26. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
Rosa Ferraro occupied Savannah like a small elegant army.
She arrived at noon exactly, which I’d learn was her standard operating procedure.
A black car pulled up to the cottage, and out stepped a woman who looked like Giovanni in thirty years and expensive lipstick, silver hair swept back, posture perfect, wearing what I was fairly certain was vintage Chanel.
Behind her, two men unloaded boxes from the trunk.
So many boxes.
“Kylie.” Rosa crossed the porch and took my face in her hands before I could react. Her eyes searched mine with an intensity that reminded me viscerally of her son. “You survived.”
“I did.”
“Good. We have work to do.” She released me and turned to survey the cottage. “This kitchen. What are we working with?”
“It’s small, but-”
“We’ll make it work. Giovanni, bring the copper.”
Giovanni appeared behind his mother, carrying a box that clinked with the particular sound of very expensive cookware. He shot me a look that said I warned you and I’m sorry and help all at once.
I bit back a smile.
Then Miss Dot emerged from the house.
The two women stopped.
Assessed each other.
The moment stretched.
“You’re the one who texted back,” Rosa said finally.
“I’m the one who coordinates this neighborhood,” Miss Dot replied.
“Including my son?”
“Including everyone within a six-block radius.”
Another long pause.
Then Rosa nodded once, decisively.
“Good. I need a lieutenant. The cheese situation here is apparently dire.”
“The good shop is on Broughton,” Miss Dot said. “But you have to know the owner.”
“Introduce me.”
“I’ll get my keys.”
They swept off together, leaving Giovanni and me standing on the porch surrounded by boxes of heirloom copper.
“What just happened?” I asked.
“I think they just allied.”
“Against what?”
“Probably us.” He set down the box he was holding. “Fair warning: my mother has opinions about everything.”
“So does Miss Dot.”
“Then we’re doomed.”
But he was smiling.
***
By six, Rosa had extracted a promise that we’d cook the sugo properly on Sunday, and, with suspicious tactical timing, arranged to take Nico for the night.
“The boy and I have things to discuss,” she said, lifting my son onto her hip with the ease of a woman who’d raised three children. “Ferraro history. Important matters.”
“He’s barely five months old,” I pointed out.
“The best age to start. Their minds are absorbent.” She kissed my cheek, kissed Giovanni’s, and swept out the door with Nico gumming her pearls and shrieking happily about nothing at all.
The cottage went quiet.
Giovanni and I stood in the kitchen, surrounded by copper pots and cast iron and four generations of Ferraro history.
“Your mother just stole our son.”
“She does that.”
“Phones in the drawer tomorrow,” I said. “No work, no emergencies, no family crises unless someone’s actually dying. All day, you said. I want all day. Just us.”
His expression shifted. Softened into something warm.
“The card’s in my wallet,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
***
Sunday.
The sun came through my kitchen windows like honey.
Giovanni arrived at eight with the card and a list of ingredients. He’d added something, I noticed, a second card behind Nonna’s, fresh ink in his handwriting.
“What’s that?”
He hesitated. Then handed it over.
NICO’S SAUCE. RECIPE IN PROGRESS
The card was mostly blank. Just a few notes in the margins: more garlic than Nonna used, the boy agrees with me and basil from Miss Dot’s garden and stir counterclockwise, he thinks it tastes better that way.
I had to put the wooden spoon down.
“Giovanni.”
“It’s just notes. For later. When he’s old enough to-”
“Shut up.” I pulled him close. Pressed my face against his chest. “Shut up, you impossible man.”
His arms came around me.
We stood there.
Then I pulled back and reached for the first card.
“Okay. Step one?”
“Step one.” He smiled. “We start with the onions.”
We cooked.
The sugo took all day, just like he’d promised. Hours of simmering, of adjusting, of him standing behind me showing me how to fold the basil at exactly the right moment.
I sat on the counter and read steps aloud, steps he’d had memorized for a decade, but he let me read them anyway, because he knew the pleasure was in making him wait.
He stood at the stove, sleeves rolled to his elbows, a dish towel over his shoulder like something out of a painting I’d hang in a museum.
“My grandmother used to say the sauce tells you when it’s ready,” he said, stirring. “You can’t rush it.”
“How does it tell you?”
“The smell changes. Gets deeper. You’ll know.”
“That’s very mystical for a recipe.”
“Sicilians are mystical about food.” He tasted from the wooden spoon, considered. “More salt.”
“The card says-”
“The card is a guideline. The sauce is the authority.”
I laughed.
He looked up at the sound.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just-” I shook my head. “I didn’t know you like this. Before. You never cooked.”
“I cooked. Just not where you could see.” He added the salt, stirred.
“This was the only thing that was really mine. The family had everything else - my time, my decisions, my name. But the kitchen, this recipe, that was just me and my grandmother. I kept it separate.” He met my eyes. “I’m learning not to.”
I slid off the counter.
Crossed to him.
Took the wooden spoon from his hand.
“Teach me,” I said.
The sauce wasn’t done until six.
By then the kitchen smelled like something sacred, tomatoes and basil and garlic and time. Giovanni ladled it over pasta while I set the table, and we ate at my small kitchen table with the windows open and the evening light making everything gold.
“It’s good,” I said around a mouthful.
“It’s not as good as hers.”
“It’s better. It’s yours.”
He looked at me across the table.
The expression on his face made something click into place inside my chest.
“Kylie.” His voice was rough. “You were never the contract.”
The altar words. Said again, here, in my kitchen, with sauce on his chin and four generations of copper pots watching.
I put down my fork.
Crossed to him.
Climbed into his lap.
“Say it again.”
“You were never the contract, Kylie.” His hands found my hips. “You were the escape from it.”
I kissed him.
It started slow, the kind of kiss that had all night to go somewhere. His mouth was warm and tasted like Sunday sauce and homecoming.
Then his hands moved.
“Here?” he murmured against my lips.
“Here. Against the counter. Where we just made something together.”
His breath caught.
Then he stood, lifting me with him, my legs wrapping around his waist, and carried me the four steps to the counter and set me down like something he’d been trusted with.
His hands went to the buttons of my shirt.
“Stop asking permission,” I said, “and start earning it.”
His eyes went dark, and the last of the careful houseguest went out of him.
He undressed me right there against the counter, unhurried, filthy-patient, each button its own small negotiation, each new stretch of skin claimed by his mouth as he went. He kissed down my sternum, my stomach, the crease of my hip, talking the whole time in that low Sunday-morning voice.
“You have any idea how many nights I stood at a stove somewhere and thought about this exact counter?” His mouth dragged lower. “You spread out on it. My mouth on you. The whole neighborhood asleep and you trying to stay quiet.”
“You’re getting ambitious for a man who just learned to make his own sauce.”
“I’m a fast study.” He dropped to his knees on my kitchen floor. “Hold on to something.”
“To wh-”
He put his mouth on me and I grabbed the counter with both hands.
There was nothing tentative in it. He ate me as if he’d been thinking about it for a decade and had strong opinions on technique, one big hand pinning my hips to the counter every time they tried to buck, the other hooking my thigh over his shoulder to open me up for him, and he groaned against me as if he were the one being fed.
He told me how I tasted, crude and delighted, between one filthy stroke of his tongue and the next.
He kept at it, warm and relentless, until I was swearing at the ceiling of my own cottage and my thighs were locked around his ears, and when I finally broke he stayed with me through every pulse of it, gentling me down with his mouth, smug as sin.
“You’re insufferable,” I managed.
“You’re shaking.” He kissed the inside of my knee, unbearably pleased with himself. “I’ll take insufferable.”
He carried me the rest of the way to the bed after that, and took his time, and this round was slow and warm and threaded through with laughter, the kind of sex that only happens between two people who know exactly where everything is and are in no hurry to get anywhere.
He slid into me while I was still loose and humming from his mouth and set a pace that had nothing of hurry in it and everything of a promise being kept, over and over.
“Say it,” I gasped, near the end. “The English one.”
“I love you.” No hesitation. No armor. “I love you, Kylie. Every day, in English, for as long as you’ll let me.”
I shattered with his name in my mouth and his heart going hard against my palm.
***
After, wrapped in his shirt, I gave him forgiveness with teeth.
“I want to be dated,” I said. “Not remarried. Not yet. Win the rest, remember?”
“I remember.”
“And hear me once, because I’ll only say it once.” I propped myself up to look at him. “If you ever choose anything over me again - the family, the peace, my own protection, anything - I’m gone. And there’s no third version of us.”
He held my gaze.
“I accept those terms.”
“Just like that?”
“Exactly like that.” He kissed my knuckles.
“You want me to court you? I’ll court you so thoroughly you forget we were ever legally bound.
I never got to win you the first time - it was arranged, negotiated, decided before I met you.
” His smile was slow. “This time I get to earn it. That’s not a punishment, Kylie. That’s the only version I ever wanted.”
He looked, in fact, personally delighted by the assignment.
“You’re strange,” I told him.
“I’m in love. It’s making me stupid.” He pulled me closer. “Come to New York with me. One day. One thing I want to show you.”
“The brownstone?”
“No.” He hesitated. “I sold the brownstone.”
I sat up.
“You what?”
“Six months ago.” His eyes didn’t move from mine. “There’s a lot, apparently, you don’t know.”