I turn to him, hands on my hips. He lifts his hands as if to show they’re empty, guilty of nothing but being a man with arms people like to hold.
“Don’t,” I say, because he’s about to be charming about it and I’m about to hate how well it works.
He shuts his mouth. Smart man.
We stand there, a breath apart, the hill breathing under us and the smell of figs and sun making everything feel worse in that way beauty sometimes does when you’re raw. He watches me with the patience he claims to own, the hunger he doesn’t bother to hide, the handful of lines at the corners of his eyes that appeared sometime between nineteen and now, each one a ledger entry I wasn’t here to witness.
“The tour,” I say, crisp. “Was illuminating.”
“Molto,” he agrees.
“And very long.”
“Endless.”
“And very… hands-on.”
His mouth tips. “Her hands were on. Mine were not.”
“They would have been if I wasn’t there.”
“They are on you now,” he says, and places his palm over mine on my hips, this time with fierce intent, with claim, withthe possessiveness he should not voice but I’m suddenly grateful to feel. “Come on, Mrs. Dillinger.”
“Where?”
He leans in closer, his sinful lips a whisper from mine. “To discuss jealousy,” he says, voice gone silk and sin, “and the appropriate primal, sexy, husbandly remedies for it.”
The heat that streaks through me answers before I can form a rebuttal. The pergola arches ahead, strung with lights that will glow like captured fireflies when dusk comes.
The old man’s laughter carries from the far terrace, Lulu’s trill chiming after it.
We step off the path and into shadow, the kind that promises privacy and trouble in equal measure. The tour is over.
The heady turbulence, I suspect, is just beginning.
13
VASSO
Jealousy is a stupid emotion for a man like me to bait.
As I’ve recognized it in myself in the past, the memory of it hot, sour, and far too real, I can’t mistake it when I see it Naomi’s face.
And while it sends a singeing thrill through my blood, I know it’s borderline adolescent to court it in my wife. Especially when she takes another look at Lulu’s peach tattoo, winking at me like a dare, and her smile goes tight.
It’s sharp and weaponized by the time we slip under the fig tree beside the dappled shaded pergola. The resin-sweet air and the sound of the cicadas drilling the afternoon drift away as I watch my wife lose the last of her patience.
She spins on me the second we’re alone, linen whispering around her sexy legs, beautiful eyes like polished amber and just as flammable. “Did you enjoy your tour,Mr.Dillinger?”
“It had its… diversions,” I say, because yes, I’m an idiot and occasionally can’t resist poking a lit fuse.
Her chin lifts. “I noticed,” she says, cool and cutting. “She counted your biceps like rosary beads she wants to lick before she prayed to, Vasso.”
“And you watched me not touch her,” I counter, stepping in, letting my voice stay low and even. “You watched me not encourage her. You also watched me wait for you to sayenough.”
“I shouldn’t have to,” she snaps, and the truth in it lands where I live. Hard and true and yup, shaming. “And if you say this is optics?—”
“It isn’t.” I move until the fig tree’s shade turns our skin a little greener, a little more secret. The pergola is twenty steps away, vine-laced and empty. The house is far enough that our voices won’t carry, and the vineyard amphitheater catches only the softer sounds. “It’s nothing. Means less than nothing. And you know it.”
