The question catches me off guard. In all the frantic planning and desperate strategizing, I haven’t actually explained much about my relationship with Ginni beyond the basics. The heavily edited basics, carefully scrubbed of anything that might make me sound like I’m completely irrational for loving him.
“We’ve been... seeing each other,” I say carefully. “For a few months. His family doesn’t approve. Too worried about their reputation to accept that their son is gay and feminine.”
It’s not entirely a lie. The timeline is wrong, and I’m leaving out some rather crucial details, but the basic emotional truth is there. His family does disapprove. They are worried about their reputation. And I do care about him far more than is sane, sensible or safe.
“So you’ve been sneaking around,” Dante observes.
“Something like that.”
“And then?”
I pause, searching for a version of events that doesn’t involve kidnapping and attempted murder-suicide and escape from a basement prison that had started to feel like a sanctuary.
“I got freaked out about my own reputation. About Marco’s reaction… and I broke it off.”
“And he couldn’t handle it.”
“No.” That part, at least, is absolutely true. “He’s not... he’s sensitive. Emotional. The thought of being separated from me... he snapped.”
Dante nods slowly, as if this all makes perfect sense. “So he stabbed a cop to get arrested. Force your hand. Make you choose between him and your comfortable life.”
The cold delivery of his assessment makes my chest tight. Is Dante right? Were Ginni’s actions less about escaping his family and more about getting my attention and forcing me to act?
Is that really what Ginni was thinking? That I needed to be forced to choose him? That he had to create a crisis dramatic enough to prove my feelings were real?
If so, he was right. Without this incentive, I would have kept hiding, kept making excuses, kept telling myself I was doing the right thing until I shipped him off to an expensive institution and never saw him again.
But now… now the thought of Ginni in danger has blown away all of my denial. I can’t escape my feelings when they are clawing at me like this. Ginni is in prison and I can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t think of a single other thing.
“I remember him,” Dante says suddenly, his voice startling me out of my spiral. “From Christmas. At Dario and Molly’s.”
The memory hits me hard. Christmas dinner, not so long ago but also an entire lifetime ago. Ginni sitting quietly beside me with that carefully controlled intensity radiating off him like heat.
“You brought him,” Dante continues. “Said he was Marco’s little brother, needed somewhere to spend the holiday because his family had gone back to Italy without him.”
I nod, not trusting my voice. I remember that evening with painful clarity. The way Ginni had watched everyone with those assessing eyes, how he’d only really come alive when Molly started talking about wedding planning.
“He barely spoke,” Dante observes. “Just sat there watching, taking everything in. Most people would have called him sullen, antisocial.”
“But not you.”
“No. Not me.” Dante’s smile is sharp and knowing. “I recognized it. That stillness, that way of cataloguing threats and opportunities. He wasn’t being rude. He was hunting.”
The word sends a chill down my spine because it’s so accurate. That’s exactly what Ginni was doing that night, even in a roomfull of my friends. Assessing, calculating, deciding who was safe and who wasn’t.
“Didn’t seem weak to me,” Dante continues. “Quite the opposite, actually. Takes a special kind of control to sit in a room full of predators and never show your throat.”
I look up sharply, surprised by the insight. “You think he’s strong?”
“Don’t you?”
The question forces me to really consider it. Ginni, strong? My beautiful, fragile boy who falls apart when there is a power cut?
But then I think about everything he’s endured. His family’s rejection, their attempts to institutionalize him, years of being told he’s broken and wrong and fundamentally unlovable. The fact that he survived all that with his capacity for joy intact, his ability to love still fierce and uncompromising.
And then there’s the fact he managed to abduct me and keep me prisoner for two weeks.
“Yes,” I say slowly. “He is strong. Stronger than I gave him credit for.”
