Chapter 9
EMILY
“He’s probably old money,” Nora said through a mouthful of cereal.
At least, I thought that was what she said.
I was too busy staring at the enormous bouquet of lilies that had just been delivered to my door.
“Sorry, what?”
I buried my nose in the flowers, breathing in their soft, expensive perfume with an undignified amount of pleasure.
That was the thing about Pietro. He listened to everything.
A few days ago, in the middle of a completely unrelated conversation, I had mentioned that lilies were my favorite flowers. I hadn’t thought about it again.
Apparently he had. Because here they were, beautiful and very much not in season, sitting in my arms like proof that the man missed nothing.
Nora pointed her spoon at the bouquet. “I said that man is taking game to a whole new level.” She shook her head. “I’m sending Jared a picture. He needs to improve immediately, because in comparison my boyfriend is underperforming.”
“Pietro is not my boyfriend,” I said without thinking.
Nora’s brows lifted. “No?”
I shifted the bouquet in my arms and tried very hard not to sound as unsure as I suddenly felt. “I mean…not officially. We haven’t had that conversation.”
“That is not a no.”
“That is also not a yes.”
She made a vague motion with her spoon, like labels were beneath her. “Fine. Mysterious almost boyfriend, then.”
I rolled my eyes and carried the flowers into the kitchen, hunting for a vase while she followed me with all the subtlety of a police investigation.
“So,” she said, leaning against the counter, “how’s the sex?”
I nearly dropped the vase.
“There isn’t any,” I said, far too quickly. Yes, we’d gotten closer. And one dinner turned into two, then three. After that came spontaneous breakfasts, impromptu coffees outside my classroom, and stolen kisses in quiet corners dark enough to make bad decisions reasonable.
Two weeks of seeing him every day. But nothing beyond that. Nora blinked. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
She stared at me, not cruel, just openly surprised. “Emily, he’s twenty-three. Sex is on his mind.”
I glared. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing bad,” she said at once, holding up both hands. “I just mean he clearly likes you. A lot. He looks at you like he’d happily commit treason in your honor. So I’m a little surprised he hasn’t at least tried.”
The words hurt more than they should have.
For one stupid, ugly second, something old and poisonous stirred to life inside me.
Maybe he didn’t want to.
Maybe all that intensity, all those looks, all the flowers and stolen kisses and the way his hand lingered at my waist meant everything except that.
Maybe he liked me, just not enough.
My stomach turned over.
Then, almost as quickly, I was annoyed with myself.
I was being ridiculous.
Because the truth was, he wasn’t exactly keeping his hands to himself.
Pietro touched me all the time now, but never in a way that felt careless.
A hand at my waist as he passed behind me.
His palm settling lightly at the small of my back when we crossed a street.
His fingers sliding over my hip when he pulled me closer in some dim corner before kissing me slow enough to make me forget my own name.
Once, in the library, his hand had come to rest just under the curve of my breast as he leaned over to murmur something against my ear, and the brief, accidental pressure sent heat through me so fast I almost dropped my pen.
My body lit for him with humiliating ease.
That was still new enough to feel dangerous.
After Adam, I half believed that part of me had died, or at least gone quiet for good. Desire had started to feel like something complicated and treacherous, too tangled up with fear and and the constant low-level calculation of how to keep someone else pleased without losing track of myself.
But with Pietro it was different. With him, when his hand found my hip or his mouth brushed the place just below my ear, there was no dread. No bracing. No split second of panic dressed up as anticipation.
Just fire.
Which was almost as unnerving.
Nora was still watching me with the expression of someone who had already guessed half the answer from my face.
“Oh my God,” she said slowly. “You want him.”
I turned back to the lilies as if they had suddenly become a matter of national importance. “That is not the point.”
“That is absolutely the point.”
“It is one point,” I muttered.
She grinned. “A very important point.”
I knew saying it out loud would make it too real.
Yes, I wanted him, the quiet intensity of his attention.
The way he looked at me like I was something rare instead of something to manage.
The rough edge in his voice when I surprised him.
The feeling of his hands on me, careful and firm at the same time, as if he was holding himself back not because he lacked desire but because he had more than enough of it and wanted to be sure I never doubted I had a choice.
But underneath all of that was something else. I wanted this for myself. Not to please him, not to keep him. Because I wanted it. That was worth paying attention to.
Because if a twenty-three-year-old man wanted me the way Pietro seemed to and still hadn’t pushed for sex, it wasn’t because he wasn’t thinking about it. “I say you go for it,” Nora said with a shrug before shoveling more cereal into her mouth.
I frowned. “Go for what?”
She arched an eyebrow as she chewed.
“His dick.”
I choked on my own saliva.
Nora rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Maybe the guy’s trying not to freak you out.
Maybe he’s from some weirdly traditional upbringing.
Maybe he’s waiting for a sign that you’re actually ready and not going to bolt if he touches you for longer than thirty seconds.
” She pointed her spoon at me. “Maybe you need to show him you’re open to getting some cardio in. ”
I rolled my eyes but didn’t answer. In a way, what Nora was saying made sense. Especially with Pietro knowing at least some of the history with Adam, maybe he was waiting for me. Maybe I had to take the lead.
The only problem was that I had no idea how.
My only real relationship was with a man who took the lead in everything. What we did, where we went, how far things went, when they stopped. Even my own desire ended up feeling reactive instead of chosen.
I threw Nora a sidelong glance while pretending to rearrange the bouquet, trying to work out how to ask the question forming in my head without wanting to immediately evaporate afterward.
I’d had girlfriends back home, but I rarely brought relationships up.
Probably because they had all seen the red flags I spent too long ignoring, and once things got bad enough, I was too embarrassed to admit how trapped I felt.
“I—” I stopped and shook my head.
Nora narrowed her eyes. “What? Come on. Tell me. I share plenty with you.”
“Maybe too much,” I said with a wince.
She shrugged and kept looking at me expectantly.
I stared down at the lilies. “I just… How do I show him I’m open to more?”
“Oh.” Nora leaned back in her chair, looking far too interested. “You’ve never taken the lead?”
I caught my bottom lip between my teeth and gave the smallest shake of my head.
For one dreadful second, she looked thoughtful.
Then she said, “Well, my usual method is to grab their cock, but that might be a little aggressive for you.”
I nearly dropped my flowers.
“You think?”
She grinned.
“That was a mistake,” I muttered. “Forget I asked.”
“No, no.” She sat up straighter, still laughing at my expression. “Okay. Real advice.” She set her bowl down and pointed the spoon at me. “First of all, men are not nearly as mysterious as they like to think they are.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“Shush. Second, if Pietro is as obsessed with you as he appears to be, then you probably don’t need some grand seduction plan. You just need to make it clear you’re not going to panic if things get a little more than PG.”
I frowned. “How?”
She thought for a moment.
“Touch him first,” she said. “On purpose. Not one of those accidental little brush-past moments you two do when you think no one notices. Sit closer. Kiss him like you mean it. Put your hand on his chest, his neck, his face. Anywhere that says I am here, I am not running, and yes, you can absolutely kiss me harder.”
Heat rushed into my face.
Nora, encouraged by my embarrassment, kept going.
“And if you want to be really clear, when he kisses you, make a sound. Men lose all remaining common sense over that.”
“Oh my God.”
“I’m helping.”
“You’re horrifying.”
She reached for her cereal again. “Also, if he’s decent—and for the record, I think he is—he’ll meet you where you are. You don’t have to leap on him like a raccoon on unattended trash. You just have to give him something to answer.”
That made me pause.
Underneath Nora being Nora, there was something unexpectedly kind in that.
You don’t have to leap. You just have to give him something to answer.
She must have seen me thinking, because her voice softened a little.
“It’s okay to not know how,” she said. “You’re learning. That doesn’t make you broken. It just means this one gets to be different.”
I looked down at the lilies again, blinking harder than I needed to.
“You really are annoyingly perceptive for someone who just suggested genital assault.”
Nora smiled around another spoonful of cereal.
I carried the flowers back to my room and set them carefully beside the other two bouquets crowding my desk. I sat down and opened my thesis document on the laptop.
The cursor blinked at me from the middle of a sentence I didn't finish. Something about dependency structures. How the people with the most information were often the last to use it, because using it meant dismantling the thing they had built their safety around.
I wrote that paragraph weeks ago, before Pietro, before Boston started to feel like something other than a place I had fled to.
I read it again now.
I was writing about Florence, but I was writing about myself.
I had changed my name and moved three thousand miles, and I was still terrified to go home because some part of me still believed Adam's proximity made me smaller.
Still believed the story he told me about what I was worth.
I spent two years writing a thesis about exactly this mechanism. And I had still been living inside it.
I looked at the capybara cup on the edge of my desk.
Pale green. Absurd. Sent by a man who had listened to me mention once, in passing, that I liked capybaras, and filed that away then acted on it at six in the morning because it was the kind of thing he did.
Because I was the kind of person he paid attention to.
One cannot call a man a tyrant when he sends physicians to your wife and asks after your children by name.
Pietro was not Adam.
And I was not the woman Adam had spent three years trying to convince me I was.
I had the evidence. I had been collecting it without knowing it.
The archive. The thesis. The fact that I got myself here, alone, and did not fall apart.
The fact that I stood in that library and bartered a book from a stranger and made him nearly smile and had not once made myself smaller to do it.
I was Emily Hart.
I had built her from the ground up, and she was someone who went home for her sister's surgery.
I picked up my phone and called Sophie before I could think myself back out of it.
She answered on the second ring. “Emily?”
“Hi, menace.”
There was a pause. “Why do you sound weird?”
“That’s rude.”
“That’s not an explanation.”
I looked down at the capybara cup and let out a small breath.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Silence.
Then, “Wait. Really?”
“Yep. I’m coming home for the surgery.”
The squeal she let out was so loud I had to pull the phone away from my ear, but I was laughing by then, and the tight, awful knot that had lived in my chest since our first conversation seemed to loosen.
“Oh my God,” Sophie said breathlessly. “Oh my God. Mom’s going to cry.”
“She always cries.”
“Yes, but this time it’ll be emotional and not because I hid yogurt in the heating vent.”
I blinked. “You did what?”
“Not important. You’re coming!”
I leaned back on the bed, smiling up at the ceiling now. “I’m coming.”
As Sophie kept talking, bright and tumbling over herself with plans and relief, I knew I had done the right thing. Not just for her. For me. I was choosing it. Him too.