Chapter 23 Vasso
VASSO
Even within the city of style, in a couture salon that’s all mirrors, chandeliers dripping galaxies and a runway of Persian wool that hushes footfalls, my wife dazzles.
Naomi stands on the low dais while a seamstress pins silk to the idea of her, and the idea of her is devastating.
“Bad luck for the groom to see the dress,” the head fitter murmurs in musical English.
“I don’t believe in borrowed curses,” I say, taking the offered flute of champagne. “In this marriage, we make our own luck.”
Naomi’s mouth tips, not quite a smile, but it’s enough to make my pulse misbehave.
They bring out lingerie first because Milan has its rituals.
Whisper-soft lily-white silk that kisses the line of her hip with iced ivory corsetry that pretends it’s angelic, an obsidian lace bodysuit so sheer it might be audacity stitched into negative space.
Every change is theater: screens whisk, silk whispers, pins flick, the fitter’s chalk skates like a blessing along the seam where her thigh disappears under lace.
I taste the champagne. Then I taste her, in memory. The room tilts.
She turns. “Too much?” she asks, tone dry, eyes hot.
“Not enough. The black lace stays,” I answer, because truth is the one luxury I never counterfeit with her.
My gaze drags down and then back, deliberate, reverent and greedy.
I don’t hide the hunger; I let it live on my face, in my hands on the back of the velvet chair, in the way I wet my lower lip and catch it lightly between my teeth.
Her breath stutters. Good. She’s not the only one who remembers the blazes between us.
“Walk, please,” the fitter says gently to Naomi, and I obey the command even though it wasn’t for me.
I rise, step closer and circle my wife, let them measure the heat between us like it’s a hem.
A second flute appears; I take it and touch the rim to my mouth, slow.
The champagne paints my bottom lip. I drag my thumb across it, then my tongue, a lazy lick that steals the bubble-kiss.
Naomi’s eyes lock on my mouth like it’s a hand placed low on her back.
Her throat works. Her fingers flex against her thigh.
I sample again…just my bottom lip, and watch her watch me.
She obeys a seamstress’s turn, and I take her in profile: the proud line of her jaw, the necklace’s ghost on her skin, the way her breasts lift and her juicy nipples bead against lace that isn’t hiding a sin so much as framing it.
She is magnificence in silk. She is everything I want and exactly what I said I wouldn’t beg for.
“Next, signore,” the assistant chirps, producing a sultry scarlet slip-dress with cut with only wickedness in mind. Naomi steps into it and the fabric pours like molten fruit down her body. I sit because standing would be an admission.
She looks at me through the mirror. One heartbeat. Two. And the air learns how to spark.
“Ladies,” I say pleasantly, handing the second flute to the nearest pair of trembling fingers without taking my eyes off my wife, “you have another of these garments available yes?”
“Si, signore,” someone responds eagerly.
“Good. Give us the room.”
Pins freeze. Then breaths catch as Milan understands this language.
The room clears in a choreography of professional haste; a door clicks. Naomi doesn’t move off the dais. I don’t move at all.
“Missed you this morning,” I say, and it’s not a line; it’s the ache in my knuckles when I didn’t touch her.
“Florence needed you more,” she replies, chin high, voice softer than her posture. I catch the question in there though.
“Handled,” I say. I don’t really want to talk about Harrison or what it took to douse the fire he dared to start.”
Relief flares, then guilt; I feel it across the room like heat from an open oven. She opens her mouth—I’m sorry lurks there, a bird that hates cages.
“Come here,” I murmur.
She steps off the dais. Two steps. Three. I don’t meet her halfway because I need her to cross the last inches, choose this line herself.
“I texted to wish you good luck.”
“Hmm, I saw.” When she’s within reach, I hook a finger in the strap of that red sin and slide it an inch, exposing skin I’m already fluent in. “But, baby…luck,” I tell her, “is for people who don’t do the work.”
“And what are we?” she asks, mouth a fraction open.
“Working hard,” I say, and then I put my mouth on hers, her hand on my rigid cock, and stop pretending I have a temper left to save. “Very hard indeed.”
It starts hungry, goes dangerous, then finds the softness I reserve for her and no one else: my hand cupping her jaw, my thumb drawing circles that quiet storms, my body not slamming hers because I’ve learned that restraint is the dirtiest thing I own.
The bottom of the slip whispers up as her thighs part, but the top rips clean in two beneath my greedy fingers. The velvet chair takes her weight as I anchor her, taste her, let anger scorch down into heat and then into something that sounds like vow when I breathe it against her tongue.
“Say you’re mine,” I mutter, just to hear it.
“I’m yours,” she whispers, because in this room and this hour it’s the only true thing that fits in our mouths.
When I finally let her breathe fully, she pants and blinks. Then she crooks her finger.
I let her unbuckle my belt and worship my cock with her mouth and tongue and teeth. And when I hiss and taste heaven and come hard, we both laugh after, wrecked and inadequate.
Then we pull ourselves back into something that can face pins and cameras without confessing.
“Five minutes,” I call toward the door, not taking my eyes off her. “Then we want the wedding dress.”
A chorus of si, signore scatters down the corridor.
I straighten her, remove the torn silk, toss it away and cover her with a dressing gown, pressing my mouth to her temple.
“We’ll win this,” I tell her quietly. “I didn’t come this far to lose to a man who can’t keep his own name clean.”
“Neither did I,” she says, and the steel in it sets my bones.
The designers return; the ritual resumes.
Naomi steps into something moon-pale and fitted like intention.
They pin, they murmur, they defer to my nod and her no.
When the final chalk marks are made and the last pleat agrees to obey, I thank them, sign what needs signing, and we leave the salon into a smaller, quieter fitting room with a sofa and a low table and a bottle already sweating in a bucket.
Which is when I do the thing I promised myself I would do clean, not couched inside a fight. I take the box from my jacket—sleek, new, matte black—and set it on the table.
“Before dinner,” I say. “A gift.”
Her gaze flicks to mine, then to the box, then back, cautious as a deer that learned what salt licks can hide.
“Open it.”
She does. The phone inside looks like any other until you know what it is—secure number, secure messaging, geo-scrubbed, white-listed to bounce venom. Sleek as a knife but kinder than it looks.
Her face shifts. Beautiful. Then shuttered. Then wounded. “You bought me a new phone? You don’t trust me.”
###
I shouldn’t be surprised, but the sting is still sharp.
The phone sits in its little coffin like a verdict; my heart gives a very stupid little lurch I pretend is annoyance.
“I trust that you said it won’t happen again,” he says, steady, not defensive. “But I also know that trust comes with work. This is to simplify yours.”
“Way to couch it in supportive language,” I say, because sarcasm is easier than oaths, and I watch his mouth tighten at the edges.
He doesn’t look away. “It took me a while to realize it, maybe a little too long to accept it.” He breathes out. “But you have a soft and giving heart. Even for monsters.”
“Harrison is not—” I stop, because defending a hurricane is a waste of sandbags. “He’s my father.”
“And he knows exactly how to be that,” Vasso says, gentler than the words deserve.
“He will keep reaching for your soft places until you armor them or I take his hands. You can have your old phone back if you wish and I’ll stand next to you while you fight him.
” His eyes hold mine without flinching. “Or you can accept this and remove the heartache of loving a father who—”
“—who will weaponize that love,” I finish for him, the sentence tasting like coins and old blood.
He nods once. “I won’t force you. I’ll just refuse to pretend the knives aren’t knives.”
The least romantic thing is sometimes the kindest: the truth, plain as linen.
I pick up the new phone; it’s heavier than it looks, reassuring in the palm, a quiet promise to filter the world.
The box I mailed from Amalfi lifts its lid in my head and shows me what I did with love and panic and too many years of learning the wrong reflex.
“You can be infuriating. You know that, right?” I tell him, which is how women like me say thank you when we’re not ready to be soft with our throats.
“I can,” he agrees, completely unbothered. “Will you take it?”
I look at the screen, still dark, still innocent. I imagine handing my old number back to a man who will ring it at midnight just to hear me breathe. I imagine answering because the part of me that still wants to fix the past can’t resist picking up.
I slip the new phone into my bag.
“Fine,” I say. “But if you installed an app that shocks me every time I type H and a too close together, I’m giving it back.”
His mouth slants. “Fuck, I should’ve thought of that. But as tempting as it is, I’m the only one allowed to give you shocks. Pleasurable ones,” he emphasizes.
A small silence opens, charged but not empty.
I drag a finger along the seam of my skirt to keep from reaching for his hand and confessing the thing that’s been banging on my ribs since Florence—I want this to be more than a year.
I am afraid of what that means if we fail.
I suspect he’s holding the twin of that confession in his own mouth and hates it just as much.
“What did Harrison do?” I ask instead, because if we’re going to bleed tonight, let it be for something outside the room.
“Tried to rattle a pre-IPO fund with a story about my ‘stability’,” Vasso says.
“He found the grumpiest octogenarian on the docket and fed him a line about men in linen suits who marry for headlines.” A pause, wry, lethal.
“He didn’t account for the octogenarian’s granddaughter liking your lighthouse vows. It’s… handled. For now.”
For now is a phrase that leaves thorns in the air. I smooth my skirt again, then his tie, then the front of his shirt because if my hands are busy they won’t shake. “Thank you,” I say, and the gratitude is a stone with heat in it. “For fixing the part I couldn’t.”
He tips a knuckle under my chin, a motion so tender I have to catch my breath to keep it from sounding like a sob.
“Thank you,” he says back, and I blink, startled.
“For calling the trustees. For pulling the strings only you could pull. I heard your name three times before lunch. Each time it made stubborn men remember their better selves.”
“I bribed them with path names and wildflowers,” I confess, because it feels like a sin to take credit for magic I hired.
“That’s leadership,” he says. “Rope and roses.”
My laugh is a crackle that breaks just enough to let oxygen in. “We’re very good at this part,” I say. “The war.”
His gaze drops to my mouth; the atmosphere drops an octave. “And the other part.”
Heat licks low. “The other part,” I agree, and then we’re both remembering the salon and the red silk and the way his mouth pressed yes into my skin until the word held.
He steps back a fraction—discipline, mercy—extends his hand. “Dinner? We owe Milan a performance before we leave.”
“We always do,” I murmur, sliding my fingers into his, the contact simple but not small.
We walk out together past mirrors that give us our reflections back a little braver than we felt. In the corridor, a junior seamstress drops her pins and blushes, no doubt a witness to our unalloyed passion.
Outside, a photographer angling for a stolen shot gets a curated one instead—our shoulders brushing, our mouths curved like we know secrets we might actually survive.
In the car, the city flickers by, granting us glimpses of the Duomo, slick storefronts, and zipping scooters. I sit with a new phone heavy in my bag and a husband heavy in my chest and the understanding that turbulence is the price of flying fast toward something worth landing.
He watches me without pretending he isn’t.
I look back.
Neither of us says I’m scared.
Neither of us says I want this enough to make a fool of myself.
Our silence is overcrowded with unsentences.
At the restaurant, the ma?tre d’ sells us a smile and a corner banquette at an overpriced rate my husband barely bats an eyelid at.
Vasso orders the good Barolo and I let him wine me.
Under the table our knees touch and our hands find one another’s.
Above it, we talk logistics and lilies and the angle of the lighthouse steps for an old man’s knees. Between courses our eyes keep making promises our mouths haven’t caught up to.
When the second plate clears, he leans in, voice a secret. “Tomorrow, final fittings at ten. Then wheels up at two. Does that suit you, baby?”
“Yes. I love Europe, but I can’t wait to get back home,” I say, as if naming the time will slow it.
He smiles and I realise what I said.
The bill arrives as my heart ducks and dives. The city keeps glittering because that’s what it does. We step back onto the street with dinner behind us and war ahead and wedding wrapped around both like silk that can be beautiful and strangling in the same breath.
He offers his arm. I take it.
And we head toward the hotel, heat coiled, peace borrowed, the charged air between us bright enough to see the path and sharp enough to warn that there are thorns on either side.