Chapter 14
Katerina
Ilooked at him. He was gorgeous. Standing at the foot of the bed in his shorts, the whole inked record of him bare in the light.
I looked at his muscular body, the scars, the tattoos.
As usual, all I wanted to do was to sink my teeth in and groan.
In his scarred, strong hands he held two scraps of fabric.
“Up,” he said, gently. “Out from under there, Little One. Come stand.”
I went, didn’t even consider not doing it. I stood at the foot of the bed with my arms at my sides and let the cold air find every inch of me.
He held up the green lace lingerie in one hand. The black thong and push-up bra set in the other. And then he looked at me.
Not the way men usually look. Not the grab-and-go assessment I’d been clocking since I was nineteen.
He looked at me the way he’d once looked at my flour racks and my proofing schedule and the chipped tile floor that first week—like inventory, like a thing to be counted and known and accounted for, slow, top to bottom, missing nothing.
His eyes went down me unhurried. Throat.
The pulse there he told me he liked. Further down.
The strong shoulders, the burn scars on my forearms that he never once flinched from, the rest of me, all of it, taken in like a man doing the books.
Except now I was the books.
God help me, I liked it. I stood there bare and I felt the heat come up my throat. I did not cross my arms, did not look away, did not make myself smaller. I let him have the looking. I imagined how he felt as he looked at my breasts, at my stomach, at the lick of hair above my pussy.
“Turn,” he said.
I turned. I felt his eyes on my back, on the curve of me, on the marks his hand had left two nights ago that had gone pale by now and that I’d touched in the mirror like a fool.
“Around,” he said, and I came back to face him, and his jaw had gone tight in a way I was learning to read.
He held the green out.
“This one,” he said. “You’ll wear this today.
Under all the things you try on. All day—out with Donatella, at the salon, with all those people, the dress shop, every minute of it.
” He stepped in, and the lace trembling in his hand.
“And you’ll feel it when you sit. You’ll feel it when you walk.
And every single time you feel it, you’ll think about me. About this. About who picked it.”
I took it. I remembered signing that contract. Daddy picks your underwear, in my own scarlet hand—and here was the clause made flesh, made green lace, made his.
“Are you going to be good?” he asked.
“I’m always good.”
His eyebrow went up. The grin tipped sideways, slow, knowing, and then his hands were on my hips, both of them, warm and sure, and he tipped me back onto the blanket like I weighed nothing, like I was a thing he’d decided to have.
His mouth came down on my throat, and I arched up into him before I’d voted on it, the want lighting the whole length of me at once, the green lace forgotten in my fist.
“You don’t feel always-good to me,” he murmured against my skin, working down, his stubble dragging, his hand sliding flat up my belly. “You feel like trouble. You feel like a woman who’s going to spend the whole day testing how far the line moves when I’m not in the room.”
“I would never,” I said, and it came out breathless, and I arched again, my hips chasing his thigh where it had pressed between mine, and he made a low sound against my breast and his hand slid lower and—
The phone went off on the nightstand.
A bright stupid chime. He stilled over me, his forehead dropping to mine, both of us breathing wrong, and I turned my head and saw the screen.
6:30. Below it: SALON 8.
“No,” I said.
“Yeah.” He laughed, low, wrecked, the heat still banked behind his eyes. He didn’t move for a second. He just stayed, forehead to mine, his thumb tracing slow over my hip where his hand had stopped, and I felt how much it was costing him to stop.
“You did that on purpose,” I said. “You set it.”
“I set it last night. So you’d be on time. I’m responsible.” He kissed me once, slow, and rolled off me and came up onto his knees, and the light caught the whole beautiful banked length of him, and I wanted to drag him back down by the saint over his heart.
He picked the green lace up off the blanket where it had fallen out of my fist. He held it out to me between two fingers, and his face was grave and his eyes were laughing.
“On,” he said.
I looked at the lace. I looked at him. I considered, very seriously, throwing it at his head.
“You’re a menace,” I told him.
“Salon at eight, Baby Girl. You’re a businesswoman. You keep your appointments.” He shook the lace gently, the way you shake a treat at a dog who’s pretending not to be interested.
I took it and put it on, there at the foot of his bed, while he watched me do it with that look, that inventory look, that count-and-keep look, and I felt it go on, the green of it, the cool of it, his choice against my skin.
“Good girl,” he said.
It went down me like warm honey, the way it always did.
“I’m going to think about anything but you all day,” I said, pulling my shirt over my head, lying through my teeth.
“Sure you are,” he said.
The salon was on Damen, and the smell hit me at the door—a wall of bleach and bergamot and money.
I wasn’t used to this—the idea of someone touching me, doing something for me—was alien. I’m the one who does the doing. I haven’t been on the other side of anyone’s hands in longer than I could name.
“Sit,” Donatella said, steering me into a chair by the shoulders with the absolute confidence of a woman who has never once been the one to step aside.
“Both of us. Blowouts, the works, a trial run so we know what we’re doing the morning of.
I’ve booked it. Relax. I can see you don’t know how. Try anyway.”
She had her espresso in one hand and a phone in the other, and within ninety seconds she was running the room. A girl came to take her coat and Donatella told her to bring two more espressos and then, without one breath in between, told my stylist exactly what she wanted done to my hair.
My stylist took my hands.
She lifted them off the armrests, both of them, the way you’d lift something to read the maker’s mark, and she turned them over, and she tutted. Flour-wrecked, knuckles cracked, the deep oven burns scarred pale along the insides of my forearms, a year of four a.m. starts written into the skin.
“Oh, these poor hands,” she said, not unkindly. “We’ll do something. A little cream, at least.”
I felt annoyance rise up—these hands made every loaf in my bakery, lady, don’t pity them—and I went to pull them back.
“You’re allowed to enjoy it, Katty.”
Donatella, in the mirror. She wasn’t even looking at me directly; she said it to my reflection, dry, between sips, the way you’d note the time.
“Nobody’s stealing the bakery while you sit here.
The ovens are cold. The door’s locked. The world is going to keep turning for one Saturday without you holding it up by hand.
” She turned the espresso cup a quarter turn on its saucer. “You’re allowed.”
And something that had been braced in me for a year eased.
Just a notch. Just enough that when the stylist took my hands again I let her, and let her work the cream into the scars, and let myself, for one whole minute, be a woman in a chair being looked after, and the green lace was warm against me, and I thought about who’d picked it, and I went red and called it the espresso.
At eleven there was prosecco. I don’t know how—I think Donatella simply willed it into being—and somewhere into the second glass she told me a story about Santo.
I never got the punchline.
That’s the thing about a Donatella story.
It built and built, this catastrophe with Santo and a uncle’s wedding and a stolen car and a priest, and she did all the voices, Santo’s growl, the priest’s outrage, her own brother roaring across a parking lot in three languages, and the prosecco was in me and the cream was in my poor hands and my hair was being wound onto something hot, and somewhere around the part where Santo apparently tried to bribe a nun, I started laughing and I could not stop, and the laughing kept coming up over the words so I lost the end of it entirely, the actual point of the story drowned in my own helpless wheeze, and Donatella looked at me laughing and her sharp red mouth went soft and she said, “There she is,” the same words Tonio used, and I didn’t even have it in me to be annoyed.
I hadn’t laughed like that in a year. Maybe longer. Maybe ever—the kind that takes you over, that’s louder than you’d choose, that leaves you wiping your eyes and not caring who saw.
After, hair done, both of us shining and ridiculous, Donatella took my arm and steered me two doors down before I’d agreed to go anywhere.
“There’s a place,” she said. “I swear by it. You’re coming.”
It was a lingerie boutique, the kind with one of everything in the window and a saleswoman who looked at our hair and our prosecco flush and clocked us correctly as a good morning, and Donatella was already inside touching things and pronouncing on them like a critic.
And I—loose on prosecco, warm clear through with the strange wonder of a day that was only mine, a day with a closed door and a friend and cream worked into my scars — I went and I bought something for myself.
For the first time in a year. Longer.
I picked it with my own hand off the rack, black, scandalous, deliberate — a crotchless set, the kind of thing that announces its intentions before you’ve got it home, the kind of thing I’d never once let myself want because want was a luxury and the bakery was the dream and there was no money and no time and no one to wear it for.
I held it up and I felt the daring of it go through me bright and hot, the choosing of it, mine, nobody picking it for me, nobody deciding it for me — me, deciding, for once, what I wanted.