One.
Two.
Three.
The bag swings back. I meet it. This is what I brought back from the island. Not the sand. Not the sun. Not the illusion of freedom.
Boxing.
A way to keep my hands busy when my heart wants to claw its way out of my chest. A way to feel like I am not waiting. I punch harder and the bag groans on its chain.
Behind me, the door opens.
I don’t need to know my visitor because the very air changes when Giovanni enters a room. It always has. Even before I knew what he was. Even before I knew what his name meant.
For long minutes, he doesn’t speak while I punch, punch, punch.
He stands there, watching, and the silence stretches until it becomes its own kind of pressure.
I hit the bag again, harder than necessary.
“What?” I snap, breathless, irritation sparking too quickly. “Are you going to stand there all night or are you going to say something?”
His voice comes smooth, edged, intimate in the way it always is when he is not trying to be gentle. “I am saying something.”
“With your staring?”
“I am learning,” he replies, unhurried, sauntering in with grace that makes my belly jump, “what my wife does when she’s attempting to work through a thing alone.”
My jaw tightens. I pull off one glove with my teeth, then the other, fingers shaking with the adrenaline that never fully leaves my system anymore. “I’m allowed to be alone.”
His footsteps sound against the floor as he moves closer. “You are,” he agrees. “You’re also allowed to tell me what this is.”
I finally turn.
He is dressed casually, black shirt open at the throat, the scar on his chest visible when he breathes, a brutal reminderof the cost of the last few months. He looks healed. He looks dangerous. He looks like a man who has decided to stop waiting.
His gaze drops like a goddamn missile. To the trainers. Then up… to the gloves. To the small, ugly proof that I have not been resting the way he wanted.
His mouth hardens. “When,” he asks quietly, “exactly did you take up boxing?”
My throat tightens. I could lie. Except I’ve tried it before, and I’m pretty shit at it. “On the island,” I say.
His eyes lift back to mine. “Why? I seem to remember your relaxation tool of choice was yoga. And these days it’s sex. Boxing never featured.”
The words are flat. Not so much curiosity but a quietly seething demand.
I swallow. “I don’t want to fight, Gio.”
He steps closer, close enough that I can smell him, that familiar clean heat that makes my body react even when my mind is braced. “Then answer me,amuri.”
Amuri. Love.
I learned the word in secret, late at night, typing Sicilian into my phone like it might explain him, like it might explain what we are doing to each other. The way he says it now does not feel like tenderness.
It feels like a blade with a velvet handle.
“I wanted a way to defend myself,” I say, my voice sharper than I intend.
