Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
When I finally stand, my legs have the unfamiliar wobble of someone who has been sitting still for a long time. He stands too. His shirt is still open, and I reach out and close one button, then another, and my fingers are on his chest and his heart is under them and he watches my hands with an expression that I’ll carry with me through the cold walk home, through the four flights of stairs to my apartment, through the moment I lie down in my bed and press my face into my pillow and realize that my whole body smells like him.
“Goodnight, Luciano.”
He walks me to the door. Opens it. His hand finds the frame above my head—the same gesture from his office, months ago, when he trapped me against the door and said you’re wrong in a voice that changed everything. But this time his body isn’t a barrier. It’s a question.
“Goodnight, Elsa.”
I walk out. I don’t look back. I’ve learned what happens when I look back in this man’s doorways, and tonight I want to carry the feeling of his arms home with me whole, unbroken, mine.
THE TEXT ARRIVES AT 7:12 AM.
Sunday morning. My phone buzzes on the pillow next to my face, and I reach for it with eyes still closed, and the screen glows in the gray early light of my apartment, and Iowa watches from the ceiling while I read two words.
Italian. The language he reaches for when his control fails.
I open the translation app. My fingers are clumsy, half-asleep, and it takes me two tries to type the letters correctly, and my heart is doing something that has no medical precedent, beating in a rhythm that doesn’t match any chart.
The translation appears.
Sposami.
Marry me.
I press the phone against my chest. I press it there so hard the edges leave marks on my skin, and I stare at the ceiling, at Iowa, at the water stain that has watched me through all of it.
Marry me.
My finger lifts. Finds the edge of the phone case. Traces one loop. Then another.
I don’t type back.
Not yet. Not until my hands stop shaking. Not until I can look at the word sposami and hold it without breaking open, because this man—who commands and doesn’t ask, who has never once said please until he wrote it on a note for a girl from Nebraska—just asked me to marry him in the only language his heart speaks.
My phone against my chest. Iowa on the ceiling. The circles on the phone case getting faster.
And the morning isn’t gray anymore.
Chapter 13
TWO DAYS.
The text has been sitting on my phone for two days, and I haven’t answered it.
Not because I don’t know the answer. I’ve known the answer since before I had words for it, since a girl in an alley pressed her back against a brick wall and drew circles to convince herself she was whole and thought, without language, without logic: whoever sent these men is mine.
I’ve known.
But the word sits in my phone—sposami, marry me—and every time I open the message to type back, my hands do the fast tight circles on the phone case and my chest fills with something too large for a one-word reply, and I close it again.
It’s Tuesday morning. I’m walking across the quad with my coffee in one hand and my bag on my shoulder and the April air is cool and damp and smells like wet earth, which is the closest New York gets to Nebraska in spring. My phone is in my pocket. The weight of it’s absurd—it’s the same phone it was last week, same cracked case, same scratched screen, but it’s carrying a word in Italian that makes it feel like I’m walking around with a live grenade against my hip.
David is beside me, eating a protein bar with the single-minded focus of a man fueling for something athletic, his cap backward, his jersey from whatever team has his loyalty this week. He’s been talking about Verniece for three blocks. She made him a study playlist. This, in David’s metrics, is seismic.
“A playlist, Lively. A curated playlist. That’s not a study group move. That’s a move-move.”
“Maybe she just likes sharing music.”
“Nobody curates fourteen songs for someone they’re not interested in. I counted. Fourteen. That’s intentional. That’s a message.”
“David, I think you might be overthinking—”
“Says the girl who draws circles on things when she’s overthinking.” He grins sideways at me. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed they’re back, by the way.”
My finger, which is currently tracing a loop on the lid of my coffee cup, stills.
“They’re back,” he says, quieter. “That’s good. Right?”
I look at David, who noticed when my circles stopped and carried granola bars for me like medicine and dragged me to Bucky’s and wiped milkshake off my face and never once asked me to explain the thing he could see breaking me from the outside. Who’s now asking if my circles coming back is good, because he understands, in his uncomplicated David way, that the circles are the barometer and their return means the weather has changed.