LUCA
Natalia stares at me,mouth agape.
Then she grins.
It’s a slow, lazy curve of her mouth, the kind of smile that makes you think you might be able to get away with anything. Her eyes are still hazy from sex, her hair a dark mess against the pillow.
“Luca.” She tests out the name. “That suits you. Though I’m going to miss Johnny.”
“Johnny sounded like a guy who sells fake IDs at the boardwalk.”
A laugh bursts out of her, soft and breathless, and close enough that I feel it in my chest. Then she’s kissing me, quick and warm, her hand on my cheek.
She says it again, slower this time. “Luca.” Fitting it into the space where Johnny used to be. “Well, it’s about damn time. Nice to finally meet you.”
I bark out a laugh. “Yeah. You too.”’
I get up and grab a towel from the bathroom. When I come back, I press it gently to her stomach, wiping her clean.
“Thank you,” she says. Quiet. A little formal for a woman who was screaming my name two minutes ago.
I toss the towel toward the bathroom and stretch out beside her. Settling back against my side, Natalia rests her head on my shoulder, her fingers tracing idle patterns over my skin. The afterglow is a warm, heavy blanket over both of us. I could stay here for a week. A year. A lifetime.
So.” She tilts her head up to look at me, her chin on my chest. “You finally remembered your name.”
“Apparently sex is good for the memory. Someone should put that in a medical journal.”
She snorts, the sound vibrating against my ribs. Then she settles back down, and the laugh fades, and her fingers go still on my skin.
“Did you… remember anything else?”
My hand tightens on her shoulder.
The question is casual. Almost offhand. But my breathing catches on it.
Every lie I’ve swallowed since my memories started coming back sits between us. She doesn’t know they’re there. I do.
Still fuzzy. Nothing solid.Just fragments.The words are right there on my tongue, same place they’ve been living for days.
But her skin is warm against mine. I can still taste her. And the easy deflection just won’t come up. Like my body has decided,independent of my brain, that there’s a limit to what I can do to this woman in one day.
I swallow. Once.
“Some things.”
She waits. Natalia’s good at that, I’ve noticed. She doesn’t push or fill the silence. She just holds it open and lets you walk through it on your own.
“The scars make more sense now.” I look down at my hands on the sheets. The calluses. The bandaged knuckles that knew exactly what to do in that bar fight. “The fighting. The reflexes. All of it.”
“What do you mean?” She tilts her chin and looks up at me.
“I think…” I start again, the words dragging themselves out of me. “I think I might be in the same line of work as your family.”
The silence that follows is a different animal entirely.
She doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t flinch. But something shifts behind her eyes. A door closing partway.
She sits up slowly, pulling the sheet with her, tucking it under her arms. She’s not looking at me anymore. She’s looking at the window, at the line of ocean beyond it.
