27. Mel
— ? —
Mel
The twins’ birthday party looks like a county fair exploded in Hattie’s orchard.
Balloons. Streamers. A bouncy castle that Chiara insisted on and that Gerald has already tried to headbutt three times. There’s a face-painting station run by Doris from the inn, a pie-eating contest organized by the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary, and, inexplicably, a mechanical bull.
“Why,” I ask Chiara, “is there a mechanical bull at a toddler’s birthday party?”
“Because it’s Texas,” Chiara says, as if this explains everything. “When in Rome, Mel.”
“We’re not in Rome. We’re in Wisteria.”
“Same energy.”
The bull sits in the middle of the pasture, surrounded by hay bales and a crowd of townspeople who are treating this like the social event of the season.
Marigold Miller from next door is taking bets.
Primrose Vaughn is selling lemonade at three dollars a cup.
And half the town seems to be waiting for someone to be foolish enough to climb on.
“No,” Santino says, appearing at my elbow. “Absolutely not.”
“No one asked you to ride it.”
“Your eyes asked me.”
“My eyes did no such thing.”
“Your eyes-” He leans in, voice dropping. “-are the same eyes that watched me haul feed yesterday like I was some kind of performance art.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“That was useful. This is just-”
“Santi!” Chiara’s voice cuts across the pasture. She’s standing by the mechanical bull with a crowd of locals, waving frantically. “Get over here! Bianchi family honor is at stake!”
“What honor?” I mutter.
“Exactly.” Santino’s jaw sets. “I’ll be right back.”
“Santino-”
But he’s already striding toward the bull with the determined expression of a man who has never backed down from a challenge in his life. The crowd parts for him like the Red Sea, and I can hear Chiara’s delighted cackle from across the field.
“This is going to be a disaster,” I tell the nearest person, who happens to be Hattie.
“Yep.” She takes a sip of lemonade. “Best birthday party I ever threw.”
***
Santino on a mechanical bull is a sight I didn’t know I needed.
He mounts with all the confidence of a man who benches more than I weigh and has never, in his entire gym-sculpted life, been thrown off anything.
He wraps one hand around the grip, puts the other behind his back like he’s seen in a movie, and nods at the operator with the grim focus of a man about to close a merger.
The operator grins and flips the switch.
The bull barely twitches, one lazy roll to the left, and Santino goes off it like a man launched from a catapult.
One and a half seconds, maybe. He’s airborne before his own hat has finished settling on his head, and he lands flat on his back in the hay with an “oof” that carries clear across the pasture.
The crowd loses its mind.
Chiara is bent double. Doris is wiping tears. Marigold is already paying out bets, cackling. Every single person in this town who has watched Santino Bianchi fail to impress them for the last two months is getting exactly what they came for.
He sits up, hay in his hair, dignity nowhere in evidence, and looks at me with such wounded betrayal that I have to press my lips together to keep from laughing.
“The machine is defective,” he announces.
“Sure it is.”
“It’s rigged.”
“Absolutely.”
“Let’s see you do better.”
And that, that, is my mistake, or his, depending on how you look at it.
Because I spent every summer of my childhood on my uncle’s working cattle ranch outside Austin before life took me to Italy, and I’ve been riding actual, non-mechanical, genuinely-trying-to-kill-me livestock since before I could spell my own name.
I hand my cider to Hattie.
“Hold this,” I say.
Her eyebrows go up. “Oh, this I want to see.”
I climb on. Settle my grip. Nod at the operator, and tell him, quietly, to skip the warm-up and take it straight to the top.
He does.
The bull explodes into motion, and my body just…
remembers. Hips loose, spine fluid, free arm counterbalancing every buck and spin like it’s a conversation I’ve had a thousand times.
The world narrows to rhythm and instinct.
I hear the crowd start to chant somewhere far away, a low, building roll of my name, but mostly I hear my own blood and the whir of the motor trying and failing to unseat me.
Thirty seconds. A minute. The operator cranks it higher and I ride that too.
Two minutes. Somewhere in there Santino stops laughing.
I glance over once, one flick of my eyes, and catch his face, and oh. Oh, that’s a good look on him. That’s the look of a man reconsidering every assumption he ever made about the woman he married.
Three full minutes, the operator will tell everyone later, which is a full minute past when he maxed the setting. When I finally decide I’m done, I don’t get thrown, I dismount, one clean vault off the side, and stick the landing in the hay like I’ve been practicing for weeks.
The pasture erupts.
I brush off my jeans, turn to my husband, and blow him a kiss.
Santino stares at me like I’ve rearranged the fundamental architecture of his brain.
“Marry me again,” he says faintly.
“Working on it.”
***
“Storage barn,” he murmurs against my ear, his hand closing around mine as we pass the lemonade stand. “Please.”
“The party-”
“Can wait.”
He tows me across the yard, past the bouncy castle and the face-painting station and a group of church ladies who definitely notice but are too polite to say anything. The storage barn is blessedly empty, just hay bales and old equipment and the lingering smell of apples.
He backs me against the door the second it closes.
“That,” he says, low and wrecked, “was the single most devastating thing anyone has ever done to me at a toddler’s birthday party.”
“It was a mechanical bull.”
“You were undulating.”
“I was staying on.”
“You were undulating. For three minutes. In front of the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary.”
My grin widens. “Did it bother you?”
“Catastrophically.”
“Good bother or bad bother?”
I answer by kissing him, hard and filthy, all teeth and tongue, my hands already working at his belt. He groans into my mouth and spins us, pressing me against the weathered wood of the door.
“We have maybe five minutes,” I manage against his lips. “Before someone comes looking.”
“I can work with five minutes.”
He hoists me up, hands under my thighs, and I wrap my legs around his waist. Thank god I wore a sundress today, one layer of fabric between us, easily pushed aside.
“This is insane,” I gasp as he grinds against me. “Anyone could-”
“Then we’ll be quick.”
He shoves my underwear aside, drags a thumb through me and swears under his breath, “already this wet, at a birthday party, you filthy thing,” and then he thrusts up into me in one stroke that has me biting down on his shoulder to keep from screaming.
The angle is brutal, deep and tight, his body pinning mine to the door, his breath hot against my ear.
“Quiet,” he murmurs, already snapping his hips. “You have to be quiet, amore, or the whole Methodist Women’s Auxiliary is going to know exactly what your husband does to you.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Mine,” he admits without an ounce of remorse. “I’m the one who dragged you in here.”
“You’re the one who couldn’t sit through a birthday party after watching me ride a bull for three minutes.”
He laughs, a low, breathless sound, and hitches me higher, changing the angle. “Can you blame me? Payback’s fair. You showed me up in front of the whole town.”
“This is - oh god - this is me handling a situation.”
“A situation.”
“I was very affected. Watching you.”
“Poor thing.” He kisses my neck, my jaw, the corner of my mouth. “Let me help.”
He does help. Thoroughly. Efficiently. With the focused determination of a man who once ran a global empire and now applies all of that terrifying competence to fucking me stupid against a barn door in under five minutes.
His hips piston into mine, his thumb works my clit in tight fast circles, and I’m hurtling toward the edge so fast it almost hurts.
“Come on,” he growls into my neck. “Come on my cock and then go eat cake like nothing happened. Give it to me. Now.”
The thought of being caught, the church ladies, Hattie, god forbid Chiara, should be mortifying. Instead, it tips me over the edge.
I bite down on his shoulder to muffle the sound, and he follows a heartbeat later, face buried in my neck, body shuddering against mine. We stay like that for a long moment, breathing hard, neither of us willing to move.
Then, from outside: “Mel? You in there?”
Chiara’s voice. Of course it’s Chiara’s voice.
We break apart so fast I almost fall. Santino steadies me, yanks his pants up, runs a hand through his thoroughly disheveled hair. I smooth my sundress and try to look like a woman who hasn’t just been ravished in a barn.
“Coming!” I call, which is a terrible choice of words.
Santino snorts.
I elbow him in the ribs.
When I open the door, Chiara takes one look at us, at my flushed face, at Santino’s hay-covered shirt, at the general air of debauched chaos, and grins.
“Nice,” she says. “Cake’s in five. Try to look like parents.”
She turns and walks away, cackling.
***
The cake is a work of art.
Two tiers, apple-themed, with little fondant versions of Leo and Junie sitting on top amid a meadow of icing flowers. Hattie made it herself, spent three days on the decorating, and she presents it with the air of a woman unveiling a masterpiece.
“It’s perfect,” I tell her, and mean it.
The twins are in their high chairs at the head of the picnic table, both wearing matching apple-print outfits that Chiara insisted on. Leo is already trying to grab at the candles. Junie is studying the cake with suspicious concentration, like she’s trying to determine if it’s safe.
“You want to do the honors or should I?” Hattie asks, lighter in hand.
“Light them before Leo does it himself.”