The question made me actually take stock of myself for the first time. I focused towards my wound, but that felt fine, then I did a more overarching sweep of myself, but apart from a headache, nothing felt wrong with me. “I feel fine.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Where I got shot doesn’t hurt, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Avion, your…” He looked over his shoulder in Milli’s direction, like hewasconcerned about discretion, then leaned in closer to me. “Your eyes rolled all the way into the back of your head and you went completely limp. You scared the hell out of me.”
“Well I’m sorry, but I feel okay now.”
“If it was too much, you should have snapped for me,” he said.
“It wasn’t too much!” Gio recoiled a bit at the volume of my voice and then leaned in even closer as if that was going to stop me from being so loud myself.
He was totally concerned about the optics.
“Are you sure? The whole point of that is trust, not just you trusting me not to hurt you, but me trusting you that you won’t let me hurt you.”
“Giovanni, I swear, I was fine then, and I’m fine now. Maybe I just got a little too hot or something. Really.” I flexed an arm. “Height of health.”
He was looking me over like he still didn’t believe me. “Avion. I need you to be honest with me. I seriously thought you were gonna keel over on me or something.”
“I’mfine,” I repeated. “My wound isn’t open, right? Did Dr. Aurora say it had something to do with my wound.”
“It’s not open, but she did say that the overexertion is probably due to you not being back to max health. A gunshot that required surgery isn’t just like a broken leg, Avion. They can sometimes take months to heal fully. I never should have let you goad me on like that. That one was my fault, but it won’t happen again. Until you are 100 percent healed and cleared by a doctor, we’re not doing anything else.”
My jaw dropped. “But --”
“No! I’m not going to be responsible for killing you because we’re horny like a couple of teenagers. One of us has to be the strong one here, and because it clearly isn’t you, then it’ll be me. No kissing, touching, anything until you are healed and this thing is far behind you.”
“You won’t even kiss me?” I said.
“That’s safest. Kissing leads to…” His voice trails off. “I don’t need to explain this to you. I’m serious. No more.”
I wanted to argue about it more, but he stood up from my bed and walked away before I could. It irritated me that my nose was burning like I was about to cry. It wasn’t like I didn’t understand the nature of my relationship with Gio, so why did it hurt so bad to have it clearly confirmed like that?
“Don’t let him get to you,” Milli huffed. He was still standing at the table not far from my bed, finicking with the sleeve of crackers like he was clearly trying to listen in. “He’s a bit of a worrywart, he got that from his father.”
“About that question,” I said, completely ignoring the statement.
“Yes. What did you want to know?”
“Well, I mostly think I just got my answer but… for him, I’m just… sex, right?” I said. “That’s kind of the exchange right now? He doesn’t kill my dad for the half-million so long as I stay here and do the whole BDSM thing with him.”
Milli walked over to me and handed me a small plate with some of the crackers on them, then he sat on the edge of the bed and crossed one leg over the other like he was seriously contemplating the question. “Would you be doing it with him if it weren’t for your father’s debt?”
That wasn’t quite the answer I was looking for. “I mean, like if I’d met him in other circumstances, but we still got to this point, I wouldn’t be unhappy with it.”
“And do you want that to be all that it is for him?” he asked. “Or would you prefer it to be more or less?”
I didn’t entirely understand the question, nor was it an answer tomyquestion. “Do you know, or not?” There was an evil irritation in my voice that I didn’t entirely intend to have there, but Gio’s attitude had me on edge.
“Honestly? No.” Milli wasn’t a guy who admitted to not knowing things, so I knew he was telling the truth. “What I do know is that I’ve never seen Giovanni behave the way he’s been behaving before. All of the precautions, tripping all over himself. Even when he jumped off the elevator and went and got your phone when Merrick got shot. All of that capriciousness and over consideration is so bizarrely un-Giovanni that I barely recognize the man. And whenever I find myself lying awake at night and thinking about it, it all comes back to one thing.” He looked back over his shoulder at me. “You.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “You have changed Giovanni’s life, and most of me wants to say for the better.”
“There’s a part of you that thinks it’s not for the better?”
