Page 35 of My Dark Fairy Tale
“Not much,” she confessed, walking almost on tiptoe over to her seat. I had noticed she had a way of doing that and wondered if she had been a ballerina or if it was simply to add some height to her short frame. “My parents always corrected anyone who called me that growing up, and my full name kind of stuck.”
“What about Vera?” I asked casually as I plucked a ripe plum from the fruit bowl and cut it neatly into segments with a sharp knife. She watched me intently, tracing the line of the blade as her tongue traced her lips, as if she was seduced by it.
“No one has ever called me that,” she admitted, sitting on her knees on the chair cushion so she could lean across the table to grab the freshly squeezed orange juice. “Is it a popular name in Italy?”
“No,” I mused. “It is mostly used as a word. It means ‘true.’ I thought it was fitting.”
She paused, arm extended, heavy pitcher wobbling slightly in her grip, as she stared at me for a weighted moment.
When she moved again, she poured the juice so quickly it splashed over her fingers, and I had the frustrating joy of watching her lick them clean.
“I’ll allow it, then,” she decided with an impish grin.
I inclined my head, but it only made her laugh.
“You would have continued to call me that anyway, wouldn’t you?”
It was my turn to grin, a curling lift of one side of my mouth.
She clucked her tongue, but when I handed her the bowl, she accepted the fruit I’d cut up for her. I kept one piece for myself, but she leaned across the table to make a swipe for it, so I held it out between two fingers for her to take. I pulled it back when she tried to grab it with her fingers and lifted a brow in silent command.
She rolled her eyes, but there was a tiny grin tucked into the edge of her mouth when she leaned forward on her knees to grasp it between her teeth. Her lips closed over my thumb, plush and damp.
I wanted to see them wrapped around so much more than just my fingers.
“This is how they eat fruit in America?” Ludo asked in his usual monotone way that made it difficult for strangers to understand his sense of humor.
But Guinevere laughed lightly and sank back on her heels, happily munching on the fruit from the bowl. “Sometimes, between friends.”
“Is that what we are now?” I asked, thinking about the fact that I had never danced with a friend the way I had with her last night.
“I think people who dance together so well must be friends,” she quipped, looking at me with an air of deliberation. “What kind of dance was that, by the way? It seemed traditional, somehow.”
“It was, a bit. Not the way we danced it, but the song. It is the ‘Tarantella Napoletana’ from Campania, where my family is originally from.”
I ignored Ludo’s eyes on me, hoping he would leave it alone, but of course he felt compelled to add, “It is a courtship dance.”
I scoffed lightly as I took the last sip of my coffee, but Guinevere’s smile was radiant as she looked into her bowl of fruit.
Why was her shyness so beguiling? Was it that every emotion seemed purer because I knew it had to fight through her natural reserve to shine through? That it felt hard won when so much in my life had come easy?
“Stefania won’t like it,” Carmine said as he swept onto the terrace in a three-piece brown suit with his hair carefully slicked back from his forehead, emphasizing his widow’s peak. He grabbed an apricot from the bowl on the table without even looking at Guinevere and hopped up to sit on the stone balustrade. “She’ll have heard of the American now and already be plotting.”
“Do not be dramatic, Carm,” I ordered. “I know you like life to mirror those absurd dramas you watch on daytime television, but this is not that.”
Ludo grunted. “Stefania makes those women look like sheep compared to a wolf.”
He was not wrong, unfortunately. And there was some merit to her aggression. As the daughter of a Camorra capo in Lombardy, she had been raised around men with blood inked into their skin. It was not fair to assume she would remain untainted by it. It was not right to want her to be either.
But her aggression seemed hollow, a thin armor over an abyss of insecurity that could be easily manipulated.
She did not interest me.
Across from me, Guinevere had lost her smile and was staring into her empty bowl of fruit as if searching for answers.
“I would like to go check into my apartment today,” she said abruptly. “I emailed Signora Verga that I was ill, but I’m better now, and it’s time I got things in order.”
“Order?” Carmine laughed. “Aren’t you on vacation?”
