Chapter 12
HIS APARTMENT ISN’T what I expected.
I don’t know what I expected. Something cold, maybe. Glass and steel and surfaces that wipe clean. The apartment of a man who has spent his life making sure nothing sticks.
But the door opens, and the first thing I notice is the warmth.
Not temperature—atmosphere. Dark wood floors, deep colors, walls lined with books in Italian and English and what might be German.
A leather chair by the window that has the cracked, softened look of something that has been sat in for years.
His coat is draped over the arm of it, which means he was sitting there before I arrived, and the image of him sitting alone in that chair waiting for me makes my chest ache.
“You’re staring.”
His voice, behind me. He closed the door and I didn’t hear it. I never hear him.
“Your apartment has books.”
“Most apartments have books.”
“Yours has more.” I turn around, and he’s leaning against the door with his arms at his sides and his sleeves rolled and something new on his face—not quite the controlled mask, not quite a smile, but closer to a smile than I’ve ever seen.
The expression from the garden bench. Still learning how to stay.
“It looks like your office. But bigger. And it smells better.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Closer every time.
I’m wearing the blue dress.
I put it on this morning with hands that shook, standing in front of my closet in my apartment with Iowa watching from the ceiling.
The gray one was right there—safe, memory-free, the dress of the wilderness.
But my hand reached past it, and my fingers closed on the blue cotton with the small flowers that Mama hemmed last Christmas, and I buttoned it and I cinched the belt and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought: I’m done wearing the color of not-him.
His eyes tracked the dress the moment I walked in. I saw the recognition cross his face—a flicker, fast—and he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and the blue flowers said everything.
IT’S BEEN THREE DAYS since the garden bench.
Three days since he sat at the far end of an iron seat and told me about a stone room and a stolen baby and a man who teaches because he’s afraid of what he is when he stops.
Three days since I drew a circle on his palm and he closed his fist around it and pressed his mouth to my knuckles and had no words left.
Three days of fragile, rebuilt normalcy. He texted the first night—not Italian, not a napkin, just a message at 10:14 PM: Your scholarship is reinstated. Agnes signed the paperwork this morning.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I typed: And the F?
Removed from your record. Dr. Malvar has been notified.
I imagined Agnes in her office, with her lilies and her brass lamp, signing forms with a hand that trembled. I imagined what he said to her behind that closed door, what words he chose, what register of his voice he used.
I didn’t ask him what he said. Some doors are better left closed.
The second text came a minute later: Your thesis defense has been rescheduled. You’ve two additional weeks.
And then, twenty seconds after that, a third: Come to dinner. Saturday. My apartment.
No please this time. But the asking was in the invitation itself—he’s asking me into the one room where his containers don’t exist.
I typed yes before I could overthink it.
SATURDAY. HERE. STANDING in his apartment that looks like his office but bigger and warmer and full of books, and he’s leaning against his own door looking at me in my blue dress, and neither of us has moved.
“Are you going to keep standing by the door?” I ask.
“Are you going to keep standing by the bookshelf?”
“You’ve a first edition.” I’ve spotted it—spine cracked, leather faded, Italian text. “On the third shelf. Is that—”
“Elsa.”
My name. His voice. The Italian in the vowels.
I stop talking about books.
He crosses the room, and I forget about first editions and bookshelves and warm apartments, because his hand finds my jaw—fingertips, light—and he tilts my face up and his thumb traces my cheekbone and he’s looking at me with those dark eyes, and I’ve missed this face from six inches away with an ache that turned my hands to stone.
“You wore the blue dress.”
“Yes.”
“You stopped wearing it.”
“Yes.”
His thumb moves. Along my cheekbone. Down to the corner of my mouth.
He traces the edge of my lower lip and my whole body goes taut and my hands find his shirt and grip, because the sensation of his thumb on my mouth is doing things to my central nervous system that would concern a medical professional.
“You’re wearing it now.”
“I am.”
He kisses me.
Not any of the kisses that came before. This is something new.
His mouth is warm and unhurried and his hand cradles my jaw and his other hand finds the small of my back, pulling me against him, and there’s no desk between us, no podium, no institutional furniture, no campus, no office door that someone might be standing outside of.
There’s just his mouth and mine in a room full of books, and his hand on my back.
I pull back. Not far. An inch. My lips still feel him.
“Dinner?” I manage.
His hand tightens on my back. “Later.”
I should insist. I should be the sensible Nebraska girl who eats at proper hours and keeps her hands on appropriate surfaces and doesn’t let a thirty-six-year-old man with a jaw like carved marble pull her against his body in an apartment she’s never been to before.
I kiss him instead.
LATER.
The word later is doing a lot of work.
We’re on his couch—a deep, dark thing that swallowed me the moment I sat down—and dinner has been later for approximately forty minutes.
My shoes are somewhere on the floor. His suit jacket is over the arm of the leather chair where his coat already lives.
His tie, which I didn’t know he was wearing until I felt it against my collarbone, is loose, pulled sideways by my hands, which apparently have opinions about his neckwear that my brain wasn’t consulted on.
He’s kissing my throat.
His mouth is below my ear, on the place where my pulse is doing something reckless, and his hand is in my hair—fingers tangled, gripping—and my head is tipped back against the couch cushion and I’m making sounds that I’ll absolutely not think about later.
Small sounds. The sounds of a girl whose entire body has become a single nerve ending and that nerve ending is located exactly where his mouth is.
My hands find his shoulders. His shirt is warm cotton under my palms, and through it I feel the muscle, the tension, the way his body holds itself even now, even with his mouth on my skin. I slide my hand to the back of his neck and his whole body goes rigid.
I freeze.
He pulls back. Looks at me. His eyes are dark and his lips are reddened and he looks wrecked in a way that makes me feel powerful and terrified in equal measure.
“Did I—”
“No.” His voice is rough. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But you—”
“The back of my neck.” He closes his eyes for a second. Opens them. “I’m not used to being touched there.”
The words make me swallow hard. A man who was raised by violence, who learned touch as a weapon, is telling me that the sensation of my hand on the back of his neck is something his body doesn’t know how to file.
I lift my hand. Place it there again. Gently, deliberately, my fingers against the warm skin above his collar.
He goes still. His eyes close. The muscle in his jaw works once, twice.
I wait.
His exhale is uneven. Then his forehead drops to mine, and we stay there, breathing, my hand on the back of his neck and his hands in my hair, and I feel the moment his body decides to trust it.
A release, fractional, the way a fist uncurls—not all at once but finger by finger, the way I opened his hand on the garden bench.
“Elsa.” Against my forehead.
“I’m here.”
HIS SHIRT IS UNDONE, my dress is askew, and I’m not sure how much time has passed or how long we’ll be able to keep this up.
His mouth moves against my neck. Not a kiss. A word, Italian, barely a vibration against my skin. I don’t catch it. I don’t need to.
The room is quiet. His apartment is dark around us—the evening has deepened while we weren’t looking, while his hands learned the curve of my waist and my mouth learned the scar on his ribs and his body learned what it feels like to fall apart in someone’s arms and not be dropped.
“I need to go,” I say. Not because I want to. Because it’s late, and the line matters, and I’m Martha Lively’s daughter.
He doesn’t move. His arms stay around me. His face stays against my neck.
“So go.” Muffled. A challenge and a plea, wrapped in two syllables.
My finger lifts to his shoulder. Bare skin, warm, the muscle beneath it still carrying the aftershock of what just happened. I trace a circle. Small. Slow.
He makes a sound. Not the trapped one from before. Something quieter. Something that sounds like it came from very far inside him and traveled a long way to reach the surface.
I draw another circle. And another. My fingertip on his shoulder, on his skin, and he isn’t moving, and I’m not going.
“You’re not leaving,” he says against my neck. Not a question.
“You haven’t let go.”
“No.”
I trace my circles. He holds me. The apartment holds us both—the books and the dark wood and the leather chair and the evening outside the window turning from copper to indigo.
We don’t talk about Agnes or the scholarship or the semester running out or what happens when a student is sitting in her professor’s lap on a Saturday night in his apartment with his shirt undone and her dress slipping off her shoulder.
We stay.
Not forever. An hour, maybe. Maybe more.
Long enough for my circles to slow, to widen, to find the warm, unhurried rhythm that means peace.
Long enough for his breathing to match mine, for his arms to go loose around me, for his thumb to start tracing its own circle on my lower back—his answer to mine, the call and the response, two people speaking the same language with their hands.
When I finally stand, my legs have the unfamiliar wobble of someone who has been sitting still for a long time.
He stands too. His shirt is still open, and I reach out and close one button, then another, and my fingers are on his chest and his heart is under them and he watches my hands with an expression that I’ll carry with me through the cold walk home, through the four flights of stairs to my apartment, through the moment I lie down in my bed and press my face into my pillow and realize that my whole body smells like him.
“Goodnight, Luciano.”
He walks me to the door. Opens it. His hand finds the frame above my head—the same gesture from his office, months ago, when he trapped me against the door and said you’re wrong in a voice that changed everything. But this time his body isn’t a barrier. It’s a question.
“Goodnight, Elsa.”
I walk out. I don’t look back. I’ve learned what happens when I look back in this man’s doorways, and tonight I want to carry the feeling of his arms home with me whole, unbroken, mine.
THE TEXT ARRIVES AT 7:12 AM.
Sunday morning. My phone buzzes on the pillow next to my face, and I reach for it with eyes still closed, and the screen glows in the gray early light of my apartment, and Iowa watches from the ceiling while I read two words.
Italian. The language he reaches for when his control fails.
I open the translation app. My fingers are clumsy, half-asleep, and it takes me two tries to type the letters correctly, and my heart is doing something that has no medical precedent, beating in a rhythm that doesn’t match any chart.
The translation appears.
Sposami.
Marry me.
I press the phone against my chest. I press it there so hard the edges leave marks on my skin, and I stare at the ceiling, at Iowa, at the water stain that has watched me through all of it.
Marry me.
My finger lifts. Finds the edge of the phone case. Traces one loop. Then another.
I don’t type back.
Not yet. Not until my hands stop shaking.
Not until I can look at the word sposami and hold it without breaking open, because this man—who commands and doesn’t ask, who has never once said please until he wrote it on a note for a girl from Nebraska—just asked me to marry him in the only language his heart speaks.
My phone against my chest. Iowa on the ceiling. The circles on the phone case getting faster.
And the morning isn’t gray anymore.