19. Chapter Nineteen Carmelo
Chapter Nineteen: Carmelo
The restaurant is full tonight.
is at table two arguing about the hollandaise with nobody because Helen is still sick. The lawyers are at their usual table splitting the Barolo. The Sunday woman with the paperback is in the corner with the risotto and a new book, thicker than last week's.
Grace is working the floor alone. No Javi.
No backup bartender. Danny pulled a guy from his other restaurant to cover the bar, a kid who barely knows the difference between bourbon and rye, and I can see it’s grating on her.
She needs a body behind it so she can run the floor, but she's still running it with the same competence she's always had except now there's something different in the way she carries it.
She's not disappearing into the room anymore. She's filling it.
I'm at table four with my usual, about to dig in when my phone buzzes and Leone’s name pops up.
I step outside and through the window I can see Grace at table six taking an order, her notepad on her hip, her weight on her left foot. The posture I've memorized. The woman I've memorized.
"Carmelo."
"Leone."
"Matteo finished the analysis on the Philly infrastructure. Delvecchio's network, Petrone's card game, the contacts you built during collections. You've got a footprint."
"I know."
"I want to formalize it. Philly is open territory. No major family has a claim. You're already operational, you've got local contacts, you've got a reason to stay." He pauses. "I want you to open for us."
Open for us. Establish a Bonaccorso presence in Philadelphia.
Territory. Operations. Collections, distribution, whatever Leone needs run on the eastern seaboard outside the compound's immediate radius.
It's the question he asked weeks ago in a different form.
Are we expanding into Philly? The answer then was maybe.
"Yes," I say.
"Good. I'll send Claudio back to set up the security infrastructure. Same structure as the compound, just smaller."
"How small?"
"Start with collections and enforcement, build from there. Delvecchio's your first asset. Petrone might be useful if he can keep his mouth shut. The restaurant is your front."
"The restaurant isn't mine."
"It could be. Danny's been looking to sell for two years. Matteo pulled the records. The building is worth less than the liquor license. Buy it. Run it clean. Use it as a base."
Buy the restaurant. The restaurant where Grace works. The restaurant where I sat at table four and ordered the branzino and learned her name and fell in love with her between the pork shoulder and the coffee.
"I'll talk to her," I say.
"Talk to her." There's something in Leone's voice I don't hear often. Amusement. The Don of the Bonaccorso family is amused that his enforcer needs to check with his girlfriend before buying a restaurant.
"One more thing," Leone says, the amusement gone. "Danila."
"What about him?"
"You've been working with a Bratva operative for months. He's fed you intelligence. That intelligence was useful. It saved the girl's life. But I need to know where the line is."
"The line."
"Between what Danila gives you and what you give me. You said weeks ago you would disclose everything and haven’t. I let it go because the priority was Grace. The priority has shifted. I'm building operations in Philadelphia, and Bratva activity on the eastern seaboard is relevant to my business."
I lean against the wall outside the restaurant. Through the window, Grace is laughing at something a woman said. Her whole face is open, eyes narrow, mouth wide. The laugh I kept. The laugh I hear in my sleep.
"Danila is my brother," I say. "Not by blood. Not by family. By years of keeping each other alive. I won't betray his confidence."
"I'm not asking you to betray him."
"Then what are you asking?"
"I'm asking if there's a channel. Between us and the Bratva. Formal or informal. Something that lets both sides communicate without compromising either side's operations."
A channel. Leone doesn't want Danila's secrets.
He wants a relationship. The Bonaccorsos and the Bratva, operating in the same geography, aware of each other's movements, coordinating when it serves both parties.
Not an alliance, but a communication line.
The kind of arrangement that prevents wars and creates opportunities.
"I can ask," I say. "Danila has the authority to establish a contact channel. His rank in the Bratva gives him operational discretion, but he won't do it as a favor to me. He'll do it if there's mutual benefit."
"There's mutual benefit. The Silent's supply chain is collapsing. The Bratva built that supply chain. They're going to need new revenue streams. We're expanding into their geography. We can either compete or cooperate."
"I'll talk to him."
"Tonight?"
"He's coming for dinner."
"Good." Leone pauses. "And Carmelo, if Danila shares something that threatens the family, I need to hear it."
"If it threatens the family, you'll hear it. You have my word."
"That's enough."
The call ends and I stand on the sidewalk, looking through the window.
Grace is at the bar, leaning across to tell the new bartender something, her hand on the bar top, her finger tapping the wood twice.
She catches me watching from outside and her mouth curves up on one side and she holds the expression for two seconds before turning back to work.
I go back inside and my pork shoulder is cold.
I eat it anyway.
At ten fifteen, the last table pays. Grace locks the front door and turns the sign. The new bartender finishes his cleanup, grabs his jacket, and leaves through the kitchen exit. Danny's been gone since eight. Devon finished the kitchen and left at nine thirty. It's just us.
Grace walks to table four. She doesn't sit across from me. She stands between my knees where I'm sitting and puts her hands on my shoulders and looks down at me.
"Good shift?" I ask.
"Thirty-two covers. Eighty-seven percent tip average. Arthur ordered the eggs Benedict without arguing with me because he didn't have Helen to perform for, and then he argued with himself about it on the way out. The Sunday woman is reading a thriller."
She's talking more than she used to. Fuller sentences, more detail, more willingness to fill space with words.
The wall she maintained for four years, the one that let people in exactly far enough, is lower now.
Not gone. Lower. And the space behind it is occupied by a woman who is learning how much of herself she's allowed to show.
"You're staring," she says.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you're standing between my legs and your hands are on my shoulders. You're beautiful and I'm allowed to look."
Her fingers tighten on my shoulders. Her chin drops. Her hair falls forward around her face and she's close, close enough that I can feel her breath on my forehead. I can smell her shampoo and the garlic from the kitchen and the specific scent of her skin underneath all of it.
"Say something else," she says. "You've been doing five words or fewer for weeks. Give me more."
"What do you want to hear?"
" Something you've been thinking and not saying. I know you think in full paragraphs, Carmelo. I know the five-word thing is a choice, not a limitation. Give me the paragraph."
I put my hands on her hips. My thumbs find the gap between her shirt and her waistband and press against her bare skin, and she inhales through her nose, her fingers digging into my shoulders.
"I've been thinking about buying this restaurant," I say.
Her eyes widen. "What?"
"Danny wants to sell. The building is worth less than the liquor license. Leone wants me to establish operations in Philadelphia. The restaurant would be the base. Clean. Legitimate. Yours to run."
"Mine to run."
"If you want it."
She stares at me in disbelief. "You'd buy me a restaurant.”
"I'd buy us a restaurant."
"Us."
"Yes."
She lowers her face to mine. Her forehead against mine, her nose against my nose. Her lips an inch from mine and I can feel the heat of her mouth and the rhythm of her breathing. Her finger is tapping my shoulder, fast, the pace that used to mean anxiety and now means something else entirely.
"You're… something else, holy fuck… the restaurant… mine," she whispers.
"Yes."
She closes the inch. Her mouth lands on mine and the kiss is slow, deep, the kind of kiss that starts at the lips and spreads through the body.
Her hands move from my shoulders to my head, palms on either side of my skull, fingers scraping across the buzz cut.
She tilts my head back and opens my mouth with hers, her tongue slides against mine and I grip her hips, pulling her forward until she's sitting on my thigh, straddling it, her weight in my lap and her chest against mine.
She grinds against my leg, riding the friction as heat rises through her chest, landing on her face.
I can feel her heartbeat through her shirt.
Her hips press down against my thigh, and the pressure makes her breath stutter.
She grips my head harder and kisses me deeper and I let my hands slide from her hips to the small of her back to the curve of her ass to pull her tight against me.
She makes a sound into my mouth that hits in my core.
Her hips keep rocking back and forth, her head falling back.
She’s close, so close when she pulls back. Her lips are swollen, her face is flushed, and her eyes are dark in the low light of the restaurant, and her chest is heaving.
"Not here," she says. "Not tonight. Tonight, Danila is coming over and if we don’t go now, we’re gonna be late and I HATE being late."
"Okay…"
"But tomorrow." Her grip tightens on my head. Her hips press down one more time, and the friction between her body and my thigh makes my vision narrow. "Tomorrow, in my apartment, I'm going to take my time with you and you're going to let me."
"Yes, my little Graziella, whatever you say."
She climbs off my lap, straightens her shirt. She picks up my plate and my cup and carries them to the kitchen, and I sit at table four with my heart hammering and my jeans uncomfortably tight and the taste of her still on my tongue. I smile as she saunters off, hips swaying.
Danila arrives to my place at eleven with pizza.
He knocks this time. Two knocks, because Grace is here and Danila has never met her and even Danila understands that walking unannounced into a space where a woman is, is just plain rude.
I open the door. Grace is on the couch, her feet tucked under her, a cup of tea in her hands. She's wearing my shirt again, the one from last night, and her hair is down, still damp from our five-minute shower.
Danila comes in with the pizza box and two bottles of something that isn't water. He's wearing the dark coat, the jeans, the gold rings.
"Graziella," I say. "This is Danila."
She looks at him from the couch. She reads him the way she reads a dining room, fast, complete, taking in the size, the posture, the clothes, the tattoos, the rings. She lingers on the star between his thumb and index finger.
"You're the one who found me," she says.
Danila looks at me. I nod.
"Carmelo found you," Danila says. "I provided information."
"Well, whatever you did..." She takes a sip of tea. "Thank you."
Danila blinks. It's the first time I've seen anyone surprise him in twenty years.
"You're welcome," he says.
She stands, walks to the counter and opens the pizza box and takes a slice and eats it standing up, and Danila looks at me with incredulity.
We eat, standing at the counter. The three of us, with Grace shooting the shit like she’s always belonged.
She finishes her tea and opens whatever Danila brought, which turns out to be Georgian wine that he insists is better than Italian.
Grace takes a sip and says it's not bad and Danila puts his hand over his heart and says not bad is the highest compliment a Georgian wine can receive from an Italian woman who didn't know she was Italian until last week.
Grace laughs and it’s a full belly laugh, breaking my face open in a smile. Danila grins and pours her another glass.
She asks him questions. Where he grew up.
How he met me. What the star tattoo means.
He answers some and deflects others. She accepts them and she doesn't push past the places where he stops.
She learned that skill from Javi. She learned that skill from being Grace.
And she's applying it to a Bratva operative in a kitchen in South Philadelphia, and Danila is responding to it because nobody has ever treated him with this kind of uncomplicated attention.
"So, you’re Bratva.”
"Yes."
"And Carmelo is Cosa Nostra."
"Yes."
"And you've been friends since you were fifteen."
"Yep, saved each other more times than I can remember and still do, to this day."
She nods and takes another slice of pizza. "Must be exhausting. Having a best friend the world says you shouldn't have."
Danila looks at me. I look at him. Neither of us has ever described it that way, but she said it in one sentence and it's the most accurate thing either of us has heard about our friendship.
"It has its moments," Danila says.
"So does everything worth keeping."
She says it simply and Danila lifts his glass and Grace lifts hers.
They drink, and I stand between them with my glass in my hand and my knife in my pocket.
There’s the realization that the two people I trust most in the world are standing in my kitchen; one of them is eating pizza in my shirt and the other is drinking Georgian wine and neither of them needs me to say anything because they've figured each other out in thirty minutes and become friends.
Well after midnight, Danila leaves. He shakes Grace's hand at the door, and she holds the shake for an extra second and says, "Come back. Next time bring better wine."
"Georgian wine is the best wine."
"Bring Italian. I'm learning to drink what I am."
He laughs and pulls her in for a hug, then looks at me and nods and the nod says everything. She's good. She's right. Don't fuck this up. Then he leaves.
Grace walks to the window. My window. The one I've stood at every night for weeks, watching her apartment across the street. She looks through it. She can see her own windows from here, dark, the curtains she never closes because she never knew anyone was watching.
"Twenty-three," she says.
"What?"
"Nail curls on the windowsill. I counted. Twenty-three nights of standing here watching me."
I don't deny it, I don't explain it, I just stand behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. She leans back against my chest, and we look through the window together at the street, the bodega sign, her apartment and the cracked window of the restaurant below us.
"Tomorrow," she says. Her voice is low. "My apartment. My bed. My rules."
"Your rules."
She turns in my arms, and her face tilts up. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”
I grin and pick her up, bridal style, and carry her to my room.