to be good,’ I hiss, more to myself than to him.
‘Maybe this is good,’ he says. ‘Maybe someone tried to convince you that pleasure and sin were synonyms. They’re not. Not always.’
I bristle. ‘So now you’re a theologian.’
‘No,’ he says simply. ‘I’m a man who’s been half-fucking-dead and knows exactly what like feels like.’ His hands mould my hips tighter and why oh why don’t I move away? Place some distance between myself and this iniquity?
His gaze drops to my mouth and I feel his manhood jump.
Then he releases me but only so he can reach out again, but slower, palms up like he’s asking, not taking. I don’t give him my hands. I don’t pull away either. It’s the worst kind of permission, silent and trembling and waiting. A lamb to slaughter.
‘Tell me about your dream,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘You came in like a woman chased by wolves.’ He nods towards the couch. ‘The housekeeper mentioned you were napping in the living room. Sit. Tell me.’
I sit because my knees don’t trust me. He shifts off the table with a hiss, manoeuvres himself beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. I keep my eyes on the terrace door and the slit of blue beyond it.
‘There was a church,’ I say, the words tasting of copper. ‘Lilies. Choir. Someone shouting “run”.’ I swallow. ‘My hands were bloody.’
He goes very still and I feel the echo of certainty in my veins. He knows. I feel him bank himself like a pilot in a storm. ‘You know what my dream means, don’t you?’
His lips firm, but when he speaks it’s not the answer I want. ‘You’re safe,’ he says, like a promise he intends to keep even against physics. ‘You’re here. With me.’