3. Senna
— ? —
Senna
Two weeks of collaboration with Fiorella, and Rocco finally touches me again.
I’m not counting the days, except I am. I know exactly when she arrives each morning and when she leaves each night.
I know she stays later than necessary, laughs louder than warranted, and finds reasons to touch his arm when making a point.
I’ve become an expert on the schedule of my own humiliation.
Tonight, though, tonight is different.
I’m in bed reading a novel I won’t remember when Rocco comes home later than usual and stands in the bedroom doorway for a long moment before speaking.
“You’re still awake.”
“Couldn’t sleep.” I set the book down. “How was the session?”
“Good. Really good, actually.” He crosses to the bed and sits on the edge, close enough that I can smell his cologne and the faint trace of studio air. “Fiorella has some interesting ideas about structure. About getting back to basics.”
“That’s good.” I keep my voice neutral, even though neutral is the last thing I feel.
“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I’ve been distant. I know I have. The block has taken everything from me - every bit of energy, every bit of attention. And you’ve been here, and I’ve been-”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I want to explain.” He finally looks at me, and there’s something raw in his expression. “I want you to know that it was never about you. The distance, the silence. It was never because I stopped loving you.”
“Then what was it about?”
“Fear. Shame. Not knowing how to be myself when the music won’t come.” He reaches for my hand. “I don’t know who I am when I can’t write, Senna. And I kept thinking if I could just break through, I could come back to you. I could be the person you married.”
“I didn’t marry a musician. I married you.”
“They’re the same thing. They’ve always been the same thing.”
“They’re not.” I sit up, facing him directly. “Rocco, you are not your music. You’re a person who makes music, but you’re also a person who does a hundred other things. Even if you never wrote another song-”
“Don’t.” The word is sharp, almost panicked. “Please don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s the thing I’m most afraid of. That the music is gone forever, and I’ll have to figure out who I am without it.”
“Would that be so terrible? Figuring out who you are without it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”
We sit in silence for a moment, and I feel something shifting between us - not quite hope, but the possibility of hope. The first crack in the wall that’s been separating us for eighteen months.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “For being so far away. For not-” He stops, runs his hand through his hair. “I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. I’ve been so lost in my own head that I forgot how to find my way back to you.”
“You don’t have to apologize for struggling.”
“But I do have to apologize for disappearing while I did it.” He’s quiet for a moment, staring at our joined hands. “The session today was good. Really good. And the whole time I kept thinking about that morning - the B-flat, you standing in the doorway like you used to. I missed that. I miss you.”
“I’ve been right here, Rocco.”
“I know. That’s the worst part.” His voice cracks slightly. “You’ve been right here, and I’ve been somewhere you couldn’t reach, and I didn’t know how to tell you I was drowning because I was too ashamed to admit I needed help.”
“You could have let me help.”
“I know. I should have. I just-” He looks at me, and there’s something raw in his face, something I haven’t seen in months. “I didn’t want you to see me like this. Broken. Empty. I kept thinking if I could just fix it first, I could come back to you whole.”
“I didn’t marry you because you were whole. I married you because you were you.”
“I know.” His free hand comes up to cup my face. “I know. And I’ve been an idiot.”
I lean into his touch despite myself, and I’m surprised to find there are tears on my face. “I’ve been so lonely,” I whisper. “Even with you right here.”
“I know. God, Senna, I know.” He pulls me closer, and I let him, because I’m tired of the distance, tired of sleeping next to a stranger, tired of pretending I don’t still love him even when he’s breaking my heart.
“I can’t promise I’m fixed. I can’t promise I won’t disappear again.
But I’m here right now, and I want to be here. That has to count for something.”
“Does it?”
“I don’t know. But I want to find out.”
He kisses me, and it’s gentle at first, tentative, like he’s asking permission.
I pull back just enough to see his face. “Rocco. Wait.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I just-” I take a breath. “I need to know this isn’t just tonight. That you’re not going to wake up tomorrow and disappear back into whatever hole you’ve been hiding in for eighteen months.”
“I won’t.”
“You say that. But you’ve said a lot of things. You said you’d come back to me when the block broke, and then you brought in my sister instead.”
“I know.” His voice is rough. “I know I did. And I can’t take that back. I can’t undo any of it.”
“Then what can you do?”
“I can be here. Right now. With you.” His hand comes up to cup my face, his thumb tracing along my cheekbone. “I can tell you that I’m scared too. That I don’t know if I can be the person you need me to be. But I want to try. I want to try so badly, Senna.”
“Wanting isn’t the same as doing.”
“I know. But it’s where it starts, isn’t it? With wanting something enough to actually fight for it?”
I look at him - really look, past the exhaustion and the fear and the walls he’s built around himself - and I see something I haven’t seen in a long time.
Vulnerability. The raw, exposed core of the man I married, the one who used to tell me his dreams at 3 a.m. and cry at commercials about legacy and the passage of time.
“I’m not going to make this easy for you,” I warn him.
“I don’t want easy. I want you.”
“Those might be the same thing.”
“They’re not. You’re the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do right.” He laughs, a little desperately. “And I’ve been doing it wrong for years. But I’m here now. I’m asking you to let me try again.”
“And if you fail?”
“Then at least I’ll have failed trying. Instead of failed by giving up.”
Something shifts in my chest - not quite forgiveness, not quite hope, but something adjacent to both.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“Okay?”
“Okay. Try.”
He kisses me again, and this time I let myself fall into it.
His hands find the hem of my shirt - hesitant at first, like he’s waiting for me to stop him - and when I don’t, when I pull him closer instead of pushing him away, his fingers slip underneath the soft cotton and find the warm skin of my waist.
Eighteen months. Eighteen months of sleeping beside a stranger, of wanting and not being wanted, of learning how to hold my body like it didn’t ache for this. The touch of his palms on my bare sides makes something in my chest crack open, sharp and sweet and terrifying.
“Senna.” My name lands against my lips, barely voiced. “If this is too much-”
“Don’t ask me to stop.” My voice comes out rough. “Just - don’t disappear while you’re touching me. Stay here. Stay with me.”
“I’m here.” His forehead presses to mine. “I’m here. Fuck, I’m so sorry I ever left.”
The apology sits between us, heavy as everything else, and I kiss him harder so I don’t have to answer it with words.
His mouth opens under mine. He tastes like the mint he always chews after sessions and something darker underneath, something that is just Rocco, and I make a sound I haven’t made in a year and a half when his tongue finds mine.
He peels my shirt up slowly. I lift my arms. The cotton comes off and the cool air of our bedroom hits my bare breasts, and for a second I feel exposed in a way that has nothing to do with skin - because he’s looking at me the way he used to, really looking, and I don’t know if I can survive being seen again only to be forgotten by morning.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, and it sounds like it costs him something. “I’ve been such a fucking idiot.”
“Less talking.” I reach for the buttons of his shirt. My fingers shake. “More showing.”
He helps me. Buttons. The soft worn fabric of a studio shirt he’s had for years, the one that smells like him and cedar and the faintest trace of cigarette smoke from the alley behind the label.
I push it off his shoulders and put my hands on his chest - warm, familiar, the dark hair I used to trace patterns in after sex, the heartbeat hammering under my palm like he’s as scared as I am.
“Closer,” I whisper.
He comes. We fall back onto the pillows together, clumsy with want and rust, and his mouth finds my throat, my collarbone, the soft place under my ear that always makes me shiver.
His hand cups my breast, thumb dragging over my nipple until it tightens, and I arch into him with a gasp that sounds like surrender and accusation at once.
“Still so fucking responsive,” he murmurs against my skin.
“You always were. I used to live for this. For the sounds you made when I-” He takes my nipple into his mouth and I forget how to finish the thought.
He sucks, gentle then firmer, and his other hand is working my sleep shorts down my hips, and I’m helping him, kicking them off, leaving myself in nothing but plain cotton underwear that suddenly feels like the last wall between us.
He hooks his fingers in the waistband and looks up at me. Waiting. Asking without asking.
“Yes,” I say. “God, Rocco, yes.”
He peels them down. Slow. Watching. When I’m bare in front of him he makes a sound low in his throat - something between a groan and a prayer - and then he’s kissing his way down my stomach, past the soft of my belly, to the inside of my thigh.