Page 13 of Blood Orange Christmas
“He saw you.”
“He wanted me to be seen,” Dante corrects. “There’s a difference.”
“What happens now?”
“Now I send something back,” he says, and his voice is flat enough to scare me more than shouting would have. “A list and a receipt.”
“I don’t want to know,” I say quickly.
“You shouldn’t,” he agrees. He doesn’t let go of my hands.
Back at the villa, the staff look at us like we are weather. The porter who saw me go out that side door keeps stacking plates and doesn’t blink. Harrison peels off with a nod. Dante takes me to the kitchen, of all places, and sits me at the far end of the table, where he can stand and move and still see the door.
“You’re shaking,” he says. He pours water. I drink it. He sets bread in front of me, and prosciutto, and a little bowl of salt. It’s the first time he’s fed me without flirting. It feels like a ritual.
“Is this the life?” I ask when my throat can make the words. “Is this what it is with you?”
He doesn’t lie. He looks at the window. He looks at me. “It is quieter than it was,” he says. “But there is no quiet.”
“I’m… not sure how to put this into words,” I say, and I hear how small it sounds. “I cook. I pay rent late. I’m not built for this.”
“You were very calm,” he says, as if that’s an argument for anything. “In there.”
“I was not,” I say. “I just saved it for now.”
He nods once, as if he respects that. He sits across from me, too far to touch. We eat. The food is good because it always is, but I barely taste it. He tells me names without telling me specifics. He sayscaporegimeandconsiglieriand I understand structure and not the details, which is how he wants it. He says there will be a meeting and then there won’t be a cousin with amber cufflinks in Milan for awhile. I don’t ask what awhile means.
That night, he doesn’t touch me. He sleeps on top of the covers, or pretends to. I lie awake beside him and feel the shape of my decision press against my ribs. In the morning, he is on the phone before I’m fully awake, speaking in Italian that sounds like law. By noon, there are two black cars at the gate that he doesn’t let in. By evening, there is a single envelope on his desk that Harrison weighs with his hand and then passes to Dante without a word. Dante reads. He burns it in a metal dish. He goes out alone and comes back before dawn with blood on his cuff that isn’t his. He doesn’t notice it. I do. I take his shirt and Iwash it before he sees me do it. I don’t know why. Maybe to make it less real, as if stains are what make a thing true.
We keep moving around each other for three days like we’re in a narrow kitchen. There is sex again because there always is, hard and then soft, and I fall faster than is healthy. He teaches me the names of herbs in Italian. I tell him the best way to keep calamari tender. He doesn’t laugh often, but when he does, it’s like something heavy gets set down and I want to keep it there forever. In public rooms, he never brushes my back. In private, he can’t keep his hands off me. I keep telling myself I’m making a choice every hour. I keep hearing the chain lift.
On the fourth night, I wake to a knock I don’t hear but he does. He is out of bed and dressed before my mind catches up. Harrison’s voice is low at the door and I make out only “truck” and “warehouse” and “cleanup”. Dante comes to the bed and kneels, and it breaks me that he does that.
“Serena,” he says. “I have to go.”
“Now?” I say, even though I know that’s the only answer.
He nods. He looks at my mouth like he wants to kiss me. He doesn’t. He stands, shrugs into a coat, and this time, I don’t pretend I don’t see the weight in the lining. He leaves with Harrison. The house breathes out. I dress in the dark and go downstairs and stand in the kitchen that smells like fennel and lemon and steel. I can see a thin line of dawn at the edge of the garden. I try to picture a life with mornings that do not start like this. My body gives me a small warning pulse, low and mean like a cramp. It passes. I put a hand there without thinking and then take it away as if I’ve been caught.
I go to the bedroom and pack the small bag that brought me here. I take nothing he gave me. I leave the key to the pantry pass on the kitchen table. I write a note that says onlyThank You, and I hate it even as I write it because it makes me weak, and then I remember I am allowed to be weak because I don’t want this life to harden me into something else.
The train station is gray and humming. I buy a ticket south with hands that don’t quite work. While I wait on the platform, I try not to look like a person who has just changed her entire life before breakfast. The train arrives with a metallic sigh. I get on. I take a window seat and press my hand low to my stomach again because the cramp comes back, faint, steady, like a memory.
When the city lifts away, I see the roofs go first. The fields spread. The sun is rising, and it makes the glass warm and my throat cold. I taste him when I swallow and hate that my body keeps doing this to me. I’m afraid and I’m also missing him already, and I don’t know what to do with the kind of grief that is about someone still breathing.
I don’t look back. I make myself watch forward as the line of tracks draws me south. I count the seconds between stations. I breathe in fours. I think about eggs and flour and how many grams of salt per liter of water and whether the fennel will wilt before lunch in the villa kitchen if no one knows to put it in a bowl with ice. I think about how Harrison never asked me a question and yet always stood in the place where an answer would be needed. I think about the young man’s face against the van and Dante’s voice when he saidnowand how I can’t build a life inside that sound.
At a small station, the train stops longer than it should. A woman gets on with a child who wants to look at everything. She smiles at me because I must look like someone who needs a smile. Itry to give one back. It feels strange on my face. When the train moves again, the child presses her hands to the glass and leaves prints in perfect ovals. I put my hand low again. I don’t know what I’m hoping to feel.
Hotels are easy when you’re tired enough. They take money and give clean sheets and don’t ask where you were last night. I sleep for a day and then I don’t. I cook in rented kitchens that don’t have the right knives. I buy lemons and go light on the salt. I tell myself I don’t look at the door as much as I do. I make a list of reasons to go farther south and then I don’t follow it because I can’t seem to move more than a few blocks from the train line. I don’t answer unknown calls. I don’t open emails with no subject. I don’t write him.
Two weeks pass because I make them. The ache in my body changes from fear to something else. My mouth tastes wrong in the morning. Coffee makes me queasy. A girl I meet at the market chatters about the festival and the way her sister craves citrus, and I buy oranges without thinking and then can’t stand the smell. I count backward. I try to keep my breath even and my mind empty. It doesn’t work. In my mind, I grow more and more certain that the condom likely didn’t, either.
The clinic is white and quiet. A nurse with kind eyes tells me to wait here and then there and then here again. I take the little test into the bathroom because I can’t stand sitting in the chair in the hallway with the poster about vitamins. I read the instructions, but I don’t have to. I know how to count to two. I do the thing. I set the strip on the edge of the sink and tell myself not to look early. I look early. I see the second line start to rise like it’s being drawn by a careful hand, and my breath leaves my body like someone opened a valve. I say nothing. I grip the sink. I can’t feel my legs.
When I can, I reach out and pick up the little white plastic. The lines are clear now. There’s nothing to interpret. I don’t cry. I thought I would. Instead, I hear his voice in the garage saying “belongs” and my own voice answering that no one asked me, and something in me steadies.
I press my hand low, gentle. “You’re mine now,” I whisper, and my voice doesn’t shake. “Only mine.”
