Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Luca
She hasn't screamed yet.
Ten minutes on this roof and she stands at the railing with both hands on the bars, looking out at the city like the city owes her an answer.
Eleven floors. The Sartoris own the building, offices on the bottom four, storage above that. I've been on this roof twice before, both times for work. Neither time ended well for the other party.
I lean against the utility housing, smoke and let her have the silence. My thigh aches in the cold. I shift my weight off it and my shoulder answers instead, so I stop moving and let both of them complain.
She wanted to scream. That was the whole point of the drive back into the city. Now she's up here and the scream isn't coming, and I understand that too. Wanting a thing and doing it in front of a witness are different problems.
The cigarette burns down. I light another off the end of it, which is a habit Elena hated, and the thought arrives before I can stop it, so I look at the tar paper under my boots until it passes.
Gemma turns around.
She looks at me for a while without saying anything. The railing is behind her now and her hands are jammed in the pockets of the coat. Then she walks over, sits down on the concrete curb beside me.
"Can I have one?" she says.
"You sure as hell don't look like a smoker."
"I've never smoked. Not once." She holds out her hand anyway, palm up. "But right now there's a long list of things I've never done before, so I don't see why this one matters."
I shake one out of the pack and put it between her fingers. She holds it wrong, pinched near the filter like a pen.
"Go slow," I say. "Don't drag it down like it's goddamn air. Just pull it into your mouth first."
"Okay."
I cup the lighter against the wind. She leans in toward the flame and for a second her face is close to my hands, lit orange from below, eyes down, lashes throwing small shadows.
The tip catches. She sits back and takes her first drag. She ignores everything I said and pulls it straight into her lungs.
The cough comes up out of her whole body. She folds forward, hacking, eyes flooding, and her free hand shoots out and grabs the front of my coat, fisting the fabric over my sternum to hold herself up.
"Cristo. I told you—"
"I know—" Another cough tears through the sentence. "I know, you said—" She can't finish. She's laughing now, laughing and coughing at the same time, wheezing, her fist still knotted in my coat, and the laugh keeps breaking apart before it lands anywhere.
"It's disgusting," she gasps. "Why does anyone—" The cough takes her again. "Why do you do this every day, it's like licking a chimney—"
"You held it wrong and you pulled it wrong. That's on you, not the fucking cigarette."
She laughs harder. Then the laugh changes.
I hear it change before I see it. The pitch drops and the rhythm goes uneven and the next sound out of her isn't a laugh at all. Her shoulders come up. Her face drops toward her knees. The hand on my chest stops holding her up and starts holding on.
She's crying. No noise to it at first, just her whole frame shaking, and then the noise comes and it's worse, low and cracked open.
I stand and take the cigarette out of her fingers before she burns herself and grind both of ours out under my boot. I pull her to stand.
My arm is already around her.
My hands shake. I haven't put my arms around another person in a long time but my body has kept the memory of how. I pull her in against my chest and she comes without resistance, folding into me, her fist still twisted in my coat, her face against the wool.
She cries. I hold and let her.
The wind keeps cutting across the roof. Her hair moves under my hand and I realize I'm stroking her head, slow, from the crown down, and I didn't decide to do that either.
"Non piangere," I hear myself say, quiet, into her hair. "Io sono qui."
Don't cry. I'm here.
She won't understand it. That's the only reason I can say it.
Gemma
My breathing comes back in pieces. His hand is still moving over my hair, slow, and his chest is warm through the coat. I notice I'm not thinking about pulling away, which is new information about myself that I file for later.
The wind has dried the tears on one side of my face. He said words in Italian a minute ago. I don't know what they meant. They worked anyway.
I lift my head.
His face is right there. Inches. His eyes are on mine and he doesn't lean back to make room. Neither do I.
I should say sorry. That's the word that lives in my mouth.
His eyes move down my face. Then he leans in.
His mouth touches my cheekbone. Just under my eye, where the skin is still wet. It isn't a kiss the way I know kisses. It's soft, it takes its time and it collects the tear that was sitting there. Then he moves to the other cheek and does it again. His breath is warm and smells like smoke.
Nobody has ever done this to me.
The tears start again. I feel them come up hot and spill over. I can't stop them, and he doesn't stop either, his lips find the new ones, patient, one side and then the other, like this is a job he intends to finish.
When he pulls back, only far enough to look at me, his thumb stays at my jaw.
"I can't promise you'll feel better soon," he says. His voice is low and rough and completely level. "I don't make promises I can't keep. But you'll be safe. You and Nina. That one I can keep."
I look at his mouth. I look at his eyes, which are waiting, not asking for anything, not moving, and I think about how every man I've known took first and explained after.
I close the inches myself.
His mouth is warm and he goes rigid for a second, completely still. Then his hand slides from my jaw into my hair and he kisses me back.
Luca
Her mouth opens under mine and I stop thinking.
I feel her hands gripping my coat, her body pressing into me, the small sound she makes against my lips.
She rises onto her toes, so I take her by the ass and lift her. She wraps her legs around my waist like she's done it a hundred times, like her body decided before her head could vote, and her fingers slide into my hair and pull. The pull goes straight down my spine.
I'm hard. I've been hard since she grabbed my coat, and now she's seated against me and every shift of her hips makes it worse. My hands shake against her thighs. My hands don't shake. Ever. They haven't shaken over a trigger in twenty years. They shake now, holding her.
Her heels dig into my back and I press her against the railing, and the sound she makes into my mouth nearly finishes me standing up, fully dressed, like a boy.
Enough. If I don't stop now, I won't.
I break the kiss. We're both breathing hard. Her face is close, blonde hair pushed everywhere by the wind, her lips swollen from mine. Her eyes search my face and I let her look. I don't know what she finds.
"We shouldn't do this," she says.
I nod.
I don't agree. There is nothing in me that agrees. But I know what I am and I know what she's survived. A man like me has no business putting his hands on a woman like her. Her husband hurt her. I kill people for money. From where she stands, the difference is small.
I set her down. Her feet find the concrete and I step back.
"I'm sorry," I say. "That was out of line. It won't happen again — I'll stay the fuck away from you."
She looks at me and her face changes. Her brows pull together and her mouth presses thin. There's pain in it, real pain, the way people look when they watch a dog get kicked.
Pity. She pities me. Of course she does.
I straighten my coat. The wind has picked up and neither of us moves toward the door.
"Are you finished?" I ask. "You came up here to scream."
She blinks. Then she pushes her hair out of her face and something settles in her shoulders.
"No," she says. "Now I'm about to start."
She turns to the railing. The city spreads out below us, lit windows and moving headlights, all of it too far down to matter. She grips the rail with both hands, fills her lungs, and screams.
It comes out ragged, furious, and it goes on longer than I expect, tearing up out of her like it's been packed down for years and finally found the exit. Her whole body shakes with it.
The scream dies and she stays bent over the railing, breathing. When she straightens, her eyes are wet again.
"Your turn," she says.
"That's not necessary."
"Try it." She steps aside and nods at the railing like she's offering me a chair. "Think of the thing that hurts the deepest. The one you never touch. Then let it out."
The thing that hurts the deepest.
That's easy. That's the easiest thing I could do.
I step to the railing. I think of a house outside Naples and smoke rising off the roof at four in the morning.
I think of a woman who laughed before she finished her own jokes and a daughter who never got a name I could say out loud.
I think of six years of hotel rooms and nobody's hands on me.
Elena's face the last time I saw it, asleep, unworried, safe, because I had promised her she was safe.
I scream.
It rips out of me and it doesn't sound like my voice. It sounds like an animal, like a thing left too long in the dark, and I can't stop it once it starts.. My throat tears. I keep going until there's nothing left in my chest to push.
Silence after. The wind. My own breath, loud and wrecked.
My eyes burn. I keep my face toward the city until the burning stops, because I will not let her see that, whatever it is. My hands are steady on the rail now. Empty and steady.
Gemma doesn't speak. She doesn't touch me. She stands two feet away and lets me have the quiet, and that probably costs her nothing but it's worth more than anything anyone has given me since the fire.
I nod at her.
"Come on," I say, and my voice comes out scraped raw.
I turn for the door before she can answer. Behind me, her footsteps follow, and I pretend I don't want to turn around and pick her up again.