1. Cat
— ? —
Cat
I’ve been awake for hours, laptop balanced on my knees, deep in chapter seventeen of a book I’ll never tell anyone I’m writing. Lena Amara, mafia-romance author, face unknown, books everywhere, not one soul in either family the wiser. The irony isn’t lost on me.
The click of the lock is too careful. Someone trying not to wake the house. Third floorboard creaks.
That’s him.
I close my laptop and wait. His footsteps pause outside my door. Move on. Come back.
A knock. Soft.
“Cat? You awake?”
Something’s wrong with his voice.
I open the door, and my husband is bleeding.
“Jesus Christ, Max-”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.” He’s already pushing past me, one hand pressed against his ribs, his white shirt dark and wet. “Just a graze. I need you to stitch it.”
“You need a hospital. Or at least Dr. Ferraro-”
“No hospitals. No famiglia doctor. Just you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one I want touching me right now. Please, Cat.”
He never says please. He orders, he decides, he disappears, but he doesn’t ask.
“Sit. Shirt off. Don’t argue with me about anything for the next twenty minutes.”
“I can manage that.”
“We’ll see.”
He lowers himself onto the closed toilet lid and fumbles with his buttons. His fingers are clumsy, shaking.
“Let me.”
“I can do it.”
“You’re trembling. Let me.”
The shirt peels away with a wet sound. The wound is ugly, a dark furrow carved along his ribs, still seeping. Not lethal, but deep enough to scar.
“What happened?”
“Business.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I can’t give you a better one tonight.”
I clean the wound, and he hisses but doesn’t move.
“You’re quiet,” he says after a moment.
“I’m concentrating.”
“You’ve stitched me four times this year. Concentration never stopped you from talking before.”
“Maybe I’ve run out of things to say.”
“Have you?”
“I don’t know, Max. Have I? You’re the one who disappeared for three days without a word.”
I keep my eyes on the needle, on the clean clinical work of closing him up, because it’s easier than his face while I say it.
“I know.”
“And before that, two weeks where you barely looked at me. Before that, the study door locked every night. Before that-”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because sometimes I wonder if you notice I’m here at all.”
His hand comes up, hovering near my wrist.
“Can I?”
“Can you what?”
“Touch you. While you work.”
I should say no. But I’m so tired of being alone in this marriage.
“Yes.”
His thumb brushes my wrist, tracing slow circles over my pulse. The most openly tender he’s been in months, and it’s happening while I’m elbow-deep in his blood.
“I missed you,” he says quietly.
“You live twenty feet from my bedroom.”
There was one other night, a few weeks ago. He came to me without words, and I let wanting answer for both of us. By morning he was gone. Sex, apparently, could cross the twenty feet. Conversation couldn’t.
“I know. I still missed you.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Mine. All of it.”
I dab at the wound harder than I need to. He doesn’t flinch, which is somehow worse.
“Then why? Why disappear? Why lock yourself in that study like I’m something to be avoided?”
“You’re not something to be avoided.”
“Then what am I? Because I’ve been trying to figure that out for six months. Am I your wife, or just an obligation you’d rather manage from another room?”
Six months of the list I’ve kept in my head, right there, wanting out. I bite down on most of it.
“You’re my wife.”
“Wives get told things, Max. Wives get included. Wives don’t find out about their husband’s schedule from the household staff.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Forget it.” I thread the needle. “First stitch. Breathe.”
The needle slides through skin, and he exhales sharply. I fall into the rhythm, puncture, pull, tie, move on, while silence pools between us.
“The night we got married,” he says eventually. “Do you remember what I said I wanted?”
“You said you wanted one night where we weren’t enemies or strangers.”
“And you gave me that. You gave me months of that. The chess games that went until 3 a.m. The way you argued with me about everything: politics, books, whether pineapple belongs on pizza.”
“It doesn’t.”
“It absolutely does.” His thumb resumes its slow circles on my wrist. “And that night you fell asleep on the study rug, telling me about your grandmother’s farm. You talked for two hours about lemon trees and a crooked pantry door.”
“You remember that?”
“I remember everything about those months, Cat. Every single moment.”
“Then what happened? What changed?”
He’s quiet for a long moment. “I did. Something in me changed, and I handled it wrong.”
“That’s a fortune cookie, not an answer.”
“It’s the best I can give you right now.”
I tie off another stitch, hands steady even as my chest aches.
“You know what I remember? I remember the exact day it shifted. We’d just buried your father.
I brought you tea in the study, that terrible chamomile you pretend to hate but always drink, and you looked at me like I was a stranger. Like you didn’t know why I was there.”
“Cat-”
“And I thought, okay, he’s grieving. Give him time. So I gave you time. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and you just kept… not being there. Even when you were right in front of me.”
“I’m sorry.”
The apology is quiet, worn thin from overuse. I’ve heard it too many times for it to land anymore.
“Sorry doesn’t explain it.”
“I know.”
“Sorry doesn’t make up for six months of feeling invisible in my own marriage.”
“I know that too.” His hand tightens on my wrist. “I know I’ve been a terrible husband. I know you deserve better. I know-”
“Then be better. It’s not complicated, Max. Just be here. Talk to me. Stop treating me like a stranger you’re obligated to tolerate.”
“You’re not, I don’t-” He breaks off, frustrated. “You’re the opposite of someone I tolerate. You’re the only thing that feels real anymore.”
“Then act like it.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
I tie off the last stitch with more force than necessary.
“Done. Try not to tear these out.”
“Cat, look at me.”
I don’t want to. Looking at him means seeing the exhaustion, the shadows under his eyes, the way he’s watching me like I’m precious and painful all at once.
But I look.
“I don’t deserve your patience,” he says quietly. “I don’t deserve you still being here after everything I’ve put you through. But I’m asking anyway. Give me a chance to fix this.”
“You’ve had six months of chances.”
“I know. I’ve wasted every one. Let me stop wasting them.”
“How? What’s going to be different tomorrow?”
“I don’t know yet. But I want to figure it out. With you.”
“Pretty words, Max. You’ve always been good at those.”
He says it looking straight at me, and the awful part is how badly I want to believe him. Wanting isn’t believing. I remind myself of that.
“I mean them.”
“You meant them last time too. And the time before that.”
“This is different.”
“Why? What’s changed?”
He doesn’t answer directly. Instead, he pulls me closer until I’m standing between his knees, his hands gentle on my hips.
“Stay,” I hear myself say. “Tonight. With me.”
His breath catches. “What?”
“Stay. I’m not asking for explanations. I’m just asking you not to disappear the second I finish patching you up.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
He goes very still, like I’m a deer he doesn’t want to spook.
“Okay. I’ll stay.”
“And in the morning?”
“I’ll be here. I swear it.”
He kisses me like he’s been starving for it.
I should push him away and demand answers, where he’s been, who put the hole in him, why the blood on my kitchen towel smells like copper and broken promises.
But his hands are in my hair and I’ve missed him so much my chest aches with it, a physical bruise under the sternum I’ve been pretending was indigestion for half a year.
“Careful,” I murmur against his mouth. “Your stitches-”
“I don’t care about the stitches.”
“You will when they tear. I’m not restitching you at three in the morning because you got enthusiastic and bled on my good sheets.”
“I don’t care, Cat. I’ve spent six months holding back from you. I’m not spending tonight worried about a few inches of thread and antiseptic.”
I pull back enough to see his face properly.
The bandage wraps his side, white gauze already freckled with pink where my needlework is still fresh and angry.
His pupils are blown wide. His mouth is soft in a way the rest of the world never gets to see.
He looks like a man who walked into a knife fight and somehow ended up in my doorway anyway, dripping apology he doesn’t know how to say out loud.
“Right there,” I say. “Don’t move. And if you rip those stitches I will be extremely unsympathetic while I fix them, and I will narrate the whole thing in the most judgmental voice I own.”
“Tyrant.”
“Nurse. Temporary. Don’t get used to the bedside manner. It expires at dawn.”
He stays where I stitched him, propped on the closed lid of the toilet, his hand finding the small of my back like a compass needle.
He watches me strip with an intensity that makes my fingers clumsy on my own buttons.
Blouse first. Then pants. The practical underwear of a woman who wasn’t expecting company and refuses to apologize for cotton when there’s still dried blood under her nails.
“You’re beautiful,” he says quietly.
“You’re concussed. Or blood-loss delirious. Pick one.”
“I’m lucid. Painfully lucid. Come here before I start begging, which would damage what’s left of my reputation.”
I straddle his thighs carefully, knees bracketing him on the narrow seat, mindful of the bandage like it’s a third person in the room who didn’t ask to be invited and won’t leave.
He reaches up and cups my breast through my bra, thumb circling until the nipple hardens against the fabric, then looks at me, really looks, for permission before he pops the clasp.
“Yes,” I say. “You can. God, Max, you can.”