by CD Reiss
“It’s fine,” I say, holding up my hand, where a bandage covers the wound. “It’s already stopped bleeding.”
“I don’t like it when you’re hurt.” He kisses the inside of my wrist and down the elbow. “In your hand or your heart.”
His lips brush my bicep, then my collarbone as his hands trail down my waist, reaching under my skirt to move down my bare thighs.
“We need to talk then.”
“We will.”
Then he does something I never thought I’d ever see him do, and it’s so erotic, my world goes from a monochrome that seemed normal my whole life, to an explosion of color and light.
He kneels before me.
I gasp at the sight of him looking up at me like a supplicant. He runs his hands up my thighs, and I’m not so foolish to misunderstand the context. He’s not begging or setting himself beneath me. He’s sliding off my underwear, and yet, just the sight of his vulnerability is breathtaking. His closed eyes as he kisses the insides of my legs, working upward with upper and lower lashes pressed together in a thick black line, mouth open, one hand putting a knee over his shoulder. His tongue darts out, and when I lose sight of it between my legs, I gain the sensation of it running along the ridge of my clit.
Bit by bit, he works me with his tongue, holding me against the wall as I lose the ability to keep myself upright. I try to focus, because I shouldn’t be intimate with him until I’m sure he won’t let Gia be sold off, but like a train riding off into a cartoon sunset, my reality slowly shrinks.
“Santino,” I groan. “This is not talking.”
“Yes, it is,” he whispers before sucking on my nub so gently, then so forcefully I dig my fingers in his hair as my hips rise to slide toward his waiting mouth.
By now, Santino has a map of my body and gently flicks his tongue while his fingers stroke my tenderest flesh.
The voice that scolds me for giving him my body before getting an agreement to free Gia has quieted but not disappeared. Yet I cannot fathom, in a million years, ever telling this man to stop, because the sight of him, a man of granite and power, on his knees before me, kissing my pussy, sends waves of electricity straight from my brain to his tongue. I ride his face harder and he licks me from top to bottom in broad, clean strokes, then he bites a little, just enough to remind me who has the power here.
The lump in my throat unworks itself enough to let out a moan.
“You are delicious.” He runs a finger against my slit and it’s so perfect I could cry. “You like this? You want to come for me now?”
Even beneath me, he’s in charge, easily taking control of my body with a question I can’t answer in words. He slides his finger inside me so slowly, it feels as if it’s petitioning for an invitation. My hips tip against him in response.
“You.” I can barely manage the tiny word.
His finger finds the precious space deep within me and another finger quickly joins it as he massages me from the inside out and blows gently on my clit without touching it. If I wasn’t all but tethered to him, I’d take off in flight.
“Fammi sentire come godi,” he asks to hear me come, then buries his face between my legs.
Heat pulses through my body and settles in my core with the utterance of his command.
Electricity rips over my skin and heat thumps through my veins. I can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t feel anything but the sweet heaven between my legs. It’s when my stoic man moans into me that I’m finally pushed to the edge. It builds to a roaring crescendo and hurls me into the horizon of pleasure. I cry his name from there, then I crumple over him, panting as if I’ve just been saved from drowning.
“Brava, Forzetta.” Santino rises and snaps a tissue from the box.
I collapse into him as the tides of euphoria roll back out to sea. After wiping his mouth, he delicately cleans my folds and lets my skirt fall back over my legs.
When he kisses me, I drink up my taste from his lips and tongue. He kisses my forehead and rests his hand against my throat, his thumb stroking the soft divot between my collarbones.
There’s so much I need from him, and the only thing I want is for this moment to never end.
“You’re dirty,” he says, taking both my hands. “Come. I will get you clean.”
I lie alone, flaccid-limbed and soaking. Steam clouds my eyes, and for the first time since the sun set, it’s not coming from me. The bathroom’s air is heavy and dense with vapor from water so hot, my skin is red and tingly. A mountain of bubbles rises in the center of the tub between my breasts and my knees. My wounded hand rests on the ledge to keep dry.
When my stomach grumbled, Santino left fully clothed, and now he returns in low-hanging drawstring bottoms and a bare chest, carrying a bowl of grapes.
“You didn’t cook for me?” I joke, well aware he wasn’t even going to boil water for tea.
“A husband does not do the cooking.” He says it solemnly, with the hearty cynicism of unpleasant but unchangeable truth.
“Mario Batali is married.”
“He does not cook for his wife.” He sits on the edge of the tub with his bowl and twists a grape off the stem.
“How do you know?”
“Cooking is his job. I don’t bring my work home.” He holds up a grape and I open my mouth so he can feed it to me. “I do not mow my own grass. I do not clean my own pool. I do not cook my own food.”
“Lucky for you I enjoy being in the kitchen,” I tease. Santino is an attentive husband in ways that give him power and pleasure, so it’s rare for him to cater to me on my terms. I know it’s all a game, but playing means pretending it’s real.
“I ordered your zia to train you to enjoy it from a young age.”
“You did not.” I roll my eyes at him. “Stronzo.”
He laughs, full and rich. Parts of my heart sell themselves to him, and he buys in bulk. I think back to that afternoon when I was twelve and captivated by him. What would I tell that girl if I could? “One day, he’ll be yours, but only in title”? Or something more frightening? “He will take possession of you like a piece of real estate and you will hate him before you love him”?
That young Violetta in my head turns into a young Gia, and I freeze with guilt. If I avoid tough conversations because Santino drew me a bath and fed me grapes, I’ll be complicit in whatever happens to her.
Someone—a visitor or a neighbor who didn’t know any better—once said to Zia, “Kids are different when they’re your own flesh and blood.” She almost lost her mind over it. Rosetta and I were not hers, maybe, she said, but she would do anything and everything for us.
I believed her, and she was complicit too.
“Open,” Santino says, grape between two fingers. His hair is mussed slightly, but he still looks impeccable.
It’s okay to feel loved and cared for. I don’t have to be angry every second. I don’t have to ignore my own life. I can have this.
It’s almost like we’re back in Amalfi, where everything was beautiful and felt right. Being his wife wasn’t a curse, it was a joy. I haven’t felt this way since before we were ambushed by Siena Orolio and her bad news. I close my eyes and convince myself it’s okay to be happy for five seconds.
Swallowing, I close my eyes and hum a tune I remember from my childhood, then I feel the cool velvet of a grape skin on my lips and take the fruit. Santino picks up the tune, soft and low, wordlessly singing the quiet, classic melody in a series of vowels until the chorus when I belt it out with him, our voices booming off the white marble. He continues the verse, and I’m captivated. He has a voice—deep, rich, and soulful. Exactly how I imagined it would be.
When he’s done, I open my eyes and can’t help but clap. “That was beautiful.”
“My aunt sang to me when she bathed me.” Santino’s smile fills his voice. “It was an old favorite. Her mother sang it to her and her mother before her sang to her and the one before her.” He rolls his hand at the wrist, meaning on and on.
“A c
entury of DiLustros singing?”
“And Morettis,” he says. “We sang it with your father in the car whenever we were going someplace…” He pauses to choose his words. “Someplace bad.”
“You knew my father better than I did,” I say, and he looks a little guilty about it. “Tell me more.”
“This ring?” He holds up the hand with the diamond crown ring. “He left it to me when he died. He always said I was like a son he never had.”
Looking down over me, Santino’s expression is pure yearning for something he fears he’ll never have, because he’s powerless to grab it for himself.
“I’m not ready for children.” It’s one of the most honest things I’ve said to him, even when it papers over the secret truth that ready or not, a child may be coming.
“Are you unhappy, my violet?” He snaps off another grape. “Should I feed you?”
I open my mouth for it, chew. He thinks feeding me will make me happy, or maybe he thinks it’ll shut me up. There’s no discontent in silence.
I want this man to love me. Despite everything, I want this relationship to mean something. I want it to be the thing that drives him to be a better man, and me to be a stronger woman, but it’s clear we are very different people and view the world through vastly different lenses. He protects a status quo where everyone smiles because their lives depend on it.
That is not the happiness I want, and I can’t help but think that if he could see the desperation and fear of the people living with the traditions he so cherishes, he’d destroy what he’s worked so hard to protect.
“What you told me,” I say after I swallow. “It doesn’t change anything. Gia’s still going to be sold, and she doesn’t even know it.”
“What if she’s happy?”
“With Damiano? The guy trying to get close to you so he can steal an antique?”
Santino pushes the bowl aside and bends at the waist, hands folded in front of him. “Gia wants to be married. But even more, she wants to be American. Damiano will stay here. Their marriage gives her what she wants twice over.”
This level of cold calculation never left Gia’s lips. This is one hundred percent Santino.
“He can try to,” Santino says. “But he’ll never get what he wants out of it.”
“He’ll never love her either.”
“You can see into his heart like a surgeon?”
“I can see into yours. You want to feel good about the way things are.”
“Maybe.” Santino’s voice warms up and drops an octave lower. He looks away from me. The admission hurts him. “If you’d known I was coming for you, what would you have done?”
I lean back, letting the water slosh around me.
What would I have done if Zia and Zio had told me? I would have been incredulous, but I would have had no choice but to believe it. If I’d been informed at an early enough age, I might have gotten used to the idea. But they couldn’t have told me until after Rosetta died. By that time, the news would have been shocking.
“I would have run away,” I say.
“You would have been found. By me or someone else. I tried to convince your zio to be brutally honest with you, but their choice was the right one. Telling you would have made it all worse for you.”
“I’m starting to think they’re all cowards.”
“They love you, Violetta,” Santino rumbles. “And there are times love has to lie to survive.”
With the bath bubbles flattened and the water cooled, I’m falling into the trap of thinking of myself as a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded, not a full human making my own choices.
“You had all the information you needed,” I sulk.
“Knowing everything didn’t give me any choice.”
“Wait.” I straighten, launching myself into a crouch as if I’m ready to pounce on the moment. “You’re talking about it as if you’re the one who was sold into a situation you wouldn’t have wanted. Right? Doesn’t it feel shitty?”
“This is how things have always been, and how they will always be. It is our way.”
“But it can be different.” I cling to his hand, relieved to know that for one minute, he can imagine what it’s like to have your life stolen. I can use that knowledge. “It has to be different. I’m different!”
“You are different, Forzetta,” Santino says softly, touching the parts of my face as if memorizing them. “You are different because you are special. You are different because I want you. You are different because I love you.”
He loves me.
It’s crazy, because of the way we started and who he is. But it’s also completely sane, because the way we started is the only way I could have broken down who I wanted to be and found out who I really am.
I collapse into his embrace, because he’s broken the dam, and I know I love him too.
Santino helps me out of the tub and dries me off. He leads me to the bedroom in a flurry of kisses and caresses.
I let him lay me down. I let him kiss me. I let his hands cover my body. I let him roll me on top of him and his waiting cock, and I straddle him, on top, in control. And I know, right then, that either I will follow him to the ends of the earth, or I will pull him to the limits of his world… but wherever we go, we go together.
16
VIOLETTA
My body is sore where Santino used it, and in the half-sleep of morning, I’m aware of the pleasures of every ache. Yet my dream is focused on my hand. Though the stuck stiffness of the bandage is there, it’s Santino—standing in front of me, in a light blue jacket and white shirt with his palms up and elbows bent slightly—who’s bleeding from both palms.
Apply pressure.
Remove rings and bracelets that may compress nerves.
Clean.
Disinfect.
Ice.
Elevate.
My feet are stuck. I can’t reach him. I tell him to come to me, but he looks back at me in distress, bleeding as if there are arteries in his hands. I’m frustrated, but the dream reveals that his feet are stuck in a mound of dried plaster. Then that he’s trapped inside a connected plaster grotto surrounded with pots of red roses, and then, I am as well.
Church bells ring. His olive skin goes pale as paint. I reach for him, but he’s too far for the length of my arms, and his are frozen in place.
“Mrs. DiLustro?” he says, and in my dream, it’s Italian for do not come.
If I’d stayed in school, kept on my path to nursing, I’d live in a smaller house with fewer nice things, but I’d know what to do. My clothes would have no value, but my knowledge would be priceless, and I could stop the flow of this river of blood.
The church bells in my dream are the only thing left as I wake, turning into the doorbell chiming over and over, with a pang of regret—not because Santino’s not in bed with me, but because by obeying him, I’m unable to save him.
“Mrs. DiLustro?” Armando’s voice comes from the other side of the door, followed by a light rap I can barely hear over the frantic doorbell dings.
Sun cuts through the windows, turning the view behind my eyelids bright orange.
“Yes?” I say, hoping he’s here to ask a yes or no question. I want to go back to my dream and take control of the situation, get out of my plaster grotto and save Santino.
“Gia’s here.”
My bloodstream floods with cortisol and I bolt upright, remembering what I’d promised myself I’d do and who I’d do it for.
The bell keeps ringing.
“Did you let her in?” I hop off the bed, now really annoyed by the chiming. She must be trying to wear out the button. With all the security, I’ve never heard anyone actually ring it.
“Yes, but she won’t come inside until you’re down, and just to say… she is upset.”
“Tell her I’ll be right down.” I slap open a dresser drawer.
“Thank you.”
I jam my legs through a pair of sweatpants, throw on a tank, then a hoodie over it,
and run downstairs without even peeing.
Framed by the open front door, Gia pokes the doorbell repeatedly. Her cheeks are striped with mascara and her lips are wet and puffy, lines of spit connecting them.
“I’m here!” I shout and run to her with bare feet and open arms.
She stops jabbing the button and lets me hold her in the space between inside and outside for a few seconds before I drag her in. Armando closes the door. I mouth the word “coffee” and he nods, heading for the kitchen. To my new cousin, I whisper comforts and avoid asking what happened until she can breathe, then I take her hands.
“What happened, Gia? What can I do?”
She opens her mouth to speak, but her face betrays her. Her mouth twists and sadness just pours out of her like a broken dam. I have never seen someone so red with distress.
I reach to hold her, but she slaps me. The sting on my cheek is nothing compared to the burn of her rejection.
“Gia?” I ask, my hand to my face.
“Whu-whu-why did you do it?” Gia huffs. “Papa is so mad at-at me and I… I… I… why?” The words catch between her tears and vanish. “Why did you ruin everything?”
She rushes into me and I’m too naïve to flinch in fear of another slap. Even with my skin burning where she hit me, I’m operating as the Violetta of ten seconds ago, so when she collapses into me, I hold her.
“We’ll figure it out.” I put my arm around her shoulder, stroking her hair. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be fine.”
Gia presses her forehead against my neck and sobs as I lead her inside, passing the couches and walking her to the kitchen—where comfort resides. Celia’s setting up coffee and a cookie tray. I nod to her. She nods back silently as I sit Gia down on one of the kitchen chairs.
“Now.” I take a seat, turning toward her so I can smooth the hair around her forehead.
It’s nice to feel needed. I haven’t had a friend in a long time or felt useful in even longer. I hand her a paper napkin from the dispenser and she squishes it up and pushes the ball into her eyes one at a time.
