Bonus Chapter Carmelo #2
"You're such a good boy," she says against my mouth. "Helping me with the pastries. Rolling my dough. Separating my yolks."
I groan against her neck, and she laughs, the full laugh, the one that takes up her whole face, and the combination of her laughing while she fucks me on a stool in a bakery is so absurd and so perfect that I almost come undone.
Her pace increases. Her thighs grip my hips. Her nails dig into my shoulders through my shirt, and her breathing goes ragged and she bites my ear and pulls and whispers, "Touch me."
My hand slides between us, and my thumb finds her and presses in a circle. Her body jerks and her hands slam flat against the wall on either side of my head, and she braces and pushes down onto me and my thumb at the same time and the sound she makes hits the walls and comes back doubled.
She's close. I can feel her tightening around me, her thighs shaking, her stomach muscles flexing against mine. I press harder with my thumb, faster, matching the rhythm of her hips, and she grips my face with one hand and holds my jaw and makes me look at her.
"Don't stop," she says. "Don't you fucking stop."
I don't stop. My thumb works her in tight circles and my hips thrust up to meet her on every downstroke and the stool is sliding on the tile floor, scraping, and the biscotti timer has three minutes left and neither of us is going to answer it.
She comes apart. Her body bows back, her grip on my jaw tightening, her mouth open, and the orgasm hits her so hard that her thighs clamp around my hips and she squeezes me out.
I flick her clit and she squirts, it floods between us, soaking my jeans, running down my thighs to the stool.
She shakes and gasps and says my name, the full name, all three syllables, and I pull her back down onto me and thrust up twice and follow her over the edge.
We collapse against the wall. Both of us breathing hard, covered in flour and sweat and each other. She's laughing again, quiet this time, her face in my neck, her body trembling with the aftershocks and the absurdity.
"The biscotti," she says.
The timer goes off. She climbs off me and pulls her pants up and ties her apron and opens the oven and the biscotti are perfect. Golden brown, the almonds toasted, the edges firm. She pulls the tray out with steady hands and sets it on the cooling rack and turns back to me.
I'm still on the stool. Jeans undone, shirt covered in flour and powdered sugar and evidence of what just happened, my back against the wall, my legs extended.
The Bonaccorso Butcher, undone on a metal stool in a bodega kitchen by a woman who weighs a hundred and twelve pounds and bakes cannoli at four in the morning.
"Clean up," she says. "You have flour in your eyebrow."
"I have more than flour on me right now."
"That's your fault for being distracting while I'm trying to run a bakery." She picks up the pastry bag and starts a new batch of cannoli. "Go home and shower. I want you showered and presentable."
"Presentable."
"Clean shirt. Clean jeans. No knife."
"No knife."
"You're not carrying a knife to my grand reopening, Carmelo. It's a bodega, not an enforcement action."
"Right… but it might be a safety concern."
"Today you will carry a tray of sfogliatelle and smile when the customers come in. That's your job. Pastry and smiling."
"I don't smile."
"You smiled two minutes ago."
She's right. I did. Somewhere between the stool and the surrender and the biscotti timer, my face did something it rarely does, and she caught it.
“Fine, but I’m not going home. I’ll clean up here.”
She rolls her eyes and shoo’s me away.
I clean up in the bathroom. Splash water on my face.
Button my jeans. Look at myself in the mirror above the sink.
Flour in my eyebrow. Powdered sugar on my collarbone.
A bite mark on my neck that's going to be visible above any collar I own. Soakes jeans that I’m trying to dry under the hand dryer.
Six months ago I was standing at a window in a dark apartment across from a restaurant, cleaning my nails with a knife, counting the taps of a woman I hadn't spoken to. Twenty-three nights of nail curls on a windowsill. Twenty-three nights of watching her lights go on and off.
Now I'm in her bodega bathroom with her teeth marks on my neck and her name going on the sign outside and flour on every surface of my body.
I wash my hands. The water runs clean because my hands are clean. They've been clean for six months. Back in the kitchen, Grace is finishing up and putting the pastries in the display. Her hips are swaying, ass shaking and she looks like a whole new woman than the one I first fell for.
Not different… just whole. “I love you.” I murmur.
"I know,” she says, turning around and smirking when she catches me staring at her.
"That's my line."
"We share it now."
She laughs. Short, quiet, the laugh I kept, the laugh I put somewhere inside myself where I keep very few things. The collection is bigger now. Six months of laughs, stored and memorized with the same attention I give to enemies I kill.
At eight AM, Renzo arrives with the sign.
It's hand-painted, green letters on cream, the same green as the restaurant awning down the street.
Graziella's. He hangs it above the door with a drill and a level and stands back on the sidewalk and looks at it and his eyes are wet.
He wipes them quickly, but his jaw is working and he doesn't say anything because some things are too large for words.
Grace comes out of the bodega. She stands next to her father on the sidewalk and looks up at the sign with her name on it. Her real name. The name that was taken from her at eight and given back at twenty-four by a man with a knife and a window and an obsession he couldn't explain.
She puts her arm through her father’s. He puts his hand over hers. They stand there, father and daughter, looking at a sign above a door on a corner in South Philadelphia.
I stand behind them. Hands in my pockets. No knife. Clean shirt. Flour still in my eyebrow because Grace was right, I missed it.
At nine AM, the door opens. The bell rings.
The first customer walks in and Grace is behind the counter.
The coffee is still a dollar twenty-five, the cannoli are three dollars, the sfogliatelle are three fifty and the sign above the door says Graziella's.
The woman behind the counter says buongiorno and means it.
My finger taps my thigh.
I didn't know I did that.
***