by Sunniva Dee
“Hey. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“As in what? Come here with this?” I put the chicken ciabatta sandwich in her hand. Watch my favorite glossy nails close around it before I let my gaze flow up to her eyes.
“Yeah, that, and not texting me to come outside like you promised.”
I exhale through my nose, study her as she chomps down on my offering. Nothing could give me more pleasure nowadays. It used to be different, of course. She notices my smirk but doesn’t comment, probably getting where my thoughts are.
“You’re cute when you’re embarrassed,” I say.
“Right, so you embarrass me every day.”
“Not every day. And if you wanted to, you could clear it up that I’m your cousin.”
The bite she has in her mouth seems to grow at that.
“Sorry, baby,” I say.
“Don’t ‘baby’ me.”
“Sorry, Ina mia.”
“You shouldn’t say that either.”
I shrug. “But you are my Silvina.”
She swallows. Then, she takes a fresh bite. No one knows her tastes better than me; the sandwich has red onions in it, which according to Silvina, has a sweeter taste than other onions. I’ve also added sprouts of the fresh, crunchy variety. If they go limp, they make her gag. As cute as that is, it keeps her from finishing her sandwich.
“What are you doing tonight?” I ask while she chews. She lifts her shoulders, showing me her lack of plans. I’m glad she doesn’t go clubbing on weekdays.
“That superhero movie’s still playing,” I say and look away.
“I know.” She’s answering and swallowing at once. She used to do that when we were little too. I love her.
“You like that actor, the Aussie, right?”
“Mm-hmm.” Her eyes brighten. “He’s the opposite of you, all blond and blue-eyed. Cool and calm.” She looks at me like there’s nothing she wants more than to touch my face.
“I’ll take you to see him, then,” I decide. “Want to bring Tracy?”
She snorts. Then she coughs, trying to get whatever-it-is out of the back of her throat. I grin, watching her eyes tear up while she coughs.
“You okay, Ina mia?”
“I’m fine.” She coughs again, so I scoot closer on the window sill and play-hit her between the shoulders.
“So no Tracy, then? How about Morpheus?”
“That’s not even his name,” she laughs.
“He likes it. Makes him feel philosophical,” I invent, which doesn’t help. She hunches forward and cough-laughs quietly over her knees.
Smiling, I lean her over my knees so I can get to her back and whack it gently.
I love it when we’re at the theater together, just the two of us. It’s dark in here, and tonight we have the first ten rows to ourselves.
I purposely picked the Markheed’s, a small theater that specializes in artsy films no one in their right mind would watch. Strangely, they still show this commercial super-hero movie. Maybe because it flopped when it came out a few years ago? The main dude is in a small-run art film coming out sometime this year. That could be it too.
Silvina loves to be as close to the front as possible. She’s aware how illogical I find that; you have to move your head from side to side to watch movement shifting across the screen, and you lean back in the chair to catch what happens at the skyline.
I’ll complain that it makes me dizzy. She’ll suggest we go farther back, and I’ll turn down her offer because my experience of her won’t be the same; Silvina’s emotions don’t flow as openly as they do up front.
This movie is eighty-four minutes long. Sometimes, Silvina relaxes against me early on. At other times, it takes a while for her guard to crumble. Tonight, she’s keeping her hands to herself, folding them in her lap like someone holy. She’s always holy to me, even when she lets me touch her.
Our hero is sad in the beginning. He’s lost a beloved pet, a cat who’ll later turn into a mutant, according to the description. It causes Silvina to dab at tears. They pool so quickly at the corners of her eyes, she’s making me chuckle. I lift the armrest between us and invite her into the crook of my arm. She sighs and sinks against me without any more prodding, and the world suddenly became all right.
When Ina mia molds to my body the way she does now, the lack of space between us makes all the sense. It wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. I’d watch a romantic comedy, a fucking Bollywood movie, as long as my arms are around her like this.
Beneath my nose, her hair smells flowery. It’s silky with a subtle sheen of coffee you won’t notice unless you study her for hours. I pucker my mouth quietly. It’s how I get in small kisses without her realizing it.
“Good movie, huh?” I ask when we walk out of there. Silvina doesn’t take my hand. It’s cold in San Francisco, and I’d like to keep hers warm.
“It was awesome. You know what I liked best?” she asks, looking up at me with her happiest, most genuine stare.
“That the kitty came back to him and he accepted it even though it had turned into a murderous mutant?”
“No!” She sends me one of the serious-playful looks she’s perfected. “The kitty wasn’t murderous anymore. All she needed was for him to love her right. Sure, she’s a mutant, but she can be kept from killing people as long as he’s there for her. She just needed him to accept her as she is. You know?”
I nod and want to say that I accept Silvina as she is. Which reminds me of the dude from the club. Her cell lit up with a text from him during the movie. I should have destroyed him a little harder.
Jealousy’s a bitch when you have no rights. She’s been saying the same thing for weeks now: “Gioele, per favore. Since we can’t be together, let’s live our lives. We need to find our person in other places. We just have to look a bit wider—there are awesome people out there for us.”
“Are you hungry?” I ask, and she smiles at me sadly. I can’t even think without her reading my mind.
“I’m okay. Can you take me back to the apartment, and not sleep over on the couch, scaring Tracy?” She adds the last part with a mischievous wink. She wants to be lighthearted, but I see through her.
“Yeah. You having those old raviolis, then?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Just don’t forget. It’s not good for you to forget.”
“I know, baby.”
It’s not often that she slips and calls me baby. I cherish it.
5. ILLEGALITY
GIOELE
Don’t think I haven’t researched it. See, it boils down to your family and how they feel about shit. We’re from Italy, second generation, and in the old country it’s not that unheard of to find your soulmate in your cousin. In all of Europe, there isn’t a single law against it, and I’ve tried to make Silvina understand this. That was years ago, when she wasn’t yet indoctrinated by la famiglia.
They anchor their rejections in birth defects. I’ve tried to show Silvina the statistics, because it really isn’t that bad. Between two and three percent of regular couples have a risk of birth defects in their children, while for first cousins marrying, it’s increased to between four and six percent depending on the studies.
“Ina mia, just read the articles I sent you. Simply having children with someone from your own race, hell, from the same city as you, increases the chances of birth defects. Plus, I don’t actually care. This isn’t about babies.”
Silvina cried. She covered her ears and shook her head. “It’s not right, Gioele.”
“What can possibly be more right than you and me?”
I took her in my arms, then, when her tears turned into sobs. She linked her arms around my neck and pulled herself close. Nose winter cold, she nuzzled behind my ear. “I can’t. It’s illegal for a reason. And the clan doesn’t approve.”
“Because of a single incident,” I growled.
“Don’t call Oscar an incident. If I were his mother, I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself. Everything is wrong with him. Hunchback, cleaved lip, mentally challenged. Allergies no one had even heard of in the family before. What if, just because we gave in and indulged ourselves, we doomed our own child?”
I huffed out my stress. “We wouldn’t. It’s not like that.”
“No? What’s it like, then? We’d be shunned by the family, and— and—” She hiccoughed.
“Shhh.” I tucked her head under my chin and stroked her back. “You take this too seriously. We have all the time in the world. Let’s just be together, you and me. I don’t need anyone but you.”
“But it’s even illegal to… do what we’ve done. Spend nights together.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It is!”
“Okay, but only in a few states in America.”
“And you don’t think they have a point?”
I hate it when her voice changes, when concern grows so thick it turns to panic. Even so, what I hate most is to not be able to comfort her. I was always that person to her, the one she trusted with everything.
“Four to six percent,” I repeated, kissing her head. “That means four to six babies out of a hundred, and it could be the tiniest shit that’s easy to fix. And if you want babies and don’t want to have them with me, we’ll fucking adopt. I don’t care.”
“I’ve read up on it too, you know.” She pulled air in through her nostrils, moisture causing a quiet rattling as she did. “It’s illegal in twenty-four states, Gioele. That’s not ‘a few states.’ Mom is right. Zia Carola’s right. Do you realize that if we traveled in those twenty-four states, we wouldn’t even be considered a legal couple? If they knew, we’d not be allowed to sleep in the same room! What kind of life is that?”
Silvina was eighteen when we had that conversation, and I’d just turned nineteen. I still recall where we sat, between warm, green walls, at a table with a white-and-red-checkered table cloth. My mother’s kitchen is Italy-in-America down to the olive pattern of the salt-and-pepper shakers and the black-white wall hanging of women stomping grapes in a big wine barrel.
My parents were out for dinner, and we’d come home early from a movie. I fed her ciabatta with fresh cheese and red wine on the side, but I couldn’t stop her tears from falling.
“You know what that means?” I whispered. “That over half of the American states approve of us loving each other.”
“Twenty-six states.” She looked up at me with big, deep, beautiful, dark eyes, and it stabbed me that I was to blame for her pain. Why hadn’t I been born into one of my friends’ families?
They say family is everything. Since “the talk,” it’s been everything bad for me.
“You know what that means, though,” I said, holding up her cheese and olive focaccia so she wouldn’t forget to eat. She broke off a piece, inserted it between her lips, and chewed without pleasure.
“Tell me.”
“It means over half of the United States agrees with us: what I feel for you is good. What you feel for me is valid. It’s okay. Perfect. Fucking legal.”
“Please.” Her chin began to tremble again, and I stilled it with a finger.
“And not only that, but all of Europe is fine with it too. Where do we live again?” I nudged her with my shoulder. Then, I leaned in so I could run my nose up the side of her face. Silvina’s eyes shut, enjoying our connection as much as I did.
“We live in California.”
“And is California on the yay or nay side for us?” I murmured.
“On the yay side.” She let out a quiet chuckle. My Silvina’s chuckles sound like small bells tempered by cotton. It’s the most beautiful sound in the world, and it made me want to punch the air in victory.
“Yes,” I whispered, collecting her from the chair and into my arms. She chuckled again, and my chest wanted to burst open. She was light. She’s always been light. With her arms around my throat, I could’ve taken on an earthquake.
“Where are we going?” Her legs jiggled over my arm as I carried her toward the stairs.
“Nowhere. Just to my room. I want to make you happy.”
“I am happy. What if Zio Evodio and Zia Carola come home? We’re not even supposed to be together without supervision.”
I scoffed, and she didn’t pull away when I found her mouth on the way up. “We’re too smart for them. Plus, we’re in California, and we can do what we want. There’s no stopping love!”
She giggled, dainty fingers massaging me and causing goosebumps to rise at my nape.
“My parents are out for the night. You know how they are. When they’re at Mintrer’s with Il Signore, they don’t return until late. He’ll treat them like royalty and serve them a full eight-course Sicilian dinner.”
“Le Otto Sorelle,” Silvina said, accepting each one of my kisses. Halfway up, I ran into the wall with her, which made her laugh more.
“Ouch. Yeah, Le Otto Sorelle. ‘And no skimp on the meat!’” I copied Il Signore, the owner of the restaurant’s Neapolitan accent.
“No skimp-eeh on the meat!” Silvina said. “All the garlic, because gli di Nascimbeni amano the garlic!”
“Yes, yes, we do love the garlic,” I joked, inhaling her flowery scent while I sank her to my bed. It has an old-fashioned, dark wooden frame with a headboard picturing Il Silvestre—the man turned wolf from the old legend of Lake Como. He howls at the moon over a love long lost. My mother found it so beautiful she had it shipped back from Italy after one of their trips.
“But more than garlic, we love women.”
“You do.” Silvina’s breathing sped up.
“You know what I love most, though?” I opened one pearly pink button at a time down her shirt. Once I was done, I spread the shirt open so her simple white bra was the only thing covering her beautiful little breasts. Between them, her ribs showed, small ridges lifting and sinking while she waited for my next move.
I let my eyes run over her, starting with her eyes, moving down to the center of her chest. I strayed to the left, right above the rim of her bra, and saw what will always make the world fade around me.
Her heart.
Steadily speeding up, it thudded against her ribs, meeting me with the worship I felt for her. I ripped my shirt off. Leaped to the door and locked it. My urgency made her laugh, and I loved, loved making her laugh.
“You’re killing me,” I whispered. Slowly, I lowered myself until I fitted my heart against hers. Heavy, I kept us joined, my heart absorbing her rhythm. We breathed together, and kissing her neck, I reveled in the sensation of her love against my skin.
“Do you feel me?” I asked. With my lips, I tickled her ear. I moved a lock of hair away with my tongue, making her husk out a laugh again.
“You’re obsessed with hearts,” she whispered, funny. Serious.
“Can you? I feel you.” I thrusted my cock against her thigh. Too low, I didn’t hit her core, but that was okay. I’d do that soon anyway. For now, it was our hearts that concerned me. I wanted us to share this. Her rhythm thrummed through my chest, and I wanted it to carry into every bone of my body.
“You make me breathe too fast.”
I pulled up to look into her eyes. Mischievous, they backed up the blush of her cheeks.
“You like me on top of you. Admit it.”
“Okay.”
“I heard that. You’re panting.” I pulled her lower lip into my mouth, and she arched her back from the mattress, meeting my thrusts.
“Give me more.” Her words were the hottest sighs stirring each ounce of me into action. Still, I held back. There was nothing like those seconds of insanity, of knowing the pleasure to come with the one person that was made for you only.
; My Silvina. My Ina. Ina mia.
“See, I can’t do that. There are rules, you know,” I said.
“And what are those?” Always in sync with me, her voice was playful too.
“You don’t know?” I licked along the fleshy tip of her lower lip, dipping inside and finding her tongue. I sucked on her mouth, savoring our kiss until she moaned out her impatience with me. God, I loved her impatience.
I rolled her over so she was sprawled on top of me. “The rule is that our hearts have to beat together.”
“They do. They do. Come on, baby.”
“Your heart beats perfectly against me, but you haven’t felt mine yet.” I pressed her closer, aligning us, sneaking one hand inside the rim of her skirt, wiggling it under the lining of her panties. I pressed downward until I had one delicious ass cheek cupped in my palm. “God, I love you so much.”
“I feel your heart every day.”
“Only when you sleep on it. But now. Feel it now.”
She squirmed, and I loosened my arms so she could shift downward like she wanted to. The top of Ina mia’s head reached my chin, and the bliss-filled pain of her shifting downward made me groan.
Winded, she puffed out her amusement, and I forgot to breathe as she stilled over me, ear flat against the left side of my chest. Exhaling quietly, she listened, and in that moment, everything I felt for her congregated like a pack of dynamite in my chest.
“Anything?” I whispered.
At first, she didn’t answer. My hand moved, enjoying the dip between her thinnest, softest rib and her waist. I closed my eyes. It wasn’t the first time we’d worried about our future. It wouldn’t be the last. But it might have been the first time I realized each moment together could be our last.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Your heart is talking to me.”
“What’s it saying?”
“All the things.”
I let out a snort. “All the things, huh? Is it happy? Sad? Mad? Oh, it’s mad.”
“Nah. Your heart is in love.”