Chapter 14
NICO
The bell over the door announces us before I have it open.
Marguerite is already in the doorway.
Reading glasses on a chain, white hair pinned, and she catches my elbow with her hand before I’m fully through.
“Nico. Tu es en retard. Comme toujours.”
You’re late. As always.
“Bonjour, Marguerite.”
“Bonjour, mon c?ur. Entre. Entre.”
Good morning, my heart. Come in. Come in.
Her hand moves from my elbow to her chest in the small theatrical gesture she’s been making since I was a child.
She looks past me.
Mila is on the sidewalk behind me, the dark green sweater, flat shoes, her hair down and her hands at her sides.
Marguerite’s voice softens.
“Ma chère.” My dear. “You must be Mila. Enchantée. Come in.”
Mila does not respond. She just walks in, and I don’t know if that’s compliance or something closer to survival instinct. Don’t make noise, don’t draw attention, get through the door.
“Drink that. I will be twenty minutes with her, maybe thirty.” She picks up the second coffee cup and sets it on the side table where Mila was standing. “When she comes out, you tell her she looks beautiful. You say it like you mean it, not like a man reading from a card. Compris?”
Understood?
“Compris,” I say.
“Bon.”
Good.
She turns to Mila. Her voice drops.
“Six dresses on the rack, ma chère. I have eyes. I saw you on the sidewalk and I already know which one. You have the shoulders and the waist and Nico is going to have a very long afternoon.”
Mila does not answer.
Marguerite nods as if she has.
“This way.”
She takes Mila behind the curtain.
The curtain closes.
I pick up the coffee.
I have never brought a woman here. This place is not casual. Dante brought Cassia when he’d already decided she was his. Renzo brought Isabella the same way. I am not thinking about what it means that I’m here now.
I heard about both from Marco, who thought it was the funniest thing he’d seen in years. A man sitting on a boutique settee while a woman tries on dresses Marguerite picked. Marco did the impression for a week.
I’m sitting here now.
Mila is behind that curtain and Marguerite is in there with her and Marguerite’s voice comes through the curtain, soft instruction in pieces, and the small sounds of fabric, and I cannot breathe. My cock has been half-hard since she came through the door and I watched her eyes go to the exits.
Now she’s in a room I paid for putting on a dress I haven’t seen yet and I’m gripping the coffee cup so hard the ceramic is warm against my palm and I am one breath from standing up.
Don’t stand.
She is behind a curtain in a room I paid for and that is not an invitation and I know that.
I drink the coffee.
“Hooks on the wall on your left. Curtain on your right. No one comes through that curtain until you call me back. Sleeves first. Yes. Like that. No, ma chère, I am not going to look. I am at the door of the closet picking up the second one in case this is wrong. Tell me when you are zipped.”
The curtain holds.
“Brava,” Marguerite says through the curtain.
Well done.
The curtain opens.
Marguerite comes out first. She crosses to the three-panel mirror and adjusts the angle of the side-mirror a hair.
She turns.
“Come, ma chère.”
Mila comes out.
The dress is the color of raw ochre. The color I reach for when I want something to look alive. The color I have been chasing in paint for years.
Cristo.
My cock goes hard against my zipper before I’ve had time to look at her properly, before I can name the color or the cut or anything about it, and then I do look, and three years of keeping my hands to myself goes thin as paper.
The ochre sits against her skin like it was ground for her specifically. Warm amber-gold at her throat, catching light at her collarbone, following the line of her shoulders down to where the fabric skims her waist.
Her waist.
I have been keeping my eyes on the road for weeks because I didn’t trust what I’d see if I stopped. I know now. The line of her from shoulder to hip, the waist I didn’t let myself look at. I can’t unknow it and I don’t want to. My cock is fully hard against my zipper and I am not moving.
Her throat is bare above the collar, the chain at the hollow, and I want my mouth there. I want my hands on that waist. I want to follow the line from her throat to her collarbone and keep going and I am gripping the armrest hard enough to feel the wood grain.
I am halfway off the settee before I catch myself. Fuck. Sit. Sit down. Do not walk across this room.
Mila looks at the mirror.
Her chin lifts. Her shoulders don’t flinch. Her hands at her sides are open, which I have watched at the gearshift, at the thermos, pulling the bow across a violin, and her right hand rises slow and spreads flat against her own collarbone and fuck I am off the settee before I know it.
I sit back down.
Her hand drops.
She skips every reflective surface in Nonna’s kitchen.
Today her eyes don’t drop. Her face holds and I watch it hold and her mouth is soft and her eyes are gray-green in the boutique light and I have been trying not to look at her mouth for weeks and I am looking at it now and the dress is not helping.
Marguerite stands at the corner of the three-panel mirror, hand on the frame, watching Mila. Sideways, through the glasses, memorizing her.
She speaks to the mirror.
“You are the third Santoro brother whose woman I have dressed in this room. I should start a loyalty program.”
The corner of Mila’s mouth moves.
Marguerite sees it too.
She turns and looks at me over the top of her glasses.
“Je ne savais pas,” she says, quiet. “I didn’t know. It was the first bolt I pulled. I don’t know why.”
She turns back to the mirror.
Her reading glasses slide down her nose toward Mila. “I dressed your mother. She would have liked this one.”
Mila’s face goes white.
Marguerite stops.
“Lucia Santoro, ma chère.” Her voice softens. “Forgive me. I meant Nico’s mother. I dressed her for years. Every Easter. Every Christmas. Her wedding dress, before that.”
She looks at Mila.
“She would have liked to see you in this color. She loved ochre. She liked the quiet ones.”
The color comes back to Mila’s face. Slow.
Her shoulders settle.
Mila looks at Marguerite in the mirror and nods once.
Marguerite nods back.
“I will wrap her. Stay where you are, Nico.”
I stay.
My hands are on my thighs. Marguerite disappears behind the curtain. Mila steps off the platform and turns and faces me fully for the first time since she went behind that curtain and I stand.
Fuck.
The ochre against her skin. The line of her waist. Her mouth.
“Krasivaya.” Beautiful.
She doesn’t answer.
Her shoulders rise and stay there. Her breath stops. I watch her chest go still with it, the ochre fabric not moving, and the space between us is four feet and it might as well be nothing. My hands are fists. My cock is against my zipper. I am not crossing it.
Marguerite returns.
Cream tissue paper in her hands. The dress folded in her arm.
“Out of it now, ma chère. I have it. Behind the curtain, please.”
She glances at me over her glasses.
“You stayed where you were, Nico.”
“Compris,” I say. My voice comes out even.
“Bon.” Good.
Mila comes out. Back in the dark green sweater and the flat shoes.
Her hair pulled back behind one ear. The waist of her is under the sweater again and I cannot see it anymore and that is worse.
She takes the box from Marguerite and tucks it against her chest and walks toward the door and I watch her walk and I need to get out of this room.
Marguerite puts her hand briefly on Mila’s shoulder.
“Bonne soirée, ma chère.” Good evening, my dear.
She turns to me.
“Nico. Mes amitiés à toute la famille.”
My love to the family.
She opens the door.
The bell announces our leaving.
I open the passenger door for Mila.
She gets in with the box on her lap.
I close her door, walk around, get in, and start the engine.
I take the long way home because I need the drive — something to do with my hands, something to look at that isn’t her, time to get my pulse back below a hundred before we’re back inside those walls together.
The streetcar tracks and the live oaks closing over St. Charles and the light coming through at an angle turning the whole street gold.
The streetlight through the oak canopy turns the whole road the same amber-gold as that dress against her skin. Ochre, almost. I don’t say it because if I start I won’t stop there.
At the boutique she almost smiled. The corner of her mouth, barely, when Marguerite said the loyalty-program line. I have been thinking about that corner of her mouth for the last four blocks and before I decide to do it I am already pulling off.
I pull off into the parking lot of a place I haven’t been since I was a kid, the drive-through menu board lit up with thirty-two flavors in colors that have nothing to do with paint and everything to do with being nine years old in the back of Papa’s car.
Mila looks at me.
I put the SUV in park at the speaker.
“Welcome to Sweet Cream. What can I get you?”
“One of everything,” I say.
“Sir?”
“Every flavor you have. Small cups. All of them.”
Mila’s head turns toward me slowly.
“Uh, okay. That’s. Thirty-two flavors. You want all thirty-two?”
“Yes.”
I pull forward to the window. Mila hasn’t looked away.
I don’t look back. If I look at her I’m going to say something I cannot take back.
Her thigh is close to the gearshift. The ochre dress is in a box on her lap.
I am running on the thinnest margin of control I have had since Moscow and I am buying this woman thirty-two flavors of ice cream because the alternative is pulling over and telling her what I actually want and I’m not going to do that.
The kid at the window hands me two cardboard carriers. Thirty-two small cups. Plastic spoons.
I hand them to Mila.
She looks down at them and up at me.
“All?” So quiet I almost miss it.
“All,” I say.
She picks up the spoon and tastes it. Strawberry. Maybe cherry. Her eyes close.
Christ.
My hands go tight on the wheel.
She sets the cup down, picks up another, and tastes it. This time her mouth curves, not a smile, not yet, but close, and my chest goes tight and I keep my eyes on the road because if I look at her mouth right now I am going to drive into something.
She picks up another cup. Another. Another. By the time she’s making sounds, soft, low, somewhere in her throat that I have absolutely no business hearing from the driver’s seat, my jaw is locked so hard it aches.
Her tongue catches the edge of the spoon when she pulls it out.
God.
I put both hands on the wheel.
She picks up another cup. Chocolate. She makes the sound again and I am going to drive into a lamppost. I am genuinely going to drive this SUV into a lamppost and I do not care.
Then she laughs, quiet, small, a sound she catches almost before it gets out.
But it gets out and I pull over on a side street under the oak canopy on Audubon and put the SUV in park because I heard her laugh and I need to see her face.
She’s holding a cup of something green. Pistachio, maybe. Mint.
Her fingers are sticky. There’s a smudge of chocolate at the corner of her mouth and she doesn’t know it’s there. I cannot tell her. I cannot tell her and keep my hands where they are.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
She looks at me, the cup in her hand. She holds it out.
I take it, take the spoon, taste it.
Mint.
I hand it back.
“Khorosho?” I say. Good?
She nods. “Khorosho.”
Then she holds out another cup.
Vanilla. She’s already tasted it. I taste it.
Hand it back. She tries another and holds it out and we do this, her hand crossing the console, my hand meeting it, the cups small and cold and her fingers warm underneath, and I am not thinking about her fingers.
I am not thinking about her fingers. I am looking at the line of her throat in the passing streetlight and the way her hair falls against her collar.
Then her fingers brush mine and don’t pull back.
Caramel.
Her fingers are sticky and cold and warm underneath and she is not pulling back and neither am I.
Her hand is small against mine and her knuckles are pale from the cold cups and her fingers curved around the caramel like she forgot to let go and I am not breathing and the oak canopy holds the dark above the car and the street is empty and there is sugar and her in the space between us and I am one breath from saying something I cannot unsay.
Then she pulls her hand back.
I reach across the console before I decide to. My thumb finds the chocolate at the corner of her mouth and wipes it clean. I pull my hand back and put my thumb in my mouth and suck it clean and look at her.
She goes still. Her eyes drop to my mouth. The color comes up in her face starting at her throat, moving up her neck to her cheeks, and her mouth is slightly open and my cock is so hard it hurts and I put the SUV in drive before I do something I can’t undo.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever, you idiot. Drive.
My hands are white on the wheel. My pulse is in my ears. I drive.
We pull through the compound gate.
I stop in the drive.
She opens her door, gets out with the box against her chest and the ice cream carriers balanced on top, and walks to the front door without looking back.
I do not turn off the engine until she has closed the front door behind her.
Then I sit in the car.
Fuck.
I turn off the engine, get out, walk inside.
I put my hand on the front door before I open it. The knob is still warm where her hand was. I want things I am not going to name tonight. I go inside.