His hips thrust up once, twice, hard, his hands pulling me down against him. He says my name again, not broken this time, whole, every syllable intact. He presses his face into my neck and shudders against me, and I hold him and feel his heart hammering against my chest.
We stay connected. His arms wrap around my waist. I stay in his lap.
My finger does a small circle on his shoulder blade. Slow. Slower. The slowest it's ever been. One tap. Long pause. One round. Not counting, not grounding, not surviving. Just touching. Just confirming. The oldest language my body knows saying the simplest thing it's ever said:you're here. I'm here...we're real. THIS is real.
I lift my head from his shoulder and look at his face. Eyes closed, lips parted, his expression open in a way I've never seen from any angle. Not from across the restaurant, not from below him in bed, not from across a bar with blood on his lip. This is what Carmelo looks like with every wall down, every defense lowered, every silence broken. What's inside is vast and tired and full, and it's mine.
"I love you," I say.
He opens his eyes. "I know." Two words. Classic Carmelo, but his arms tighten around me and his mouth presses against my forehead, and those two words contain everything he'll never say and everything he doesn't need to because his body has been speaking the whole time.
I climb off him and we lie down. My back against his chest, his arm over my waist, the same position as the first night he held me through the flashback except now neither of us is shaking, neither of us is afraid, and the only sounds in the apartment are our breathing, the radiator clicking, and the street outside going about its business.
My hands are still, both of them, resting on his arm, fingers open, palms flat.
"Your hands stopped," he says quietly. He noticed, because of course he noticed. He's been counting my taps since the first night he watched me through the window.
"Yeah. They did."
"Does that scare you?"
I think about it. My hands, still for the first time since a concrete floor in a room I can now remember in full detail.
"No," I say. "I think it means I don't need it right now. I'll need it again, tomorrow or next week or in a year when something triggers a memory I haven't processed yet. But right now, in this bed, with your arm around me, I don't need the thing that kept me alive. Because I'm not surviving anymore. I'm living."
He presses his mouth to the back of my neck, right on the vertebra. His lips and his stubble and his breath against my skin.
"Graziella," he says into my skin.
"Carmelo."
"I love you."
He said it. The full paragraph condensed into three words. Five syllables. From a man who communicates in headlines and has spoken more in the last three weeks than in the last three years.
"I know," I say, and I smile against his arm and close my eyes.
Morning. My apartment. Light through the window, warm, the kind that comes from a low sun hitting the building across the street.
The radiator is clicking. The coffee maker is dripping because Carmelo got up before me and figured out how it works, which means he pressed the button and stood in my kitchen being too large for the space while he waited. He's at the counter now, shirtless, just in his jeans. The knife is on the counter next to the coffee maker, folded closed, sitting between the sugar bowl and the salt shaker. Not on his belt. On the counter. Next to the coffee. Next to the life we're building.
I get out of bed, pull on his shirt because it's right there and it smells like him, and walk to the counter. He pours me a cup and I take it. Our fingers touch on the handle, the way they've touched every time he's handed me something since the first cup of coffee at table four.
And I realize that I always want them to touch. I always want to brush against him, I want to do circles on his skin because that’s my way of letting him know that I’m not anxious and I’m notscared. I want to tap when I am, and then feel safe as he holds me.
This is all I ever wanted.
I take a sip and look at him over the rim. His face that doesn't make sense individually but together creates something I can't stop looking at. The face I watched from across a dining room for weeks before I knew his name. The face I held in my hands while he came inside me. The face of a man who found me in a file and fell in love with me through a window and killed for me and lied to me and told me the truth and stayed.
I say something in Italian. Something small, ordinary, the kind of thing you say to someone who is in your kitchen in the morning.Buongiorno. Good morning. He smiles and says it back before downing his coffee and starting on breakfast.
I don't flinch when I hear myself say it. The Italian doesn't make my skin crawl. It sits in my mouth where it belongs.
My finger taps the coffee cup…
And stops.
Bonus Chapter: Carmelo
