24. Cielo
— ? —
Cielo
We get home to find the house secure, Gio safely eating dinner with Delphine, and no sign of any threat. Beppe’s men are everywhere, doubled patrols, locked gates, eyes on every entrance.
“False alarm?” I ask Giovanni, but the tension in his shoulders doesn’t ease.
“Maybe. Or maybe she’s waiting for us to relax.”
“Then we don’t relax.”
“No.” He looks at me, and something in his expression shifts. “But we also don’t stop living. That’s what she wants - to control us through fear. I won’t give her that satisfaction.”
I want to argue, to insist that we lock ourselves inside and wait for the danger to pass. But I know he’s right. We can’t live like that. Gio can’t live like that.
“Fine,” I say. “What did you have in mind?”
The smile that crosses his face is unexpected, almost boyish.
“Dinner. In the garden. Just the two of us.”
* * *
The table is set under fairy lights, strung between the trees in a pattern that makes the garden look like something from a dream. Two place settings, candles, the good linens - the same setup I created five years ago in a house that no longer exists.
“You remembered,” I say, my voice catching.
“I told you. I remember everything.” Giovanni pulls out my chair, and his hand brushes my shoulder as I sit. “This is what you set up that night. In Sicily. The night I never came home.”
“You couldn’t have known that.”
“I found the table. That night, when I got back to the villa after the raid.” He breaks off, his jaw tight. “The candles had burned down. The food was cold. I’ve thought about that table a thousand times. Wondering what you were planning. What you wanted to tell me.”
My heart is pounding now, because this is it - the moment I’ve been dreading and longing for in equal measure.
“Giovanni, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“The food can wait.” He sets down the serving spoon and turns to face me fully, giving me his complete attention.
The contrast nearly undoes me. Five years ago, nothing could wait. There was always a meeting, a call, something more urgent. But now he’s standing here, dinner forgotten, actually listening.
I gather my courage.
“Giovanni. That night. In Sicily. The dinner I set up wasn’t just - it wasn’t random.”
“I know. You said you had something important to tell me.”
“I did.” My hands are shaking, so I press them flat against the table. “I was going to tell you-” My voice breaks, and I have to start again. “I was going to tell you I was pregnant.”
The silence that follows is absolute.
“What?” His voice is barely a whisper.
“I found out that morning. I was ten weeks along, and I spent the whole day planning how to tell you, and that night - the night of the raid - I set the table and made dinner and put on my best dress because I was going to give you the news. I was going to tell you that you were going to be a father.”
“Cielo-”
“And then the hours went by and you didn’t come and you didn’t answer your phone, and when the windows shattered-” I’m crying now, the tears I’ve held back for five years finally spilling over.
“When the windows shattered, all I could think was that you’d never know.
That Gio would never know his father because I couldn’t reach you, because you chose a meeting over coming home, and I-”
I can’t finish. The sobs are too strong, the grief too raw even after all this time.
Giovanni is out of his chair and kneeling beside me in seconds, his hands on my face, his own eyes wet.
“The raid didn’t cost me a dinner,” he says, his voice breaking. “It cost me the moment I would have become a father. It cost me five years with my son.”
“Yes.”
“All those years - if I’d just come home when I said I would-”
“You would have been there. When I needed you. When Gio needed you.”
He makes a sound that might be a sob or might be a prayer, and then he’s pulling me into his arms and we’re both crying, grief and love and regret tangling together in a knot that’s been five years in the making.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers against my hair. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”
“I know.”
“I should have been there. I should have-”
“I know.” I pull back to look at him, this man I’ve loved and hated and loved again. “But you’re here now. That’s what matters.”
“Does it? Does it actually matter?”
“It matters to me.” I touch his face, wiping the tears from his cheeks. “It matters to Gio. You’re his hero, Giovanni. Every story he tells is about you. Every dream he has involves showing you what he’s learned.”
“I don’t deserve that.”
“Maybe not. But he’s giving it to you anyway. And so am I.”
He kisses me then, desperate and tender and tasting of salt, and I let myself fall into it - into him, into the possibility of a future I thought I’d lost.
“I love you,” I say against his mouth. “I’ve always loved you.”
“I love you too. More than I know how to say.”
He kisses me again under the fairy lights, desperate and tender and tasting of salt, and then he’s standing, lifting me out of the garden chair as if I weigh nothing, and carrying me toward the house.
The candles gutter behind us. The dinner sits forgotten on the table - the meal five years late, finally served, finally interrupted by the only thing that matters more than food.
“Where’s Gio?” I ask against his neck, even now, even like this.
“With Delphine. She took him up an hour ago. She texted - he’s asleep. She said, and I quote, ‘Take the night. I’ve got our boy.’” His arms tighten. “We’ve got the night, Cielo. Let me have it. Let me have you.”
I let him.
He carries me through the quiet house - past the kitchen, past the portraits, past the walls painted the warm impossible color I used to beg for - and into the bedroom we’ve been sharing for weeks.
He sets me on my feet beside the bed and undresses me like he’s unwrapping something precious.
Not frantic. Not rushed. Each button of my dress is its own small ceremony, his fingers steady, his eyes never leaving mine.
When the fabric slips from my shoulders he presses his mouth to the hollow of my throat and just breathes there, like he’s tasting the decision we’ve made.
“I should have been at that table,” he says against my skin. “I should have heard you say you were pregnant. I should have put my hands on your stomach and cried like a fucking child. Instead I silenced my phone.”
“Giovanni-”
“Let me say it.” He eases the dress the rest of the way down, lets it pool at my feet.
“I need to say it while I’m looking at you.
While you’re real and here and not a ghost I spent five years chasing.
I failed you. I failed our son before I even knew he existed.
And I am going to spend the rest of my life making sure neither of you ever wonder again whether you come first.”
“You’re already doing it.” I reach for his shirt, work the buttons open. “You’re here. You’re listening. You’re carrying me to bed instead of answering a phone. That’s the man I married. That’s the man I want.”
“You have him.” The shirt comes off. “You’ve always fucking had him. He was just too stupid to prove it.”
I push his trousers down. He steps out of them.
We’re naked in the low light of the bedroom, and for a moment we just look at each other - two people who lost five years and somehow found their way back to the same mattress.
His body is a map of everything between then and now.
Mine is softer in places, marked by pregnancy and years of running and the particular exhaustion of raising a child alone. He looks at me like I’m perfect anyway.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“I’m cataloging.” His hands settle on my waist, thumbs stroking the faint silver lines on my lower belly - stretch marks from carrying Gio, the evidence of the secret I kept.
He drops to his knees and presses his mouth to them, one by one, reverent.
“I missed this. I missed watching you change. I missed the mornings you were sick and the nights you couldn’t sleep and every fucking moment of you growing our son.
I’m going to kiss every inch of what I missed. ”
“You don’t have to-”
“I want to.” His mouth moves lower, over the soft of my stomach, to the edge of my underwear - which he peels down with his teeth and his hands working together, and then he’s looking at my cunt like a man who’s been handed a second chance.
“Lie down. Let me take my time. We’ve done desperate.
We’ve done furious. Tonight I want sweet. Tonight I want to ruin you gently.”
I lie down. He settles between my thighs and looks up at me first - checking, asking without words - and I nod.
Then his mouth is on me, and it’s nothing like the raw hunger of the first reunion or the careful tenderness after the wound.
This is worship. This is a man who has been given the truth of his son’s beginning and intends to spend the night learning every sound gratitude can pull out of his wife.
He licks into me with devastating patience. Flat strokes of his tongue, then the pointed tip circling my clit, then two fingers sliding inside to curl against that place that makes my back arch off the mattress. I thread my fingers into his hair and hold on.
“Giovanni - god-”
“I’ve got you.” His voice is muffled, warm. “Let me hear you. Delphine has Gio. The house is ours. Be as loud as you want.”
I stop trying to be quiet. The sounds he pulls out of me are shameless - gasps, curses, his name broken into syllables - and he answers each one with more pressure, more focus, the wet filthy music of his mouth on my cunt filling the quiet room.
When I come it’s with a sob, thighs clamping around his head, the orgasm rolling through me in long sweet waves that leave me shaking.
He doesn’t stop. He works me through it and into the next climb, slower, softer, until I’m whimpering and tugging at his hair and laughing through tears because it feels like too much and not enough all at once.