He just scowls at me. But it’s better than that blank nothingness he wore for too many days. My phone buzzes once more, and I check it.
“Is that Stuccio again?” Caligula asks.
“Got a meeting for the Gees tomorrow afternoon,” I say briefly, reading the text.
“Oh,” he says, and he sounds strange, but when I glance up, he’s back to looking out the window.
“We’ll go see this cousin of yours in the morning,” I tell him, “and then I’ll drop you home after.”
Home. Why did I say it like that? My house is not his home.
It’s barely a home for the people living in it.
The house is dark when we get back. We go upstairs, avoiding the elevator. My steps are heavy on the treads and I watch him as he climbs ahead of me, thinking again about what he said when he apologized for using my people as pawns.
Iwasready to kill him that day I retrieved him from the Morellis. Dangling all those stories above the floor, he fought back with the only weapon he could find.
That much is true, I guess.
We reach the landing where the hallway splits. Left to my bedroom. Right to the guest room. We stop. “I’ll sleep in the guest room,” I say.
He doesn’t object.
I should say something else.Good night, orsee you in the morning, or any of the normal things that normal people say to each other after a normal evening that definitely did not involve fucking on a broken-down sofa with the door wide open.
He’s standing there in his wrinkled, open shirt. There’s a mark on his cheekbone that I think I put there during our “fight,” and in the low light of the hallway it looks almost black.
“Goodnight, Dami,” he says at last. Soft. No edge.
I nod. That’s it. That’s all I can manage. He turns left and goes into my bedroom, closing the door behind him.
And I follow.
I stand in front of that closed door for a few minutes and then at last I open it. He’s in the bathroom; I can hear the water running. He’s in the shower, washing me off his skin. The olive oil, the sweat, the cum…everything. Afterward there won’t be a trace of what we did.
But I’ll know.
I still feel the way he pushed back, met me, matched me. Told me to give him more.Is that all you’ve got?No one has ever talked to me like that. Not in bed. Not anywhere. This stupid, scrawny, bronze-haired Clemenza prince pushes my buttons like he’s got something to prove, and the sick thing is, I like it.
I like it so much it scares me.
I should be in there right now. I should be washing him down and checking for bruises and telling him he did good, he was so good, he’s perfect and I’m sorry and I don’t know what I’m doing but I can’t seem to stop it.
The shower cuts off, and I back out of the room, closing the door silently behind me. I go back to being a guest in my own house, because I’m a coward.
I’ve known it since I was thirteen.
I’m a coward.
CHAPTER 29
CALIGULA
I meetDami in the kitchen the next morning after breakfast in bed. Rosa is there as usual, cooking something delicious on the stove, and Vito is drinking coffee at the counter. Sammy is nowhere to be seen. Dami barely glances my way and doesn’t echo Rosa’s good morning; he just tells Vito to bring one of the town cars around to the front.
Last night he told me I belong to him still. Then he slept in the guest room. This morning he can’t even look at me.
I have no idea what’s going on in that head of his. But then, I barely know what’s going on in mine.