Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GIA
The knock comes at half eight the next morning.
I'm still in bed, on my back, staring at the ceiling the way I've been doing most mornings since I got here.
"Come in."
Carla steps inside. She's in her usual dark uniform, hair pinned, very hard to decipher expression on her face. She looks at me in the bed, at the state of the room, at the curtains still drawn.
"Good morning, Mrs. Caruso."
"Morning, Carla."
She moves to the window and opens the curtains with two clean pulls. Grey light fills the room. I sit up and push my hair back.
"Mr. Caruso wanted you to know there is a formal event this evening." She says it the way she says everything, evenly, completely, like the information is neither good nor bad and its reception is not her responsibility. "A dinner. He'll require your presence at seven."
I look at her. "He'll require it."
"Yes, Mrs. Caruso."
A beat. "Did he use that word specifically?"
"He said he'd like you ready at seven." The correction is diplomatic. Barely.
"Right." I pull the covers back and swing my legs over the edge of the bed. "What’s the theme so I can pick out a dress?”
Carla crosses to the wardrobe without being asked. Opens the right-side door. Indicates, with the particular neutrality of a woman who is simply conveying information and has no opinions about its content, the single black dress hanging at the center.
"Mr. Caruso already selected this one."
I stiffen.
That fucking psychopath…
We’re doing this again huh?!
I glare at the dress. Floor-length, black, structured at the top, open at the back. It looks very expensive and very chic.
And I really want to hurl it at Rafael’s handsome head.
"Thank you, Carla," I manage to say instead.
She nods and goes.
That evening I open the wardrobe door. I look at it to understand the full scope of what is happening to me. It is the kind of thing that makes a statement on behalf of the man you arrived with before you've opened your mouth. It is, objectively, beautiful.
I want to scream.
I hate it with my entire body.
Not the dress itself. The dress has done nothing wrong.
I hate the chain of events that produced it appearing in my wardrobe with an instruction attached, the casual assumption that I will put on what I am given and appear when I am told and perform whatever function is required of me at whatever event has been scheduled without being asked whether I have any thoughts about any of it.
I hate that it fits the specific shape of my life here so neatly, so matter-of-factly, like of course this is how it works, like of course she'll wear what she's told.
Because hell no, that’s not happening!
I go to the other side of the wardrobe. I’m going to choose something else because fuck Rafael Caruso if he thinks he can control me like this.
I open the wardrobe and my anger bubbles up my throat.
My evening dresses are gone!
Every single one. The green silk, the burgundy with the draped shoulder, the simple navy, everything. The hangers are there. The dresses are not.
I stand very still for a moment.
"That absolute bastard," I say to the empty room.
He knew. He knew I'd look at the dress he picked and immediately want to wear something else, so he removed the something else. So now I am standing in front of a wardrobe with one option in it like a woman in a fairy tale.
"You smug, calculating, insufferable—" I yank the black dress off the hanger "—who does this?
Who does this to a person?" I lay it on the bed.
Look at it. "It's not even that I don't like it, that's the worst part, I genuinely — it's a beautiful dress and I still want to set it on fire purely out of principle—"
I put it on.
The front goes fine. The zip at the back does not. The angle is impossible, the kind of impossible that the dress designer clearly considered a feature rather than a flaw, built on the assumption that women who wear things like this have people to fasten them.
I do not want to call Carla. I do not want to give this house one more piece of evidence that I cannot manage independently. I reach behind myself, get two fingers on the zip pull, and try.
I get it approximately four inches before it stops.
I reposition. Try again from a different angle. The zip holds. My shoulder makes a noise it should not make.
"Absolutely not," I mutter. "You are going up. I am telling you right now that you are going up."
The zip disagrees.
I am still in this negotiation when the dressing room door opens.
Rafael leans in the doorframe. He's already dressed, black shirt, dark jacket, the effortless put-together of a man whose clothes do not require a twenty-minute argument to cooperate.
His eyes go to my hands, twisted behind my back, then to the gap at my spine where the dress is half-fastened, and back to my face.
"Do you need help?"
"No."
He stays in the doorframe.
I turn back to the mirror and reach behind myself again. The zipper moves approximately one millimeter and stops. I can feel him watching. I keep my face neutral, which requires genuine effort, and try a third angle.
"You could just—"
"I said no."
I get another two inches. The zip sticks again, in the worst possible location, and I drop my arms because they are genuinely starting to protest and I stand there with my back half-open in the mirror and breathe through my nose.
Rafael stalks towards me and takes hold of the zipper.
"Don't touch me!” I snap, turning to face him.
That's the mistake.
I've turned too fast and he's closer than I calculated because he'd already moved from the doorframe, and now there is essentially no distance between us.
A foot, maybe less. His cologne reaches me before I've finished the sentence, something dark, cedar and something underneath it I can't name, the specific scent of him that my body has apparently catalogued without my permission and the reaction is immediate and humiliating.
The slickness starts, low and sudden, and I press my thighs together and keep my face entirely still.
His eyes are on mine. He doesn't step back.
Oh gods.
"You can let me help you with a smile on your face," Rafael says from behind me, "or you can let me help you with a frown, either way, and we will leave in one minute."
I close my eyes for exactly two seconds.
I’m going to fucking murder this man.
He says nothing. He just waits.
I stand there for another moment. My back is open. The zipper is stuck. His cologne is everywhere. I am going to be late to an event I didn't agree to attend, wearing a dress I didn't choose, and I cannot fasten it myself.
I turn back to the mirror.
"Fine," I say to my own reflection as if I have any choice in the matter.
He hums and steps behind me. I watch it happen in the mirror, his height behind mine, his hands coming up to the fabric at the base of the zipper with the same deliberate care he applies to everything, careful to touch only the dress, not my skin. He finds the catch. Starts to work it upward.
Slowly.
I don't know if he intends it slowly. I suspect he does.
The zip travels up my spine one careful inch at a time and I am aware of every millimeter of his hands' proximity, the warmth radiating off his palms without contact, the slight shift of air when his fingers move.
My breath has gone shallow. I watch my own chest in the mirror, the give and take of it, trying to keep it even.
His eyes find mine in the reflection.
I don't look away. I can't, somehow.
My anger is diluting into something else entirely.
We just look at each other in the mirror while his hands work the zipper up and the room is completely silent. My heart is going at a speed that is genuinely inappropriate for a woman who is simply getting dressed.
“You’re not breathing,” he says, his voice a low rumble that vibrates through the air between us.
“I am!” I am not.
“Breathe, little Gia. Or you’ll faint.” He teases with such a straight face that I have to think about it twice.
I force air into my lungs. It shudders on the way in. The zipper passes the midpoint, the slide of it a slow, sensual invasion. My skin prickles, anticipating a touch that doesn’t come. He’s so careful. So infuriatingly, deliberately careful.
“There,” he murmurs. It glides the last few inches easily. His hands settle at the top, his fingertips so close to the nape of my neck I can feel the warmth of them like a brand. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?”
His breath is near my hair. I can see his jaw in the mirror, the hard line of it, the muscle working once at the hinge.
Neither of us moves.
The ache between my legs is a steady, insistent throb. I am so wet I can feel it and I am standing in an evening gown in front of a mirror with this man's hands at my back and his eyes in mine and I have completely run out of useful thoughts.
He leans forward.
His lips touch the side of my neck and I gasp before I can stop myself.
He straightens. Steps back. "You're testing my restraint, little Gia."
I glare at him.
I say nothing.
“Meet me downstairs in a minute.” And then he’s gone, back through the dressing room door, and I stand in front of the mirror in the dress he chose with his kiss still sitting on my neck and my thighs pressed together and my hands finding the edge of the vanity.
My reflection looks back at me. Hair done, dress fastened, cheeks carrying color I didn't put there.
I look like a woman on the verge of doing something she absolutely cannot do.
Pull yourself together, I tell myself. You have an event to attend, a father waiting for information and a sister who needs you to hold this together.
I look at the dress one more time.
It fits perfectly. Of course, it does.
"I hate him," I say to my reflection, with feeling.
My reflection does not look entirely convinced.