14. Chiara #2
“So you chose Livia because she was safe.” I remember how easily he could reassure her, how every difficult question from me became a reason he needed more time. “Because protecting her made you feel competent. And you kept me at arm’s length because I might have expected something real.”
“Yes.” He looks at me again. “You expected something real. I knew you were right to.”
“And the investigation?” I move toward him. “Was that fear too?”
“I didn’t want to be wrong about her. About all the years I’d trusted her.” He looks toward Livia’s statement. “So I stopped them looking.”
“And let them look at me.”
“Yes.” He has no papers to reach for now, no call he can take instead. He stays with me while I look at him. “And I will never forgive myself for that.”
“I haven’t forgiven you either.” I stay on my side of the table. His willingness to admit it doesn’t spare me the memory of carrying my evidence into his study.
The storm rages overhead, thunder and rain and wind that we can only hear as a distant roar through the stone. The candles flicker and steady, and I realize I’m breathing hard, my heart pounding with the force of everything we’re finally saying.
“You want to know what made it unbearable?” I look at the folder where I’ve kept every scrap of evidence I hoped would make him speak. “You knew I was innocent, but you let me keep trying to convince you. You managed what I was allowed to hear instead of telling me the truth.”
“I knew what you were asking.” He grips the chair instead of reaching for me. “I kept refusing to give it to you.”
The silence stretches between us, heavy with everything we’ve said and everything we haven’t. I’m so angry with him, still, but underneath the anger is something else. Something that’s been there since I walked into this room and started examining evidence with the man who broke my trust.
“In the vat.” His hand shifts on the chair back, and I remember those hands steadying me on the slippery grapes. “During the pigiatura. When you slipped on the grapes and I caught you, and you laughed instead of being embarrassed.”
I remember laughing. For that evening, being his wife hadn’t felt like something I was failing at.
“I thought about what it would be like to make you laugh like that every day.” He’s not looking at me now, his eyes on the candles. “To be the person who got to see you that unguarded. And then I panicked, because wanting something that badly meant I could lose it.”
“So you kept your distance.” I look at the chair he has left between us. I thought we had finally found a way toward each other that evening. “You protected yourself from wanting too much.”
“I protected myself from everything.” He moves the chair aside, then stops with his hand on the back of it. I can see the effort it takes to leave himself with nothing between us. “And in the process, I hurt the one person I should have been protecting from everyone else.”
I don’t know what to say to that. The anger is still there, but it’s mixed with something else now. Recognition, maybe. Knowing he was afraid doesn’t give me back a single evening. It does make me wonder how often we lay beside each other wanting something neither of us knew how to ask for.
“You could have told me.” I rest my hand on the end of the table, where there’s a pale mark from a wineglass someone never wiped up. “Any of this. At any point in our marriage. You could have let me see that you were struggling instead of pretending you had everything under control.”
“You were asking me to try.” He moves around the chair, then stops short of me. “And I kept deciding not to. I don’t get to make that your job now, Chiara. You’ve already told me what you need.”
I remember him writing down the garden instructions without handing the responsibility back to me. He knows where the rosemary bed drains now. I need to know he can listen when the subject is uglier than a damaged plant, when the answer costs him more than a morning’s work.
I could step back. Instead I stay where I am, close enough to see the small cut beside his thumb from yesterday’s work. I want to take that hand, and I’m still angry enough that I don’t trust myself to explain what it would mean.
“Don’t.” I lift my hand from the table and put it between us. “Don’t kiss me. Not when I’m still this angry.”
Lorenzo goes still. He takes a step back, creating space between us. His hands drop to his sides.
“I won’t.” He moves back to the chair he left unused, putting enough room between us that I can lower my hand. “I would never. Not unless you wanted me to.”
The distance helps. I can think more clearly without his warmth so close to mine. But thinking clearly doesn’t change the fact that I’ve spent four days watching him learn to care for my plants, reading his notes, feeling something shift between us that I didn’t expect and don’t know how to handle.
“I’m still getting divorced.” I keep my place at the end of the table instead of following him. “This afternoon doesn’t erase months of hurt. It doesn’t mean I’m coming back.”
“I know.” He stays where he is. “I’m not asking you to come back. I’m not asking for anything.”
“Then what do you want?” I look at the space he has given me. This time I’m the one choosing to keep the conversation open.
“I want you.” He leaves his hands on the chair back.
I can hear the want without having to step closer and take care of it.
“I want you home. I want to wake up next to you and learn the names of every plant in your garden and spend the rest of my life earning back what I destroyed. But I want you to choose it. Not because you’re trapped or obligated. Because you want to be there.”
I look at him across the candlelit room. My husband. The man who let me face the worst days of our marriage alone, and who has spent the last four days showing me he might be capable of something different.
“I want you too.” I leave the shelter of the table and stop in front of him, close enough that he has to let go of the chair to turn toward me. “I hate that I do. But I do.”
He doesn’t move. He waits, giving me the choice he should have given me all along.
I close the distance between us.
I kiss him, and he lets me set the pace. For a moment I can only think how familiar he is, how much I have missed being close to him without feeling foolish for wanting it. When I step back, he waits. He doesn’t try to turn one kiss into permission for anything else.
“I want to be close to you.” I take his hand because I want him to understand that this choice is mine. “But I need you to understand what I said. About going back.”
“I understand.” He turns his hand beneath mine and lets me hold it. “You can change your mind about this too.”
I tell him I haven’t, then close the distance again.
Whatever waits for us outside this room, I choose to stay close for now.
The second kiss is not careful. I catch the front of his shirt and haul him into me. He answers with a low sound that goes straight through my anger, mouth opening under mine, tongue sliding against mine until I moan into him.
His hands fist at my waist, then my ass, pulling me flush so I feel how hard he already is. Candlelight jumps. The storm pounds somewhere far above the stone.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I whisper against his mouth, wrecked already. “Just this once. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.” Forehead to mine, hunger leashed. “Just this. Only what you give me.”
“Then stop talking and take it.”
I kiss him hard. He lifts me onto the archive table in one motion, shoving the folder and my bag down the wood as the table creaks under me.
Lorenzo steps between my knees and kisses my jaw, my throat, the hollow where my pulse hammers, biting just enough to make me gasp. Sweater shoved up, bra dragged aside.
His mouth closes over my breast, sucking hard, tongue circling, while his other hand works my trousers open.
“Let me,” he murmurs against my skin, voice rough. “Let me take care of you. Right now.”
“Then do it properly.” I fist his hair and shove him lower. “On your knees.”
He drops.
Trousers and underwear yanked down my legs. Cool air, then his breath, then his mouth. He doesn’t tease. He licks a long, greedy stripe through me, groans like he’s starving, and seals his mouth over my clit, sucking until my hips jerk and a broken sound tears out of me.
“Lorenzo… Fuck.”
“I’m yours right now.” He pulls back just enough to speak, chin wet, eyes dark, then dives in again. “Hold my hair and use my mouth. Take everything you want.”
And I do, shamelessly. Grinding against his tongue while he fucks into me with it, then pushes two thick fingers inside and curls them hard.
The wet sound of it fills the little room. I whimper, then moan, then nearly sob when he adds a third and sucks my clit in tight pulses.
“That’s it. Fuck yourself on my hand. Give me those sounds. I’ve wanted this. Wanted you shaking on my tongue. Come for me, Chiara. Soak me.”
I break hard, thighs clamping around his head, crying out as the climax rips through me. He doesn’t stop. He licks me through every pulse, filthy and devoted, until I’m twitching and yanking him up by the hair. He kisses me deep so I taste myself. I bite his lower lip.
“Inside me. Now. Before I remember why I shouldn’t.”
He shoves his trousers down and frees himself. Rubs the thick head through my soaked folds until I’m pushing forward for it, then thrusts in to the hilt in one desperate stroke.
The table shrieks. I moan into his shoulder, nails in his back.
“Cazzo.” He holds deep a second, breathing hard. “Tight… So fucking tight.”
“Lorenzo… Don’t you dare stop.”
He fucks me. Hard. Hungry. The table knocks the wall in a filthy rhythm. Papers slide, candle flames leap. Each thrust punches a moan out of me. He grips my thigh, folds it higher against his hip, and drives deeper, praising every broken sound.
“That’s it, Chiara. Hate me, want me… just let me consume you.”
“Harder.” I’m whimpering, furious and aching. “Right there… fuck.”