18. The Weekend Continues
The Weekend Continues
Niccolo
I wake before she does.
This is unusual. I sleep lightly, have since I took the position. The particular insomnia of a man whose problems don't pause when the city goes quiet. Some nights I'm at the window by two in the morning, running through variables that don't resolve at any hour.
But this morning, in my own bed with her body curved against mine and the bay going silver through the windows, I slept until seven. I woke slowly. I noticed because it doesn't happen.
She is face down in my pillow. Her glasses are on the nightstand where I set them last night before dinner, before the candles, before I knelt between her legs at the dining table and she arched her back against the wood and said my name in a voice I will hear for the rest of my life.
Her hair is a dark scatter across the white cotton.
One leg is tangled in the sheet. The other is bare, the line of her thigh disappearing under the hem of my t-shirt she reclaimed at some point during the night.
I lie beside her and study her the way I study paintings.
The line of her jaw against the pillow. The curve of her throat where her pulse is visible, slow, steady.
The small crucifix resting in the hollow of her collarbone.
The eyelashes that are darker than her hair.
The freckle below her left ear that I discovered last night with my mouth.
She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
Not in the way the city means it. Not the performative beauty of gala women, beauty deployed as strategy.
Hers is the beauty of a thing that doesn't know it's being observed.
Unguarded. The Caravaggio version, where the light falls on the subject not because the subject chose the angle but because the light did.
I want to let her sleep. I also want to touch her. The second impulse wins.
I pull the sheet down. Trace my finger along her spine. Light. Barely touching. She shifts. A murmur. Not awake. I press my mouth to the back of her neck. The spot where her hairline meets her skin. Down. Between her shoulder blades. She stirs. Another murmur, closer to a word.
I push the t-shirt up. Kiss the small of her back. The curve of her hip. She rolls onto her back, half-asleep, eyes closed, her body responding before her mind engages.
My mouth moves lower. Below her navel. The inside of her thigh. She opens her eyes. Looks down at me.
"What time is it," she says. Morning-thick.
"Early."
"What are you doing."
"Research."
"You did research last night."
"Preliminary findings. Further study required."
Her head falls back on the pillow. Her hand finds my hair.
I take my time. She sounds different in the morning.
Quieter. The sounds come from deeper, unmodulated, the raw version before the composure kicks in.
I learn what she sounds like when the defenses are still lowered, when her body is soft from sleep.
She cums with the morning light on her face and someone's radio playing through the building's pipes, a quiet sound, surprised, the sound of a woman who didn't plan on starting Sunday like this.
I crawl up beside her. She pulls me close. Kisses me. Makes a sound against my mouth that is either approval or observation.
She pushes me flat. Straddles me. My t-shirt hanging off one shoulder, her hair a mess. She reaches between us. Finds me. I've been hard since I started kissing her spine.
She sinks down. No preamble. The directness of a woman who knows what she wants at 7 AM on a Sunday. It's fast this time. Urgent. She leans forward, her hair falling around my face, a curtain that blocks everything except her eyes and her mouth.
Afterward she collapses onto my chest. Both of us breathing hard.
"Good morning," I say.
"Your bed is better than mine."
"Most beds are better than yours."
"Don't insult my bed.”
"I'm offering you mine."
She lifts her head. Looks at me with an unfiltered attention that goes through me the way certain music does. Without resistance.
"Careful," she says. "I might take you up on that."
She gets up. Walks to the kitchen naked from the waist down, my t-shirt barely covering what it should cover. I watch her go. The view from behind is extraordinary. She knows I'm watching. She doesn't adjust the shirt.
I follow. She's already at the moka pot, filling the base, packing the grounds. She's learned the ritual from watching me yesterday. Same movements. Same care. She's adopted my mother's pot the way she adopted my shirt. Without asking. Without ceremony.
I stand behind her. My hands on her hips. My chin on her shoulder. She leans back into me while the coffee heats. The gesture his wife made while stirring the ragù, I realize. The same instinctive lean. Two people in a kitchen finding the position where their bodies fit.
"I want to show you something today," she says.
"What."
"My market. In the Sanità. The vendors I buy from. The tomatoes you can't get anywhere else."
"You want to take me grocery shopping."
"I want to take you to my Naples. You showed me yours." She gestures at the penthouse, the bay, the marble. "Today I show you mine."
We drink the coffee. We shower. Together again, because the shower is big enough for four and she pointed this out yesterday with the practical tone of a woman optimizing resources.
We don't have sex in the shower this time.
We wash each other. Her hands on my back, working the soap across the tattoos.
My hands in her hair, tilting her head under the spray.
The intimacy of maintenance. The domesticity of two naked bodies performing a routine they've never shared with anyone else.
She dresses in her own clothes for the first time all weekend. Jeans. A pullover. Her glasses. Her hair pulled back. She looks like herself again. The waitress. The girl from the church pew. Not the woman who came apart on my dining table eight hours ago.
Both versions are real. I'm learning that.
We take my car to the Sanità. She directs. I drive. The neighborhood is different from the waterfront. Narrower. Louder. Older. The streets fold into each other like a conversation that never reaches a conclusion.
The San Gaetano market is ten minutes' walk from where I park. She knows every vendor. The cheese man who offers a piece of something aged before she buys. The woman named Concetta who sells vegetables from her own garden in Bacoli and whose tomatoes exist at no other stall.
Concetta is in her seventies, built like someone who has spent a lifetime outdoors. She looks at me with the specific assessment of a woman who has strong opinions about whoever accompanies her regular customer.
She doesn't address me. She asks Valentina about her uncle, whether she's sleeping enough. The questions of a self-appointed guardian. Valentina answers briefly, redirects to tomatoes.
Concetta gives her the good ones. Nods at me once when we leave.
Provisional acceptance.
The cheese man is younger, proud of his product. He wants to explain the aging process. She lets him explain, though she already knows. When he finishes she asks about the milk source that lights him up entirely. He gives her a larger piece than she asked for.
"You know a great deal about cheese," I say at the bread stall.
"My uncle's parish covers a farming family in Vomero. They kept goats when I was young." She tucks the cheese into the bag. "I spent enough time at their farm that the cheesemaking became inevitable."
"What else became inevitable."
She considers this. "I can shear a sheep. I'm poor at it, but I can do it."
We buy eggs, tomatoes, bread. She buys basil from a woman selling it from the wrong end of her allotted space. The woman says something in Neapolitan too fast for me to follow. Valentina responds equally fast. They both laugh.
"What did she say," I ask.
"She said you look serious."
"What did you say."
"I said you look less serious than usual."
She's right. I feel less serious than I have in two years.
Walking through a market carrying a bag of tomatoes while a woman in glasses argues with vendors in Neapolitan dialect, I feel like a version of myself I thought had been filed away permanently.
Not the Don. Not the inheritor. The man who wanted to paint at sixteen and couldn't get the shadows right.
Back at the penthouse she takes over my kitchen.
She directs. I execute. Not because she requires it. Because the tomatoes are from her vendor, the eggs are from her market, the cheese is from her young admirer. This is her meal in my space. The merger of the two worlds she talked about this morning.
She scrambles the eggs. I handle the tomatoes. She wants them cooked down until they've lost most of their water, which takes patience and produces something worth eating.
She works beside me at the stove. Our hips touch. When she reaches across me for the salt, her hand grazes my stomach under my shirt. When I lean past her for the olive oil, I press my mouth to the spot behind her ear. She doesn't break stride. Adjusts the flame. Takes the salt.
"You're distracting the cook," she says.
"You're the cook. I'm the assistant."
"The assistant is overstepping."
"The assistant knows what he's doing."
She turns. Looks at me. Holds a wooden spoon with tomato sauce on it, the spoon my mother used for thirty years.
"Taste," she says.
I lean forward. She pulls the spoon back an inch. I lean further. She feeds me the sauce. It's extraordinary. But it’s missing something.
"More salt," I say.
"It doesn't need more salt."
"My mother would say more salt."
"Your mother isn't here. I am."
She turns back to the stove. I put my arms around her from behind. The same position from the ragù yesterday. My chin on her shoulder. She leans back.
"It doesn't need more salt," she says again.
"It's perfect," I say. Not talking about the tomatoes.