8. Cillian #4
A pause and she swallows heavily. “I like the crown,” she says with great composure, before going back to the bandage like none of that happened.
I can see the outline of the note in the thin material of her robe, but I drag my gaze to look at her profile—the set of her jaw, the very deliberate focus she’s applying to the gauze—and something warm and bright settle in my chest.
“The note from this morning,” I say. “The one in my shoe.”
Her hands still, then they keep moving. “What about it?”
“Why three stars?”
She cuts the tape. “I like stars.”
“You drew one on the first note,” I continue, my heart thumping. “Two on the second. Three on this morning’s. Why?”
“I’m not sure what you think that means,” she says to my knuckles.
“Valentina.”
She looks up and the composed, cool Valentina Santoro is gone. In its place is the unguarded version of her, the one that slips through sometimes when she’s not expecting it.
Those dark eyes are doing something I don’t have a word for, and neither does she.
“You kept them,” she says, quietly.
“Yeah,” I say, mouth dry, eyes trained on hers. “I kept them.”
The kitchen is so quiet I can hear the city below us.
She has both my bandaged hands in front of her, we are sitting close enough that our knees are touching, and she hasn’t moved and neither have I.
“I kept yours too,” she says, and it comes out small, almost like she didn’t mean for it to come out at all.
Damn.
I reach for her, but not in the urgent way it’s been before. I take her hands and pull her toward me.
She slides off the stool and into my lap, sitting sideways across my thighs.
Her gaze is on me, and this is the face I don’t get nearly enough of, the real one, the one with nothing in the way.
“Hi,” she says softly.
“Hi,” I say back before I lower my mouth to hers.
She makes a quiet sound and brings her hands up to my jaw and her hands trace my face as she kisses me back.
I stand with her, her legs around my waist, and I carry her to the bedroom.
Later, she’s deep asleep and my arms are wrapped around her naked body. I should be asleep, too, but I like to watch her sleep sometimes.
But not in the creepy Twilight way.
Because in sleep is when the real Valentina comes out.
All the tension she carries in her shoulders finally lets go and she just becomes a person.
Undefended.
Her dark hair is spread across the pillow, one hand open near mine on the sheet.
I’ve been lying here for forty-five minutes watching her breathe.
I know this is the behavior of a man who has completely lost his fucking mind, but I find I can’t bring myself to care. Because my wife has gotten into every facet of my life.
Because that’s what she is.
My wife.
Not the transaction version, or the terms-of-the-alliance version.
Mine.
The woman who draws stars on her insults and keeps the ones I write back and said good when I told her I broke someone’s jaw for her and meant every damn syllable of it.
I’m in love with her.
I’ve been in love with her for a while now, probably since the hospital, possibly before, and I’ve been calling it everything else because naming it out loud felt like stepping off something I couldn’t step back from.
But I nearly killed a man tonight for saying Valentina’s name. I’m done pretending I don’t know what this is.
It’s going to need to be said eventually.
With Valentina, everything needs to be said eventually.
Nothing just settles between us; we are not people who let things settle.
There’s going to be a conversation.
Probably more than one.
It’s going to be a disaster somewhere in the middle of it, because that’s how we do things.
She might throw something, and I’ll probably say the wrong thing first and she’ll correct me on it and I’ll argue and she’ll be right and I’ll know she’s right and we’ll both know she’s right.
She drew three stars.
One more each time.
She kept my note in her robe pocket like it was something worth keeping.
She might say it back.
I tighten my arm around her.
She makes a small sound in her sleep and turns her face into my shoulder.
I was handed this woman like a transaction.
I walked into a cathedral two months ago convinced I already knew what she was going to be in my life.
I was wrong about every single part of it.
She is sharp and impossible and funny when she doesn’t mean to be, and she has made every possible thing harder.
I cannot imagine my life without her.
I’m going to stop at the bakery tomorrow.
I’m going to bring something home and she’s going to ask what it’s for.
I’m going to say nothing, it was just there, and she’s going to look at me with a skeptical look and know I’m full of shit, but she’ll say nothing about it.
We’ll have coffee and she’ll once again steal mine.
At some point—not tomorrow, I’m not rushing this; rushing things with Valentina is how you end up with a wine glass against the wall behind your head—I’m going to tell her.
That I love her.
That I’m in love with her.
I close my eyes.
Outside, New York is going quiet. In here, she breathes.
And I let myself believe it.