15. First Time
First Time
Valentina
The date is a disaster in the best possible way.
He takes me to a place in Vomero, up the hill, a trattoria with checkered tablecloths and a proprietor who calls every woman bella and every man dottore regardless of qualifications.
It's the opposite of the Posillipo restaurant.
Loud. Crowded. The kind of place where the tables are too close together and you can hear the couple next to you arguing about whose mother makes better ragù.
He chose it because I told him I was tired of restaurants that feel like performances.
He listened. He always listens. That's the thing about Niccolo that undoes me faster than his hands or his mouth or the way he says my name.
He listens the way a man listens when he believes the person speaking has something worth hearing.
The food is extraordinary. Gnocchi alla sorrentina with mozzarella that pulls in long, obscene strings between the fork and the plate.
A carafe of house red that tastes like cherries and volcanic soil.
He orders for both of us because the menu is handwritten in Neapolitan dialect so dense that even I struggle with it, and he grew up speaking dialect with his grandmother before he learned proper Italian.
We talk about nothing important. His mother's moka pot, which he still uses every morning.
My neighbor's cat, which climbs through my window at 3 AM and sleeps on my books.
The worst customer I've ever served at La Terrazza, a German tourist who sent back his pasta four times because it was "too Italian.
" He laughs at that. The full laugh. I'm collecting those the way some women collect jewelry.
Under the table, his knee presses against mine. Not accidental. A deliberate point of contact that he established when we sat down and hasn't broken for the entire meal. The warmth of it radiates up my thigh. My skin is hyperaware of every degree of pressure, every shift in angle.
I'm nervous.
This surprises me. I have killed thirty-two people. I have sat motionless for four hours in a parking garage waiting to open a man's throat. I have held a Beretta with a pulse rate of sixty and pulled the trigger without my hand moving a millimeter.
I am nervous about sleeping with Niccolo Sorrentino.
Not if. When. Tonight. I decided before I got dressed.
I decided when I chose the underwear, black, simple, not lace because lace feels like a costume and I am done with costumes for the evening.
I decided when I shaved my legs in the shower with a precision that had nothing to do with waitressing and everything to do with the way his fingers felt on my thigh in the elevator.
I decided when I strapped the knife to my leg and then, for the first time in years, took it off.
I am not wearing the knife tonight.
My thigh feels naked without it. The absence is a phantom limb. I keep reaching for the buckle that isn't there, catching myself, folding my hands in my lap.
He notices.
"You're fidgeting," he says.
"I don't fidget."
"You've touched your left thigh four times since dessert."
Four times. He counted. This man counts my gestures the way I count heartbeats.
"Habit," I say.
"Of what?"
"Checking that I have everything."
"Do you?"
I look at him across the checkered tablecloth with the candle between us throwing soft light across his face, the silver temples, the dark eyes, the open collar.
His sleeves are rolled to the elbow. The tattoos are visible, dark ink running down his forearms. The scar he traces when he's thinking.
He is not tracing it now. He is looking at me.
"Yes," I say. "I have everything."
We leave the trattoria. The Vomero streets are steep, cobblestoned, lit by lamps that cast circles of yellow light on the stone. He walks close. Our shoulders touch. The air smells like jasmine from someone's balcony garden, thick and sweet in the warm night.
"Come up," he says when we reach his building.
Not a question. Not a command. Something in between.
An invitation with weight behind it. The weight of dinners and elevators and his knee against mine for two hours and the accumulated pressure of two people who have been circling each other like binary stars, locked in orbit, accelerating toward the inevitable collapse.
"Yes," I say.
The elevator to the penthouse takes twelve seconds. We don't touch during those twelve seconds. We stand on opposite sides of the car, a meter apart, looking at each other. The tension fills the space like water filling a tank. By the time the doors open, I can barely breathe.
His penthouse. The marble floors. The view of the bay. He doesn't turn on the lights. The city provides enough. Naples through the floor-to-ceiling windows, glittering, restless, casting a shifting blue-gold glow across the furniture, the walls, his face when he turns to me.
He steps close. His hand comes to my face. Palm against my cheek. Thumb on my cheekbone. He holds me like that for a moment, just looking, studying me the way he studies paintings. With attention so specific it feels physical.
His other hand reaches for my glasses.
He takes them off. Slowly. One arm at a time, lifting them away from my face with the care you'd give to removing something sacred. He folds them. Sets them on the console table by the door. The metal clicks against the marble surface.
The world goes soft.
I am exposed in a way that has nothing to do with clothing.
Without the glasses, my face is uncovered.
The barrier I've worn since I was twelve, the frames that make me bookish, forgettable, invisible, is sitting on his console table.
He is looking at my actual face. My eyes without glass between them and his.
"There you are," he says.
My chest tightens. Not fear. Something adjacent to fear. Something with the same chemical signature but a different origin. The vulnerability of being seen without the armor I didn't know I was wearing until he removed it.
He kisses me.
Different from the elevator. That was collision.
This is arrival. His mouth on mine, unhurried, his hand still on my face, his thumb moving across my cheekbone in slow arcs.
He tastes like the house red. His lips are warm and dry and when he opens his mouth against mine, when his tongue touches my lower lip, my hands come up to his chest on their own.
My fingers spread against his shirt. I feel his heartbeat through the fabric. Fast. Faster than mine.
The Don's heart is racing.
Something in that fact breaks through whatever restraint I had left.
I pull his shirt free from his trousers.
My hands go under the fabric, flat against his stomach, the hard plane of muscle beneath warm skin.
He inhales sharply through his nose, mouth still on mine.
My fingers trace upward. His ribs. The ink I can feel in texture where the tattoo lines are slightly raised, needle scars, stories written in skin.
He pulls back. Takes his shirt off. Over his head, not unbuttoned. Impatient. It drops somewhere behind him.
The tattoos in the dim light. The compass rose. The Latin along his ribs. The sleeve on his right arm, dense and dark, the Caravaggio fragment I noticed at the massage. I want to read every line. I want to press my mouth against the ink and taste the stories underneath.
Later.
He reaches for the hem of my dress. His fingers gather the fabric. He lifts it, slow, up my thighs, my hips, my stomach. I raise my arms. He pulls it over my head.
I'm standing in his foyer in my underwear. Black. Simple. No lace.
He looks at me. Takes his time. His gaze moves from my face to my throat to my collarbone, down my chest, my stomach, my hips, my legs.
It's not assessment. It's not the male gaze I've felt from men at the restaurant, the one that calculates and consumes.
He looks at me the way he looked at the Caravaggio.
With reverence that has nothing to do with ownership.
His eyes reach my thighs. The scars. The network of thin white lines on my inner left thigh, the topography of fourteen years that I cannot explain and he promised not to ask about. His gaze pauses there. I see the question form and dissolve. He keeps his word.
His mouth goes to my shoulder. Then my collarbone. The hollow at the base of my throat where my pulse beats against his lips. He tracks it downward. His hands find the clasp of my bra behind my back. A simple hook. He opens it with one hand. The fabric loosens. He pulls it away. Drops it.
The air is cool against my chest. His mouth is warm.
He kneels.
Don Niccolo Sorrentino, head of the Sorrentino family, one of the most powerful Camorra clans in Naples, is on his knees in front of me in his dark penthouse with his mouth on my stomach, his hands on my hips, his thumbs hooked under the waistband of my underwear.
He pulls them down. Slowly. Over my hips, down my thighs, past the scars, to the floor. I step out of them.
I'm naked. He's on his knees. The bay behind him through the windows, the city light on his shoulders, his silver temples, the ink on his back when he leans forward and puts his mouth on me.
My hands go to his hair. My fingers twist into the dark strands between the silver.
His tongue is slow, precise, deliberate.
The way he eats. The way he drinks wine.
He gives this his complete and undivided attention, his hands gripping my hips to hold me steady because my legs are already starting to shake.
"Niccolo."
He responds by pulling me closer. His mouth opens wider. His tongue presses flat, then circles, then focuses on the specific point that makes my vision blur, the point he found in the elevator with his fingers and is now finding again with his mouth, with devastating accuracy.
I grip his hair. Pull. Not gently. He groans against me. The vibration goes through my body like a bass note through a floor.