19. Mel #2
When he’s gone, I raise an eyebrow. “Spoken for?”
“Was I wrong?” But there’s an edge under it, a real one, and his hand has found the small of my back and flattened there, warm and possessive in a way that shoots straight down my spine.
“You’re jealous,” I say, delighted and appalled.
“I spent two years imagining you’d built a whole life without me. A husband. Someone at your table.” His voice drops. “Turns out imagining it and watching a man in a bolo tie ask you to dance are very different experiences, and I didn’t care for the second one.”
“Tucker’s harmless.”
“Tucker can keep his dances.” He steers me pointedly away from the cider line, and I let him, and I absolutely don’t tell him that the naked possessiveness in his face just did more for me than any flowers ever could.
“There’s a game over there,” Santino says a moment later, nodding toward one of the stalls, jaw still tight, a muscle ticking. “You throw darts at balloons.”
“I’m terrible at darts.”
“I’m not.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m walking through the festival carrying a stuffed bear the size of a small child. It’s bright purple with a ridiculous bow tie, and Santino won it on his first try.
“You didn’t have to get the biggest one,” I say.
“You deserve the biggest one.”
“It’s a carnival prize.”
“It’s the best carnival prize. Look at his little bow tie.”
I look at the bear. The bear stares back with its plastic eyes, deeply judgment-free.
“Fine,” I admit. “The bow tie is pretty cute.”
Santino’s smile could light up the whole festival.
We dance, eventually. The fiddle band plays a slow one, and he pulls me onto the makeshift dance floor, and we’re both terrible at it, stepping on each other’s feet, turning the wrong direction, laughing at our own incompetence.
“You’re worse than I remember,” I tell him.
“I’m out of practice.”
“You were never in practice. You’ve always been terrible at dancing.”
“I had other strengths.”
“Name one.”
His hand tightens on my waist. His eyes go dark.
“I could remind you.”
The air between us shifts. Charges.
“Dancing,” I say quickly. “We’re dancing. This is dancing.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
But my heart is hammering, and he knows it.
***
Later, we wander to the edge of the grounds.
The festival noise fades behind us, replaced by cricket song and the whisper of wind. The sunflower field stretches out in the moonlight, rows upon rows of stalks, some still blooming, some bowing under the weight of their heavy heads.
Santino walks ahead a few steps, then stops.
I catch up to him. Follow his gaze down to his chest.
His collar is open. A few buttons undone in the warmth of the evening. And through the gap, I can see ink.
Not the tattoos I know. New ink.
“What is that?” I ask.
He goes quiet.
“Santino. What is that?”
Slowly, he reaches up. Undoes two more buttons. Opens his shirt.
My lake.
Our lake.
It’s tattooed across his heart, the waterfall, the water, the cave behind it. Rendered in black and gray with the kind of detail that must have taken hours. And worked into the rocks at the bottom, flowing with the water, woven through the whole design -
My name.
Melanie.
“A year old,” he says quietly. “I got it after the first year of searching. When I still didn’t know if I’d ever find you.”
I stare at the tattoo. At the cascade of water, the shape of the cave, the place where we were happy.
“Why?”
“Because I couldn’t go back there without you. So I put it where I could see it every day.” He looks down at his own chest. “To remind myself what I was looking for.”
I break open.
I’m on my toes before I know I’m moving. My hands find his face, pull him down, and then I’m kissing him.
He makes a sound, a groan, deep and desperate, and kisses me back like a dam failing. His arms come around me, lift me, and we’re stumbling into the sunflowers, stalks parting around us, the festival a distant glow through the leaves.
“Mel-” He pulls back, breathing hard. “We don’t have to-”
“I want to.”
“Are you sure?”
I answer by kissing him again. Harder. Deeper.
He lays me down on the earth, his shirt spread beneath me, the sunflowers rising around us like walls, and there’s a voice in the back of my head, small, sensible, two years old, saying we shouldn’t do this, not here, not yet, not with everything still unresolved between us.
I tell the voice to go to hell.
“I’ve missed you,” he breathes against my throat. “Every second. Every day.”
“Show me,” I say. “Stop talking and show me.”
He shoves my dress up to my waist and drags my underwear down my legs and I should be embarrassed, a field, the festival glowing two hundred yards off, anyone could wander, but the cool night air hits me and I’m already soaked, already aching, and when his hand slides between my thighs and finds exactly how wet I am, he makes a sound like he’s been gut-punched.
“Fuck, Mel.” His forehead drops to my collarbone. “You’re - you did this just from kissing me?”
“Shut up.”
“You’re dripping.”
“I hate you.”
“You’re clenching around nothing.” He drags two fingers through me, slow, gathering the wet, and I hear how obscene it sounds and it only makes it worse, makes my hips chase his hand. “Look at you. Falling apart and I’ve barely touched you.”
He pushes those two fingers into me and curls them and I have to slam my own hand over my mouth to keep from screaming across the whole county.
He works me open like he’s got all night, like he’s cataloguing every sound, and I’m rocking down onto his hand shamelessly, past caring, that sensible little voice long since drowned.
“Santino - I need-” I get his belt open, shove his jeans down over his hips, and get my hand around him, and God, I forgot, I forgot how much of him there is, hot and heavy and already leaking against my palm. I stroke him once, base to tip, and he shudders full-body.
“Do that again and this is over before it starts,” he grits out.
“Then do something about it.”
He catches both my wrists in one of his enormous hands and pins them above my head in the dirt, and the loss of control should terrify me and instead it lights me up like a struck match.
“I love you,” he says, right into my mouth. “I need you to hear it while I’m about to - I love you, and I never stopped, not for one day-”
He notches himself against me and drives in.
No slow, no careful. One long brutal stroke that splits me open and punches the air out of my lungs, and I arch clean off the ground, and he catches my hip and holds me there, buried to the hilt, both of us shaking.
“Oh my God-”
“I know.” It comes out of him half-strangled.
“I know. You feel-” He can’t finish it. His jaw is locked, a vein standing out in his throat, holding himself still inside me by what looks like sheer violence of will.
“Every night for two years I dreamed about this and I got it wrong every time. You’re better than the memory. You’re always better than the memory.”
Then he moves, and thought stops.
He fucks me into the earth beneath the sunflowers, deep and relentless, one hand still pinning my wrists and the other hitching my leg up higher so he can get impossibly deeper, and every drive drags against the place inside me that makes the stars smear overhead.
I’m making sounds I don’t recognize. I’m begging, harder, there, please, his name over and over like it’s the only word I know.
“There it is,” he pants against my ear. “God, listen to you. You’ve never once been quiet for me and I’ve missed it like a limb-”
“Santino-”
“I’ve got you.” He drops a hand between us, finds my clit slick and swollen, works it in circles that keep exact time with the snap of his hips. “Let me feel it. I want you falling apart on me right here in the dirt where anyone could walk up. Two years I earned this. Give it to me-”
The filth in his voice is what does it.
When it hits it’s not a wave, it’s a snap, the coil going all at once so hard my vision whites at the edges, and I lock around him and he loses it, releases my wrists to fist both hands in my hair and drink the sound straight out of my mouth, groaning my name, my actual name, as he empties into me while I’m still fluttering and greedy around him.
We come apart tangled on his ruined shirt in the dirt, filthy and breathless and grinning like fools.
The sunflowers whisper around us.
Eventually, I find my voice.
“This changes nothing.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me with that dark, satisfied gaze.
“Capito, amore.” I understand, love.
His grin says otherwise.
So does mine, but only to the sunflowers.