13. — her body.
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Staten Island, New York
Salvatore, Gallo Estate
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“I made an appointment.”
Those words played on repeat in Salvatore’s mind as he walked the halls of his home. He had a direction in mind, and a purpose to get there when the destination did arrive, but he took slow steps to delay what he believed to be the inevitable.
Behind him, Stella padded along, indifferent but still sharp-eyed. How a cat’s face could serve such attitude while her eyes read a person’s soul never made sense to him. It also soothed Sal for reasons he did not understand
She brought him back. From a lot.
“I made an appointment.”
Stella had been perched on one of four large posts that made up Salvatore’s king-sized bed when Carina woke him up the day before with those words.
She’d stood at the entry of her stairs that led to his private quarters, and she hammered nails with words into the coffin between them.
Then promptly left after explaining when the appointment would be, as if she had been offering him wine and cheese.
Today, apparently. The appointment was for today.
The cat had been following him ever since.
“I’m going,” he told Stella, “okay? I’m asking. I’m doing it.”
Stella continued her stroll behind him.
He came upon the opened doors of Carina’s master suite but a cursory glance inside gave him no clue to her whereabouts.
Her white mountain of a bed made up from a dozen pillows and three different blankets sat unmade.
This place meant more to her than all the magazine covers featuring her face that she’d hung along her reading nook wall.
He built this for her, two years into their marriage.
A spot where she could just be, and it didn’t hold memories of a time before her in that house.
He wanted it for her. To have that.
He’d known it back then. He’d known he loved her then.
And it just killed him.
“Rina?” Sal called in, using a nickname he rarely did anymore.
It had been popular in her youth, but it stemmed from the lights and glamor of her survival.
He still held it inside, fondly, only bringing it out when the two needed to meld what used to be and what was now together. It always hurt doing it.
She’d been a different woman back then. Not even she knew how much but so had he.
He’d been so different, too, and neither of them could be a fraction of who they were now without the other.
A far harder truth to settle the score between them when it also meant facing a much bigger picture they’d been painting together for years.
He called again to nothing, but Salvatore headed deeper into the room. Sissy said Carina had been here not long ago, readying for tomorrow’s events.
Stella didn’t cross the threshold.
“Now you stop,” he muttered back at the cat.
She yawned, canines showing prominently, and totally unbothered. Damn thing.
He eventually found Carina in the bottom floor of her closet; low jazz curled around the room from the many built-in speakers overhead.
As she laid a second silk gown onto the Calcutta marble island, pink in color, next to the soft blue one, both with matching capes, he didn’t wonder anymore why she hadn’t heard him.
Carina stood back, surveying the two and the coordinating accessories, including shoes and jewelry.
Salvatore tried to make his steps heard as he walked in as not to startle her, saying, “Hey, could we talk?”
“Music off,” she ordered the smart system.
The jazz stopped.
She didn’t even flinch at his unexpected arrival.
In fact, she tossed him a small shrug over her shoulder before going right back to her previous task as if he hadn’t bothered her in the first place.
“Do you think gold or white gold jewelry for both, or do you think she can have the gold, and I’ll take the white? I mean, with the blue for me...”
“I guess I didn’t have to worry about scaring you, huh?”
Her brow dipped as she faced him again. “What?”
“Your mind is elsewhere, that’s all.”
Carina shook her head. “You were trying not to scare me by what, walking up behind me like an elephant?”
“You didn’t know I was there; it’s nothing.”
Her face said it was something.
Salvatore chuckled. “I know you like the white gold, Rina. And gold is better for pink, which you’ve said a thousand times before. I’m going to go with what you’ve taught me. I will always choose what I know you really want just to make you happy. Let’s not pretend differently.”
“No babe, today?” she asked him. “Darling, even?”
He sighed. “I can’t win with you, can I?”
She said nothing.
“It’s fine,” he told her, “I deserve that and more. I do, so let me have it. Just keep throwing it at me all day, every day, and I’ll stand here and fucking take it like I should.”
The two stared one another down for a good while. Neither said a word, their gazes locked with three feet of space between them and whole world of hurt pulsating there like a living, breathing thing.
Then, her Gucci heel hit the floor in a stomp.
“You are literally—literally, literally, literally,” she said firmer each time, her palm smacking the top of the marble island to match, “the only man in my life, ever, who can walk up behind me and say boo, and it wouldn’t affect me a bit. Do you know that?”
He blinked. “I—”
“Just you,” she stated, turning on him fully, a tear tracking down her cheek. “You, Salvatore, are the only man I have felt safe with. I have never, not once, thought you would hurt me. In any way. Ever. Not really.”
“We’ve done a lot of hurting between us, Carina. Don’t change history now.”
“What, the fighting? How awful I was to a child that only needed love? The name calling? Or maybe you mean the handful of other men I let fuck me over the years? I bet you none of that, and all of it put together, didn’t hurt either of us the way you hurt me in our kitchen while I stood there pregnant with your baby.
Tell me those things hurt you more! Please, tell me. ”
He couldn’t.
She nodded, waving at him. “Exactly. And whatever that felt like for you, magnify it by a thousand and stuff it all inside of me along with everything else that’s already killing me here.
And I believed our whole marriage that you would never do to me what other people have.
I believed it the moment you met me at the end of the alter. ”
He rubbed at his cheek, still watching her.
Carina didn’t let up, another tear falling in the meantime. “But didn’t you just do exactly that? In a way, didn’t you just weaponize my trauma against me to hurt me? Like a monster would, Salvatore. You were a fucking mon—”
“I am, and I’m sorry.”
That, at its core, was the truth.
He couldn’t justify it. He would not try to explain the things he said or why he’d said them.
Even a possible relapse, which he had been so close to, couldn’t make right how he had treated her.
None of it excused his behavior, so he wouldn’t use it to.
He simply needed her to know he understood that, and it would never happen again.
“I was wrong, I will always be wrong for saying those things to you,” he said, playing with his wedding band while she cried and tried to hide it with quick swipes of her hands. “I know that, and I’m so sorry. And you will never hear anything like that from me again.”
She cried even harder, openly doing so now, and staring at the crystal chandelier overhead as her hand slapped her jean-covered thigh.
“And see, I know you are. You don’t even apologize to God anymore for the things you do.
I know you mean it, because between the two of us, we know who does the monstrous things. We know, Sal.”
“Hey, don’t.”
He stepped forward. She put that hand up fast.
“Don’t you dare, please. I just...I can’t. I cannot have you touching me, okay,” she muttered thickly.
Salvatore froze on the spot, and his hand remained outstretched for hers. “I just want to tell you—”
“If you touch me, I’m not going to keep being mad at you.
If you tell me that it’s okay and you’re sorry while you’re holding me and look at me the way you always have, then it will be.
And it shouldn’t be that fucking easy for you.
It’s never that easy for me, is it? Shouldn’t you have to do the same?
God knows you made me pay in years sometimes, Sal.
There were years when you wouldn’t even touch me.
I earned you back every fucking time. You know what I forgot to do over the last few days? ”
His hand dropped to his side, trembling. “No, what?”
“Count. I don’t know how many days it’s been, I know it’s only a few more than—”
“Stop.”
He was a monster. Completely.
Her fingers found home clenching into his silk button-down shirt when he rushed her.
Fuck all that noise about not touching or holding her, because that wasn’t really what she wanted or needed.
Salvatore knew this woman, he loved her.
He couldn’t not give her exactly what she was desperately screaming out for: him.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he chanted alongside soft kisses to her damp cheeks. The salt of her tears danced across his lips each time. “That doesn’t matter—that’s never gonna matter between us again, do you hear me? I promise, Carina.”
Somehow, she just cried harder. He kissed her forehead, holding her close in hopes she would calm. She didn’t.
“You don’t even know why I did it to you,” she said, words broken and soft with her tears. “The one in Milan, and then down in Haiti. In Chicago...”
He squeezed her tighter, never moving an inch. “It doesn’t matter. They didn’t matter.”
Her body shook against him. The tears continued.
“Just think about it, Sal,” she practically begged.