25. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - Three Months After the Arrest
There’s one line from that folder I’ve never been able to put down.
Proposal - vineyard, sunset, callback to first meeting.
I read it standing in his office the day they took Papa, and I’ve been carrying it for three months like a stone in my pocket.
Because if he planned the vineyard the way he planned the balcony, then maybe he planned the words too, and I need to know if what he said to me that night was ever his, or just the next line in a file with my name on it.
Tonight I put my coat on over my dress and got in a cab, because he’s the only person alive who can answer that.
There are four photographers on the sidewalk outside his hotel, and I get past three of them before the doorman ruins it.
“Good evening, Mrs. Stallone,” he says, warm and far too loud, holding the brass door open like he’s been waiting all night for the chance.
Behind me, a shutter starts firing.
I keep my chin down and walk into a lobby full of a stranger’s wedding. There’s a band going somewhere past the columns, and the whole room smells like lilies and hot wax, and a bridesmaid in blue is sitting halfway up the marble stairs with her shoes in her hand.
Anthony is at the far end of the bar with a glass of water in front of him.
Not whiskey. Water. He’s been living in a hotel for three months and he’s sitting alone at a bar drinking water, and I hate that I noticed, and I hate more that I know exactly what it means.
He sees me in the mirror behind the bottles before he sees me in the room. His whole body goes still.
“You’re here,” he says.
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“It’s a thing.” He stands. His hands don’t know where to go, so he puts them in his pockets, and even that looks like it costs him. “Do you want to sit?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to answer something, and I want you to do it fast, before I lose my nerve.”
“Ask me.”
The band swings into something with horns in it.
Two men in rented tuxedos push past me to get to the bar, and one of them apologizes without looking at me, and neither of them has the first idea who we are.
Anthony shifts, not quite into me, close enough that I feel the heat off his sleeve.
His hands stay in his pockets. He looks like a man reminding himself not to touch me.
“The night you proposed,” I say. “In the vineyard. You started to tell me something and I said yes straight over the top of you.”
“I remember.”
“If I had let you finish.” My voice does something I didn’t authorize. “If I had kept my mouth shut for ten more seconds. Would you have said it?”
He could lie. It would be the easiest lie in the world and I’d hand it to him gift wrapped, because I want it that badly.
He takes long enough that I know whatever comes next is going to be true.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I have.” He looks at me straight on.
His voice has gone low, the way it does when he’s refusing to dress something up.
“I had it in my mouth. I wrote it out on the plane. And then you were crying in the dirt with your skirt ruined and you were so happy, and I’ve gone back down that row a thousand times since and I still can’t tell you which way I would have gone.
” His jaw works. “I want to say I would have told you. I’ve wanted to say that to you for three months.
But you asked me not to manage you, so I won’t. ”
That’s the thing that takes my legs out from under me. Not the confession. The not knowing, handed over with nothing tied around it to make it easier to hold.
I’ve spent three months building a case against this man in my head, and every time he does this, the case gets one brick lighter.
“Alessia.” He’s watching my face far too closely. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“It isn’t nothing.”
“A woman is filming us,” I tell him.
She is. Over his shoulder, by the coat check, in a mother-of-the-bride dress the color of wet pavement, with her phone up and her thumb moving.
Anthony doesn’t turn around. “There’s a service corridor behind the bar. Door past the ice machine.”
“You know the service corridor of your own hotel.”
“I’ve been getting out of this building for three months.” A beat. His mouth goes tight. “Come with me. I’m not leaving you out here for her.”
He goes first. I follow him through a swinging door and the hotel turns itself inside out.
Bare bulbs, a rubber runner down the middle of the floor, racks of banquet chairs stacked along one wall, a wheeled cart of dirty glasses parked outside a door marked BANQUET 3.
The band is on the other side of that wall.
I can feel the bass coming up through the floor into my shoes.
“Freight elevator’s at the end,” Anthony says. “I’ll take you up the back way and you can go out through the garage. Nobody sees you leave.”
“I didn’t come here to leave.”
He stops walking.
He’s three feet away with his back to a stack of chairs and a bare bulb burning over his head, and he looks at me the way he looked at me on a terrace when we were sixteen. Careful. Like I’m something that could go off in his hands.
“Say that again,” he says.
“No.”
“Alessia.”
“I’m not saying it twice. You heard it.”
He doesn’t close the distance. His hands stay in his pockets. When he speaks, it’s quieter, and it goes straight through me.
“Then don’t say it like that and expect me to pretend I didn’t hear what it did.”
“What did it do?”
“You know.” His throat moves. “I’ve been sitting at that bar with a glass of water, letting you hate me, and I have not put my hands on you. And then you walk in and tell me you didn’t come here to leave, and I am trying very hard not to put you against that wall.”
My pulse kicks. “Anthony.”
“I’m not going to.” He says it like a vow and like a warning.
“I don’t get to decide what this is. I don’t get to touch you because I want to, and I want to.
I have wanted to since I saw you in that mirror, and I haven’t taken a clean breath since.
” He looks at my mouth and drags his eyes back up, wrecked and disciplined.
“So you tell me. Garage. Or you come here and you say what you want, because I am not going to be the man who takes it off you in a hallway when you still haven’t forgiven me. ”
“You think I don’t know you don’t get to take it?”
“I think if you take one step, I’m going to forget every reason I have to keep my hands to myself.” His voice roughens. “And I need you to be the one who decides I don’t have to.”
I close the three feet myself.
I get both hands in his shirt and put him back against the chairs hard enough that the whole stack shifts and something metal rings out down the corridor, and I don’t care.
He doesn’t kiss me. But he puts his mouth close to mine and stops there, close enough that I feel the heat of his lips and not the press of them.
His hands come up and hover at my waist without landing.
He makes a sound I’ve been hearing in my sleep since the arrest, and he doesn’t use it to take anything.
“Alessia.” It breaks on my name. His mouth barely moves. “I’m right here. I’m not going to be the one who does it.”
His breath shakes against my mouth. He lets me have the last inch and he will not cross it, and the not-touching is worse than if he had grabbed me.
I kiss him.
His mouth is already open under mine. He kisses me back like he’s been starving and like he’s still asking, and he doesn’t pull me in. He lets me have him.
“My hands-”
“You can touch me.”
“I need you to be sure.”
“Anthony.”
“I need you to be sure, because if you’re not, I’ll survive it and you won’t.” His forehead rests against mine. He’s trembling with how still he’s holding himself. “Say it like you mean it. If you don’t mean it, tell me to take you to the garage and I will. I’ll hate it and I’ll do it.”
“Touch me.”
He touches me.
His hands go to my hips and then up my back, spread wide, holding me hard against him, and I’m already gone.
A sound leaves him, rough, like the permission undid something he’d locked.
My mouth has gone dry. My pulse is beating in places that have nothing to do with my heart.
He kisses me deeper, one hand fisted carefully in the back of my dress, the other dragging me in until there is no space left to pretend with.
“Like this?” he says against my mouth, and it isn’t smooth. It’s ruined. “Tell me. I’ll stop. You say stop and I stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
I get his belt buckle in my fist and he groans into my neck and says my name like he’s apologizing for it.
“God.” His mouth is hot under my ear. “You do that and I’m not going to be polite about how much I want you.”
“I didn’t ask you to be polite.”
His hand tightens on my hip. He doesn’t move it lower.
Even now, even with my fist on his belt and his mouth on my throat, he’s waiting for the next yes like it might be taken back.
“I missed you,” he says, and it isn’t sweet.
It’s scraped out of him. “I missed your mouth. I missed the way you get when you want me. I’m not going to use that. I just need you to know I feel it.”
A door bangs open at the far end of the corridor.
We freeze. A boy in a banquet vest comes through with a tray of champagne coupes balanced on his shoulder, and he looks at us for exactly as long as it takes to decide we’re not his problem, and he keeps walking. The ballroom door swings and the music gets loud and then goes muffled again.
Anthony starts laughing against my throat.
“Don’t,” I say, and I’m laughing too, helplessly, into his collar. “Don’t you dare.”
“Fifteen feet.”
“Be quiet.”
“Come here,” he says, already quiet, already moving only because I’m pulling him. “Not against that. They’ll hear the metal.”