Friday: wheels up.
The trick to control isn’t willpower; it’s removing choices you don’t need.
I stand in the dark and try to name what this is. Not hunger. Not exactly. Hunger is simple. This has edges and rules and unknowns.
Italy will make it worse.
I tell myself I’m going because it’s right. Because she asked straight and earned it. Because she works for me now, and I won’t send her alone.
All true, technically. None of it is really the reason, though. None of it keeps my chest from getting tight when I picture her in Italy, wine fields at her back as she leans against the balcony of my bedroom, wearing a thin robe and sipping wine.
I didn’t know before I put a plate of pasta in front of her that she makes a low sound when she’s enjoying her meal—soft and low, almost private.
Now I know. Knowing is the problem.
I lean on the counter and stare at the glass in my hand. The kiss sits between us like a live wire ready to spark. I can live with refusal. I’ve done it before. But I don’t like that it’s with her.
What I want is simple: time near her. A morning where she cooks in my kitchen, and I make her laugh. Her laugh. I haven’t heard it yet. I want to earn that.
I think about her hands. Not soft hands. Capable hands, small and sure. How she set the heel of Parmigiano in her palm firmly, turned it, shaved, tasted, adjusted. How she gripped the towel while I brushed my lips over hers.
If I had any sense, I’d put her on the plane and let her go. Meet her back here with a polite nod and a grocery list.
I have sense. I also have a plane waiting because part of me knows what the rest of me won’t acknowledge: I want to know more. See more. See where she comes from. Not the address—her. The streets she once made her home. The kitchen where she learned to command a room. The chef she’s so loyal to, she’s willing to travel across the world for a simple conversation.
I rinse the glass in the sink and set it aside to dry before walking out of the kitchen.
I go back to the piano and lay my fingers on the fallboard. Choices and obligation. I made my choice already. I go.
And I keep my hands to myself unless she wants them on her. Then we come back, and she works off the debt.
Then what?
I shake my head.
I don’t want to think about that. Not now.
Through the dark, I take the stairs to my bedroom and let the dark do its work to put me to sleep.
Chapter Seventeen
Bianca
Giovanni’s car shows up five minutes early. Black sedan, nothing flashy. The driver puts my bag in the trunk and opens the door. We leave the city before it’s woken up.
All week I’ve been in his kitchen. Breakfast, lunch, dinner when he was home, prep labeled when he wasn’t. We spoke every day, but only in the language of food: temps, timing, “more lemon,” “salt’s right,” “hold that ten.”
Nothing about the kiss. Nothing about Italy until a text yesterday afternoon with the details: pickup time, tail number, passport,light luggage, private terminal. No flourish. No winking smile. Just information.
We pass the main entrances to the airport—curbside drop-offs with their rolling suitcases and harried goodbyes—and turn where the signs say Authorized Vehicles Only. The driver shows a pass to a guard. The gate lifts. We keep going. The normal soundtrack of airports fades as we drive along the service road. Planes sit along the tarmac like sleeping birds. A smaller one waits ahead with a set of stairs at its door and a man at the bottom.
My stomach does an unhelpful little leap.
He’s here already. Of course he is. Dark coat against the pale of the fuselage, hands in his pockets like he has all the patience in the world. He’s looking at the plane, not the car. Ground crew move around him without getting in his space. He wears money and control like it’s nothing.
My mother’s voice trills in my ear. “You’re going on a private plane with that man? You’re going with him to Italy for aweek?”
Shock, outrage, fear. I told her I’m going to talk to Chef Sorrentino and pack up my apartment.
