My heart recorded as I watched her smile, laugh, fix her hair.
Exist.
She pulled her—my—worn-in flannel a little tighter over her chest. She had switched her shorts to jeans. Jeans that hugged every curve and flared at the bottom. She was slim with curves I wanted to trace with my hands. Sink my fingertips and mouth into. She laughed. The melody of it seemed to slow dance toward me. She talked to Atta’s friends, who had arrived for the wedding and were here for the party to mark the change of seasons. Her scent was carried by a gust of wind that made the bonfire waver. Crisp and sweet, like a juicy apple with a smoky tinge from the burning wood.
Sistine Evita was that religious experience I’d always have. The one I’d had the moment my eyes found her in that jewelry shop in Venice. She was my reminder that heaven existed, and wherever she went, I would be there.
My heart raced straight to hers.
It felt weightless. Bottomless. Like it was flying on air. It was like the lion inside of it had hit a dip in the road, and its stomach never recovered. It made the need to be close to her, protect her at all costs, an obsession.
My eyes refused to leave her.
Her eyes were on me.
It felt like the space between us was a breath, a breath I had to catch, or I would die.
It would be that wayper sempre.
Thoughts from the night before invaded my mind. How she felt. How she tasted. The scent of her. The noises she made. Itwas as if I was watching a creature that was made for me,mine, for the first time. Exploring every inch of her as if she were a map, a map straight to the core of who she was.
That one small word made the difference.
Mine.
My name needed to be next to hers.
Sistine Evita Fausti.
My children needed to mark her skin—somehow, some way.
Irrevocably mixing her blood with mine for centuries to come.
I needed to live with her, then lay next to her forever, a grave somewhere on the hillside, the dash between when we were born and when we left this world the same length.
Theexactsame length.
I couldn’t live a second without her.
I refused to.
In that moment, my heart and soul came together, handing my mind the vow, making it jot it down. I lifted my hand, pounded a fist over my heart, like the vow was sealed in the span of the beat it took to make it, then I ran a hand over the aching thing. Watching her, my eyes barely able to hold such beauty in, was like watching a Wyoming sunrise and sunset. Fucking heartbreaking.
“Fuck me sideways,” I grumbled. “I’ve turned into my old man.”
“If you’ve turned into your old man,” a soft voice whispered from beside me, “I’d say he did a mighty fine job of raising you.”
My eyes turned to the left.
The blond who’d tried to bid for me the night of the auction.
She tipped her glimmering cowboy hat at me. “Hiya, Italian Cowboy. We meet again.”
“We’ve never met,” I said.
“You’re Mariano Fausti. I’m Carlie Killingsworth. I’ll be working with Atta on her world tour. That’s all a man like you needs to know, right?” She winked at me.
I shook my head, about to walk off. She grabbed me by the arm. I looked down at it. Back up at her. She smiled at me, fixing a strand of her hair with the other hand.
