Chapter Twenty Grace
I spend the morning preparing, and not in the way other women might. No candles, no lingerie, no curated playlist meant to set a mood. I clean my apartment and wash the sheets. I throw away the trash that’s been sitting for a week because I need this place spotless.
Claudio doesn’t care, but I want it to be…
Nice.
I want it to be nice.
I take a shower, wash my hair, and stand in front of the mirror for a long time looking at my body.
Not checking, not assessing. Looking. I've never done this before.
For twenty-four years, I treated my body as a vehicle.
A thing that carries plates, walks three blocks, takes pills, taps its finger against surfaces.
I've never once stood in front of a mirror and thought: this is mine.
I’ve never once been proud of it.
But it is mine. All of it. Small, narrow shoulders, thin wrists.
The hip bones where Carmelo's grip leaves bruises that I press my thumb into just to feel the ache.
The collarbone my finger taps in the dark.
The freckle below my ear where his mouth always goes first. Olive-warm skin and dark hair hanging past my shoulders and gray-blue eyes that belong to my father, set in a face that belongs to my mother, on a body that survived five years of the worst things human beings can do to a child and is still standing.
The bruises from Carmelo's last grip are fading on my hips, yellow at the edges, green in the center.
Every mark on this body is mine, the visible ones and the invisible ones.
The tapping, the flinch at Italian that's finally starting to fade, replaced by something closer to a pull than a push.
My tongue keeps finding words my mouth forgot and putting them back in the air.
I get dressed. Jeans, a black shirt that fits close, no bra because I don't want one and I'm allowed to not want one, then I walk to the bodega.
Rosa looks at me over the counter, opens her mouth to comment on my hair, which is down and damp and doing whatever it wants, and then closes it again. She tilts her head instead.
"New man?" she says.
"What?"
"You look like a woman with a new man. Something in the eyes. My grandmother used to say a woman's eyes change when she's found the one who stays."
"Rosa, I came in for coffee."
"Coffee is a dollar twenty-five. The observation is free." She hands me the cup. "He better be good to you. If he's not, you send him to me. I'll sort him out."
"He's six-four and carries a knife."
"I have a rolling pin and seventy years of rage. He doesn't scare me."
I drink the coffee and leave the two dollars and walk to work.
The restaurant is mine now, not officially, not yet, but Carmelo told me last night about buying it from Danny.
The word "us" is still sitting in my chest where he put it.
A restaurant. A base. A life built with someone instead of alone, built on purpose instead of whacked out on pills.
The lunch shift is easy because Devon is getting better in the kitchen. The new bartender is getting worse, but he's trying.
At two PM, I call Javi's mother and she invites me over. Says the police told her they found her son in a ditch and she hasn’t stopped crying since.
An hour later, Renzo drives me to her house in Cherry Hill.
He waits in the car because I told him to, and I go to the door alone.
She opens it and she's short and round with Javi's brown eyes, his grin buried somewhere in her face underneath the grief of the last three days.
She invites me in, and we sit, drinking tea, dabbing at our eyes…
just existing in the same space together, mourning the person we loved who was murdered without remorse.
I tell her. Not the details, not the network or the operatives or the trafficking.
I tell her that her son was my best friend.
That he walked me home every night because he wanted to.
That he made me laugh when nothing else could.
That he called the man I love The Rhino and refused to stop even when I told him to.
That he died because he was standing near me and the wrong people came looking.
That his death is the heaviest thing I've ever carried, and I will carry it for the rest of my life and I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.
She holds my hands while I talk, her grip strong the way Javi's hands were strong, and she doesn't ask questions I can't answer.
We cry together on her couch for an hour while she shows me pictures of Javi as a kid, Javi at his communion, Javi behind his first bar.
My chest splits open and heals and splits open again with every photograph.
When I leave, she hugs me hard. "He loved you," she says. "You know that, right? Not romantic. Not like that. He just loved you."
"I know. I loved him too."
“Please… come back soon. I have no other children and Javi meant everything to me. Please?”
I turn back and smile. “I will, I promise.”
I mean it. I don’t have a mother and she doesn’t have a son… maybe we can be there for each other.
Renzo drives me back without asking how it went. He puts his hand on my shoulder at a red light and squeezes once and that's enough.
At home, I shower again to wash the salt off my face, put on clean clothes, and sit on my bed thinking about Javi, about his mother, about the photographs, about The Rhino and the counting-is-math and the way he said "lock it twice" and meant "I love you."
Then I stop thinking about the dead and start thinking about the living.
I text Carmelo: Come over. Now.
He knocks at seven. I open the door and he's standing in the hallway in a black shirt and jeans with his knife on his belt and his gray eyes on my face. He takes one step inside, I close the door behind him, and I lock it.
“Come.” I start walking towards the bedroom and smile when I hear his heavy footsteps behind me.
"Sit down," I say.
He sits on the edge of my bed, hands on his knees, eyes on me, waiting.
"I told you my rules tonight," I say. "So here they are.
You don't move unless I tell you to move.
You don't touch unless I tell you to touch.
You don't speak unless I ask you a question.
Your hands stay where I put them, your mouth stays where I put it, and you do what I say and take what I give you.
If you need to stop, you say my name. My real name. That's the only word you get."
His jaw flexes as he tries to stifle a smirk. His hands tighten on his knees. I can see the pulse in his neck running fast and his chest expanding with a breath he's controlling, because he knows what's happening and his body is already there.
"Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good. Take off your shirt."
He pulls it over his head. His chest is broad and covered in ink, saints and family crests and the Madonna on his left forearm and the words on his inner wrist that I can read now because I know the language.
Sitting on my bed shirtless with his hands on his knees and his eyes on me, the size of him is staggering, and the fact that he's waiting for my instruction makes my blood run hot in a way I've never felt before.
I pull my shirt off. No bra. His eyes drop to my chest, and his hands grip his knees so hard the tendons in his forearms stand out against the ink.
"No," I say. "You look. That's all. Until I say otherwise."
I step between his knees and put my hands on his shoulders, dig my fingers into the muscle and feel the density under my palms, the heat of his skin, the tension coiled in every fiber.
My hands run down his chest, over the ink, over the hard ridges of his stomach, and his breathing is getting rougher with every inch.
Then, I lean down and bite his ear. My teeth close on the lobe and pull, his body jolts, and a sound comes out of his throat that's low and involuntary and mine. I press my mouth to his ear.
"You've been watching me for weeks. From your window. From your table. Counting my taps, learning my schedule, memorizing my freckle. Now I'm going to watch you, and you're going to sit there and let me."
I drop to my knees between his legs and unbuckle his belt.
The knife clatters to the floor when I pull it free, and I don't care.
I unbutton his jeans, pull them down his hips while he lifts to let me, his boxers coming down with them.
He's hard, thick, and I wrap my hand around him and his head drops back, his hands come off his knees, reaching.
"Hands down."
They go back. His jaw is clenched so tight I think he’s going to pop a tooth, his stomach muscles rigid. His entire body is a wall of tension and restraint, the Bonaccorso Butcher who holds a knife with terrifying control being told to hold still while a woman half his size grips him in her fist.
I take him in my mouth, and his groan fills the apartment, deep and raw and torn out of his chest. His thighs tense under me, his hands leave his knees again reaching for my head, and I pull off and look up at him.
"What did I say?"
He puts his hands back. His chest is heaving, his eyes wrecked, the dead gray gone and replaced by something alive and desperate and completely at my mercy.
"Good, that’s a very good boy." I take him in my mouth again and I don't rush.
I find the rhythm, slow and thorough, the same patience he used on me the first time when he learned my body with his mouth.
I'm learning his now. I learn what makes his breath catch, what makes his thighs shake, what makes that sound come out of his chest that I can feel in my ribs.
His hips start to move, involuntary, trying to hold still while his body refuses. I put my hands on his thighs and push them apart and take him deeper, and the sound he makes is my name. Broken in the middle, half-groaned, the syllables collapsing into each other.