It took a minute for me to realize Capo had said something to me. After my doctor’s appointment, where the ultrasound confirmed the baby was a boy, he took me out to eat at Mamma’s Pizzeria. We sat in the front, on stools, turned to one another.
“Yeah?”
He grinned at me and then picked up the ultrasound picture I’d placed between us, leaning against a dessert menu. He flashed it at me.
“I want him to have your nose.”
“Your eyes and my nose?” I grinned.
He set the picture back, ran a finger down the slope of my nose, and then kissed me on the end of it. His hands came around my stomach, cradling the bump like a ball. “It pleases me that everyone knows I did this to you.”
I almost spit my drink out. “You like that everyone knows you got me pregnant?”
He leaned in even closer, keeping his hands around my stomach. My knee was close to his crotch. “No, that everyone knows it’s me that fucks you.”
My eyes closed and the breath escaped my mouth in a rush. “Forget the pizza. Let’s go home.”
“Why home? They have a backroom.”
I pulled away from him, trying to gauge his face. He was dead serious.
The waitress set our salads down with a loudclink!against the old counter. A second later, a man with an apron tied around his waist slid our pizza between the two bowls.
“Good enough,” the waitress said, and then she hustled in the opposite direction to take more orders.
Their customer service lacked finesse, but hey, the food was amazing. It was like having an asshole doctor with no bedside manners, but he wasthebest asshole doctor with no bedside manners.
My eyes went back and forth between the meal in front of me—the man—and theactualmeal in front of me—the pizza and thesalads.
He sat back, roaring with laughter. “You just busted my balls.”
Not waiting around, I took a stab at my salad. Sometimes I liked to put lettuce on top of my pizza and roll it up. Mamma’s hadthebest Italiandressing.“I didn’t touch your balls, Capo.”
“Exactly. You picked this—” he waved his hand toward the table “—over me. You wounded my balls without even touchin’ ’em.”
“I didn’t pick one over the other.” I took a bite of pizza, almost moaning. “You’re dessert.”
He leaned in very slow, and the bite of salad I’d just stabbed was in route to make it to my mouth. Slowly, oh so slowly, he licked my bottom lip, removing some leftover dressing. “Everything tastes better from your mouth.”
It was hard for me to find excitement in the food again, but after a minute or two, when he started eating, my hunger came back even stronger. He didn’t even ask. He ordered another pizza, noticing how much I was eating.
“The salad here is really good, too,” I said.
He ordered another.
“That’s how I met old man Gianelli.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin. We still faced each other, and he reached out and wiped my face, too. “I came here for pizza.”
“You bonded over pizza?”
He reached over and grabbed a standup menu. He pointed to a spot at the bottom.
“‘All ingredients are locally grown or imported from Italy,’” I read aloud.
“Old man Gianelli used to supply their garlic from his garden. The old owners were friends with him. My grandfather came down from Italy, and I brought him here. They met. Hit it off. For the longest time they played correspondence chess by mail. They stopped talking after I left you with them. It wasn’t safe to keep in contact.”
“Nonnotrusted Pops?”
“Yeah.” He took a drink of his water. “He’d gotten to know them well. That’s how I knew about all of Jocelyn’s troubles. You were wanted. Maybe even needed in their lives.”
