She’s sitting across from me at the long wooden kitchen table, chopping up onions, garlic, and tomatoes, glancing at me every so often.
I keep my eyes focused on the view of the ocean in the distance.I can just about make out the people on the distant beach—they’re black dots, no bigger than ants, but what I wouldn’t give to be one of them right now.Free.Running around on the beach, swimming.Laughing.Instead of stuffing my face with sandwiches and eyeing a cake cooling on a rack on the huge counter.I hope there’s some ice cream to go with it.
I feel the sun on my back long before Matteo appears in the kitchen.
“Is that dinner?”he asks Maria, while leaning down to kiss the top of my head.
“Yes,” she says tersely, gathers up everything she’s chopped up and goes to the stove, where two huge pots are waiting.“But I will need some help if I’m to cook for so many men.”
He gives my shoulder a squeeze then takes off his silver-grey jacket, hangs it on the back of a chair and starts rolling up his sleeves.“I’ll help.”
I very nearly choke on the piece of tramezzini I just bit off.It’s not just that he offered to help cook—though most men I know wouldn’t be caught dead helping out in the kitchen—it’s the familiar ease with which Maria accepted his help, moving aside for him at the counter.
“You cook too?”I ask, maybe a little too harshly, maybe a little too shrilly.
He grins at me over his shoulder.“Sure, Maria’s an excellent cook and she’s taught me everything she knows.”
She swats his shoulder and gives him a sharp look that nevertheless carries a lot of fondness.“Not everything.Not even close.”
“Yeah, that’s probably right,” he says.The smile he gives her is nothing but fond.
But her eyes remain mostly sharp.“I wish I had taught you how to treat women better.”
She glances at me and then looks back at him pointedly.The look that crosses his face is hard to describe.There’s a lot of darkness in it, hard relentless anger, but remorse too.Just not the soft kind.
“Can’t be helped,” he says and puts the chopping board covered in chopped onions he was about to hand to her back down on the counter.“I’ll get you some help in the kitchen.”
She sucks on her lips and goes back to minding the pot, her eyes still very stern.He picks up the cake and brings it to the table.
“We could have this with some coffee,” he says.“If you’re done with your sandwich, that is.”
I lay the half-eaten tramezzini back on my plate, while he collects a huge knife from the counter.
Maria stops him.“I’ll bring the cake and coffee out to you.In the gazebo.I’m sure Gianna would like to go for a walk in the fresh air.”
They both look at me expectantly and I just nod, once again wondering why they have to be so damn nice to me.Why can’t they starve me and keep me locked up and be mean to me?Then I could just hate them and everything would be right.
“Let’s go then,” he says and offers me his arm.Which I don’t take.It’s the least I can do to keep our roles here in the right perspective.
He shrugs at my snub, darkness still swimming in his eyes, but it’s mostly been displaced by the regret and remorse now.So, what’s he thinking?That he’d rather not keep me as his prisoner?Well, he can let me go whenever he wants!
I walk out through the wide-open French windows, onto a narrow stone porch and down the side.Maria was not wrong, I have wanted to go for a walk in the pretty garden surrounding this house.All the way to the beach.Although we’re so high up on this hill that it would be a trek rather than just a walk.And I’m only wearing flip-flops.
I go down the three steps to the grass and just keep going straight.I can feel him right behind me and I wonder if that’ll ever stop.Me feeling the heat of his gaze.And whether I actually want it to as I feel it wane a little.
“The gazebo is that way,” he says, and I turn automatically.He’s standing a few feet behind me pointing in the opposite direction than the one I had chosen.I shrug and join him.
Then we start walking, side by side down a stony path that radiates the heat of the sun.He’s so close I can feel the tension in his muscles, smell the intoxicating scent of his aftershave and that underlying musk that’s all him and which never fails to intensify the flapping of the butterflies in my stomach whenever he’s near.He wants to put his arm around my shoulders.I feel that too.But he’s not doing it.
“Did you speak to your sister?”he asks as we turn a corner in the path and come to a part of the garden that is very nice indeed.Full of flowering bushes, lined with green grass, all the colors bright and vivid in the sun.
“Yes,” I say.“She’s getting better.Might go home soon.”
He nods.“I heard that too.”
“From Ferro?”I snap.“You two talk about us?”
I stop and glare at him.He looks surprised at my anger.“Among other things, yes.”
