“Your aunt and uncle are up to something,” I tell him as he searches.
“When are they not up to something?” he murmurs, then turns and holds out his hand for me to give him my wrist.
“They were speaking loudly and in English about a man being here and whether or not to tell you. I assume they want me to tell you, hence the volume and the English,” I say.
James is hyper-focused on rubbing the burn cream on the tiny red welt on my wrist.
“Does that hurt?” he asks.
I shake my head and he looks up from my burn and straightens, pulling me slowly to where he’s leaning against the sink. My free hand finds a droplet of water that must have dripped from his hair and I trace it down over his chest toward his navel.
“Is the cream helping?” he asks.
“Mmhmmm.”
I can’t feel anything but his hands on my hips as he pulls me to him. I look away from the water droplet and up into his eyes, and my entire body turns to liquid. He lowers his mouth to mine, but just before his lips find mine he freezes.
“Non fermate. It was just getting good, no?”
I turn to see Maso leaning against the hallway wall, a picture of him in a white suit in church above his head.
“Maso, you little perv—”
“Better me than papà, who is on his way up now,” Maso says with that painfully wide grin as he skips down the hallway toward the stairs.
I step away from half-naked James and hurry out of the bathroom. The only thing worse than voyeur Maso would be the dean of students crashing our little bathroom party.
“Ava,” James says, grabbing my good wrist.
I smile, but make sure to stay outside in the hallway, as if the threshold makes it more acceptable to be ogling his goodies.
“Can we talk later? After dinner?” he asks.
And my stomach drops an inch or five.
Talk? We talk all the time. Of course we can talk.
But I know this one will be different. This is “the talk.” I’m not ready.
“Yeah. Of course,” I tell him, trying to give him my best reassuring smile.
He leans down and kisses my forehead just as Leo’s booming voice can be heard from somewhere downstairs. James throws me one last smile and then shuts the door between us, and I hightail it back downstairs where I might get burned, but at least I’m safe.
CINQUANTUNO
James
All through dinner I can’t help but notice how natural it is to have Ava at our table. She helps Nina in the kitchen without being directed, like they’ve been running a restaurant for years. She challenges Leo like she’s his daughter. And she can silence Maso with just the lift of a single eyebrow. Not that it hasn’t been this way before tonight, but now with her hand on mine as she laughs at Nina’s story about the time I brought home a wild horse when I was fifteen, it has never been more obvious that Ava belongs here with me. With us.
I take another sip of wine to try to clear this terrifyingly dangerous train of thought before it derails me completely. Does she feel it too? This sense of rightness? She runs her thumb up the side of mine and then stands to clear the plates for dessert, and I follow suit.
“Do you really want to help or are you trying to have another make-out session in the kitchen?” she whispers over her shoulder asshe steps over Verga. He sees the plates in her hands and immediately gets up and follows after us. He knows the drill.
“Both,” I tell her.
She lays the plates down on the floor and Verga gets to work.
“Well, judging from the smell, we have about a minute and a half until Nina is in here fussing over the cakes, so—”
