I can feel her heartbeat through her shirt. Her hips press down against my thigh, and the pressure makes her breath stutter. She grips my head harder and kisses me deeper and I let my hands slide from her hips to the small of her back to the curve of her ass to pull her tight against me. She makes a sound into my mouth that hits in my core. Her hips keep rocking back and forth, her head falling back.
She’s close, so close when she pulls back. Her lips are swollen, her face is flushed, and her eyes are dark in the low light of the restaurant, and her chest is heaving.
"Not here," she says. "Not tonight. Tonight, Danila is coming over and if we don’t go now, we’re gonna be late and I HATE being late."
"Okay…"
"But tomorrow." Her grip tightens on my head. Her hips press down one more time, and the friction between her body and my thigh makes my vision narrow. "Tomorrow, in my apartment, I'm going to take my time with you and you're going to let me."
"Yes, my little Graziella, whatever you say."
She climbs off my lap, straightens her shirt. She picks up my plate and my cup and carries them to the kitchen, and I sit at table four with my heart hammering and my jeans uncomfortably tight and the taste of her still on my tongue. I smile as she saunters off, hips swaying.
Danila arrives to my place at eleven with pizza.
He knocks this time. Two knocks, because Grace is here and Danila has never met her and even Danila understands that walking unannounced into a space where a woman is, is just plain rude.
I open the door. Grace is on the couch, her feet tucked under her, a cup of tea in her hands. She's wearing my shirt again, the onefrom last night, and her hair is down, still damp from our five-minute shower.
Danila comes in with the pizza box and two bottles of something that isn't water. He's wearing the dark coat, the jeans, the gold rings.
"Graziella," I say. "This is Danila."
She looks at him from the couch. She reads him the way she reads a dining room, fast, complete, taking in the size, the posture, the clothes, the tattoos, the rings. She lingers on the star between his thumb and index finger.
"You're the one who found me," she says.
Danila looks at me. I nod.
"Carmelo found you," Danila says. "I provided information."
"Well, whatever you did..." She takes a sip of tea. "Thank you."
Danila blinks. It's the first time I've seen anyone surprise him in twenty years.
"You're welcome," he says.
She stands, walks to the counter and opens the pizza box and takes a slice and eats it standing up, and Danila looks at me with incredulity.
We eat, standing at the counter. The three of us, with Grace shooting the shit like she’s always belonged. She finishes her tea and opens whatever Danila brought, which turns out to be Georgian wine that he insists is better than Italian. Grace takes a sip and says it's not bad and Danila puts his hand over his heart and says not bad is the highest compliment a Georgian wine can receive from an Italian woman who didn't know she was Italian until last week.
Grace laughs and it’s a full belly laugh, breaking my face open in a smile. Danila grins and pours her another glass.
She asks him questions. Where he grew up. How he met me. What the star tattoo means. He answers some and deflects others. She accepts them and she doesn't push past the places where he stops. She learned that skill from Javi. She learned that skill from being Grace. And she's applying it to a Bratva operative in a kitchen in South Philadelphia, and Danila is responding to it because nobody has ever treated him with this kind of uncomplicated attention.
"So, you’re Bratva.”
"Yes."
"And Carmelo is Cosa Nostra."
"Yes."
"And you've been friends since you were fifteen."
"Yep, saved each other more times than I can remember and still do, to this day."
She nods and takes another slice of pizza. "Must be exhausting. Having a best friend the world says you shouldn't have."
