Chapter 6 #3
“Rules tomorrow. Now, take your coffee back to your room.”
I picked up the book and left, heart pounding in my chest.
That evening, with dinner, he brought a separate bowl for Midge.
Not a plate, not a saucer, not food scraped from his own portion onto a napkin. A bowl. Ceramic. Small. Filled with shredded chicken—plain, unseasoned, the kind of preparation that required someone to know or to find out that chihuahuas had sensitive stomachs and that rich food made them sick.
The pasta was on the plate—penne, something with tomatoes and basil and the smell of garlic that had been cooked slow enough to go sweet.
Garlic bread beside it, the edges browned, the butter soaked through.
A glass of water with ice, which was a detail so mundane it shouldn't have registered and did, because ice meant he'd thought about what I might want to drink and decided water and decided cold and decided ice and carried all of it upstairs on what must have been two trips because you couldn't balance that much on one.
He set everything on the nightstand. The plate. The glass. Midge's bowl on the floor beside the bed, positioned within her reach.
Then he turned to leave.
"Wait."
The word came out before I'd approved it.
My voice was hoarse—I hadn't spoken to anyone but Midge all day, and the single syllable sounded rough and strange in the quiet room.
He stopped. His back to me. His hand on the doorframe.
The hallway light behind him, making him a silhouette, wide shoulders, dark, the same shape I'd seen from the study doorway the night he stitched himself up while I watched from the dark like a woman who'd already lost control of the situation and hadn't admitted it yet.
"Sit," I said. Then, because the word had come out like a command and I was in no position to command anything: "Please."
He turned. His eyes found mine. Something moved in them—not surprise, exactly, but a recalibration. The look of a man who'd expected the routine and gotten a deviation and was deciding, in real time, what to do with it.
He sat on the floor.
Back against the wall, legs stretched in front of him, arms loose at his sides. The position put him below me—below the bed, below my eye level, his head at the height of my hip. I could look down at him. He had to look up at me.
He'd done it on purpose.
I ate the pasta. It was good. Better than good—it tasted like someone had cooked it with care, which was a flavor I hadn't encountered in years and which sat in my mouth differently than anything else.
Midge had her face in the chicken bowl, her stub of a tail going, the small wet sounds of a tiny animal experiencing bliss.
"Thank you," I said. "For helping me look after Midge."
The words came out stiff. Reluctant. Like I was pushing them through a door that didn't want to open.
But I meant every one. I meant them the way I meant the things I never said—completely, totally, with the full weight of a gratitude that terrified me because it implied debt, and debt implied connection, and connection implied vulnerability, and vulnerability implied all the things I'd spent twenty years learning not to afford.
He nodded. Once. Downward. No triumph in it.
I picked up the Quasimodo book. It had been on the nightstand since this afternoon, the spine cracked open to the poem I kept returning to.
"The tattoo," I said. "Your ribs. It's from this."
Not a question. He looked at the book in my hands. Something crossed his face—quick, private, the flicker of a door opening and closing in the same motion.
“Surprised the tattoo was what you focused on.”
My cheeks burned.
“It wasn’t the only think I noticed.”
"My mother's favorite." His voice was low. Stripped. The words came out the way mine had—reluctant, like they cost something. "She was Sicilian. She loved Quasimodo. Read him to us when we were kids." A pause. "She died when I was fifteen."
I understood his feeling, the depth of it.
"I had a sister," I said.
His eyes came to mine. Dark. Steady. Waiting. Not pushing. Not probing. Just present, the way the wall behind him was present, the way the floor beneath him was present—solid, patient, there.
I didn't say more.
He didn't ask.
I ate the garlic bread. He sat on the floor. The heating system ticked. Midge finished her chicken and sat back on her haunches and licked her chops with the thorough satisfaction of a creature whose needs were simple and currently met.
Then she stood.
She walked to Santo.
The careful, deliberate approach of an animal making a decision, each step considered, each inch of distance closed with the full awareness that distance was safety and she was choosing to give it up. Her body was tense. Her stub of a tail was low. But she kept walking.
She reached his hand. The right one, resting on the floor beside his thigh.
She lowered her head and sniffed his knuckles—the scarred ridges, the thick fingers, the hand that had pinned me to the floor and cut my zip ties and caught me around the waist in a frozen yard.
She sniffed thoroughly, the way she always sniffed, with the commitment of a creature that believed the nose knew things the eyes didn't.
She didn't growl.
I watched the seven-pound arbiter of my emotional life walk up to the man I was supposed to hate and sniff his hand and not growl.
She settled, not quite touching him, but close.
Closer than she'd been to any man since I'd found her behind that dumpster two winters ago, shaking and feral and missing half an ear.
Something inside my chest rearranged itself.
Not a crack. Not a break. A shift—tectonic, slow, the deep movement of something fundamental changing position.I felt a warmth that wasn't heat.
A pull that wasn't hunger. Something quieter and more permanent than either, something that settled into the rearranged space and fit there like it had always been meant to and was just waiting for the architecture to accommodate it.
I could not put it back.
I tried. In the seconds that followed, while Santo kept his hand still on the floor and Midge kept her nose near his knuckles and the room held its breath, I tried to reach into my chest and push the thing back where it came from, behind the wall, into the dark.
The way I'd pushed everything back. The way I'd been pushing since I was seven.
It wouldn't go.
Santo looked up at me. His eyes were soft.
Soft in a way I hadn't seen before—the dark still there, the steadiness still there, but the edges different.
Open. A man looking at a woman whose dog had just forgiven him for something the woman hadn't, and knowing what it meant, and being careful with it.
I looked away. Picked up the book. Stared at words I couldn't read because my vision had blurred at the edges.
The heating system ticked.
Midge sighed and lay down beside his hand.
I turned a page I hadn't read and the feeling in my chest stayed exactly where it was.
Eventually, after the most comfortable silence I’d ever experienced, he stood to leave.
The motion was careful—one hand on the wall, the push to vertical that I'd learned to recognize as his side talking, the wound reporting, the body negotiating with the damage it carried.
He was good at hiding it. Not good enough.
Midge was asleep on the pillow, curled into her usual comma, one paw over her nose. The book was in my lap, open to a page I'd stopped reading twenty minutes ago when conversation became more interesting than poetry, which was saying something, because the poetry was good.
He walked to the door. His hand found the frame. He turned.
"Goodnight."
The word in his mouth. Low.
"Santo."
His name.
He stopped.
His hand was still on the doorframe. His body had been turning away—weight shifting toward the hallway, the motion of departure already in his muscles—and it stopped.
Everything stopped. His shoulders. His breath.
The particular quality of his stillness, which I'd learned to read the way I read rooms, the way I read hands.
He turned back.
Something in his face had changed. The same shift I'd seen in his eyes that morning in the bathroom—a door opening.
The control still there, the steadiness still there, but behind it, behind the wall he'd built and maintained and reinforced for however many years, something moving forward. Toward the light. Toward me.
He crossed the room.
He didn't rush. Each step was deliberate, the floorboards giving slightly under his weight, and I tracked his approach with every nerve in my body firing because this wasn't the fireman's carry and this wasn't the yard and this wasn't the study floor with his knee against my back and his hand on my wrists.
This was something else. Something that made my pulse climb into my throat and stay there.
He stopped in front of me. Close. Close enough that his thighs nearly touched my crossed knees.
Close enough that I had to tilt my head back to look at him, and the angle put my face in the lamplight and his face in shadow, and from below he was enormous—broad, dark, the tattoos disappearing into his collar, his eyes catching the amber light in two small points that looked like heat.
Neither of us was breathing.
I knew this because I could hear the absence. The room had gone airless. The only sounds were Midge's small sleeping exhales and the tick of the heating system and my own blood in my ears, loud, rhythmic, a drum being struck by something I couldn't see.
He reached out.
One finger. His right hand—the scarred knuckles, the thick fingers, the hand I'd watched stitch his own skin and cut my zip ties and hold still on the floor while a tiny dog decided whether he was safe. One finger, extended, and it found my cheekbone.
The cut. The scab that was healing into a scar, dark against my skin, the mark left by his hardwood floor on the night I tried to kill him with a brass bookend and he pinned me down and I looked at him without fear and something moved between us that neither of us had language for.
His fingertip traced the edge. Light. So light I barely felt the pressure, only the warmth—the specific, unbearable warmth of someone touching a wound they'd made with the tenderness of someone who wished they hadn't.
The touch traveled the length of the scab, from the rise of my cheekbone to the hollow below my eye, and every nerve in the path lit up and sent its report to my spine and my spine sent it everywhere.
"I’m sorry I did this to you."
"It’s okay," I said. “I jumped you.”
"Jumped me? That’s what you call smacking me on the head?"
“It’s how I say hello.”
“Maybe you could try again?”
“Smacking you?”
He smiled a wicked smile. “Jumping me.”
His eyes were on mine. And the thing in his expression—the thing I'd been watching surface for five days through the cracks in his control—was fully visible now. Not anger. Not patience. Not the predatory focus of a man managing a situation.
Want. He wanted me.
It was written across his face the way his scars were written across his body—honestly, without concealment, the record of something that had happened to him that he hadn't chosen and couldn't undo.
He wanted me and he knew it and he wasn't hiding it and the raw, exposed truth of it hit my chest like a hand against a drum.
“You could,” I whispered, “jump me, instead? It’s only fair.”
“It’s only fair,” he whispered into my mouth. And then, he kissed me.
His hand moved from my cheekbone to the back of my neck, his fingers sliding into my hair, his palm cradling the base of my skull.
Slow. So slow that I felt every increment of the distance closing—the warmth of his breath first, then the brush of his lips, then the press.
Firm and soft at the same time, the way a thing can be two contradictory things at once when both of them are true.
I grabbed his shirt.
Both fists. The cotton bunched in my scarred hands and I pulled.
Pulled him closer, pulled him down, pulled him into me with a force that surprised us both.
The kiss deepened. His mouth opened against mine and I tasted him—coffee, warmth, the faint ghost of the garlic he'd cooked, and under all of it something that was just him, just skin and heat and the particular taste of a man I should not be kissing, should not be touching, should not be pulling toward me with hands that shook.
His other hand found my waist. Not grabbing—settling.
The weight of his palm against my hip, his thumb tracing the strip of skin between my shirt and my jeans, and the touch was so careful, so specifically restrained, that it undid me more than force ever could have.
He was being gentle. This man—this scarred, violent, broken, terrifying man—was kissing me gently, and my body responded to the gentleness the way dry wood responds to a match.
I made a sound. Small. Involuntary. A sound I hadn't made in years, maybe ever—not a moan, not a gasp, something between the two, something that came from the place in my chest where the wall had shifted and the feeling had moved in and the architecture of my entire interior life was rearranging itself around the pressure of his mouth on mine.
He pulled back.
Not far. An inch. His forehead against mine, his breath on my lips, his hand still in my hair.
I could feel his pulse in his fingers—fast, hard, the rhythm of a man whose control was costing him.
His eyes were open. Mine were open. We were breathing each other's air and the space between us was charged and warm and impossible.
"Fuck," he said. “I should not have done that.”
He let go.
His hand left my neck. His hand left my waist. He straightened, and the distance between us reopened like a wound, and the cold air rushed in where his warmth had been, and I sat on the bed with my fists still clenched in the empty space where his shirt had been.
I felt a stab of sadness. I wanted to say something—anything—to let him know that he should have done that, that he should do it again.
But I couldn’t say a thing.
He left. The door closed. The lock engaged—that heavy, metallic, definitive sound.
I sat.
That night, I didn’t sleep a wink.