“After Elliott’s funeral?”
“Yeah.” He set the container on the dash, digging in the bag for a napkin. He wiped my mouth before his own. “I spent the night out here, sleeping against his stone.”
“Brando,” I whispered, laying my hand over his. I could feel the currents rushing underneath his lifted veins, humming so beautifully against my own, and the twitch of his muscles. “It was freezing out—colder than it is tonight.”
It had snowed the night my brother went to the party, and the entire ground had been coated in it. A week later, it had all melted, but the air was laced with moist cold, the kind that seeps through clothes like spilled ice water.
“It was either that or come into your room and sleep with you. I owed it to Elliott to make sure he was safe his first night in—” His eyes glanced toward the cemetery. “I couldn’t leave him.” He cleared his throat. “The next morning, you came. I knew you would. I stood between two trees, watching.”
He became silent, gazing out of the windshield as though he was seeing the scene all over again.
“You were wearing the leather jacket, the one I gave you. Your hands were stuffed into the pockets, your neck tucked under. You looked so fragile, like delicate glass, and I thought that if the wind blew too hard, it would shatter you—and I’d never be able to put the pieces back together.”
“What about you? Did you shatter that night, sleeping out in the cold?”
“No,” he breathed, eyes still gazing into the distance. “A purpose. A reason. You held me together.”
Another long pause and then he licked his lips. “At first, you were hesitant, stroking the marble with a finger, back and forth. Then you sat, and I worried the ground was too cold, that the moisture from the damp air would rise up and chill your bones. You started whispering to him after that—I caught a few words, but not much. I didn’t mean to hear, though. I meant to make sure that you wouldn’t lie down next to him and leave me, too.
“That was the first time in my entire life I’d ever felt fear. I had never been so afraid in my life, Scarlett. Of losing someone as much as I feared losing you. You were the first person, place, or thing that I had ever called mine.”
Whenever he told me that, I jokingly responded,I’myournoun. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it, to even lighten the mood. There was no cure for this.
He stayed silent for so long that I put a hand to his arm and squeezed. He blinked and the air seemed to move again—stirring.
“There I was, faced with the loss of my best friend, my brother—” he waved a hand toward the cemetery, encompassing both Elliott and Mick “—and a few nights before, I had fallen for you. Hard as fucking stone. The world shrunk down to the size of the two of us. It revolved around us.She is yours… Life made sense, but I’d grown wings. Which made no fucking sense.”
He spoke in a daze, right above a whisper, almost as if he were speaking to the memory, not me. Or reciting all of the things that had gone through his head at the time, like a poetic rhapsody that was his alone to keep.
“The sight of you made me go hollow—maybe that’s where the feeling of flight comes in. The heart floats for a while, knowing that it’s finally found its true home. Not inside a man’s chest, but inside his woman’s.”
His hand lifted to his heart and touched his ribs, almost unconsciously.
“I felt the sharpness in my side and called you a thief for stealing my rib. But then I felt hollow again, thinking how you were made for me. It took my marrow to create you from my bone. You were as good as mine from the day you were born, Scarlett Fausti.
“Some would call that romantic, but I’ve never been one for romantic gestures, not until you came along. But what that is—” he opened and closed his hands “—is common sense. Plain and simple. You can look at a horse and call it many things, but it’s still a horse.
“Then life delivered me a blow that I wasn’t sure I could recover from. Elliott was gone. He was a bright spot for me. I see now—you shared your light with him. He’d light up when he’d watch you dance. That carried over. It was you all along. I had always chased your love, even when I didn’t know that’s what it was.”
He reached out and took my left hand, bringing it to his lips. His warmth touched the cool metal, and he inhaled the scent of my skin. Then, turning my palm right side up, he kissed away the bloodstain from the rose’s sharp thorn.
A sudden urge to cover him, to shelter him from the cold, overtook me. I shivered in empathy just thinking about how cold it was that night he spent out in the cemetery so he could look after Elliott.
“Here,” I said, removing the blanket from my legs, about to cover him with it, so that he could feel the warmth of my body. “It’s cold,mio angelo. And late. Why don’t you sleep for a while? I’ll keep an eye out for Mitch.”
He set his hand on the blanket, keeping it where it was, over my legs. “I’m warm enough, baby. You keep it.”
“You’re trembling—” I went to protest, but he cut me off.
“That’s not why.È stata una lunga giornata.”
“It has been a long day,” I agreed on a dense sigh. “The days we take for granted should last forever, but somehow they go by so quickly that they’re over in the blink of an eye. The hard ones—those seem to last for years.”
Silence stretched the time even further, coming between us like damp cold at the stroke of midnight, when there was no light left to provide warmth. There was the witching hour, I knew, but I wondered if there was such a thing as the lonely hour, too.
If so, we were in it. We were lost to our own thoughts, and given the circumstances, I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable with it.
Winter was made for deep, rambling conversations to stave off the chill and grow closer during the languorous hours of the night. Cold air reflected colder thoughts, and sometimes brought nightmares. Conversation and touch were the remedies, sparking a warm fire to light up the darkness and ward off predators and ghosts.
