1. Deirdre #2
He pauses, then his gaze grows slightly distant, like he’s doing some kind of mental tally.
Until this point, he hasn’t even paused once to make sure he’s alright in the rush to get me back here.
God, he was making me fucking tea without even stopping to let the adrenaline wear off enough to see if he was injured!
But then his gaze sharpens with clarity once more, homing in on me like I’m giving off some kind of Elio-attracting beacon.
“I’m good,” he says simply. “Or, I will be once you drink your fucking tea.”
Relief pours through me, makes my muscles sag. The violent shivering is finally subsiding a bit. I lift the cup and take a sip.
The heat of it is nice, but the taste is not what I’m expecting. I swallow, then cough slightly.
“What is this?” I rasp against the little bit of the tea that went down the wrong tube.
“Some herbal shit.”
“Herbal?!”
“The amount of stress hormones that just dumped through your system do not need additional caffeine.” He looks thoughtful in a pissed-off sort of way. “If you want something else, I’ll get you wine. Or whisky.”
“No, no. This is fine. What is it?” I ask, taking another sip. I don’t normally drink herbal tea. So often it just feels like a flavourless, watery version of what tea is supposed to be.
Maybe this is how Elio feels about my Irish breakfast compared to his espresso…
He doesn’t answer me or move until I take another sip. As if satisfied that I’m actually drinking some of it, he goes back to the kitchen and returns with the box of tea bags and holds it up between us so I can see the name.
“Snoozy Time Tea?” I say, squinting at the curly, cursive font. “What am I, eighty years old?”
“Like I said, no caffeine. It’s supposed to be soothing.” Elio looks at the box then back at me. “Plus, I like the cat on the front. Reminds me of you.”
There actually is a cat on the front. A cartoon one, with ginger fur and giant blue eyes.
“It’s wearing pyjamas…”
Elio just shrugs his good shoulder.
“So? You wear pyjamas.”
Apparently a snoozy, tea-guzzling cat has got my tongue because I can’t come up with a retort to that. I have to hand it to him – he kind of has me there. The blue pyjama set the cat is wearing actually looks a lot like some of the ones I’ve worn in this very house.
I take another sip of the tea to avoid continuing this absurd conversation. Maybe we’ve both fucking lost it, talking about a cartoon cat when men have died tonight.
When one of us could have died tonight.
I keep on drinking the tea and Elio keeps on watching me, arms stubbornly crossed like some kind of supervisor, the cardboard box of tea bending under the force of his curled fist. There’s a tension in his frame.
A bristling energy that makes me thing he wants to be doing something else right now – maybe killing somebody, maybe touching me – but he’s holding himself back so that he can stand there and watch me drink the tea he made. Like his good little Songbird.
But I don’t have the energy to be anything else right now. So I drink my tea, and by the time I’m nearly done the large mug, I actually do think it’s helping. I’ve stopped shaking entirely now, and I feel warm, though very, very tired.
I look around weakly for somewhere to put the empty cup, but Elio is already reaching for it, his huge black hand passing in front of my line of vision and taking the dish from me.
He brings it back into the kitchen, and I twist where I’m sitting to follow him with my eyes, staring at him over the back of the couch as he puts the used tea bag in a bin and the cup in the sink.
It’s a jarring image, shocking in how unnatural it looks.
Elio, moving through the kitchen and doing such mundane tasks like that, throwing away a tea bag and putting a dirty dish in the sink.
I remember what Valentina told me once about the Titone men never stepping foot in a kitchen, and here Elio is not only making me tea but also cleaning up after me too.
Even in the massive space, he still looks huge. And honestly, completely out of place. Like some stalking predator has stumbled into a forest cottage and is suddenly doing its best at pretending to be a human who lives there.
Have I domesticated him?
I’m an idiot for even asking myself such a question. If I had any real sort of control over him, he wouldn’t be using the threat of exposing my father to get me to marry him.
Marry him…
Where the hell did that even come from, anyway?
I mean, maybe he’s right. Maybe it really will get Darragh to back off. But marriage? The first time I met Elio, he told me he didn’t even fuck redheads, and now he wants to make me his bride?
It doesn’t make sense. And surely someone in his position would have a political match lined up, not unlike Valentina with her picked-out fiancé. There has to be some mafia princess promised to him, someone from his world who would be an asset to the Titone empire.
I think of the blonde woman from the gala, think of her possessive hand on Elio’s chest, and my stomach lurches in a way I don’t want to acknowledge.
Elio hasn’t said anything else about marrying him since the car, so maybe he just threw it out there in the heat of the moment. Something he didn’t really mean.
But then again, I know him well enough to know that he doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.
Well, maybe I imagined it then. Fucking dreamed it, for all the sense it makes.
Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and realize most of this insane day has been a dream. I’ll open my eyes in the morning on the day after the anniversary of Mom’s death. Elio will still be up north. And I’ll still be a virgin who hasn’t visited her mother’s grave in years.
But that version of reality doesn’t feel comforting either and I’m too tired and shaken up to figure out why.
Elio returns and resumes studying me. Then, as if mostly satisfied with what he sees, he gets down onto his knees and works off one boot, then the other. He holds my ankles and rotates me so that my legs go lengthwise along the couch and my socked feet don’t get soaked by the puddles on the floor.
But for some reason, he doesn’t let go yet.
My muscles tighten and then relax in one big, wave-like movement when he begins to slowly massage the arches of my feet with his thumbs.
He’s thorough. Endlessly meticulous. Drawing deep, slow strokes against parts of me that I didn’t even know were sore and tired until now.
Whether it’s the tea or the massage or the warmth, I’m even more exhausted now.
My limbs feel like lead. I sag back against the arm of the couch and watch him.
His face is mostly cleared of the pulsing rage I saw from the side in the car.
His hard, scarred jaw and dark brows seem to be set in a fairly neutral expression, though I doubt Elio Titone has ever felt truly neutral about anything important in his entire life.
His expression puckers slightly when I flinch.
His thumb has pressed into the tender place where my foot was injured from the piece of ceramic from the broken cup.
Thanks to his ministrations, the surface skin healed up just fine, but there’s still some lingering sensitivity in that spot.
Very carefully, he peels off my sock and puts it to the side.
He regards the bottom of my bare foot with that same cool look.
And then his eyes fall shut and he presses his mouth to the place that I was hurt.
My leg jerks at the unexpected kiss in such a ticklish place, but his hand turns to iron on my ankle, holding me there.
When he draws back and opens his eyes, his expressionless facade is still mostly in place.
Except for the eyes. They’re liquid, molten black. Heat and darkness combined.
Elio places my feet down on the couch, then bends over me, his fingers rising to my throat.
I suppress a small whimper, not even knowing if I want him to touch me or not, my skin already anticipating the possessive glide of leather.
But instead, he simply grips the collar of my parka and unzips it, letting the coat fall open.
He’s quick but careful in his movements, pulling one of my arms out of one sleeve, then the other.
But just as he’s pulling my right sleeve all the way down, he freezes, his gaze stuck on one spot on the sleeve’s cuff.
Elio’s face goes briefly cataclysmic with rage, and when I look down at the bit of the sleeve he’s holding in his hands I can suddenly see why.
There’s a singed, ripped part on the puffy outside, near the wrist. It takes me a moment to fully realize that a bullet actually grazed me. Or the parka, anyway.
Elio’s like a statue, staring at that blackened rip like it’s someone he wants to murder.
“It’s OK,” I say. I know even as the words leave my mouth they’re ridiculous. None of this is OK.
But for some reason I just can’t stop myself from saying them.
Elio gives me a potent, angry stare, then rips the coat off the rest of the way and hurls it into a heap on the ground.
In a second, he’s on his knees again, his trousers soaking in the slushy puddles.
But he doesn’t seem to notice that. He’s too preoccupied with a silent, frantic examination of my hands.
He holds each of my fingers right up to his face, then scrutinizes the palms, then the backs.
Then, he shoves the sleeves of my hoodie up to my elbows, running his ferocious gaze up and down each forearm, then the tender places at my wrists, like he’s counting every vein and artery.
“You already did this,” I remind him softly. He checked my hands back in the cemetery.
“That was before I knew a bullet actually grazed you,” he bites out. “Shut up and let me fucking focus.”
“Right,” I say, irritated by his command. “Guess I’m no use to you if my fingers get shot off and I can’t play violin anymore.”
He goes still, his gloved hands locked around my wrists like handcuffs.
Then his gaze rises to mine once more, and the rage has taken on a new depth. This time I can tell it’s aimed at me.
“If you weren’t on the edge of going into traumatic shock, I would spank your fucking ass for what you just said.
” Elio lays my hands down in my lap, his movements tightly controlled, then lets me go.
“But as it is, I will instead inform you that a thought like that was about as far from my mind as possible.”
“I mean, you’ve said something like that to me before,” I remind him, hackles rising further. “Remember? When you gave me mittens and said I wouldn’t be able to play for you if all my fingers fall off from frostbite?”
“Yes,” he seethes, “and I seem to recall that I was joking when I said it. If I remember correctly, you even laughed.” There’s anger harsh as iron in his voice. “Look me in the fucking eye and tell me what you just said was a joke.”
I avoid his eyes because I can’t and he knows it. There was no humour in my comment, just bitterness. Maybe even something mean.
My gaze settles on his gloved hands at his sides, and that bitterness withers in my chest, replaced with guilt. If anyone knows what it’s like to go through life with mangled hands, it’s him. Is it so hard to believe that he might not want that same fate for me?
I nod.
“You’re right. OK,” I say quietly after a long, tense pause.
I’m not ready to apologize, not to him, not after everything we’ve been through.
But I can accept what he said. That he’s acting out of concern for me as a person instead of just worrying that I might not be able to perform like his little Songbird inside the glittering cage he’s created.
“OK,” he repeats after me, and it looks like he’s calmed down ever so slightly. The anger is still there, but it’s retreated somewhat, replaced with a nameless rawness in his gaze. “OK,” he says once more, a little quieter this time, and I wonder if he’s saying it to me this time or to himself.
And then, as if this has been the most normal day in the world, he suddenly holds out his hand to me and casually says, “Let’s go to bed.”
I stare at his outstretched hand, at the hard, strong shape of it, cloaked in that dull-yet-luminescent black. It’s a hand that’s hurt me and held me, possessed me and protected me. It’s choked the breath from my lungs and left its stinging imprint on my skin.
I don’t entirely trust it.
But I rise and take it anyway.