Chapter 8 #3
My first instinct was to laugh, and I almost did, and then I kept reading and the laugh died in my chest. Because it wasn’t what I’d braced for.
It wasn’t the leering thing the four letters had made me brace for.
It was—I scrolled, fast, my eyes hunting—structure.
Care. Someone who holds the line. Rules that aren’t a prison but a hand on your back.
Meals. Sleep. Eat this. Sit down. Let me.
I’ve got it. The relief of handing the weight to someone you trust enough to hold it.
The freedom—that word, freedom, right there in the middle of a thing I’d have sworn was the opposite of freedom—of not managing everything alone.
Not a leash.
The more I read, the more I realised that I was reading about . . . me.
I read about different types of Littles, with the reasons they do what they do.
One of the descriptions resonated so strongly with me.
A passage about a businesswoman who carried everything all day, who was the boss, who ran her office, but underneath, was so tired of being in charge that the relief of putting it down was enough to make them cry.
I read about her coloring, about her Daddy looking after her, about the freedom of submission, and I thought I was going to cry.
But it wasn’t just the emotion of relief. It was more than that. It was more complex.
Because I read about other women, too. Who longed for the release of discipline, by the erotic power of being dominated, controlled, worshipped by their Daddies.
My face was hot. My whole body had gone warm and tight in the little office, low down, that same dawn-over-a-valley heat, just reading, just reading, and I pressed my thighs together without deciding to and was appalled at myself and didn’t stop.
And then—because I couldn’t help it—I turned it on him.
Tonio.
And every piece fit. Every single piece slotted in like he’d been built out of the page I was reading.
The way he sets people down. I’d watched him do it for two weeks—the bus driver, the nurses, the old woman, the kid in the thin coat—he runs toward the thing that needs feeding, he notices who hasn’t eaten, he’s the steadiest thing in any room he’s in under all that noise.
Sit down. Eat something. I’ve got the counter.
I’d thought that was just kindness. It was, but it was a shape of kindness, it was the exact shape, the words almost word for word off the screen in my hand.
And the near-kiss.
Oh.
I sat very still in the office chair.
He’d had me. My fist in his shirt, my mouth on his, my body up on its toes and yes in every cell, and he was the one who pulled back, who uncurled his hand off my waist like it cost him everything, who opened the space and left me with nowhere to fall—and I’d decided it meant he didn’t want me, and it had made no sense because his face hadn’t been a face that didn’t want me, his face had been pain—
He stopped because he knew what he was and he was worried.
Worried about telling me. He wanted me, but he was anxious to say that he was a Daddy Dom.
Fuck.
The whole chapter of confusion I’d been living in resolved all at once, every crooked thing going straight, and it was the most terrifying and the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to me.
Because now I knew. I knew what he was. I knew what I might be—what the screen said I was.
And he didn’t know I knew.
I sat in the closet office with my phone hot in my hand and my heart slamming and the warmth pooled low and impossible to ignore, holding a piece of knowledge that changed absolutely everything, and I had no idea on God’s green earth what I was going to do with it.
A little. I was a little. He was a Daddy.
I put the phone down. I sat one more minute with my hand flat on the desk until my breathing came back to something I could walk out into the shop wearing. Then I stood, and my knee popped, and I went back out front.
It felt like I was floating. Like I was outside of my body.
I stopped in the doorway, head spinning. He hadn’t seen me yet and I watched him.
The rush was gone. The shop had emptied to the gray and the gold haze of settling flour, the radio low under it, and Tonio was crouched down by the storeroom doorway where Olimpo had his usual ridiculous spread.
Tonio had a piece of yesterday’s koulouraki in his palm and he was feeding it to the dog one slow bite at a time, and talking to him. Low. Not for anyone except Olimpo.
The dog leaned his enormous drooling head into Tonio’s hand and Tonio took the weight of it, the whole heavy skull of him, and scratched behind the floppy ear and called him something that was probably an insult.
A small bird landed on the new windowsill outside and Olimpo flinched the full-body flinch of a creature half his size, and Tonio laughed—quiet, just to himself, just to the dog—and steadied him, it’s all right, it’s just a sparrow, you coward, I’ve got you.
He looked up and saw me.
The air changed. He stood, slow, the dog’s head sliding off his hand, and we looked at each other across the warm empty shop with the radio going, and there was a beat where neither of us said the thing, the way we never say the thing, except now I had a thing of my own to not-say that was bigger than his.
He came over for the till count, or for nothing, for an excuse, the way I’d had an excuse for the office.
We ended up close. Of course we did. He reached past me for the cloth on the hook and his arm brushed mine, and I didn’t move, and he didn’t move, and his hand came to rest a moment on the small of my back — barely, just the warmth of it, just steadying me past, the way he steadied the dog — and it held a beat too long.
A beat we both felt. A beat where I knew exactly what that hand was, where it came from, what shape of man it belonged to, and the knowing went down my spine and settled somewhere low and unspeakable, and I had to grip the edge of the counter.
“Katerina,” he said. Low. The steel in it gone soft, the same voice from the chair, and my whole body answered before my brain got a word in, the want spiking so hard I nearly leaned back into the hand.
He was gathering himself to something. I could feel it.
The big easy body of him had gone still and careful, working up to a thing, and—
I thought he was going to say it.
For one suspended second I thought he was going to name it, the four letters, the whole thing, do you know what I am, do you know what you are, and my heart slammed up into my throat ready to lie, ready to say I didn’t know, ready to make him show me his hand because I am a woman who has to see the catch—
“Come to the Angela and Pietro’s wedding,” he said. “With me. As my guest.”
It wasn’t what I’d braced for. It was somehow worse, somehow more, it took the floor out a second time in one afternoon.
“It will be intense—I won’t lie,” he said, and his voice wasn’t smooth.
It had a roughness in it, a nervousness I’d never heard, this man who walks through every room like he owns it asking a thing he wasn’t sure he’d get.
“Three weeks. Two hundred and forty Sicilians at war over lilies. My brothers—my cousins—everyone—they’ll all be there.
The whole family. Don Arturo flying in from Palermo.
” He swallowed. “I want you there. With me. Not as—not as my boss. As mine.”
As mine.
Suddenly, I thought of my family. My mother who left when I was small, my father who struggled until the end.
Now I had no one. No brothers, no sisters, no one.
This man was asking me to walk into a room full of his—blood and chosen, the whole roaring clan of them, the brothers who’d stood in my doorway, the don off a plane from Sicily—and stand beside him where every one of them could see, and belong to something, and be claimed in front of everyone.
Imagine belonging like that.
It terrified me. If I belong to them, if they to me, then they can leave me. Just the way Baba did. But there was another fear. Saying yes to the wedding was saying yes to him, to all of it.
The speech rose up in me on reflex—nothing’s free, the bill comes later, I’d rather lose it on my own two feet, I don’t need, I’ve got it—rose up the way a heartbeat rises, and I opened my mouth to say it.
“Yes,” I said.
It came out before the speech could.
“Yes,” I said again, quieter, terrified, and hoping, God help me, hoping, which was the most dangerous thing of all. “I’ll come. As yours.”
The dog, in the doorway, thumped his tail once against the floor, like he’d known the whole time.