by K. J. Dahlen
I fling the door open, rage at the ready. I’ll attack with my bare hands, if that’s the only option left.
She’s alone.
She’s—got different clothes on.
Her arms are draped with plastic bags, white and shining, and a couple of paper ones.
“Gio?” Her forehead wrinkles. “Are you okay? Did I wake you up?”
“Yeah.” I’m a gruff asshole in this moment, but Sia doesn’t flinch. I can’t stand still. I move past her, toward the door, and flip the deadbolt. Then I stalk back to the middle of the room as the adrenaline fizzles down to my fingertips. How long was I asleep? The light coming through the window is waning, and my mind is thick and heavy with sleep. “Where were you?”
“I went to the store on the corner.” She holds up the bags in her hands as if to say that should be obvious. “I needed clothes. I brought your shoes back—don’t worry.”
I take another look.
Skinny jeans that wrap around her legs. Pastel sneakers. A black t-shirt.
“My shoes?” What in fresh hell is she talking about?
“I didn’t have any shoes,” she explains patiently, a smile playing at the corners of her lips. “I borrowed yours. You didn’t even turn over when I took them off you.”
“You should have woken me.” My heart thuds against my ribs. “That was fucking dangerous.”
“It would have been more dangerous to go without shoes. You know what they say. No shirt, no shoes...” She moves into the suite and puts the paper bags down on the countertop. The plastic bags, from the department store, she lets glide neatly onto the sofa.
“They could have taken you,” I growl.
Sia straightens up. “I think I know what the problem is.”
“What problem?” I let out a bitter, disoriented laugh. “The problem of my family hunting us both down?”
“No, you grumpy-ass man.” She goes back to the kitchenette and opens one bag, then the other, taking a deep whiff of each one. “The problem is that you’re hungry, and it’s making you a dick.”
“Not another word.” Sia lifts one container, then another, out of the bags. My stomach growls. Without missing a beat, she goes for the cupboard with the dishes. “I’ve brought enough food for both of us. Sit down and eat.”
24
Sia
Gio doesn’t argue.
The sight of the food turns him to putty, and with one more frustrated breath, he goes over to the sofa and flops down, staring out the window. “How long was I asleep?”
“About four hours.”
The place down the block is a Mediterranean one, cheap and fast. The food smells delicious. I fill both our plates with fragrant marinated chicken and heaps of rice. There are two more containers in the bag, and I carry them over first. Crushed lentil soup. It’s one of my favorites. I put them both on the coffee table in front of Gio and he picks one up in his big hands, cupping it as if he’s cold.
I bring the plates.
I bring forks.
I bring napkins, and last I bring one of the bags, the top rolled down. “Naan.”
“Thank you.” There’s a hitch in his voice. I gracefully ignore it and settle onto the sofa next to him.
The food tastes like it was literally sent down from heaven. For a while, we don’t say anything.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Gio says into the stillness.
“Do what?” I take another bite of rice and let the delicate flavor melt into my tongue.
“Bring food for me.”
I clear my throat. “In a way, it’s your own gift to yourself.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“I don’t have any money, so...”
Gio laughs out loud. “Christ. You took my shoes and my wallet? You should be a Moretto, not a Ricci. You didn’t leave any stone unturned, did you?” He puts his plate, empty, onto the table.
I put down my plate and pull the wallet from my brand-new pocket. “I kept it under control at the store.”
He takes the wallet back, but his fingers brush mine. It’s like tinder igniting, but I don’t want to pull away. I want to keep my hand in the flame. Gio must feel it too, because he takes both my hands in his, the smooth leather of his wallet between them. “Even if you hadn’t kept it under control, how could I blame you?” There’s something strange in his voice. An apology? Yes, but more than that, too.
“How could you, really?” The touch of his hand warms me from my wrists to my toes, and I have the sudden urge to blurt out the fact at the heart of me. After I was afraid of dying, I’d been afraid of something else. Now I’m not afraid.
“I owe you.” He glances at the plates. “You didn’t have to think of me. Not this way.”
“I knew you’d be hungry.” I shrug one shoulder. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“It was,” he insists. “I can’t remember—” His voice cuts out, and he tries again. “I can’t remember the last time someone did that for me.”
“My uncle always cooked for us.” My memory travels over the lines of him in the kitchen, half at battle. “He never liked it, though. My mother, on the other hand?” I can’t help the big smile that crosses my face. “She loved to cook. She loved to bake. She’d surprise me after school sometimes, with a cake for the two of us, and we’d sit there and eat it until we were practically sick—” I laugh, but halfway through, it turns into a sob. My throat is tight with the sweetness of that cake, of her laugh beside me on the couch in the shitty apartments we’d shared before we moved in with my uncle.
“You miss her.” Gio’s voice is reverent, wondering.
I swallow down the tears. “You know, it’s been ten years.” The images come fast and thick. The wasting of her. The defeat of her. The death. “I don’t think I’m over it.” I look back into his eyes. “But you must know how that is. It must be the same for you.”
His face is written over with compassion. “No,” he says, even and soft. “I don’t remember much about my mother. What I miss is...” He pauses, like the words are hard to come by. “I miss the shadow of her. The her that never was. All those things that she would have done for me. With me. Not that my father was...” He trails off with a shake of his head. “He was a good father.”
“But it wasn’t how it was supposed to be.” I might have a more graphic image of what it’s like to lose a parent, but I know the bone-shattering sadness of what could have been. My voice rings with it.
Gio raises a hand and tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear, and his touch screams that I am something precious, something he’s never seen in all his life. “How could he do this?” It’s half-murmured, almost to himself.
“How could who do what? You’re very cryptic now. Did you know that?”
“How could my father turn us against each other? How could he do that when you’re the missing piece?”
I can’t breathe. I can hardly blink. My chest swells with warmth and light. We’re opposite sides of the same coin, Gio and I. We both live and breathe our loss. The women who disappeared from our lives shaped us into these people. It sweeps over me, a heavy wave. He’s the only one who can understand. He is the only one.
I kick hard for the surface, drawing in a breath that clears my head. “Don’t let him, Gio.” I sound desperate, like he’s clutching the only available live preserver and I’m drowning in the ocean. “Don’t let him turn us against each other. I—” The truth tumbles out. “I want you so much.”
He pulls me close in and I am overwhelmed by the scent of him, the mint and man of him. “In spite of everything?”
“Fuck it.” I can hardly force my voice above a whisper. “Don’t let them take you away from me.”
He kisses me then, an explosion of passion and fury, and the rest of the world ceases to exist.
25
Gio
I’ve kissed her before, but never like this.
Raw. Open. A live wire. There’s nothing between us, not even the hard wall of my famil
y name.
Sia melts into me, exactly the way I always imagined she would. She’s got to be nineteen now, almost twenty, but she’s still so sweet that the taste of her bursts on my tongue like the early spring. God, she’s soft. God, she’s warm. And so pliant. So pliable.
She makes a little sound into my mouth from the back of her throat, and my cock jumps in my pants. Jesus. I’d fight a thousand battles to hear her make that sound again. I’d carry out a million missions for my father. I’d die for it.
I flick my tongue into the boundary of her lips and she makes the sound again.
“Fuck.” The word leaps out of my mouth and into hers, a prayer and a curse at the same time.
No, this isn’t how I imagined, back as a sex-starved teenager. This is infinitely better.
I run my fingers up through her golden hair and tug, tilting her face back and up, and she moans, soft and low, as if nobody has ever touched her like this before. For all I know, they haven’t.
And me? I’ve fucked plenty of women. I’ve been to college. I’ve traveled the circuit, in dorm rooms and hidden closets and dead-end hallways. But never, never have I tasted anything this precious.
I inhale her, my chest expanding with the clean, soft scent of her overlaid with new fabric, and pure need ignites at the pit of my gut, embers bursting into full flame. I have to have her. I need her like I’ve never needed anyone. I kiss her again, harder, deeper, and a flickering montage of all the things I want to do to her spins through my brain, beginning with stripping off those clothes and ending with her bent over my bed while I claim her, fuck her until she’s senseless with pleasure.
None of this is what my father wanted. He would be appalled at the idea of me sleeping with a Ricci. Don’t allow them pleasure, he’d say. Pleasure is the opposite of revenge.
Even the ghost of my father’s disapproval can’t keep me from sliding a hand under the hem of her shirt to the smooth, soft skin there. It can’t keep me from working my fingers underneath her bra to pinch at one of her nipples, already hard, drawing a surprised, hungry gasp from her. And it can’t keep me from scooping her up into my arms and charging for the bedroom.
The wooden door smacks hard against the doorstop and bounces back, but I’m not there by the time it swings shut. I’m collapsing onto the bed, Sia underneath me. She arches, stretching, wriggling up toward the center, and I follow her. I won’t be away from her for another instant. Not when she’s so needy, her pink lips opening to form my name.
Clothes.
Too many fucking clothes.
I pull her up to a sitting position and strip off her shirt, a boat-necked thing, black, that makes her look royal. Sia, the last of her line. Then everything slows down, because her gorgeous tits are encased in something lacy and delicate, and as her breath heaves them up toward me, I’m sucked right in.
“Do you like it?” Her question is soft, tentative, and it makes me harder. “I thought—”
“You thought right.” I slip one finger under the strap and tug it down her shoulder, then the other. The clasp comes undone with one movement of my fingers. College—this is what college was for. All those senseless, quick fucks—this is what they were meant to teach me.
She’s perfect.
I graze the pad of my thumb over one of her nipples, already risen, and her eyelids flutter shut. Jesus, these breasts—the exact size and weight to fit into my hands, as if she was born for me.
I worship them with my tongue. One first, then the other, and Sia squirms, little moans rising from the back of her throat. She pushes up toward me, back arching, and I’m seized with the urge to taste more of her. I need her sweetness in my mouth.
Peeling the skinny jeans from her legs is a revelation. And tugging the lacy panties beneath over her slim hips and thighs and exposing the smooth flesh beneath? I’m looking directly into heaven.
Sia stretches out on the bed as the panties drop to the floor, her cheeks flushed, blue eyes vivid from beneath her eyelashes. “It’s not very fair,” she says with a little pout.
“What’s not?”
She pushes herself up on one elbow. “I’m like this.” She flicks her eyes down to the naked expanse of her body. “And you’re still fully clothed.” There’s a flutter of her pulse at the corner of her neck, and despite the sultry words, I see it now—she’s nervous.
“So many thoughts,” I comment, and wrap my hands around the delicate bones of her hips.
“I can’t stop them,” she murmurs.
“I can.”
I spread her legs open wide and dip my tongue to the softness there.
“How can you—oh.”
Another stroke of my tongue against her clit, and Sia has forgotten the English language. She’s wet—so wet—and I lap her up, the sweetness sparkling against my tongue like champagne. I learn a lot, between her legs. I learn that it makes her muscles clench when I press my tongue inside of her opening and curve it like the crook of my finger. It makes her pant when I flatten my tongue and lick all of her in one, hard stroke. And it makes her writhe and call out and come when I suck her clit into my mouth and swirl, oh Gio, oh, god, oh fuck falling around my ears like a gentle rain.
She rides the wave of her orgasm all the way down, clutching the comforter for dear life, but I’m not done with her yet.
I crawl up over her, her eyes closed, lips parted, and kiss her. She tastes like desire. “I need you,” I growl into the space between her shoulder and her neck. “I intend to have you.”
“Gio—” She breathes the word as my belt opens with a clink of metal. My cock is so hard it hurts, heavy with that need, and when the head brushes against her inner thigh her eyes fly open. Sia puts one knuckle into her mouth, her fingers trembling. “Oh, I want this....oh, Jesus, I want this—”
There’s a but in her voice.
“Sia?” I freeze, because I’m inches away from impaling her, I’m a thrust away from claiming what’s mine.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she blurts, and I see the whole truth on her face.
26
Sia
Gio’s dark eyes narrow. His entire body tenses, pulling away from me, and I catch his face in my hands.
“Please—don’t go.”
“I wouldn’t fucking dream of it.” He says the words like he means them, but he’s the picture of frustration, his mouth turned down at the corners, eyes black. “Tell me,” he demands, the muscles of his arms tensing. He’s holding himself up over me, and all his want is coiled under his skin.
My lips buzz with nerves, and I lick them, a habit to remind myself that they’re still mostly fine. God. I should have let him go through with it, and damn the consequences. How could it have been wrong, to let Gio do what he so desperately wants to do? It’s nothing that other women haven’t done before. Other women all across the city are probably doing it right now, without a care in the world—
“Sia. Speak.”
“I’m a virgin.” I let out a hard exhale. “I’ve never—” My hands tremble and I slide them down to his shoulders. “I’ve never done this with anyone.”
Gio’s jaw works, and the breath he lets out is measured. An ancient patience comes to his eyes and a steely expression descends over his face. “A virgin.” It’s like he’s confirming that, yes, I have in fact made it to the age of nineteen without fucking anyone.
“Yes.” The air hangs heavy with my admission, and a storm rages beneath my skin. A cold front of guilt meets hot impatience and explodes into a rain of lust and hope. “Maybe it’s stupid, but—” The last of the sunlight is disappearing from behind the curtains, that last orange kiss of the sunset reflecting off the buildings outside. I’m here now, in the truth, and I might as well bare it all to him. “I always thought I’d wait until I was married.”
It’s a ridiculous thing, old-fashioned and uptight, and even as shame works its way across my cheeks I pull out all the available arguments. I never found the right man. I wanted it to mean
something. I wanted—I wanted— I wait for the inevitable scoff, the dismissal. Most guys I knew in college didn’t want to fuck around with a virgin. Or, worse, they only wanted to fuck around with a virgin.
But Gio doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t scoff. He holds my gaze for several long heartbeats, the solid weight of him hovering above me, and then bends his head to my collarbone. He kisses me there as if he’s kissing the holiest object he’s ever seen.
When he raises his face again, his eyes are black with determination.
“Okay.” He says the word firmly, as if he’s made a decision.
I brace myself on my elbows while the final glimmer of the sunset fades, pitching the room the same glow as the streetlights outside. “Okay?” God, I hate how hesitant I sound, how unsure of myself. I never felt unsure of myself with Gio when we were in school. Now? Now I’m a mess. I’m a tangled mess of hope and desire and guilt and fear, and at the base of me I’m wet for him. I’m half furious with myself for stopping him and half relieved that I said the words in time to avoid any future regrets.
He stalks toward the window and yanks the curtain back, letting more of the city light inside. His hands work at his belt. He zips his pants. He threads the belt through the clasp. Every movement is strong, muscled, and god, he could have killed me. It shouldn’t be romantic, the thought that he didn’t—hasn’t yet—but something inside my chest warms and expands. That is the depth of his feeling for me. His family is all-important, but I turned him away from their demands.
Another wash of guilt. I don’t know why he feels this way about me, only that he must. It’s fucking ridiculous, but I can’t help knowing the weight of his family, the meaning of them. I never got to experience it that way, so I feel the absence like a phantom limb. Gio breathes, his shoulders rising and falling.