Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty Six
Vito
Morning light spreads slowly across Teresa’s room, turning everything pale gold and soft around the edges.
The white curtains lift and fall in the breeze from the window cracked open and, somewhere beyond the glass, the sea keeps up its steady back and forth, like it has all night and all the nights before it.
She is still tucked against me.
Close enough that I can feel every small shift of her breathing, every place where her skin brushes mine beneath the sheet.
Her hair is a dark spill across the pillow and my arm, and every time she moves even a little, the scent of her rises again—soap and sleep and woman and something else that has already attached itself to my head in a way I’m not going to examine too closely.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
After getting some energy back last night, I managed to get us both in the shower, but I didn't have enough to change the sheets on my bed. So I carried her to hers, and that's where we spent the night, wrapped around one another.
I’ve got one arm under her pillow, the other around her waist. The sheet is twisted low around our hips, and the room is warm enough that neither of us seems interested in pulling it any higher.
The problem with that is that I’m too aware of her. The soft line of her thigh against mine. The curve of her back. Her lush lips parted slightly as she speaks softly in the early morning quiet.
It is impossible to lie in bed with Teresa and not want her.
This morning, though, it’s different.
The wanting is there. God, it’s there. Heavy and constant, humming under my skin the same way it has for weeks now, maybe longer if I’m being honest with myself. But there’s something else layered through it this morning. A strange quiet. A softness I don’t trust because it feels too good.
Her fingers trace one idle line over my chest, then stop near one of the tattoos there.
I look down. She’s touching the edge of the one over my shoulder and upper chest, not really asking about the design as much as touching me for the sake of touching me.
“My mother,” I say.
Her fingers still.
She tips her chin up and looks at me. “Carlotta.”
The way she says it does something to me. Careful, but not prying.
“Yeah.”
“How old were you when she got sick?” she asks quietly.
“Sixteen.”
Her hand slides a little, not really stroking, just there.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
I look past her for a second, out toward the line of morning light brightening through the curtains.
“Your father was gone already, right?” she asks.
“Yeah, he was already in prison by the time she got sick,” I say.
Teresa’s gaze sharpens immediately, but not in that clinical way of hers. This is something else. Just her full attention.
It feels nice. It makes me want to keep going.
“Lucia was gone too.” I clear my throat. This is not something I ever talk about. “She, uh, testified against him, and they took her into witness protection.”
“So it was just you,” she asks softly, sadly.
But not pitying. If it were pity, I wouldn't be able to keep going, but it's not. Just sadness.
“The uncles were around, but it was more for the family business. They came around more after she passed—Giovanni and Antonio moved in, Roberto for a while as well—but before that, yeah, it was mostly on me.”
“That must have been really hard.”
For a second, neither of us says anything. The room stays quiet. The sea keeps moving. Her hand remains where it is, warm over my skin, and I know I can let the silence keep doing what it’s doing or I can say the thing that is already moving up in me.
I don’t usually pick the second option.
This morning, for some reason, I do.
“Chemo was hard on her,” I say.
I pause there because I can see it all too clearly now that I’ve started.
My mother in that bed.
The smell of medicine and clean sheets and the metallic edge that came with chemo. The way she tried to brighten herself up with lipstick, even when she was too tired to sit up for long, because she hated looking sick in front of us.
The scarf over her hair when it started to go. The way her hands looked too fine and fragile by the end, even though they were never fragile hands before that.
Teresa waits me out.
Always with the waiting.
Usually, it gets under my skin.
Right now, it just keeps me talking.
“My dad was in prison, Lucia was gone. Nico and Caterina were so young. I stayed home with her. I wanted to, though.”
“What about school?” she asks.
“I dropped out,” I say, my voice rougher than I mean it to be, “against her objections.”
That gets a faint smile out of her.
“I'm sure it's every mother's dream for her son to drop out of high school.”
I feel a similar smile tug at my own mouth, too, brief and gone.
“She never wanted me to quit,” I say. “Not once. She fought me on it harder than she fought almost anything else.” A small breath, almost like a laugh, leaves me. “I thought I was helping. Thought I was doing what I was supposed to do.”
“And she thought otherwise,” Teresa says.
I look back at her.
“She made me promise I’d finish,” I say. “So while she was doing chemo and I was staying home with her, I finished high school online.”
There. It sounds so simple when I say it like that.
Like it was just a schedule. A plan. A practical solution.
It wasn’t.
It was sitting at a laptop next to her on the bed.
It was chemistry homework in hospital waiting rooms.
It was essays and quizzes and trying to stay awake after nights when she threw up until dawn, and I sat on the bathroom floor outside the door because she hated anyone seeing her like that, but hated being alone even more.
It was pretending I could split myself into parts and none of them would break.
“She died before I graduated,” I say.
Teresa’s face changes. Still not pity. I don’t think I could stand pity from her. Just a kind of quiet ache on my behalf. I can't decide if it's worse or not.
I look away before I can think too much about that.
“But I finished anyway,” I say. “Because I promised.”
The words sit between us for a second.
I can feel her watching me think through the next part before I say it.
“She always wanted me to go to school,” I continue.
“Always. She talked about it when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, when she was sick. College, classes, doing more than what had already been decided for me. I used to brush it off every time she brought it up. Told her I had other things to worry about. Other responsibilities.” I shrug one shoulder. “Told myself it wasn’t for me.”
“And after she died?” Teresa asks quietly.
Something in my chest tightens.
Because that’s the part I don’t say out loud much. Maybe ever.
“After she died,” I say slowly, “something changed.”
I stop again.
Not because I don’t know the words. Because I do, and I don’t like them much.
I drag a hand over my face and then let it fall back to the bed between us.
“I just wanted to make her proud of me,” I say.
There it is.
Simple. Embarrassing. True.
Teresa doesn’t say anything right away. Her fingers resume the smallest, absent movement at my chest, almost like she knows I need something soothing there while I say this.
“So I did it,” I say. “I applied.”
Her brows lift faintly. “Just like that?”
I let out a breath. “No. Not just like that. It took a while. Months. I started looking things up. Then I started telling myself I was just curious. Then I started telling myself there was no point because I wouldn’t get in anyway.
Then one day, I got pissed off enough at myself to fill out the application. ”
That makes her smile again.
“You got angry enough to go to college.”
“Apparently.”
“That feels consistent with what I know about you.”
I look at her. “That doesn’t sound flattering.”
“It wasn’t unflattering either.”
The answer gets a real laugh out of me this time.
She smiles at that. Just a little.
I look back up at the ceiling.
“Rutgers,” I say. “I got in.”
“You say that like you still don’t quite believe it.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Vito.”
It’s only my name, but there’s enough in the way she says it that I glance back at her again.
She’s propped up slightly on one elbow now, hair falling around one shoulder. Her face is open in a way I still don’t know what to do with. No walls. No performance. Just her.
“I’m not surprised,” she says.
The words give me a warm feeling in my chest that I don't know what to do with.
I look away first.
“You should be.”
“No.” Her voice is calm, certain. “I’m really not. You’re a lot smarter than you give yourself credit for.”
I huff out a breath.
“Everybody says shit like that when they’re trying to make someone feel better.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel better. I’m telling you what I think.”
I go still at that.
There is no softness in the statement. No attempt to soothe. She just means it.
And because she just means it, I don’t know what to do with it.
I settle for looking back at her and saying, “You barely know me.”
The corner of her mouth moves. “I have a feeling I know you better than a lot of other people.”
Dangerous words.
Not because they’re wrong.
Because I like them.
Too much.
I should probably move the conversation somewhere safer, but apparently, I have not learned a damn thing.
“I got my bachelor’s in business administration,” I say.
There’s a beat where I half expect her to laugh or look startled or ask whether I’m serious.
She doesn’t.
She just nods once, like that makes perfect sense to her.
“I figured business,” she says.
That catches me off guard.
“You figured business.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because for all your talk about impulse and chaos and anger, you notice systems. Structure. Leverage.” She lifts one shoulder. “And because you’re not as stupid as you pretend you are.”
My mouth twitches before I can stop it.
“That’s a hell of a compliment.”
“It wasn’t meant to sound romantic.”
“Good,” I say. “That would’ve been embarrassing.”
Now she laughs, quiet and warm, and I feel the sound of it in places that have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with how much I like hearing it.
Which is a problem for later.
Maybe.
Probably.
She settles in closer, her body brushing mine comfortably.
I look down at her hand on my chest again.
“I was surprised I actually liked it,” I admit.
That part feels smaller but more personal.
More dangerous.
Because getting in is one thing. Finishing is one thing. Those can be explained away by stubbornness, by pride, by wanting to prove something to my mother and to myself.
Liking it is different.
“What did you like about it?” Teresa asks.
I stare at the ceiling for a second longer before answering.
“The order of it,” I say finally. “The logic. The fact that if you understand how something works, you can change it. Build it differently. Make it better.” I pause. “I liked being good at it too.”
There.
That one is way harder to admit than it should be.
She seems to know that because she doesn’t jump on it or fill the silence. She just lets it sit.
So I keep going.
“I liked that it was mine,” I say. “Not something I was born into. Not something waiting for me because of my last name, or my father, or what people expected. Mine because I did it.”
Teresa’s eyes don’t leave my face.
“That matters,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t say it like a man talking about a phase.”
“No.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
Then: “What did your family think?”
And there it is.
I knew it was coming. Should have known the second I opened my mouth.
I look away toward the window again, toward the moving pale light outside, because the answer to that is not as simple.