Page 5 of Blood Orange Christmas
I hold very still and let the fact settle in.
He covered me. He left his coat.
3
DANTE
Idon’t believe in indulgence. I believe in control, in clean lines and clear orders, in knives that go where they’re told. The world runs better when I take the air out of a room and make everyone breathe on my count.
Then Serena walks into my kitchen and refuses to count.
She moves like she owns the very conception of fire. She sets her station the same way every time—board, towel, knife, salt within reach—and everything after that is improvisation. I tell myself she’s a girl cooking in a room I paid for, a temporary answer to a scheduling problem. Then she hums under her breath and pulls a pan just before it scorches, and something in my chest loosens without permission.
I try to stay in the parts of the house where decisions carry weight. Deals get made in studies, not kitchens. But after the third dinner—anchovy, fennel, lemon, pasta cut by hand, fish with the patience I wish more men had—I start finding reasons to stand in her doorway. I ask about salt like I care about salt. I watch the way she checks a sauce with the back of a spoon, theway she tastes and adjusts and never looks rattled. She keeps her hair pinned up, but curls escape the clip and end up dusted in flour. She wipes them back with the back of her wrist. I pretend I don’t want to put them behind her ear.
She makes a pomegranate glaze on a Tuesday night that turns the room quiet. Seeds pop in the pan, sugar melts, and the air goes sweet-tart like the markets near Palermo in December. I’m not a man who lets memory get in the way of work, but that smell pushes straight through habit. It’s Christmas in a house that doesn’t celebrate anything unless I tell it to.
“What is that?” I ask, and I hear the want in my voice.
“Pomegranate,” she says without turning. “Molasses and juice. A little orange. It’ll go on the quail.”
I step closer than I should. Steam lifts off the pan and fogs the edge of her knife. The glaze runs thick and glossy off her spoon. My mother used to paint lamb with something like that when we still lived in a place where the oven was the warmest thing we owned.
“Too sweet for you?” she asks.
“I don’t usually like sweet.”
“You don’t like most things,” she says, and there’s a smile in it.
“I like competence,” I say.
“I noticed,” she says and drags a finger along the wooden spoon to check the thickness. I watch her lick her fingertip. I need to leave the room. I don’t.
Bianchi finds me at the door and clears his throat, the signal that something needs signing. I sign without reading. He leaves withthe papers and a look I’m not going to ask about. Luca passes a moment later, scans the hall, nods once at Serena like she’s a piece of furniture worth protecting, then disappears into the parts of the house that don’t have windows.
I don’t eat lunch. I don’t linger over coffee. I don’t stand close to heat I don’t control. Yet every night, I’m in this doorway, and when she hums, I stay.
The burn happens on a night when the house feels wired. Calls stack up. A supplier has a problem, a message arrives from a man who likes the sound of his own threats, and the front gate logs an extra car. I’m on the phone, low voice, one hand pressed to the edge of the counter, when Serena drops a handful of calamari into a pan that’s a second too hot. Oil jumps, hisses, snaps. She should’ve pulled back. She doesn’t. Her wrist catches a clean kiss of heat.
She doesn’t swear. She flinches once, bites her lip, and reaches for the salt like nothing happened.
“Give me your hand,” I say, already moving.
“It’s fine,” she says, which is a lie the color of red skin.
“Serena.”
She looks at me once, fast. I take her wrist like I take a knife, secure and without shake. The burn’s small but bright. I steer her to the prep sink, open the tap, and run cool water over the skin. She stands still, shoulders tight, breath pulled in. I can feel the pulse at the base of her palm, a fast beat that syncs up with mine and makes everything louder.
“I didn’t know you knew how to be gentle,” she says, quiet enough to miss if I weren’t closer than I should be.
“I didn’t either,” I say, because it comes out before I can watch it.
“That’s not true,” she says, eyes on the water. “You just don’t get to practice.”
“Maybe.”
She glances up. Her lashes are wet at the tips from steam, not from pain. She studies my face the way she studies a sauce that’s almost right. Her free hand lifts. She sets her fingers on my chest, just above the place where a vest would sit if I wore one in my own house. She keeps them there a beat, like she’s checking the temperature.
