They were insatiable.
Something about Ivy’s wide-eyed wonder and heated delight made everything seem new to Giaco, too. Every time he touched her, it got harder and harder to recall if he’d ever touched another. He was creative, but she—
Well. She was a legend. And she was his wife.
In his experience, intensity depreciated at a rapid rate. Intensity required mystery, and once mysteries were solved, boredom set in. He had experienced this cycle more times than he—or anyone else—could count.
But there was nothing boring about Ivy.
Ten days into their honeymoon, they lay in their bed rumpled and panting. She shifted, then smiled down from where she lay stretched out on top of him. “There’s a beautiful island out there,” she said, pausing to kiss him. “I think we ought to explore it.”
Giaco had the lowering thought that perhaps she was bored. That perhaps this wasn’t about him at all.
He wasn’t sure he knew what to do with that notion.
She smiled wickedly. “I want to see if we can take a walk like civilized people. Or if we really are the wild animals we seem to have turned into here.”
And he laughed, because he laughed a great deal in her presence, it turned out. He wasn’t sure he had ever laughed so much in all his life—notreallaughter, anyway. It was one more reason why Ivy wasn’t boring.
He tried, repeatedly, to demystify her. It never worked.
Giaco was fascinated by the way shebreathed. The small noises she made while she slept. He was captivated by the difference in the way her collarbone tasted when compared with that sweet spot at her navel.
He could not seem to solve any of these mysteries. If anything, they only deepened the more time he spent with her.
So ten days in, they finally dressed. This took longer than it should have, because Giaco insisted on choosing her clothes and that led to him taking them off again, and so it was much later when they finally emerged from the villa and wandered their way down from the villa into the famous Piazzetta to take in the beating heart of Capri at last.
Giaco told himself that he needed to be on alert, making certain that they were seen. Reported upon. Made into myth and wonder for the consumption of the world.
But how could he remember something so tedious when Ivy walked with her arm around him, holding on to him as if she couldn’t bear to let go? How could he concern himself with the grimy business of selling himself to the tabloids when every step they took felt so precious?
It took him another ten days to understand what was happening.
That she had worked some kind of magic on him, he could admit. That she had wrecked him when all along he’d been so certain he had the upper hand, he could grudgingly accept. That she had somehow turned him inside out and found her way beneath his skin when he least expected it—all of that he could come to terms with.
But there was only one word that really fit all the things he felt in her presence, and it was not a word he’d ever thought he’d have any sort of passing acquaintance with. Not about himself and his feelings.
Hell, Giaco had made it his life’s work to pretend he’d never had a feeling at all.
He told himself that the reason this intensity did not fade away was simply because he knew it couldn’t last. Because it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. She’d asked him if he was saying a kind of goodbye the night before their wedding and he had been, because he’d understood that their wedding was the start of a countdown that would end all of these games and schemes.
This was only a little bit of interstitial space as he waited for the phone call that would change everything. The phone call he’d been working toward his whole adult life.
This was a breath in between. It could never be anything else.
So perhaps it was unsurprising that it felt like more.
“You seem so pensive,” Ivy said one night. They had ventured out again and if pictures of them had made it off the island, he wouldn’t know, because he’d set his mobile to block every number save one. They sat at a restaurant that was right there on the pretty bay in the marina. They were both sun-kissed and bright, and he had spent the better part of an afternoon teaching her how to go down on him while he returned the favor on her.
This seems inefficient, she had complained.
It’s an exercise in patience and restraint, he had replied.
An inefficient and tedious lesson, she’d retorted.Did you know that you were this Catholic, Giaco?
He had laughed, because she always made him laugh, and then made certain that she had better things to do with her mouth.
Now he reached over and took her hand across the small table, playing with the rings he’d put on her finger. It was an enduring shock to find how much he liked them there. The rings themselves and the veryideaof this woman wearing his mark—this claim he’d put on her. He liked it more than he’d ever imagined he could like such a thing.
