5. The First Fantasy
The First Fantasy
Valentina
I replay it in the shower.
The way he said "It's not a mistake" without blinking. Like tipping a waitress four hundred euros was a decision he'd already defended in his head before I opened my mouth. Like he wanted me to challenge him so he could hold the line.
I stood there with the receipt in my hand, still warm from his pocket, the ink slightly smeared where his thumb had pressed while signing.
Four hundred euros on a forty-two euro check.
I chased him halfway across the dining room to correct what I thought was an error.
The other waitresses watched. Giulia raised her eyebrows from behind the bar. Even the ma?tre d' paused.
He turned. Looked at me. Dark eyes that studied rather than saw. Open collar, no tie, the top two buttons undone in a way that suggested formality suffocated him. Silver at his temples, too early for a man his age. Stress or genetics. Both, probably.
"Signore, I think there's a mistake with the—"
"It's not a mistake."
Four words. No smile. No flirtation in his voice.
Just a statement of fact delivered with the same quiet authority he'd used all evening when he asked about the wine, when he ordered the branzino, when he said "thank you" after I refilled his water and the two words landed on me like a hand on the small of my back.
I turn the shower off. Step out. Wrap myself in the towel.
Don Niccolo Sorrentino. Head of the Sorrentino family. One of the most powerful Camorra clans in Naples. I've known since the first dinner, when he sat at table nine and asked for the wine list with hands that give orders men follow with their lives.
I recognized his face from the photographs Father Domenico keeps in the parish office, the file of local families whose confessions carry political weight. Father Domenico knows every powerful name in this city. He's heard most of them through the confessional screen.
He came in for confession three days before his first dinner at La Terrazza. He confessed. I didn't hear the words. I was too far back. But I watched the alcove.
The candles stayed dark.
All four. Not one flame. Whatever he confessed, whatever weight he carried into that wooden box, it did not cross any of the lines. No murder of innocents. No abuse. Nothing involving children. Nothing sexual.
The candles didn't light for him.
I liked him before I knew his name. I liked the way he walked past my pew, heavy with whatever he'd just spoken aloud, and glanced at me for one second.
Maybe two. Not a predatory look. Not the assessment I get from men at the restaurant who calculate my body while I recite the specials.
He looked at me the way you look at something unexpected.
A painting in the wrong room. A sound you can't place.
Then he kept walking. He didn't stop. He didn't circle back. He walked into the Naples sun carrying his weight, and I sat in the pew with my book in my lap thinking: the candles didn't move.
No candles means he's clean. Not sinless. Clean enough. Clean enough that the system passed over him, that whatever lives in his confession doesn't cross into the territory where I operate.
I liked that. I liked it more than I should have.
I dry my hair. Brush my teeth. Pull on the oversized shirt I sleep in, soft cotton worn thin from years of washing. My apartment is quiet. The courtyard outside my window is dark except for the blue light of my neighbor's television flickering through her curtains.
I get into bed. The sheets are cool. I take my glasses off, set them on the nightstand next to my phone and the crime novel I'm halfway through. The world goes soft at the edges, the way it always does without the lenses, like someone smudged the lines of everything with their thumb.
I think about him.
The dinners. Plural now. He came back the next night. Sat in my section again. Giulia noticed. "Your admirer is back," she said, bumping my hip with hers as I loaded plates onto my tray. I told her to shut up. My cheeks burned. She noticed that too.
The second dinner was longer. He ordered slowly, asked questions about dishes he clearly didn't care about, extended the interaction the way a man extends a conversation he doesn't want to end.
I told him the octopus was the best thing on the menu.
He said he'd trust my judgment. I said that was risky. He almost smiled.
Almost. The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. More like the place a smile would go if he let it.
He asked what I was reading. I told him. He knew the author. Of course he knew the author. He quoted a line from the second book in the series, in Italian, from memory, while I stood there holding a bread basket with my mouth slightly open.
I told him most customers don't quote Italian crime fiction at dinner. He said he wasn't most customers. I said I'd noticed.
That was flirting. I was flirting with a Don.
Great survival instincts, Valentina.
I pull the covers up. Close my eyes. My body is tired from the shift. Eight hours on my feet, carrying plates, smiling, being the sweet one. The girl who blends in. The furniture.
But my mind won't stop.
His hands. I keep seeing his hands. The left one resting on the tablecloth, fingers relaxed, a scar on the forearm he touched once, absently, while I was describing the dessert menu.
Like the scar was a thought he kept returning to.
His right hand holding the wine glass by the stem, not the bowl, the way someone does when they've been taught or when they care about the wine. He cares about the wine.
I wonder what his hands feel like.
Stop.
I roll onto my side. Press my face into the pillow. My heart rate is elevated. Seventy-six. Traitor.
I think about his voice instead, which is worse.
The low register he uses when he's being polite, public, managed.
The way it drops another half-tone when he says something just for me, leaning forward an inch, the collar of his shirt falling open enough that I can see the edge of a tattoo beneath his collarbone.
Dark ink. I couldn't make out the shape. I wanted to.
I wanted to trace it with my finger.
Stop it.
I close my eyes tighter. My body is warm under the covers.
Too warm. The thin shirt clings to my stomach.
I shift, adjust, try to find a position where I'm not thinking about the sound of his voice saying "Mi fido del tuo giudiFather" (I trust your judgment) while looking at me like I was the only person in a room full of people paying two hundred euros a plate.
My hand rests on my stomach. Below my navel. Not moving. Just resting.
I think about his mouth.
The way he eats. Deliberate. Present. He doesn't rush.
He tasted the wine with his eyes closed for a full second, just one, like he was giving the flavor his complete attention.
His lips against the rim of the glass. The slight movement of his throat when he swallowed.
I watched from across the dining room while pretending to fold napkins.
I watched the way you watch something you're not supposed to see.
My hand slides lower.
I let it.
He's in the restaurant. No. He's here. In my apartment.
In my room. Standing at the foot of my bed with his collar open, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, the tattoos visible now, ink running up his forearms like a story written on skin.
He looks at me the way he looked at me in the church.
One second. Two. But here, he doesn't walk away.
He sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips. I feel the weight of him.
His hand on my ankle. Fingers wrapping around the bone. Warm. His thumb tracing the tendon above my heel, slow, like he has nowhere to be and nothing to manage except this. Except me.
He moves his hand up my calf. Over my knee. The inside of my thigh, where my skin is thin, where no one touches me, where the scars hide beneath my clothes like secrets folded into a letter no one will read.
His fingers stop at the hem of my shirt.
“Can I taste it?”
I nod. I can't speak.
He pushes the fabric up. Slow. His knuckles graze my stomach. My ribs. Higher. His palm flat against my skin, wide, warm, covering the space between my hip bones. I arch into it. My breathing has changed. Shallow. Fast. The sound of it fills my small bedroom.
His mouth on my hip. The press of his lips against the bone. Then lower. His breath on my skin. Hot. His voice in Italian, low, close, words I feel more than hear because they vibrate through my body like a tuning fork struck against glass.
"Sei bellissima." (You are beautiful.)
I don't believe him but I believe the way he says it. The drop in his register. The slight roughness, like when pure sexual desire takes over.
His mouth moves down. His hands grip my thighs, spreading them apart, firm, not asking anymore.
Taking. My back lifts off the mattress. My fingers twist in the sheets.
In the quickest and fluent motion I have ever seen he rips my wet panties off like it wasn’t just covering my ass and tosses them across the room.
I tried to let out a grasp, but he finger was already on my lips telling not to make a sound.
Then he’s slow and deliberate, licking inside the folds of my pussy lips, giving them his complete attention. Like a fine wine, I’m the one being tasted, studied, held in his mouth the way he held the Barbaresco, eyes closed, endless seconds of total focus.
I cum with my face pressed into the pillow so hard that I scream with pleasure, my fingers working my clit like hummingbirds’ wings flapping in the wind.
His name caught somewhere between my lungs and my teeth as my hips grinded against an invisible dick because he isn't here.
He was never here. My hand is my hand. My bed is empty.
My panties is still on. The apartment is quiet except for my breathing, ragged, loud in the dark room.
I lie still. Staring at the ceiling. The plaster is cracked near the light fixture.
The crack has been there since I moved in.
I have never noticed its exact shape until this moment, when my pulse is still hammering and my thighs are still trembling and the ghost of a man I've spoken to only a few times is dissolving from my bed like incense smoke from a censer.
I wipe my hand on the sheet. Roll onto my back.
The crime novel sits on my nightstand. My glasses beside it. My phone, screen dark. The crucifix on the wall across the room. The ritual candles cold in their brass holders.
The ceiling stares back at me.
I just got off thinking about a Camorra Don.
A smile. It starts small. A twitch at the corner of my mouth, then wider. I'm grinning at the cracked ceiling of my apartment with my hair spread across the pillow and my heart rate still settling and the taste of his name still in my mouth even though I never said it out loud.
I can’t stop smiling.
I reach for my glasses. Put them on. The world sharpens. The crack in the ceiling comes into focus. My bookshelf. The crucifix. The small kitchen through the open door.
I take the glasses off again. Set them back on the nightstand. Pull the covers up to my chin. Close my eyes with a smile on my face.