Page 49 of Blood Orange Christmas
Dinner service on the eve of Christmas Eve runs until the kitchen breathes like a tired animal and the last spoon hits the last saucer without a fight. I wipe the pass, stack the pans, and feel the day slide out of my shoulders in slow inches. The stew pot is empty. The air is lemon and fennel and heat that has settled into the copper like a secret. Gabriella sends the last crew home in twos. Luca ghosts by the door and gives me a look that says he put Paolo where the gate could teach him manners. I nod once because that is the only answer I have left in me.
Before I go anywhere, I check on Marco. The corridor to our room is warmer than the rest of the house, the radiators ticking a lullaby underneath the saints’ blank faces. Two guards stand on either side of his door with their hands tucked under their jackets, eyes forward, alert without being loud. Pippo the dog sprawls at their boots, chin on paws, ears moving without his head. He lifts his gaze when I approach and thumps his tail once as if to sayI know this one. She belongs.
Inside, the lamp is low and the room smells like clean sheets and milk. Marco sleeps on his side with his cheek pillowed against his stuffed elephant, mouth open, a thin thread of drool shining on the cotton. His hair curls damply at the nape where sleep and heat make it stubborn. The red scarf Dante gave him—too big, too bright, too hopeful—lies folded on the chair. His shoes are by the radiator, toes aimed at the heat, laces knotted in the way only tired children and men who didn’t learn to slow down tie them.
Signora Teresa sits in the chair by the window in a cardigan the color of tea with milk, her hands folded on her knees. She looks exactly like the kind of woman who raises wolves into men and then scolds them into eating a second bowl. Dante’s childhood nanny, flown in this afternoon without fanfare and already part of the air. She meets my eyes and tilts her head toward the bed as if to say good, he sleeps heavy. Then she shifts her gaze to the door.I have this. Go do the thing only you can do.
“Grazie,” I whisper.
“Prego,” she breathes back, the word soft as bread. “Go. He is a boy. He will wake and ask for toast. I will make him toast and tell him the saints like good listeners.”
I smile without showing my teeth because anything brighter would crack. I pull the blanket up under my son’s chin and kiss his forehead. He doesn’t stir. The guards outside shift only enough to let the door open and close. Pippo blows a sigh through his nose and decides the night can mind itself.
The villa’s tasting room sits off the long south hall, the one with the old maps and the window that looks over the lower vines. I walk to it with my apron untied and hanging from one hand, the string trailing the stone like a line I can follow back. Voices from the dining room taper and vanish. The dishwasher hum takes abreath and starts again. Somewhere, a door latches and a shoe scuffs. The house listens to itself.
He is in the tasting room, exactly where I hoped and feared he would be. The fireplace throws a steady glow. The flames aren’t showy. They hold tight to wood and do the work. The room smells like oak and citrus and smoke. A single glass of limoncello sits on the tasting table, pale and bright, sweating under its own cold, untouched. His knuckles are bruised. Of course they are.
Dante stands with one shoulder to the mantel, tie gone, top buttons undone, sleeves rolled to his forearms, that James Dean slouch he doesn’t put on so much as forget to take off. The fire turns his jaw into a line that could cut rope. He looks at the limoncello and not at me, which is how I know he knew I was coming.
I don’t say a word. I slip off my apron and fold it on the edge of the table, smoothing it with a palm like I’m pressing a memory flat. Then I cross to the fireplace and hold out my hands to the heat. The flames lick my skin without asking me to explain myself. We stand like that for a count of ten, twenty, thirty—two animals catching our breath by a safe light.
“Marco?” he asks, voice low enough that it stays in the room.
“Asleep,” I say. “Guarded like a treasure. Your Signora Teresa ordered the guards to take off their shoes when they step inside. They obeyed her without blinking.”
He huffs a sound that almost wants to be a laugh. “She raised me. She raised my cousins. She raised the idea of me we kept when the house forgot to be kind.”
I glance at the limoncello. “Are you going to drink that?”
“No.” He shakes his head once, slowly. “It felt right to pour it. It feels wrong to touch it.”
I move closer to the fire and then closer to him, the way you approach a wild thing that is deciding whether you belong. Up close, the bruises on his knuckles are the shape of Paolo’s ribs. The skin is split in one place where the wall bit back. I take his hand, turn it palm up, and place my fingers over the damage. His skin is warm and rough and honest under mine. He watches my mouth like it might change what his hand feels.
“What happens to a house like this,” I ask, “when a child sleeps in it?”
“It learns manners, or it burns.” His voice is the sound a rope makes when it goes taut. “I would teach it. I would make it learn.”
“That’s not an answer.”
His eyes lift to mine. The fire says what it says in the reflection there—danger, shelter, old gods. “I would burn it all for him.” He swallows the rest and then lets it out soft, “For you.”
Heat rolls under my skin that has nothing to do with the fireplace. I keep my hand on his bruises and feel how he holds very still so he doesn’t scare me with his wanting. He has a way of kissing me that feels like a man who has been drowning for years and finally found a surface that will take him. He does it now, and I let him.
His mouth fits to mine like it remembers the angle, the pressure, the exact measure between urgent and careful, like there’s a map folded under his tongue with my directions written in the old ink. I taste him and lemon and smoke and the distance we have been climbing back across since the minute I walked into hiskitchen with a bowl under my arm. His free hand goes to my waist and closes there, not to hold me in place, but to steady the room while it tilts.
“I hate this world,” I say against his mouth, because honesty tastes better when it’s hot.
“So do I,” he answers, mouth moving against mine, words rough, breath warm. “But I know its doors. I know which ones won’t close on your fingers.”
“You weren’t here,” I say, and the sentence lands because it has to. “When they took him from my corridor. When I found the mitten and the red thread.”
“I know.” He presses his forehead to mine. His breath, his regret. “I know, I know, I know. I was chasing a ghost I thought was a man. I thought I could outrun what was coming for me by running at it. I was wrong.”
“Don’t be wrong again.”
“I won’t,” he says, and the way he says it is not a promise. It’s a sentence.
He kisses me until my knees remember that wood can be soft if someone holds you the right way. He tastes like hunger and apology and the thing men think is power until they learn the word is devotion. My hands climb his chest under the open buttons, fingers tracing the heat of him, the cut of him, the scar we never talk about. His pulse pounds against my palms like it was waiting in line and finally got called.
