“I have never seen you without them,” I said.
“My grandfather ordered them to stay with me,” he said. “Extra protection.”
“These men, these enemies—they really want you dead.”
He wore sunglasses, but I could tell he glanced at me from the side of his eye.
“I am not made of glass, remember?” I reminded him.
“No, you proved that last night.”
I lifted a finger. “This morning, too.”
A slow grin came to his face before he answered me. “They do. My cousin Bugsy figured out that a man who was working for him was using his casino in Vegas to auction women. We don’t fucking stand for that.”
“So you killed him.”
“Them,” he corrected. “But yeah, that’s the short version of how things went down.”
“I have time for the long version.”
He reached across the seat and took my chin in his hand, stroking the side of my jaw. I wrapped my hands around his fingers, stopping him. “I am your wife,” I said in Sicilian. “I am sworn to the same secrets you are. I am bound by this life. I am here to be your highest council.”
He squeezed my fingers, bringing them to his mouth, placing a long, warm kiss on my wedding rings. He stared out of the window for a few minutes, taking the turns as if he were a born racer. He cleared his throat. “Sì.” He nodded.“You are my wife. My secret keeper,” he said, answering me in the same language. “You are all the things the closest man in my family could never be to me.”
He switched to English after, maybe not having the appropriate words. “Time and place, Alcina. There will come a time when life will revolve around my family, my business, and I will need your council then. More than I need it now. What’s done is done.” He paused. “Right now I’ll enjoy my wife, getting to know her, to spoil her on our honeymoon.”
“I like the getting to know me part,” I said. Then I looked down at myself, at one of the nicest dresses I owned, which meant that it hadn’t first belonged to mymamma. “But I am fine with what I came with.”
“Not the point,” he said. “You need new things. I’m your husband. It’s my job to provide you with everything. Or would you rather insult me?”
“When you are being soromantico?” I laughed. “I would not dare!”
“If I was acting like a bastard?”
“Then I would reconsider.”
“Yeah,” he said, a smile coming to his face. “Thought so.”
We talked the entire time he drove about what we were going to do.
Villages in Como that were worth sightseeing.
Places worth eating.
He told me he could drive aVaporina, the kind of boats they used on the lake, and would teach me. We even discussed going across the border into Switzerland, since I had never been.
A slow song came on in the background, the radio on low, and I asked him what kind of music he liked. He mentioned a few bands and artists I had never heard of. I told him I enjoyed the older stuff.
“Like that song you were listening to the night—”
“Sì,” I said, remembering the night we had under the moon. When he found me touching myself, and he came out of the darkness like a fantasy come to life. “To me, they don’t make music like that anymore.”
“That’s what my grandfather says,” he said. “Bugsy agrees. He listens to Roy Orbison—music like that.”
I reminded him of the song he sang to me the night he serenaded me under my balcony. That was old, too.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s a classic. So is the song we danced to the night of our wedding.”
