15. Mel
— ? —
Mel
I’m on the porch with my coffee, fully intending to supervise from a safe and unhelpful distance, when Gerald comes around the barn at a dead run and headbutts him clean off his feet into the dirt.
“DOES THIS THING HAVE A GRUDGE?” Santino shouts, scrambling up, backing toward the fence.
“I told you! He doesn’t like men!”
“HE LIKED ME FINE YESTERDAY!”
“He headbutted you yesterday!”
“THAT WAS LIKING?”
Gerald lowers his head for a second pass, thinks better of it, and wanders off to menace the chickens.
Santino stands there breathing hard, hoodie already streaked with dirt and what I’m choosing not to identify as goat drool, and I’m not proud of how hard I laugh.
Actually, that’s a lie. I’m extremely proud.
It’s the best entertainment I’ve had in months.
“Welcome to the orchard,” I tell him.
He doesn’t quit, that’s what I don’t expect.
He picks himself up, asks what he’s supposed to do next, and goes to set up the harvesting ladder against one of the old trees, the temperamental one, the one you have to brace at exactly the right angle or it slides.
Nobody warns him. I watch him lean it wrong from the porch and I don’t say a word, and Hattie, rocking beside me with the serenity of a woman watching her favorite show, doesn’t either.
The ladder slides. He goes down in a crash of rungs and apples and Italian I’m glad the twins aren’t awake to hear, and comes up with leaves in his hair, a welt blooming on his cheekbone, and a look of pure murder.
“Ladder’s tricky,” Hattie offers, from her chair, not moving.
“I noticed.”
“Gotta brace it different for the old trees.”
“Would have been useful to know before.”
Hattie shrugs. “More fun this way.”
I bite the inside of my cheek until it hurts.
By ten the fence line has an audience. Word travels in Wisteria at the speed of gossip, which is faster than light, and there are people leaning on the rail who have absolutely no business at an apple orchard on a Tuesday morning.
“Is that the billionaire?” Dolores stage-whispers to Martha.
“Italian,” Martha whispers back. “Look at those tattoos.”
“I’m looking at that backside.”
“Martha.”
“I’m seventy-four. I’m allowed to look.”
Santino, to his credit, either doesn’t hear or pretends not to. He walks up to the ancient cider press like a man defusing a device, reads the hand-lettered instructions Hattie taped there last summer, sets his jaw, and pulls the lever.
The press makes a sound like a dying elephant and blows pulped apple across him from collar to boots.
The fence line howls. Someone actually applauds.
And I watch Santino Bianchi, a man who used to fly private, who has never in his life been laughed at by people who weren’t afraid of him, stand there dripping cider mash while an entire town enjoys the show.
His jaw works. His hands clench at his sides.
I’ve seen this exact moment go a hundred ways with the man I married, and every one of them ended in ice.
He wipes the pulp out of his eyes.
“What did I do wrong?” he asks. No sarcasm. Nothing but a man who wants to learn.
Hattie materializes at his elbow, she does that, and points at the safety catch he missed. He releases it. Pulls the lever again. The press groans and the juice runs clear, and a thing in me tips a degree I don’t have a name for.
“Better,” Hattie allows.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t get cocky. You still smell like fermented failure.”
And he laughs.
It’s nothing like the polite laugh, nothing like the careful boardroom one he wore at his mother’s table like a good suit.
This one comes out of him raw and startled, like it got past a guard he forgot to post, and it hits me somewhere I’ve had bricked over for two years.
I nearly drop the basket I’m holding. He looks up and catches me watching, and I look away so fast I crick my own neck.
This is the problem with him now, and it arrives sometime around the third day and doesn’t leave.
He doesn’t quit. Every morning at six he’s there, ruined work boots, dirt-streaked hoodie, that stubborn set to his shoulders, and every mistake, he makes exactly once.
By the end of the week he’s figured out the goat, mastered the ladder, and runs the cider press like he was born to it.
And I’ve started to notice things I don’t want to notice.
Because here is what happens to a man who spends two years turning grief into muscle and then hauls hay for a living: he gets distracting.
It’s the forearms, specifically, the way he shoves his sleeves to the elbow when the sun climbs, the vein that stands up down the inside of the left one when he grips the pitchfork, which I have caught myself tracking across an entire orchard like a lunatic.
It’s his throat when he tips a water jug back and drinks in that gulping way, the tendon that works, so I have to look at the ground and think hard about spreadsheets.
It’s the hipbones, the jeans sit low now, and when he stretches to test a high branch his shirt rides up and there’s a stripe of gold skin and the sharp cut of bone above the denim, and low in my stomach a muscle clenches around nothing, hot and immediate and entirely without my permission.
My body hasn’t read the extensive list of reasons this is a terrible idea.
When he lifts hay bales two at a time, slow, like he knows I’m watching even when I swear I’m not, my mouth goes dry.
Tongue-to-the-roof dry. My thighs press together and I have to make them stop.
I’m a grown woman with two children and a payroll to run and a restraining order’s worth of reasons, standing in an apple orchard getting wet watching a man stack hay, and I hate every second of it, and I don’t stop looking.
“He’s pretty,” Dolores says, appearing at my shoulder like a hex.
I jump. “Jesus, Dolores.”
“For a rich city boy. And he looks at you like you hung the moon.” She pats my arm before I can deny anything. “Not at everyone, honey. Just you. It’s a little intense, honestly. Kind of romantic, kind of scary.” Then she’s gone, leaving me with that, which is worse than if she’d stayed.
Hattie’s contribution to all this is the shotgun.
Every time Santino’s in view, she finds a reason to be on the porch cleaning it.
Not aiming it. Not threatening. Just, cleaning, methodically, while staring at him like a woman pricing a coffin.
The first time he noticed, he stopped dead, met her eyes across the whole yard, and gave her a single respectful nod.
She didn’t nod back. But she didn’t shoot him either, which she informs me she considers a generous concession.
“He’s got manners,” she admits over coffee. “Doesn’t push. Doesn’t demand. Shows up and works.”
“Is that enough?”
“Nothing’s ever enough.” She sips. “But it’s a start.”
The twins split down the middle over him, and it drives me insane.
Leo imprints on sight, trails him between the trees on his stubby legs, learns to holler “Santi UP” with both arms out, gets lifted every single time like he’s made of glass and holy besides.
Junie, my careful one, freezes him out completely.
Watches him from across every room with my exact green eyes, turns away when he comes close, scoots deliberately farther when he sits down.
“She doesn’t like me,” he says on the sixth day, and he sounds so genuinely wrecked about it that I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
“She’s cautious,” I tell him. “She gets that from me.”
“Leo isn’t.”
“Leo would befriend a serial killer if he smiled right. He gets that from-” I stop.
His eyes go soft. “From me.”
I don’t confirm it. I don’t deny it either. That’s the problem with all of it, every day I mean to hold the line, and every day the line moves a little, and he never once pushes it. He just keeps showing up dirty and patient and inconveniently beautiful, and lets me move it myself.
***
It’s dusk at the end of that first week when I find him in the horse stalls.
I didn’t mean to come looking. I was checking the feed supply, that’s all, making sure we have enough for the week. But I hear his voice before I see him, low and gentle, murmuring in Italian, and I pause in the doorway.
He’s with Biscuit, the oldest mare. She’s temperamental on the best days, prone to biting strangers and pinning her ears at anyone who moves too fast. But right now she’s got her head lowered, and Santino is stroking her neck with slow, careful movements, and he’s talking to her like she’s a person.
“Brava ragazza,” he’s saying. “Sei così bella. Così gentile.”
Good girl. You’re so beautiful. So gentle.
And then, softer, not meant for anyone: “Non so come farmi perdonare. Ma imparerò. Anche se mi ci vuole tutta la vita.”
I don’t know how to make her forgive me. But I’ll learn. Even if it takes my whole life.
He isn’t talking about the horse.
The answer rises in my throat before I can stop it, a whole sentence, in his language, in mine, some furious tender thing I don’t even get to choose, and I actually open my mouth, one heartbeat from three years of secret coming out all at once in the dark of a horse stall.
I catch it behind my teeth at the last possible second. Swallow it whole. My pulse is slamming.
Because the day he learns I understood every word his family ever said over my head is a bomb, and I’m not detonating it here, not now, not by accident over a mare named Biscuit. That’s mine to spend when I choose. Not a slip.
I watch his hands move, those big hands with their new calluses and fading cuts from work he never used to do, and a knot behind my ribs comes loose anyway.
He loves the horses. Obviously, openly, in a way he’s careful to hide around people. Like they’re the first uncomplicated thing he’s touched in years. Like they don’t know about any of it, the family, the money, the wife who ran away in the middle of the night.
Biscuit nickers softly. Santino laughs, that same raw, startled sound from the cider press, and presses his forehead against her neck.
My feet carry me forward without asking.
“Her name’s Biscuit,” I say, out loud, apparently. “She’s twenty-three. Usually bites strangers.”
Santino turns. His face opens when he sees me, surprise, hope, that careful softening he gets whenever I voluntarily come close.
“She hasn’t bitten me yet.”
“Give it time.”
“Biscuit.” He tests the name. “That’s…”
“Hattie’s granddaughter named her. She was four.”
“Ah.” He smiles. A real one. “And the others?”
I shouldn’t do this. I should turn around and walk away and hold the careful distance I’ve kept all week.
But I don’t.
“The bay gelding is Thunderstorm. The gray mare is Duchess. The paint is Sir Chomps-a-Lot, and before you ask, yes, he bites.” I move closer, stop at the next stall. “The pony’s name is Kevin.”
“Kevin?”
“Same granddaughter. She was six by then.”
He laughs again. I’m collecting these laughs like a problem, storing them somewhere I can’t access later.
Biscuit shifts, and the movement puts me off balance on the uneven stall floor, and Santino’s hand comes up automatically to steady me, a palm at my waist, warm through my shirt, and neither of us moves.
The barn goes very quiet. Just the shift of hooves in straw, the last of the light going amber through the slats, and the sudden loud fact of how close we’re standing.
His thumb moves once against my side, barely, like he can’t help it.
I can feel the heat coming off him. I can see the exact moment his eyes drop to my mouth, and my whole body leans in before my brain gets a vote, three years of muscle memory, my hand already lifting toward his chest -
He steps back.
Gently. Deliberately. His hand falls away from my waist, and he puts a full foot of space between us, and I stand there blinking like someone flipped a light on.
“Not like this,” he says, low and rough.
“A horse pushed you into me and you got caught off guard. That doesn’t count.
” He swallows hard, and I can see what it costs him, can see he wants to close that distance more than he wants to breathe.
“When you kiss me again - if you kiss me again - I need it to be because you decided to. Not because I got lucky with the timing.”
And then he clears his throat, steps around me, and goes back to brushing down the mare like he didn’t just leave me standing there vibrating out of my skin.
“Thank you,” he adds, not looking at me. “For telling me their names.”
“It’s just names.”
“No.” His voice is quiet. “It’s more than that.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.
I turn and walk back to the house on legs that don’t feel entirely steady, and I absolutely don’t think about the press of his palm at my waist, or the way he pulled back, or how badly, how furiously, how inconveniently, I wanted him not to.
Damn him. He’s good at this now.
***
The hoodie is hanging on the fence post where he left it after the afternoon’s work, and I’m walking past, and it’s getting cold, and I grab it before I can think about what grabbing it means.
It’s enormous on me, sleeves past my hands, hem to mid-thigh, and it smells like cedar and sweat and, underneath, just him.
I wear it inside. I eat dinner in it. I put the twins to bed in it.
And then I lie in my own bed at ten at night still wearing it, hating exactly how much comfort there is in the weight of it.
This is pathetic. I’m pathetic.
I grab my phone. I don’t let myself think about it. His number is still there, I never deleted it, never could, and I call.
It rings once.
I hang up.
Oh my God. Oh my God, what did I just do. I throw the phone across the bed like it’s live and my heart is slamming in my throat, because what was I thinking, what would I even have said -
The phone buzzes.
I stare at it. It buzzes again. With shaking hands I pick it up.
still awake. still only yours. keep the hoodie.
I read it three times. Four. I lie in the dark with the phone against my chest and his hoodie wrapped around me like armor and his three words burned behind my eyes.
Still only yours.
I’m absolutely furious at how good he’s gotten at this.