I'm nervous.
This surprises me. I have killed thirty-two people. I have sat motionless for four hours in a parking garage waiting to open a man's throat. I have held a Beretta with a pulse rate of sixty and pulled the trigger without my hand moving a millimeter.
I am nervous about sleeping with Niccolo Sorrentino.
Not if. When. Tonight. I decided before I got dressed. I decided when I chose the underwear, black, simple, not lace because lace feels like a costume and I am done with costumes for the evening. I decided when I shaved my legs in the shower with a precision that had nothing to do with waitressing and everything to do with the way his fingers felt on my thigh in the elevator. I decided when I strapped the knife to my leg and then, for the first time in years, took it off.
I am not wearing the knife tonight.
My thigh feels naked without it. The absence is a phantom limb. I keep reaching for the buckle that isn't there, catching myself, folding my hands in my lap.
He notices.
"You're fidgeting," he says.
"I don't fidget."
"You've touched your left thigh four times since dessert."
Four times. He counted. This man counts my gestures the way I count heartbeats.
"Habit," I say.
"Of what?"
"Checking that I have everything."
"Do you?"
I look at him across the checkered tablecloth with the candle between us throwing soft light across his face, the silver temples, the dark eyes, the open collar. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow. The tattoos are visible, dark ink running down his forearms. The scar he traces when he's thinking. He is not tracing it now. He is looking at me.
"Yes," I say. "I have everything."
We leave the trattoria. The Vomero streets are steep, cobblestoned, lit by lamps that cast circles of yellow light on the stone. He walks close. Our shoulders touch. The air smells like jasmine from someone's balcony garden, thick and sweet in the warm night.
"Come up," he says when we reach his building. Not a question. Not a command. Something in between. An invitation with weight behind it. The weight of dinners and elevators and his knee against mine for two hours and the accumulated pressure of two people who have been circling each other like binary stars, locked in orbit, accelerating toward the inevitable collapse.
"Yes," I say.
The elevator to the penthouse takes twelve seconds. We don't touch during those twelve seconds. We stand on opposite sides of the car, a meter apart, looking at each other. The tension fills the space like water filling a tank. By the time the doors open, I can barely breathe.
His penthouse. The marble floors. The view of the bay. He doesn't turn on the lights. The city provides enough. Naples through the floor-to-ceiling windows, glittering, restless, casting a shifting blue-gold glow across the furniture, the walls, his face when he turns to me.
He steps close. His hand comes to my face. Palm against my cheek. Thumb on my cheekbone. He holds me like that for a moment, just looking, studying me the way he studies paintings. With attention so specific it feels physical.
His other hand reaches for my glasses.
He takes them off. Slowly. One arm at a time, lifting them away from my face with the care you'd give to removing something sacred. He folds them. Sets them on the console table by the door. The metal clicks against the marble surface.
The world goes soft.
I am exposed in a way that has nothing to do with clothing. Without the glasses, my face is uncovered. The barrier I've worn since I was twelve, the frames that make me bookish, forgettable, invisible, is sitting on his console table. He is looking at my actual face. My eyes without glass between them and his.
"There you are," he says.
My chest tightens. Not fear. Something adjacent to fear. Something with the same chemical signature but a different origin. The vulnerability of being seen without the armor I didn't know I was wearing until he removed it.
He kisses me.
