"Maybe not that qui….” He cuts off my complaint with another kiss. His tongue pushes into my mouth and explores every inch of it. My husband can kiss. There's nothing tame about it, even when we're taking things slowly. He ravishes my mouth with a hunger that answers the need in me.
Gabriele undoes his pants. I reach down to wrap my hand around his shaft, smiling when I find him already hard. He drags the head of his cock through my wet folds and murmurs approvingly. He lifts me by the waist and brings me back down on him. He fucks me with an urgency that's partly to do with awareness that we have guests waiting and partly because this is a day to affirm our vitality. He holds onto me like I might disappear and I let him. This closeness, this connection, is something we both need right now.
He thrusts into my pussy hard and before we know it, we both come. I drop my head to his shoulder as I slowly get my breathing back to normal. Something sticky trickles down my thigh and I realize I'm going to have to change before we return to our guests.
We stand there for a moment, his arms around me, my head on his shoulder. Then I step back.
"You should tell them."
His expression shifts. "Tell them what?"
"You know what."
"That I'm a weak leader who could fall apart at any moment and take everything down with him."
"No." I sit on the edge of the desk and look at him steadily. "That you're a great leader who suffers from anxiety." It's the first time I've put a name to it but Gabriele doesn't try to deflect or deny it. He just looks at me with a strange sort of awe, as if I've expressed something he never could.
"Will they see it that way?"
"Yes, you were attacked. Anyone would be unsettled after that."
He shakes his head. "It wasn't the attack, Katya. I've always been this way. I don't know why it comes on sometimes and not others. It's unpredictable. One day I'll go to a new restaurant and feel fine. The next I have to look up the layout online, scroll through photos, check the menu, and when I get there I still can't walk through the door. I don't even know what I'm scared of."
He's never articulated that to me before. I doubt he's even told Lukas the extent of his difficulties. I think carefully before I speak.
"Gabriele." I lean forward. "Those men out there love you. They came from Florence in the middle of the night when you called." I pause. "They've known you all their lives. It's likely they already know more than you think. Give them the chance to help rather than watching from a distance and not understanding why they can't get close."
He's quiet for a moment. I watch him as he considers all I've said, turning it around in his mind. It's something I've come to understand about him. He doesn't resist the right answer. He just needs to arrive at it himself.
"You're right," he says.
"I know." I kiss his cheek.
Silly man. Of course I'm right. I always am.
EPILOGUE
Gabriele
There isno possibility of me ever perfecting my wife's nose if she won't sit still for five minutes. I’ve been working on it for months, creating one drawing after another and discarding them all because there’s alway something not quite. I don’t often get the opportunity to sit and draw so her endless fidgeting is doubly exasperating.
She's been reading something on her phone since we came out to the terrace and she's growing increasingly agitated about whatever it is she's reading. I put my sketchpad down.
"What is the matter with you?" I ask.
"Have you read this?" She turns the phone toward me and pulls it back before I have any hope of reading it. "Listen.Beauty and the Beast — Rome's Most Notorious Couple."
"Hmm," I say, not particularly interested in what some tabloid has written about us. There have been plenty of stories over the past few months, most of them wildly inaccurate.
"I'm notorious now apparently." She reads on and shakes her head. "They call me a Russian socialite." She looks up. "I am nota socialite." She goes back to the phone and then makes a sound of annoyance "One year on."
"What?" I ask. She’s lost me now.
"They've written one year on." She sets the phone face down on the table and looks at me despairingly. "From our first public appearance together at the San Giovanni Ball, they wrote one year on." She taps the phone. "It's been ten months."
"Is that the part that bothers you?"
"It's sloppy." She picks the phone back up and purses her lips in disgust. “We should sue.”
