25. Mel
— ? —
Mel
I wake up in pieces.
First: warmth. A body curled around mine, heavy and solid, his nose buried in my hair and his arm slung across my waist like he’s afraid I’ll float away.
Second: light. Morning sun, pale and soft through the curtains, painting golden stripes across the quilt that’s tangled around our legs.
Third: him.
Santino shifts against me, still more asleep than awake, and makes a low humming sound that vibrates through my spine. His hand flexes on my hip, slides lower, finds the curve where thigh meets ass and just… rests there.
“Morning,” he mumbles into my neck.
“Barely.”
“What time is it?”
“Early. Twins aren’t up yet.”
His hand slides lower. Fingers trace the edge of my underwear, I put it back on at some point, muscle memory from eighteen months of midnight feedings and toddler invasions.
“Shame,” he says.
“What’s a shame?”
“That you’re wearing clothes.”
I laugh, still half-asleep myself, and the motion presses me back against him. He’s hard. Of course he’s hard; it’s morning and he’s a thirty-two-year-old man and we spent last night remembering exactly how well our bodies fit together.
“I can fix that,” I offer.
“Can you.”
His fingers slip under the waistband. Find me already warm, already slick from dreams I’m only half-remembering. He makes a low, ruined sound against my shoulder.
“Mel.”
“Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop.
His fingers circle, lazy and unhurried, while his hips rock against my ass in a rhythm that’s more suggestion than demand.
We’re both still drowsy, still wrapped in that cotton-soft space between sleeping and waking, and it’s delicious, chasing pleasure while the world is quiet and the babies are sleeping and nothing is urgent except this.
“Want you,” he murmurs, palm splaying low on my belly to pull me back into him. “Like this. Sleepy and soft and already this wet for me. Christ, Mel.”
He tugs my underwear down just enough, not off, just aside, drags the head of his cock through the slick of me once, twice, until I’m pushing back and swearing at him, and then he lines himself up and slides in on a shared groan, so deep at this angle I feel it in my teeth.
“Christ, every time.” His breath stutters against my nape, his hips rolling in slow and filthy. “So tight I can’t think. Every single time you take me apart.”
“Sap.”
“Filthy sap.” He bites the top of my shoulder, unrepentant, and grinds deeper just to hear the sound I make.
He laughs against my neck, breathless and disbelieving, and starts to move.
It’s lazy. Slow. Spooning turned very awake, his chest against my back, one arm under my pillow and the other wrapped around to toy with my clit. The angle is deep and unhurried, and I can feel every inch of him on every stroke, a sweet drag that builds heat low in my belly.
“The twins,” I manage. “Could wake up-”
“Then we’ll be quiet.”
“I’m never quiet with you.”
“Then I’ll make you quiet.”
His hand covers my mouth. Not hard, just enough pressure to muffle the moan that escapes when he shifts angles and hits a devastating spot. I bite his palm and feel him shudder.
“Minx.” His thrusts speed up. “Absolutely feral.”
I grin against his hand, push back to meet him, and he curses low against the nape of my neck.
It’s messy and urgent and we’re both trying not to make noise and failing spectacularly, the headboard is thumping against the wall in a rhythm that would be mortifying if I had any brain cells left to feel mortified.
“Close,” I gasp against his palm.
“I know. I can feel you.”
His fingers work faster, his hips lose their lazy rhythm and go urgent, and when I finally tip over it’s nothing like the desperate ones. It’s slow gold spilling out from my center to my fingers and toes, a long warm unspooling I ride out with my teeth sunk into his forearm to stay quiet.
He goes a breath later, a low helpless sound muffled in my hair, pulsing into me while the sun climbs the wall.
We lie there.
Just breathing.
The sun climbs higher through the curtains, and somewhere in the distance I hear a rooster crow, probably Gerald’s nemesis from the farm next door, a territorial monster named Carl who Hattie once threatened with a shotgun.
“Shower?” Santino offers eventually.
“Together?”
“Obviously.”
***
The shower takes three times longer than showers should take.
This is entirely Santino’s fault. He’s the one who insists on soaping my back and then my front and then every curve in between, hands wandering with clear intent while I lean against the tile and pretend I’m not arching into his touch.
“We’re going to run out of hot water,” I point out.
“Worth it.”
“The twins-”
“Can wait five more minutes.”
His hand slides between my thighs, and I stop arguing.
Five minutes turns into ten. The hot water holds, miraculously. By the time we finally get out, I’m wrung out and grinning and wrapped in a towel while Santino dries his hair with an expression of deep male satisfaction.
“Don’t look so smug,” I tell him.
“I have every reason to be smug.”
“You’re impossible.”
“And you love it.”
I throw my towel at his head, and he catches it one-handed, grinning, and that’s how the morning goes: easy, ridiculous, ours.
Breakfast, by contrast, is chaos.
Leo has discovered that mashed banana makes an excellent projectile.
Junie has decided her high chair is a prison from which she must escape at all costs.
The kitchen is a disaster zone of Cheerios and sippy cups and what might be yogurt but has been on the counter long enough that I’m not entirely sure.
And I’m deliriously, unreasonably happy.
Santino is at the stove, shirtless, because apparently he just lives like that now, attempting to make scrambled eggs while Leo pelts him with fruit.
Junie has given up her escape attempts and is now staring at her father with huge green eyes, sucking on her fist like she’s contemplating his worthiness.
“Your son,” Santino says, “has disturbingly good aim.”
“He gets it from me.”
“I know. You threw a boot at my head once.”
“You deserved it.”
“I absolutely did.”
I settle into the chair across from Junie and pick up her tiny spoon, offering her a bite of oatmeal. She studies it with deep suspicion, my cautious girl, always thinking, always weighing, and finally opens her mouth.
“Look at that,” I murmur, boneless and smug. “Cooperation before coffee.”
Santino turns from the stove. His eyes catch mine across the chaos, the banana-smeared high chairs, the Cheerio minefield, the morning light turning everything gold, and his expression makes my chest ache.
I put down the spoon.
“I’m happy,” I say.
It comes out simple. Easy. Like the most obvious thing in the world.
He looks at me. Really looks.
“I’m happier,” he says.
And there it is.
Two years of aching, of anger, of missing someone so badly it felt like a piece of me had been carved out and buried somewhere I couldn’t reach.
Gone. Replaced by this, sunlight and chaos and a man looking at me like I hung the moon.
“I love you,” I tell him.
The words land in the space between us and stay there.
“I love you back,” he says. “Always have. Never stopped.”
Leo bangs his hands on his high chair tray and lets out a delighted shriek, applauding for reasons that have nothing to do with us and everything to do with his own mysterious toddler agenda.
It’s perfect.
Which is, of course, exactly when Hattie walks in.
She takes in the scene, the shirtless man, the chaos, the twins, my face which probably looks like I’ve been thoroughly debauched because I have been, and stops dead in the doorway.
“Well,” she says. “This is the part where he steals my girl back to Europe and I die alone with the goat.”
Santino laughs.
And then he turns to me, not to Hattie, but to me, and says it like he’s making a vow.
“I’d never.” His voice is steady. “I already have a house here. Bought it the week I found you, the day after you told me to settle down. I’m staying put, and I’m not moving her anywhere, ever.” He holds my eyes. “Her life is here. Our kids’ lives are here. So my life is here. Full stop.”
I cross the kitchen before I know I’m moving.
My arms go around him, and I hold on tight enough to answer everything, every fear, every doubt, every wall I built to keep him out. He holds me back just as hard, and his heart is pounding against mine, and this is it. This is everything.
Behind us, Hattie pours herself a cup of coffee.
“Fine,” she mutters. “He can stay.”
She takes a long sip.
“Probably.”
***
I corner Hattie that evening on the porch, after the twins are down, with a folder.
An actual folder. Tabbed. Color-coded. I’ve been building it in secret for three weeks, ever since a late-night ramen conversation lodged an idea under my skin that I couldn’t shake loose.
“What’s this,” Hattie says, in the tone of a woman who suspects an ambush.
“A pitch.” My heart is going like a rabbit’s. “Hear me out before you say no.”
I open it. And I lay out the thing I’ve been too scared to say out loud since I was twenty-two: I want to build.
Here. A cidery, a real one, licensed, with a tasting room in the old equipment barn we never use.
I’ve run the numbers six ways. The record apple wasn’t a fluke; it was a headline, and headlines are marketing, and I know exactly how to turn one weird giant apple into a brand people drive three counties to taste.
I’ve already found the licensing requirements, priced the equipment, mapped the first year.
“I’d finish the ag-business degree online while we build it,” I say, the words tumbling now.
“Nights, after they’re asleep. I was going to do this with my life before I ever went to Italy, Hattie.
I put it in a drawer for a man once. I’m not doing that again - not even for a good one.
” I take a breath. “I don’t want to just keep your books.
I want to grow this into a place that has my name on it too. As a partner. If you’ll have me.”
Hattie doesn’t say anything for a while.
Then she sets down her coffee, takes the folder, and looks through every single page while I try not to vibrate out of my own skin.
“Golden Apple Cidery,” she reads off my mock-up label. She’s quiet another moment. When she looks up, her eyes have gone wet. “My Rose wanted to do a thing like this. Never got the chance.”
“Hattie-”
“Partners.” She sticks out her hand, weathered and certain as a verdict. “Sixty-forty, my land, your brains, and I want my name kept small on the label because I’m old and I hate attention. And you finish that degree, or I’ll dock your share for being a quitter.” She shakes once, hard. “Deal?”
I’m crying. Of course I’m crying. “Deal.”
“Good.” She reclaims her coffee. “Now go tell your Italian. You don’t need his blessing.” Her eyes glint. “But that man should know exactly who he’s marrying. A woman with her own damn empire.”
Later, when I tell Santino, he doesn’t offer money. He doesn’t offer to call anyone, or leverage anything, or fix it. He just listens to the whole plan, and when I’m done, he says, “Can I put in an application? I hear the cidery’s hiring, and I’ve gotten very good with a press.”
“The pay’s terrible,” I warn him.
“I’ll take it.”
And that, a man who once ran a wine empire, asking to work the line at the thing that’s going to be mine, is somehow the most romantic thing he’s said yet.