“The stars are out now,” I whispered back.
“Yeah, but nowI have no patience.” And then he came down and engulfed my mouth with his.
My arms went around his neck. My body molded to meet the demands of his. We started to move around the kitchen, one wall, then another, against the stove, over the chair. It was hard to keep still, but the openness almost felt like entrapment, too, and we were forced to do and say all in this room with four walls and a door— a door that allowed anyone in at any time. Still, we couldn’t seem to stop.
“Did you hurt,mio angelo?” I asked him as he bit at my neck. I hissed at the pain. “After you—sent me away?”
He almost slammed me up against the wall. “I wanted to die,” he said, the words painful for the both of us. I wrapped my legs around him, squeezing tight. “But I knew you’d kill me if I did. What about you,mia moglie? Tell me how much you hurt for me when you danced like you did.”
I took a handful of his hair and yanked, bringing his head back so that he was forced to meet my eye. “You know how much, you ass.” Then I bit his bottom lip harder than intended. His blood invaded my mouth, the unmistakable taste of iron on my tongue, mixed with salt.
His face underwent the most extraordinary change—his eyes flared, his muscles tensed, and the hard bulge against my heat rocked up, the pain bringing him pleasure.
“Suck it,” he said on a groan. I took his bottom lip in my mouth, and with a tenderness that seemed to slow us both down, used my tongue to caress the bite. I pulled away for a second—just long enough for him to breath out, “ah, fuck, you are going to be the death of me”—before I invaded his mouth with my tongue, and my nails dug into his back.
“This isn’t—” I panted “—this isn’t normal. Is it? Tell me,” I pleaded.
Even after all of these years, whatever connection holding us together was still a mystery to me. Sometimes it felt dangerous, borderline insane, and it consumed me to the point that, in the moment before I jumped into the fire, knowing that it was a sacrifice, a cohesive thought formed—it’s not like this for everyone.
I had no experience, nothing, save him—all I had ever wanted.
My mother once told me that he and I were both fire, consuming the others’ paper parts. I had thought she was ridiculous, even laughed, and then questioned—paper parts?
In that moment, though, it suddenly made sense. The mysterious connection survived on ashes; we burned through anything or anyone that didn’t belong to the two of us.
I didn’t believe we were always heat, even though that never seemed to die. There were times when I was his water and his earth, and he was my wind and my sky. But when a threat presented itself, we both became fire to consume it.
“What everyone else has makes no difference to me,” he said, running his lip from the side of my mouth, up my cheekbone, to my ear, smearing his blood along my skin. “Only what we have matters to me. I’d die without it.”
“That’s not us anymore—those people we were back then.” My eyes rolled to the ceiling as he lowered his head to my breast. “Oh God! I hate layers!”
He laughed some, biting through the fabric of my jumper. It was a steel trap around my body, and unless he wanted to take the time to undress me, his only other option was using his knife to slice through the fabric.
Since I didn’t want to be on display for anyone roving into the kitchen, neither of those choices seemed appealing. Besides, Brando would blow something if another man saw me in less than what he felt was appropriate. It wouldn’t be good for the other man’s health.
“No,” he said, continuing my thread, “that’s not us anymore. We’re together now.”
“Nothing will change that?”
He stopped what he was doing and stared into my eyes. He lifted a hand, securing a piece of hair behind my ear. “You’re flushed, baby.”
“So I’ve been told,” I barely got out.
He narrowed his eyes at the comment—probably because it didn’t make sense to him—but let it slide. “Nothing will ever change what we have. I dare the world to try. And it has.”
I nodded once, real slow.
“Trust me.”
“With my life,” I breathed.
“But not with your—”
I jumped in Brando’s arms when the door came open and light flooded in, along with raised voices and the song playing on my father’s old record player. I stuck my face so far into Brando’s neck that the breath coming out of my nose blew against his skin in hot huffs. I could feel him shaking, trying to control his laughter.
“Mati,” he said, greeting my mother. His back was turned to her.
My arms were around his neck, my legs around his waist, and he had me pressed up against the wall—not to mention the blood from his lip that probably stained us both. He had marked me with it. It was clear to see what we were doing, or getting close to doing, in the family kitchen.
