37. Alessia
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Alessia
Now - Tuscany
We leave our own dinner early, which Euridice will never let me live down, and run up the dark hill through the vineyard.
My dress is hiked up in one fist, and Anthony’s jacket is slung over my shoulders, and I’m barefoot and breathless and laughing so hard I can barely see where I’m going. He keeps trying to carry me, reaching for me every few steps, and I keep refusing, pushing his hands away and running ahead.
I want to get there on my own.
The shed is exactly where it’s always been, at the end of the long row where the oldest vines grow.
The slats are more weathered than I remember, bleached silver by years of sun and rain, and the door sticks the same way it did when we were sixteen.
I have to shove it with my shoulder to get it open.
Inside, moonlight comes through the gaps in the walls in stripes. It’s exactly how I remember it - the smell of old wood and dried grapes, the dust motes floating in the silver light, the rough wall where I pressed him against the boards and kissed him until I couldn’t breathe.
Anthony pushes the door closed behind us.
For a moment, we just stand there in the dark, breathing hard from the run up the hill. His silhouette is all angles and shadows, and I can hear his heartbeat in the silence - or maybe that’s mine.
“The first time we were in here together,” he says softly, “your father caught us.”
“The last time we were in here together,” I tell him, “you were lying to me.”
He goes still. “Yes.”
“Not tonight.” I take his hands and put them on the straps of my dress. “Tonight there’s nothing in any drawer anywhere.”
He slides the straps down my shoulders slowly, reverently, and the ivory silk pools at my feet on the dirt floor. I’m standing in front of him in nothing but moonlight, and he looks at me like he’s sixteen again - like he can’t believe he’s allowed, like I’m a miracle he doesn’t deserve.
I back him against the same wall I pressed him into all those years ago.
I undo his shirt button by button, my fingers steady even though my heart is racing. I kiss the spot on his throat where I can feel him hum, that particular vibration I’ve known since I was sixteen and reckless and so in love I couldn’t see straight.
When he lifts me, I wrap my legs around his waist.
When he sinks into me I am so full that I laugh, helplessly, into his shoulder.
“What.”
“You’re still-” I can’t finish it. “I married you twice and you are still too much.”
“You asked for the shed.” He thrusts, deep, smiling against my mouth, feral and fond at once. “You whispered it to me in front of a priest. You don’t get to go shy on me now.”
“I missed you in me,” I tell him, because there are no drawers left anywhere in our life. “I missed this ridiculous unfair thing and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.”
He shudders like I’ve hit him, and buries it in me harder, one hand under me and the other in my hair.
He does it slowly in the end, with my back against the rough wood and his forehead pressed to mine, and I feel it everywhere. In my chest and my throat and behind my eyes. In the place where the anger used to live, now filled with something softer, something that might be hope.
“I love you,” he says, moving inside me. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. I’m never leaving without saying goodbye again.”
“I know.” I gasp the words against his mouth. “I know. I believe you.”
I said it to him once before, in a cemetery in the rain, and I meant it and still didn’t trust it enough to keep saying it. Tonight there’s no catch behind it. No inventory. Just this.
He buries his face in my neck and holds me so tightly I can barely breathe, and I come apart around him with my nails in his shoulders and his name on my lips.
A flashlight beam sweeps across the gap under the door.
We both freeze.
Tangled together, with him still inside me, we go absolutely still. Boots crunch on the gravel outside, and a voice carries up the row - the estate’s night watchman, calling out in Italian to ask who’s there.
Anthony’s eyes meet mine in the darkness. Wide. Panicked.
I bite down on his shoulder to keep from laughing.
We hold perfectly still, trembling with the effort of staying silent, until the boots crunch away down the hill and the flashlight beam disappears into the vineyard.
Then I laugh so hard I have to hold on to him to keep from falling.
He’s laughing too, into my hair, this helpless, joyful sound I haven’t heard from him in so long. The laughter of the boy he used to be, before grief and revenge and all the years of lies. The laughter of someone who’s finally, finally free.
When we finally quiet down, we’re lying in a nest of his jacket and my dress on the dirt floor. The moonlight has shifted, striping across our tangled bodies.
I take his hand and press it flat against my stomach.
“I have to tell you something,” I say. “Before I’m sure. Because I don’t want to keep anything from you. Not even for a day.”
He goes absolutely still beneath my palm.
“I’m late,” I whisper.