17. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
The invoice was for forty thousand dollars.
“This is insane.”
“It’s necessary.” Giovanni didn’t look up from his own stack of papers, spread across the desk in the Marlowe’s old manager’s office. “The foundation work has to be completed before winter. If we wait-”
“We?” I kept my voice low. Miss Dot was asleep in the box office, curled up in the ancient wingback chair like a dragon on gold, the shotgun she swore she kept under the box-office counter within arm’s reach, and I’d learned the hard way that waking her resulted in lectures about youth and impatience that could last for hours.
“There is no we. This is my project. My building. My-”
“Your building that needs forty thousand dollars’ worth of foundation repair.”
“Which I can fund myself.”
“In three years. Maybe four.” He finally looked up. Those goddamn reading glasses were perched on his nose again, making him look like a particularly dangerous librarian. “The structural assessment was clear. The southeast corner is compromised. If you wait three years-”
“Then I’ll figure it out in three years.”
“The building could be condemned in three years.”
“Then I’ll figure that out too.”
We glared at each other across the desk. The office was small, barely big enough for the furniture it held, and Giovanni’s presence made it feel smaller. He’d shown up an hour ago with paperwork and good intentions, and I’d been arguing with him ever since.
“You’re being stubborn,” he said.
“I’m being independent.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“They are when independence means not being financially dependent on my ex-husband.”
The word hit him. I watched it land, the slight flinch, the way his jaw tightened.
We didn’t talk about what we were to each other.
What we weren’t anymore. What we might be becoming, in the spaces between arguments and swim classes and the memory of a kiss under a marquee that I kept telling myself meant nothing.
“This isn’t about us,” Giovanni said. His voice was quieter now. Careful. “This is about the theater. About a building that matters to you, that matters to this city-”
“And you have no ulterior motive.”
“My ulterior motive is that I want to see you succeed.” He took off the reading glasses.
Set them on the desk. Looked at me with nothing guarded in his face for once.
“I want to give you things. I know you don’t want me to want that.
I know it complicates everything. But I can’t - I don’t know how to not want that. ”
I stared at him.
We were supposed to be talking about invoices.
“The hall table,” I said.
“What?”
“The drawer. The leg. All of it.” I gestured at the papers spread between us. “This is the same thing, isn’t it? You’re trying to fix things because that’s how you-”
I couldn’t finish the sentence.
Because saying it out loud would mean acknowledging what the hall table had meant. What all of it had meant. What Giovanni had been trying to tell me for six years in a language I’d only recently learned to hear.
“Yes,” he said. Simply. Without defense. “It’s the same thing.”
The office was too small for this conversation.
“I should check on Miss Dot,” I said.
“She’s asleep. You can hear her snoring from here.”
I could, actually. A soft, rhythmic sound drifting through the wall, punctuated by occasional mutters about property taxes and the price of popcorn butter.
“Then I should-”
“Kylie.”
The way he said my name stopped me. Quiet and serious and so goddamn honest that I didn’t know what to do with it.
“You’re allowed to want things too,” he said. “To want the building saved and the foundation fixed and the marquee lit up every night. To want that without it meaning you owe me anything.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
“I get to watch you succeed.” He stood up. Came around the desk. Stood near enough that I caught the winter scent of him, the one that had always made me stupid. “I know I helped with something you care about. I get to-”
“Get to what?”
He was close enough to touch now. Close enough to see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, lines a year had put there. Near enough to count his eyelashes if I wanted to, which I absolutely didn’t want to do.
“I get to be near you,” he said. “That’s enough. That’s more than enough.”
I should have walked away.
I’d walked away so many times. Walked away from the kiss under the marquee, walked away from the moments when his hand brushed mine during Nico’s swim class, walked away from every opportunity to make this into something more than co-parenting and careful boundaries and the exhausting work of not wanting him.
But he was close enough now that I’d stopped being able to lie to my own body about it.
I was reading him without permission, the reading glasses folded in one big hand, the ink he still wouldn’t let me see up close, the way he took up too much of a room that had felt plenty big an hour ago.
Don’t, I told myself, and did it anyway.
I dropped my eyes to his mouth, and the muscles low in my stomach pulled tight, and the back of my neck went hot, and every careful rule I’d built over a year burned off without a sound.
You are not going to do this. Absolutely, categorically not going to-
I didn’t walk away.
I kissed him.
***
It wasn’t like the marquee.
The marquee had been soft. Questioning. A moment of weakness that I’d ended before it could become anything more.
This was something else entirely.
I kissed him like I was angry about it. Like every month of wanting and not having had compressed itself into a single point of contact, and I was going to make him feel all of it.
My hands fisted in his shirt. His back hit the wall.
And the sound he made, low and rough and desperately contained, sent heat flooding through me so fast I couldn’t think.
“Kylie.” His voice cracked on it. His hands were on my hips, holding me against him, but he wasn’t pulling me closer. Wasn’t pushing. Just holding, like I was something precious and volatile and he was waiting to see which way I’d explode. “We should - Miss Dot is-”
“She’s asleep.”
“She could wake up.”
“Then be quiet.”
I kissed him again. Deeper this time, my tongue sliding against his, and I felt the moment his control started to crack. His fingers tightened on my hips. His breath stuttered. And when I rolled my hips against him, once, deliberately, he made a sound that was almost a growl.
“Upstairs,” he said against my mouth. “The balcony-”
The mezzanine. The old viewing balcony that looked out over the theater, half-restored and draped in drop cloths. Private enough, dark enough, desperate enough.
“Yes.”
We made it up the stairs without separating. His hands were in my hair, on my waist, sliding under my shirt to find bare skin. My back hit the balcony railing and I gasped, cold metal, hot mouth, the contrast making me arch into him.
“I’ve wanted-” His voice was ragged. His hands were shaking. “Kylie, I’ve wanted you every day for a year. Every night. Every-”
“Stop talking.”
He stopped talking.
His mouth found my neck. My collarbone. The place where my pulse was hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth. His hands found the hem of my skirt and I made a sound that would have embarrassed me if I’d had any capacity left for embarrassment.
“Tell me what you want.” His voice had dropped to almost nothing now. His fingers were tracing patterns on my thighs, so close to where I needed them, not close enough. “Tell me and I’ll give it to you. Anything. Everything.”
“I want-” My breath caught as his fingers moved higher. “I want you to stop being so goddamn careful with me.”
Something changed in his face.
The iron control he’d held for months, all the times he’d made himself keep his distance, made himself walk away with everything in him wanting to stay, cracked open all at once.
His hands were on my thighs. Then under them, lifting me onto the railing, spreading my legs so he could step between them. The position put us face to face, near enough to see every shade of blue in his eyes, close enough to feel exactly how much he wanted this.
“Like this?” His fingers found the edge of my underwear. Traced the elastic with deliberate slowness. “Or do you want more?”
“More.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Giovanni, more-”
He gave me more.
His fingers shoved my underwear aside and found me soaked, a year of pretending gone slick and shameless in the space of a breath.
He swore, quiet and almost reverent, as if he’d found something he’d stopped letting himself pray for.
Then he quit being careful. Two fingers, deep, the heel of his hand grinding against my clit in tight circles until my hips were working against his hand with no say from the rest of me, and when I clenched around him he bit out a curse against my jaw.
I was close in embarrassing minutes. He felt it, the flutter, the way my thighs started to lock, and he dragged his fingers out and left me clenching around nothing.
I could have killed him.
“Not yet.” Low and filthy, the voice he used to make grown men fold, aimed now at the wet mess he’d made of me. “I’ve spent a year picturing you coming on my cock, not my hand. You’ll wait.”
The crudeness of it went through me, hot and immediate.
“Then stop narrating and fuck me.”
He laughed into my throat, dark and ragged. “Bossy.”
“You’re the one stalling.”
“So I am.” His belt buckle hit the floorboards. “Say please.”
“Go to hell.”
“Close enough.”
He notched himself against me and drove in on a single stroke, no easing, no apology, and I slapped my own hand over my mouth to keep from bringing Miss Dot and her shotgun up two flights of stairs. He gave me exactly one second, forehead dropped to mine, both of us shuddering with it.
“Christ, you feel-” He didn’t finish.
“Move. Now, or I swear-”
He moved.
The railing groaned under us. He took me deep and unhurried and filthy, one hand splayed wide on my ass to hold me exactly where he wanted me, the other fisted in my hair, and he talked the whole time, low and obscene, telling me what a year of wanting me had done to him, what he’d thought about every time I told him no, exactly what kind of filthy mouth I had for a woman who chaired a preservation board.
I gave it back. Told him he’d wasted a year.
Told him he should have bent me over this railing the first day he walked in with his paperwork and his reading glasses.
He made a low, gutted sound and drove into me harder for it.
“That mouth.” He drew my head back by the hair, lips at my ear. “A year of no out of that mouth. Say something filthy for me.”
“Harder.”
“Good enough.”
He gave it to me until the balcony went white behind my eyes, until I clenched around him with his name bitten off in my teeth and my nails carving into his shoulders, and he cursed once, ragged, and slammed home and emptied into me on a groan, both of us ruined and gasping in the gold light of my half-built theater.
***
After.
Our foreheads together, both of us still shaking, his hand in my hair, gentle now, smoothing down the tangles his fingers had made.
“Just tonight,” I said, rougher than I wanted to sound. “This was just tonight.”
“Understood.”
“This doesn’t change anything.” I said it to the ceiling, mostly to myself.
“I know.”
“I’m still furious with you.”
“I know.” His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone. Tender. Careful. “You have every right to be.”
I should have left it there. Should have climbed down, straightened my clothes, walked away like the independent woman I’d spent a year becoming.
“Don’t stop,” I said instead.
He went still.
“The trying.” I couldn’t look at him. “The showing up and the following rules and the - all of it. Don’t stop.”
“Never.” The word was a promise. A vow. “Kylie, I will never stop trying.”
We stayed there for a long moment. Then I climbed down, found my underwear, fixed my skirt. He buckled his belt and retrieved his reading glasses from the office floor, where they’d somehow ended up during our trip to the balcony.
“I should go,” he said. “Before Miss Dot wakes up and asks why we look like we’ve been-”
“Yes.” My face was burning. “Go. I’ll - I’ll see you Tuesday.”
He left.
I stood in my theater, in the golden light of the restored chandelier, and tried to remember why I’d spent a year convincing myself this wasn’t what I wanted.
My phone rang at midnight.
I was in bed, not sleeping, replaying the evening on loop while my body still hummed with the aftershocks. The number on the screen was a Boston area code.
Declan.
“Don’t come to Boston.”
My uncle’s voice was clipped. Urgent. None of his usual warmth, none of the charm that made him everyone’s favorite Jordan.
“Uncle Dec, what-”
“And keep your man out of it too. That Russo woman walked into a Southie bar two hours ago asking for a Jordan sit-down.” A pause. “She’s lighting a match up here, love.”
The line went dead.