Chapter 8
No caption. No words. Just an image of a sky going copper and violet above a skyline I don’t recognize, shot from somewhere high, and the composition is careless in a way that tells me he took it quickly, instinctively, the way you reach for something before the impulse fades.
The clouds are stacked low on the horizon and the buildings beneath them are silhouettes and the whole thing looks like the sky is on fire from the inside out.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I type: Where is that?
Three dots. A pause. His reply:
My apartment.
My apartment. Not his office, not the campus, not any of the contained, institutional spaces where I’ve known him. His apartment. Where he lives. Where he sleeps. Where he stood at a window and watched a sunset and thought of me.
A circle on the edge of my phone case. I type: It looks like Nebraska.
The three dots again. Longer this time. Then:
It looks like Florence.
I press my phone against my chest and stare at the ceiling.
Iowa stares back. The water stain hasn’t changed, hasn’t moved, and he just told me his sunset looks like home, and his home isn’t New York, and mine isn’t either, and we’re two people looking at the same sky from different windows and seeing the places we came from.
Sleep takes me with the phone on my pillow. The sunset is still on the screen.
HE TEXTS LIKE HE TALKS. Few words. Every one chosen with a care that makes me read each message three times, looking for the thing underneath the thing.
Friday, 2:15 PM, between classes: How is the security section?
I write back: Still terrible. I’m considering letting my father’s spreadsheet handle it.
A pause. Then: Your father’s spreadsheet has more structural integrity than most enterprise systems I’ve audited.
I laugh out loud in the middle of the quad. A girl walking past gives me a look. I don’t care.
Saturday, 10:30 PM: Are you sleeping?
I’m not sleeping. I’m lying in the dark thinking about his hand on my thigh and the sound he made against my collarbone and the way he said tomorrow and then kept his promise, and now it’s Saturday and he’s texting me at 10:30 and I should be sleeping and I’m not.
Not anymore.
His reply takes four seconds.
Good.
One word. I read it eleven times. Good. Good that I’m awake. Good that he can reach me. Good that at 10:30 on a Saturday night, there’s a line between his phone and mine, and we’re both holding it.
Sunday, 1:45 PM, after the call with Martha: Your mother. Is she well?
My throat tightens. He knows about the Sunday calls. He knows because his men have been watching me for months, because somewhere in the careful machinery of his surveillance, someone reported that Elsa Lively calls her mother every Sunday at 1:15 and that the calls leave her quiet.
She’s good. She asked if I’m eating enough.
Are you?
I look at the sandwich David brought me yesterday, half-eaten on my desk.
I look at my dress, still loose at the waist, though less so than last week.
I look at my face in the bathroom mirror, still sharper than it was a month ago but with color returning, warmth that wasn’t there during the avoidance, and I know exactly what put it back.
Getting better.
His reply: David?
Two letters too many. There’s an edge in that one word, even in text, even without tone or inflection. David? As in, is David the one feeding you. As in, tell me more about the boy who sits across from you in coffee shops and makes you laugh and carries your books.
A man who ran a crime family and built an empire and kisses like the world is ending, jealous of a boy who builds spreadsheets about smile frequency.
I shouldn’t find this as endearing as I do.
David brings me sandwiches. Martha sends recipes. Between them I’m being managed.
A long pause. Longer than any pause so far.
Good.
The same word. But this time it carries something heavier. This time it means: I want to be the one making sure you eat, and I can’t, and the fact that someone else is doing it’s simultaneously a relief and a problem.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into a four-letter word. This is possible. This is what happens when a girl from Nebraska falls for a man who speaks in single syllables and lets the silence do the rest.
THE MUSEUM IS HIS IDEA.
Tuesday after class, a note in my campus mailbox. Not under my door this time. In the small metal box in the humanities building that I check once a week for departmental mail and never find anything interesting. His handwriting. A time, an address, and two words: After hours.
I stand in the mailroom with the note in my hand and my heart doing something complicated, because after hours means empty.
Means private. Means he’s arranged for a museum to be open when no one else is there, which is either the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me or the most terrifying, and it’s both, it’s absolutely both.
Seven PM. The street is quiet. The building is tall and pale and so beautiful it makes you want to whisper. A man I don’t recognize opens a side door, nods once, and steps aside. One of Luciano’s men. The wrong shoes are becoming a signature I could spot at fifty paces.
Inside, the museum is dark except for the gallery lights, which illuminate the paintings and leave the floors in shadow.
My footsteps echo. The ceiling is high and vaulted and the air smells like old stone and climate control and history, and I’m walking through a building full of centuries-old beauty in my hemmed dress and my sensible flats and I’ve no idea where I’m going.
But I know who I’m walking toward, and that’s enough.
He’s standing in front of a painting.
I see him before he sees me, and I stop.
Fifteen feet away, in a gallery lit warm against the dark, Luciano is looking at a painting with an expression I’ve never seen on him.
Unguarded. Something caught between memory and longing, and I realize that he’s looking at this painting the same way I look at him.
He hears me. Turns. The expression doesn’t vanish this time. It softens, shifts into something that’s still open, still him, and my chest aches because this is new. This is Luciano without the armor. Just a man in a museum, in the dark, waiting for me.
“You came,” he says. Second time he’s said this. It’s becoming a pattern, and the pattern tells me something: he invites me to things and then is surprised when I show up, because somewhere in this man’s self-image, he can’t believe that anyone would choose to walk toward him.
“You keep being surprised by that,” I say.
Something loosens at the corner of his mouth. Almost a smile.
“Come here.”
Third time. Third context. The words are the same but the voice is different from the office, different from the desk. This voice is warm.
I walk to him. My shoulder brushes his. The contact is small, fabric against fabric, and it sends a current through me that I feel in my teeth.
We stand in front of the painting. It’s large, warm-toned, a landscape.
I don’t know the artist. I don’t care. What I care about is the heat of his arm next to mine and the silence between us that isn’t tense, isn’t charged, isn’t loaded with all the things we can’t say.
It’s just quiet. Comfortable quiet. The quiet of two people who have already said the hardest things and are resting in the aftermath.
“Nebraska sunsets look like that,” I say, nodding at the painting. “That gold at the bottom, where the sky meets the land. Mama calls it God’s hour, but she would never say that in front of company.”
He doesn’t respond right away. His eyes stay on the painting, and I watch his profile in the gallery light, the scar at his temple, the line of his jaw, and I think about how I’ve been watching this face from the third row for two years and this is the first time I’ve seen it at rest.
“Florentine light.” His voice is quiet. “Before the river. The hour before sunset, the buildings go this color. Warm stone and warm air and everything turns gold.” A pause. His thumb moves against the back of my hand. “I haven’t been back in twenty-two years.”
Twenty-two years. Since he was fourteen. Since he ran. I think about the boy in the forest and the man in the museum and the distance between them, and I hold his hand tighter and I don’t say anything, because some things don’t need words. They need hands.
My hand finds his. Not a dramatic gesture.
Not a reach or a grab. My fingers brush the back of his hand and settle there, and he goes still, and then his hand turns over, palm up, and my fingers lace through his, and we’re standing in a dark museum holding hands in front of a painting that looks like both our homes.
His thumb moves. Once. A circle on the inside of my wrist.
I nearly come apart. A circle. He drew a circle on my wrist. The thing I do, the thing he’s been watching me do since the third row, and he just did it back, on my skin, with his thumb, and the intimacy of it’s so targeted that my vision blurs.
“You noticed,” I whisper.
“I notice everything about you, Elsa.”
We stand there. His hand around mine. His thumb still on my wrist. The painting glowing in front of us and the museum empty around us, and I understand now why he brought me here.
Not to impress me. Not to show me what his money can do.
To show me a place where beautiful things are kept safe.
Where they’re protected and lit and cared for, and the parallel is so clear it makes my ribs ache.
He turns to me. My hand still in his. We’re close now, closer than the painting, closer than the art, and his free hand comes up and touches my jaw the way it did in his office, light, just fingertips, tilting my face.
The kiss comes without warning.