3. Danielle
— ? —
Danielle
I’m still awake when Niccolo finally comes to bed.
The clock says eleven forty-seven, which means he’s been in his study for four hours since dinner, dealing with whatever crisis required his attention this time.
I hear him in the bathroom - water running, the soft sounds of his nighttime routine - and I close my eyes, not quite pretending to sleep.
The mattress dips as he slides in beside me.
“I know you’re awake,” he says quietly. “You breathe differently when you’re sleeping.”
I turn over to face him. The room is dark but my eyes have adjusted, and I can see the exhaustion carved into his features.
“Your mother ambushed me at dinner.”
“I know.” He reaches up to brush a strand of hair from my face. “I’m sorry. I should have said something.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I don’t know how to argue with her in front of everyone. It makes things worse. She digs in.”
“So I just sit there while she tells the entire table that my family are generational deadbeats?”
“She didn’t say that.”
“She said my family was ‘quite well-known for their debts.’ She said it’s ‘remarkable’ that I rose above my circumstances. In front of your cousins. In front of Benedetta, who already looks at me like I’m something she found on the bottom of her shoe.”
“Dani-”
“And you sat there. You didn’t say a single word.”
“I didn’t know what to say.” His voice is heavy. “She does this thing where everything sounds reasonable, and by the time I realize what she’s actually doing, the moment’s passed.”
“Then say something after the moment passes. Say ‘That wasn’t fair to Danielle.’ Say ‘We don’t talk about my wife’s family like that.’ Say anything.”
“You’re right.” He moves closer, his hand finding my hip. “I’m sorry. I’ll do better.”
“Will you?”
“I’ll try.”
I want to push harder. I want to ask when trying will become doing, when promises will become action. But I’m so tired, and his hand is warm through the thin fabric of my nightgown, and it’s been weeks since we’ve had more than a few distracted minutes together.
“I feel like I’m disappearing,” I say quietly. “In this house. Around your family. Every day I get a little smaller, and nobody notices.”
“I notice.”
“Do you? When’s the last time we had a real conversation? Not about schedules or obligations or whatever crisis your mother manufactured?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His thumb traces circles on my hip, slow and gentle.
“I miss you,” he says finally. “I know that’s ridiculous - we live in the same house, we sleep in the same bed. But I miss you. The way it used to be.”
“When?”
“Before. At the vacation house. When you’d cook and I’d watch and we’d talk about nothing for hours.” He moves closer, his forehead almost touching mine. “When you’d tell me about your grandmother’s recipes and I’d pretend I understood what you meant by ‘a pinch of this’ and ‘a handful of that.’”
Despite everything, I almost smile. “You never understood. You kept trying to measure everything.”
“I’m an architect’s son. Precision is in my blood.”
“Cooking isn’t precise. It’s feeling.”
“I know. You’ve told me a hundred times.” His voice drops lower. “You told me a lot of things. I should have listened better.”
“You’re listening now.”
“Is it enough?”
The question hangs between us. I don’t know the answer.
“Dani.” His hand slides from my hip to my waist, pulling me closer. “I know I’ve been absent. I know things have been hard. But I’m still here. I’m still yours.”
“Are you?”
“Always.”
He kisses me - soft at first, then deeper when I don’t pull away. His hands find the hem of my nightgown, and I let him lift it, let him pull me against him, let myself want this even though I know it doesn’t fix anything.
“Wait,” I say against his mouth. “We need to talk about-”
“Tomorrow. Please. Let me just be with you tonight.”
I should insist. I should make him have the conversation, make him commit to something concrete, make him understand that I can’t keep doing this.
But his mouth is on my neck now, and his hands are warm on my skin, and I’ve missed him so much that my whole body aches with it.
“Tomorrow,” I agree, and I stop thinking.
He draws the nightgown up over my hips as if the cotton itself might bruise.
Cool February air finds the backs of my thighs.
His palm settles at the small of my back and hauls me flush against him until I feel the hard, insistent line of his cock through sleep pants - already urgent, already answering a hunger neither of us named over the roast and the careful wine.
“Dani.” My name frays in his throat. “If this is too much - if you’d rather just sleep-”
“I have been sleeping alone beside you for weeks.” I catch his lower lip between my teeth, gentle and accusing. “Don’t offer me sleep now.”
A broken sound. He peels the nightgown the rest of the way off and lets it fall somewhere into the dark.
I’m bare except for plain underwear, and the hush of the estate bedroom makes my skin prickle.
His gaze travels over me the way a starving man inventories a table - throat, breasts, the soft of my stomach he used to kiss without asking permission, the place between my legs he hasn’t touched properly since before the Christmas parties swallowed him whole.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs, thumb stroking my ribcage like he’s counting the bones.
“So are you.”
“I keep thinking you’ll vanish if I blink.” His mouth finds the hinge of my jaw. “You feel thinner. Have you been eating?”
“Have you been looking?”
He flinches, then nods against my skin. “Not enough. That changes tonight - at least this much.”
He shoves his sleep pants down. I help, impatient, knuckles bumping his, and when his cock springs free I close my hand around him without ceremony - hot, thick, a bead of wetness already slick under my thumb.
He swears softly into my hair. I stroke him once, twice, relearning the weight of him the way you relearn a favorite knife after months away from a kitchen: carefully at first, then with greed that doesn’t care about dignity.
“Easy,” he breathes. “You keep that up and I finish like a teenager against your hip.”
“Then put me on my back and do it properly.”
He rolls me down into the pillows and settles between my thighs, kissing a path from my mouth to my breast. His tongue circles my nipple, then draws it in with a wet, deliberate pull that arches my spine off the mattress.
I fist the sheets. He switches sides, unhurried and starving at once, scraping faintly with his teeth until I make a sound I haven’t made in this room since autumn.
“There she is,” he whispers against my wet skin. “I dreamed about that sound. Woke up hard and alone in my study more times than I can count.”
“Poor aristocrat.” I tug his hair. “Come back to the point.”
His free hand hooks my underwear and drags it down my legs, slow enough that the elastic kisses every inch on the way off. He tosses the cotton aside and just looks for a moment - open, hungry, almost reverent - before two fingers trace the seam of me and find me already slick.
“Look at you,” he whispers. “Soaked like you’ve been thinking about this through the whole damned dinner. Through every toast. Through every moment I sat there mute while my mother carved you up for sport.”
“Don’t bring the dining room into this bed.”
“I won’t.” His fingers part me, dipping just enough to coat themselves. “Just you. Just this. The only language I haven’t managed to forget how to speak.”
He rubs my clit in slow circles - patient in a way that sharpens the distance between us, because tenderness from a man who vanishes by dawn is its own quiet cruelty, and I take it anyway.
My hips roll up to meet his hand. He slides one finger into me, then a second, curling until my breath stutters and my thighs tremble around his wrist.
“Niccolo - ah - right there-”
“Good. Let me hear it. This wing of the house has been a tomb without you making noise for me.”
I laugh, wrecked and almost angry, and yank his mouth back to mine. We kiss like people arguing without sentences. His fingers work me open; his thumb stays steady on my clit; the first crest builds too fast - weeks of starved almost-touch collapsing into a single bright point under his hand.
“I’m close,” I gasp.
“Then give it to me. I want you coming on my fingers before I bury myself in you. I want to feel it. I want to remember I’m still allowed to make you fall apart.”
The filthy edge under the tenderness undoes me.
I break with a muffled cry against his shoulder, thighs clamping, pulsing around his fingers while he murmurs wrecked praise into my temple - soft Italian scraps, my name, yes, that’s it, my brilliant girl.
He works me through it until I’m twitching and pushing at his wrist, oversensitive and glowing and already wanting more.
He withdraws his hand and brings his fingers to his mouth, tasting me without looking away. Something raw crosses his face in the dark - hunger, grief, devotion tangled into one expression.
“I’ve missed that,” he says. “Coming to bed tasting like my wife instead of like paperwork and apology.”
“Then stop collecting relics and fuck me.”
He laughs once - short, ruined - and notches the head of his cock against me.
For a heartbeat he just holds there, rubbing through my folds, coating himself, teasing both of us until I dig my heels into his back in demand.
Then he pushes in slow, inch by inch, watching my face the way he used to when every thrust felt like a vow we both still believed.
The stretch burns sweet after so long. I hook my ankles higher and drag him deeper until he’s seated fully, hips flush, both of us shaking with the simple fact of being joined.
“Christ.” His forehead drops to mine. “Tight. Perfect. Warm. I don’t deserve how good you feel around me-”
“Don’t turn this into penance.” I dig my nails into his shoulders. “I didn’t open my legs for a confession. Move.”
He moves.