Paul wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
“Yes,” I said, as much to Mary Lou as to Paul. “It was very… educational.”
I stuck around for a little while, waiting to see if Teo would resurface, but somehow we’d lost each other. “Did you see Teo leave?” I asked Bruno, who was talking to a colleague of his from the Rome office.
He nodded. “A little while ago.”
On the boat ride back to La Maddalena, I tried to puzzle out why Teo would leave without saying goodbye to me. It was all I could think about, really. That and whether his plan had been to go directly back to Sassari. I regretted not asking him.
“Do you want to grab lunch?” Laura asked as we walked to our cars, but I told her I was beat and asked for a rain check.
“Yeah, sure,” she said, and we gave each other a quick hug goodbye, then got into our separate cars.
I didn’t go anywhere right away. Instead, I waited for Laura and some of the other wives to pull out of the parking lot. When the pier had cleared out, I took a deep breath and pointed the Chevelle in the direction of Francesca’s apartment building.
136.
I PARKED IN THE SHADEof a eucalyptus tree, then ran across the street to the apartment building, where I hit the intercom button labeledS. Manca.
Within a few moments, I heard Teo’s voice in my ear. “Salve?”
“It’s Eileen,” I said softly, hoping against hope that Francesca wouldn’t hear me from her second-floor balcony.
Teo buzzed me up immediately, and we met on the third-floor landing. He was still wearing the linen slacks and button-down shirt he’d worn to the press conference, but the shirt was untucked and the jacket was gone.
I could have said something.HelloorHow are you?orI’m sorry my husband’s a shit. But we were past preambles. Instead, I walked straight into his arms and pulled his face toward mine. His lips were warm and tasted like tobacco and salt, and I didn’t know how I was ever going to stop kissing him.
We stumbled up the last flight of stairs and down the hallway, and as soon as we were inside his apartment, I tore at the buttons of his shirt, then got so frustrated that he laughed at me and pulled it over his head.
It was like we were back in that alley in Aggius, except this time there wasn’t a single brain cell in my head telling me to stop. Teo lifted me into the air, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. “I think I am dreaming right now,” he said into my neck as he carried me to the bedroom and we tumbled onto the mattress.
“You are not dreaming,” I said in the hurried whisper of someone who wants to be undressed immediately.
For a few minutes we were all arms and legs, yanking at our clothes and each other. But when our skin was finally touching in all the most important places, he forced me to slow down. “I’ve wanted to do this for two years,” he said solemnly. “You have to let me take my time.”
“Okay,” I said with a soft exhale.
He kissed the curve of my neck, then traced the edge of my claviclewith his tongue. By the time he had made slow work of my breasts, my skin was covered in goose bumps.
“Please,” I begged, eager for all of him, but Teo moved his head between my legs and took me into his mouth. I was self-conscious at first, because this particular move was not in Paul’s repertoire, but that went out the window when I realized the slow flick of Teo’s tongue was better than any shower nozzle I’d ever come across. His touch was soft and steady, and when I was about to come, he placed a finger inside me, and it was like he’d pulled a trigger. I bucked against his palm, then fell apart completely.
I was still feeling the aftershocks when Teo crawled toward me, kissed me, then asked in Italian if he could enter me. I almost laughed, it sounded so formal.
“Sì,” I said, and arched my hips toward his.
“You’re sure?” he asked, in English this time.
I thought maybe he was worried about not having a condom, so I told him I was on the pill.
“No, I mean, you’re sure you want to do this?”
It dawned on me that he was thinking about Paul and my absolute mess of a marriage, which I reasoned was still going to be a mess at the end of the afternoon.
“I’m very, very sure,” I whispered as I kissed him, and then he was inside me, which somehow managed to feel both totally new and also deeply familiar at the same time.
After a few minutes, Teo nudged my legs closed, a move that seemed counterintuitive until I realized it created a delightful friction that turned me inside out. I came a second time, with no warning, and this time I wept.
“You’re okay?” he asked, still hard inside me.
