13. — her body. #2
He didn’t want to. Her infidelity had been such a sore spot between them that the best he’d ever been able to do was just live with it until he could see past it to see her again.
It was almost like she couldn’t control it at first when it all began, and every time, she came home and told him.
Every single time. The last one, a little over four years ago, had been the worst.
“Babe, I don’t know what you want from me here.”
She shook her head against his throat. “Every time I ever fucked another man, I felt so dirty. I didn’t want you to see me like that, so I’d go and do something I thought would hurt you worse, so I could be disgusting from that, and not—”
“Giorgio,” Salvatore realized aloud.
The low wail that fell from Carina hurt his heart.
She didn’t have to say it, then. He understood implicitly. Her affairs usually followed family events or things where she’d be put in the same room with her adopted father. They all paid a price, in different ways, and they all put on the mask when the time came.
“I hated that it felt like when you looked at me beside him, me smiling while people took pictures, you saw that,” she whispered, so quietly he strained to hear.
“It’s all I ever thought about. Were you seeing what he did to me?
What he’d done? I didn’t want you to see that. It all made me feel so—”
“I only ever saw you,” he interjected so she wouldn’t say that terrible, wrong word about herself again while feeling her grip on his shirt tighten. “I see you.”
Salvatore pulled Carina back with a hand at her jaw so that she couldn’t look away. Nothing else existed as emeralds met dark earth in their stares.
“But it didn’t feel—”
“That doesn’t matter anymore. None of that will ever matter from this moment forward. I love you.”
Her words silenced instantly. The trembling stopped. Little breaths burst like pants from between her parted lips, and she never looked away.
“You’ve never said that and meant it. You don’t mean that,” she whispered brokenly.
His tears started falling, too.
One. And then another.
Never had he cried in front of this woman. Years spent crying alone on shower floors and in dark, empty beds before she came along and long after killed the ability to feel just like pills numbed the pain.
“I do love you,” he mumbled through quivering lips.
“And I’m really fucking sorry that I couldn’t be the man you needed me to be ten years ago and tell you it then.
I had to build you a twenty-million-dollar closet and let you scream at me every time we were in a room together just so you wouldn’t run away from me again instead.
I’m sorry that I am fucking scared of what it means to love yet another person that God could take away from me.
But I do love you, and I am not sorry for that. ”
Carina blinked; another tear fell. Her chest heaved hard on a hiccup.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated again, “for a lot. But not that.”
It took another ten seconds.
Her swallow was audible.
“Okay,” she eventually said.
“W-what?” he stammered.
She literally grabbed his arm to use the sleeve of his shirt to wipe her face. Blinking up at him after while he eyed damp silk, confused, she cleared her throat.
Carina kissed the soft spot under his ear, saying at the same time, “You are the most beautiful man I have ever known, and I love you, too.”
As she stepped back, he tried to make sense of her returning right back to the island to continue the perusal of the set up for tomorrow.
“That’s it?” he asked, almost amused.
“You knew I loved you every day from the moment I said I do. And you know why, too. I’ve already told you.”
You saved me. Her voice, slightly younger then, still echoed in his memories.
“The appointment went well,” she added, shooting him a small smile over her shoulder. “Seven weeks tomorrow. I saw the flutter. Like the heart, you know?”
He immediately found a chair.
And sat right down.
“The appointment,” he echoed.
He’d really thought...
He didn’t ask—
Carina turned slowly, her arms folding. He looked up at her and knew without her needing to say it that she understood their miscommunication regarding the pregnancy. The only communication they had about it since he found out.
“I’d have never done that to you,” she told him then.
Salvatore clasped his hands together, chewing on his bottom lip until he could speak. “I wasn’t gonna do to you what he did, Carina. I wasn’t gonna tell you a fucking thing, but I—”
“You wanted me to keep it.”
He nodded once.
Hell, she asked.
“I can’t even fucking imagine what life is going to look like when I’m a seventy-year-old father to a sixteen-year-old, but I think about them everyday. Whoever they’re going to be; I thought about them. But I was not going to say a thing unless you did.”
“And whatever my choice was mine, regardless,” she finished for him.
“I am not him.”
“I know, baby.”
Salvatore chewed again, tasting blood. “So, seven weeks?”
“I already know the names, boy and girl. You will not change them, for the record.”
“Girl?” he asked.
Her eyes glittered. “Dove.”
She’d always loved that name.
“And a boy?”
“SJ, but you know what for. You’re not really freaked out about the age thing, are you?” she asked. “Although, to be fair, I cried today when they called it a geriatric pregnancy. I’m thirty-seven and a half. Please. So, there’s that. Fun.”
He laughed.
It felt crazy good.
“They also said, straight up, it’ll be a caesarean. You know why. You’re not really worried about your age, seriously?”
“Yeah, I am worried about what the road looks like in twenty years, for everybody,” he eventually said knowing she wouldn’t let it go.
She cocked her head sideways, rolling pretty eyes that had cleared of tears. “Samuel L. Jackson, and Liam Neeson. Mmm, who else? Oh, George. You know what watching him always does to me.”
Sal smirked. “Clooney? Woman, I’ll have almost ten years on—”
“Fine wine, husband. That’s what you are. And if you’re dead before I start looking like rotten fruit, that’ll be a cold day in hell. Because guess what, you’re keeping me until I’m at least eighty.”
He couldn’t even do the math on that one, he laughed so hard.
“And we better be still fucking like rabbits,” she added pointedly, “or you’ll be fighting me for a whole different reason every damn day.”
Jesus Christ, his side hurt.
“I love you,” he told her again, just because it didn’t ache as much as those initial times. “You don’t even know how much.”
“Yeah, I do. Truth is, I probably always did every time I caught you looking at me. It was just going to hurt a lot for you to say it.”
Something triggered in his mind, and his laughter faded away quickly.
Carina didn’t miss the change. “What is it?”
“You know tomorrow...who’s going to be here.”
The boss, he meant.
He didn’t spell it out.
Carina proved he didn’t need to. “I know, but I see you now, too, Sal.”
“I don’t feel safe in a room with him, either. I hope you know that.”
“Salvatore, you pay thirty million dollars a year for a security team that rivals the President’s.
You think I don’t know what he’s done to you, too?
I know the details, yes, but I know, too.
I sleep in your bed, too. I hear your nightmares, too.
I’ve been to their graves, too. Every dollar you spend on our well-being probably feels like another inch between your head and his bullet, doesn’t it? ”
He couldn’t deny it.
He couldn’t even tell her that she didn’t know how it felt to live through what that man could do to a person one choice, or one funeral, at a time. Because she did know.
Just differently.
“I still wished you killed him that day,” she said, the words barely above a breath. They never spoke about that day. The day it all changed for the two of them a long time ago.
He didn’t want to talk about it now, either.
“I might still,” he admitted.
“How many more reasons do you need?” she asked him.
···
The next day...
Sissy and Larkin strolled into the kitchen while a few of his guys straggled behind. Salvatore passed the group a nod as they came to stand at an attention of sorts while he finished affixing the cufflinks on his suit jacket.
Next to him, Carina adjusted the cape of Frankie’s dress where it connected at the shoulders. Frankie wore hers at her back, pink, that way while Carina opted to drape the cape of hers, in blue, across the front of her chest and back down her shoulders like a shawl.
“An hour to go-time,” he said to the quiet room.
“Everybody knows the plan, boss man,” Larkin replied.
“And the caterer is finishing up now setting the tables,” Sissy added.
The ones in the back stayed silent.
“There,” Carina stated, smiling brilliantly as she stepped back from Frankie. “You are not wearing it at the front. Why are you trying to hide that body, baby? Look at you.”
Salvatore cleared his throat and jerked his head toward the group. “Okay, get lost. Thank you, everybody. Regroup at the end, all right?”
Nods answered back.
Larkin lagged to say, “Nico’s a minute or so out, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
Another last-minute detail to handle.
“I’m not trying to hide it,” Frankie muttered after the kitchen emptied out, “but it hung a little looser when you first had me try it on.”
“Yeah, months ago. When you were ten or more pounds under weight and probably weren’t even getting your period given how hard you were exercising on top of soccer,” Carina replied, although not meanly.
“You don’t know that I wasn’t getting my period.”
“Were you?” Carina demanded.
Frankie didn’t answer.
“Are you now?” Carina questioned further.
At that one, Frankie admitted, “Not yet.”
Salvatore found Carina’s stare but said nothing. This had happened before, between the two of them dealing with their respective eating disorders. He’d been at the doctor appointments. It would come back, but their bodies kept the score. It took time.