I shiver and reach for my coffee, hoping Rosa doesn’t notice.
I told him what I needed. I laid it out plainly.Love is giving part of yourself to someone without the fear of gettingnothing back. Now I can’t stop wondering what he’ll do with that information. A normal man would hear those words and understand them. Would feel them. He would either rise to meet them or walk away.
Cristiano isn’t normal. Cristiano heard me describe vulnerability and immediately started calculating how to perform it. I could see him filing my words away, adding them to his arsenal.She wants vulnerability. She wants sacrifice. How do I fake that convincingly enough to get what I want?
I should have kept my mouth shut instead of making him more dangerous, but the orgasm he gave me turned my brain to mush.
God, the orgasm.
I press my thighs together and take a scalding sip of coffee.
When my legs had finally stopped shaking, he watched me get dressed with reluctant eyes. Like letting me put my clothes back on was physically painful for him. He’d tried to pull me back into his arms twice, and I’d had to physically duck under his reach to grab my shoes.
Then I’d heard him in the hallway, telling Gloria that I was taking the rest of the week off and would return on Monday.
The rest of the week off. With pay, presumably. Like I’m a kept woman he can dismiss and summon at will. At the spa to service him. Massage him. Fuck him. That’s what they’ll all think.
Worse than the mortification of Gloria’s carefully blank expression when I finally emerged was that I didn’t try to explain. I just put my head down and walked out of there before anyone could say another word.
A knock at the door startles me out of my thoughts.
“I’ll get it,” Rosa calls, already halfway there.
I hear her open the door, then a male voice, and then Rosa’s confused, “Can I help you?”
I round the corner to find a delivery man nearly hidden behind an enormous armful of flowers. Not roses. Whimsical, delicate blooms in soft purples and whites and pale pinks, the kind of flowers I’ve always loved. The sort you might find in a fairy dell, or a dream.
“Delivery for Mina Santoro.”
“That’s me.” My voice comes out strangled, because I have a horrible feeling I know who sent them, and my sister is here to see it.
There’s more than one bouquet. There aredozens. The delivery man makes three trips, filling my tiny living room with flowers until the interior of my apartment looks like a woodland clearing.
Then he brings in the packages. They’re wrapped in cartoon dinosaur paper, simply but neatly. I remember the blue wrapping paper on the snow globe Cristiano gave me all those years ago, and my heart does a flip as I picture him carefully wrapping these gifts for my son.
“Mama, look!” Leon abandons his cousins to investigate. “Presents.”
“Mina, are you seeing someone?” Rosa asks in astonishment. “I’ve been hoping you would. Who are they from?”
I can feel the heat climbing up my neck and spreading across my cheeks. “I’m not sure,” I lie.
Rosa finds the card tucked among the flowers. She reads it aloud, her frown deepening with every word.
“I’ll follow thee and make a heaven out of hell. —C.” She looks up at me. “That’s a bit dramatic. Who’s C?”
I look around at my tiny living room, which resembles a fairy dell with hundreds of delicate blooms, and I feel like Puck trapped inside the snow globe.
Rosa’s face transforms, her confusion giving way to dawning horror. She looks from my face to the presents and then backat my face. “Not Cristiano Montoni.” Her voice drops to a hiss. “Mina, please tell me you’re not seeing him again.”
“I’m not.” The denial comes out too fast, too defensive. “I was never seeing him back then, and I’m not seeing him now. He just has a way of blindsiding me when I least expect it.”
Rosa opens her mouth to say more, but it’s too late. The kids have descended on the presents like locusts, tearing through dinosaur paper with gleeful abandon.
“Mason, Carly, those aren’t yours,” Rosa starts.
“It’s all right.” I watch Leon’s face light up as he pulls a stuffed T-rex from the wrapping. “Let him share.”
It’s too late to send them back now. The paper is shredded, the boxes torn open, and Leon is clutching that dinosaur like it’s the most precious thing he’s ever owned. I couldn’t take it away from him. He so rarely gets new toys. Cristiano probably spent more on this single delivery than I make in a month.
