Santino drives us to Pompeii, and it takes my breath away.
We are part of a small tour, and every stop manages to both fascinate and terrify me. We’ve all heard the stories about how it happened, how tragic it was, but to see it is something else entirely.
I want to touch everyone who suffocated in a personalized prison of ash. I want to hug the children. I want to hide the pets. Everybody reminds me of my family. My mother. My father. My beautiful sister who was stolen from me too soon.
“Are you okay?” Santino’s hand rests lightly against my lower back.
My body leans against his hand, seeking comfort as my heart stretches into my stomach. His hand covers my entire lower back, like armor for my core. I can’t bring myself to move away from its protection as he leads me into the stone amphitheater.
“I’ll be fine.” I lie, but only a little. Maybe I really will be fine. Maybe this dangerous coil of vengeance and violence will be enough armor.
I swallow the lump crawling up my throat and shade my eyes. Tourists are everywhere, gawking at the destruction of lives and the preservation of artifacts, lining up to sit in the rotunda with their bright fleece and white sneakers.
Santino lays his jacket on the stone seat, and I sit beside him.
The tour guide is a distinguished-looking man in a sport jacket and white shirt. He’s facing into the sun, so he leaves on his sunglasses to launch into his tale of history. The plays, the orators, the music. The life that once vibrated inside these crippled ruins.
“First time I came here…” Santino lowers his voice under the guide’s. “I stayed too long and missed the last bus. Zia Paola didn’t know where I was until the next day. Her fury was worse than Vesuvio, I promise you.”
“How old were you?” I ask.
“Fourteen.”
“I don’t blame her. I would have killed you the minute I found out you were alive.”
“Some nurse you are,” he grumbles, and I try to jab his ribs, but he catches my hand before it reaches its destination and kisses it.
The tour guide gestures across the plains, describing what lays beyond. Santino takes my hand, and with a sly wink, we sneak out of the amphitheater. He leads me through the massive city, keeping an eye out as if we’re on some sort of secret mission.
Where is his security detail? I haven’t seen any of them since we left the house. Santino wouldn’t travel without them. Not with me here.
Or does he feel just that safe?
As we run between crowds of people and sneak into dark corners, laughing, I know that’s the answer. This is his home and he doesn’t need men with guns under their jackets.
“Do you like Pompeii?” Santino murmurs in my hair. I can feel the grin spread across his face.
“It’s my new favorite place.” All I can smell is him and it’s intoxicating.
“Mine too.”
I think about his pack of cigarettes sitting on the veranda back at the house, but I’m too overwhelmed with the nearness of him to dwell on it. When I look up at him, he’s already staring at me with an intensity that weakens every defense I put up between us.
When Santino kisses me, I know he carries the key to my body and soul. I don’t know when he got it, when he had it made, but I know it fits me, because when he turns it, I unlock.
Maybe the heat of Italy in June is getting to me, and I pull away.
“This feels wrong, in a place like this.” I whisper to keep myself from turning into a submissive puddle. “We should be reverent.”
“Do you know how long ago these people died?” Santino asks in my ear, his breath sending cascading goosebumps across my entire body. “Did you know there were people encased in lava as they were lying together? They spent their last minutes on this planet fucking.”
“There were also women cooking, frozen in place for all eternity in a position of servitude.” I manage some sass even though he continues to disarm me in such close proximity. “They deserve respect.”
“Because they died? Have we not already established everyone dies?” His fingers curl around a lock of my hair and pull ever so gently. Heat shoots through me. “I will not take you here.”
“I never said you could have me.” I level my gaze with his to display the remaining shards of my breaking defiance.
His gaze runs from hot to humor. He laughs heartily and kisses my forehead. I have never in my life wanted him to kiss my lips hard and real and deep this badly.
“Come, Violetta. We have much more to see.”
And see we do. The king knows how to travel. We tour wineries, cathedrals, orchards. Every day is a new adventure full of wine and food and immaculate scenery.
He kisses me gently at each stop, like christening each stop in our travels. As the days progress, I want more. I don’t want gentle. I don’t want a kiss on the forehead and hands lying respectfully on my shoulders or over my clothes.
I want to be owned. I want to be pleasured. I want my body to slow its fucking roll.
Every morning, he walks out onto the back patio with pajama pants slung low around his hips. Here in Italy, he doesn’t swim at night. He stretches and does his laps in the morning, before drinking his coffee and reading the paper—for once—on the day it’s printed.
Watching his body flow and move while half clothed is something like an awakening. Every. Single. Day. At this point, I’m convinced he’s doing it on purpose.
We go to the markets for fresh croissants and espresso. While there, he picks out a tiny, strappy red bathing suit from a stall that screams “for tourists.”
Red. Just like the clothes he bought me. I put it on at the house and can’t shake the feeling this is exactly what the Violetta of two months ago would wear in Greece,
I watch Santino outside, stretching and collecting towels for our trip to the beach. He’s better than a frat boy. He’s everything a frat boy would want to be—powerful, sexy, commanding. He’s given me the attention all the other girls would want.
He’s mine.
The words feel strange. Not quite a lie, but an unbelievable truth.
I focus on twisting my hair up into something that looks effortless and cute, which is more difficult than making it look as if it took all afternoon.
Rosetta was the one who did my hair, my whole life growing up, until she was gone.
“Rosetta, what would you do?” I whisper, still watching the king outside. He doesn’t pace, only scrolls through his phone, as if waiting for me doesn’t bother him. “Why does he care so much about me? Why aren’t you here to help me figure this out?”
Because she’s dead, like everyone else.
Except Santino, for now.
A tight knot creases in my chest, and I leave the room in the hopes it’ll loosen with a change of scenery.
Downstairs, Santino smiles when I walk outside. It immediately slides off his face and is replaced with concern. Because, for some fucked reason, he cares about me.
“What’s the matter?”
“Just thinking.” I try to wave it off.
He frowns with disbelief. I’m going to have to work harder than this.
“Do you like it?” I open the robe to show him the red bikini.
His eyes go from incredulous to ravenous, and I close it up before I become a meal. Without a word, he throws his arm across my shoulders and escorts me down to the private beach. Immaculate blue water rolls across the postcard-pristine sand.
There’s a cabana set up in the center with two comfortable loungers around a table full of drinks and snacks.
We settle into the armless loungers set close together, and it only takes a minute before my body almost instinctively rolls into him. We haven’t shared a bed yet, but the night before, we spent it curled up on the couch watching old TV shows and now I gravitate back to that position.
I hear his heartbeat and the crash of ocean waves. Everything smells salty and musky. A cool breeze dances through the spaces between us.
“How long can you be away from work?” I ask, suddenly feeling guilty.
“You want to go home?”
“No, no.” I shake my head slightly against him. “I just wish…” The words feel stuck in my throat, but I fight to unstick them. “I wish we could be alone like this forever.”
“Pretend this moment is forever.”
I wish I could see his face. Do I make him feel the same way? Does he get flustered around me? Do I make him feel strange things he must fight? Or does the king never get flustered?
“Memorize it,” he continues. “Because it could end any time.”
He lifts my chin and captures my lips with his own. It’s a beautiful kiss, one that leaves every inch of skin in tingles. My body tries to crawl up his and I force it back down, just to enjoy this moment for as long as possible.
Because it could end at any time.
“Why?” I ask. “How about you quit doing whatever it is you do?”
“You think it’s so easy?”
“Yes. You do it between now and when I get my nursing license. I’ll support us.”
“I can cook and clean then?”
“I cook.” I lay my hand on his naked chest without thinking about it, and keep it there when I do. “You clean.”
“Will I have the babies too?” he asks and my body and mind are aware of what has to happen before anyone around here gives birth.
“Shush,” I say.
“Who are you shushing?”
“You.” I pick my head up to face him.
“Why is that?”
“You’re not taking care of babies.”
“No?”
“Conosco i miei polli.”
I know my chickens, and I know him.
The old Italian saying comes to me more easily than any modern sentence, and I don’t know why.
“Tale padre, tale figlia.” He has a half-smile as he says such a father, such a daughter and I know why I could spit out the saying about the chickens so easily.
“My father used to say that when my mother forgot where she put something.”
I get wistful thinking about the slices of memory I have of them. In the house paid for with dirty money. The grocery store that was a front for a criminal empire.
I flop back on the lounger with my wrist over my eyes to block out the afternoon sun.
“She’d be looking everywhere for her car key or a shoe,” I say. “And he’d know exactly where it was.”
“He said that about the men who worked for him.”
He knows my father better than I ever will.
“Were my parents happy together?” I ask, still staring into the darkness of my wrist, because it doesn’t matter.
“Yes.”
“I’m glad.”
“Why?”
I find the question valid, which could be an illustration of a compatibility between us that I’ve suspected and denied. It doesn’t matter if they were happy. I am who I am no matter if I was conceived in love or obligation. My first five years with them are all I have, and my memory of them has taken enough of a beating.
“Rosetta,” I say. “She thought they were perfect. I wouldn’t want her to die believing a lie.” I lean on my elbow, facing him. “Did I ever tell you the last thing I ever said to her?”
“You had a fight?”
I shake my head. “Even worse. It wasn’t cruel. I don’t even regret it, honestly. It was just, ‘See you later.’ In my Zs’ front hall. I got back from school and she was on her way out. Bags packed. ‘See you in a month!’ she said. I was jealous she was going to Italy and I wasn’t, so I just said, ‘Okay, see you later,’ and went to my room.”
He pauses to see if there’s more. There isn’t. That’s all there ever was.
“You did not see her later.”
“No. I didn’t.”
It goes quiet again, and in the silence, a thought presses impatiently behind my teeth.
“Sometimes,” I say, sure I’m going to regret this, “I think that’ll happen to you. I’ll say ‘see you later’ and you won’t come back.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“What if you get killed?”
Santino tsks, nonplussed.
“No, really.” The fear I’ve denied finds its way into words. “I don’t know what you do when you’re not in the house, and I know you won’t tell me. I trust you won’t leave, but I don’t trust your career choices.”
“All you need to know is my word, and I swear, Violetta, you will not be left alone. Not ever while I breathe.”
“And if you’re not breathing?”
“I want you to know this…” He takes my chin in his hands. “If we’re separated, even by death, as long as your heart beats, I will walk the earth until I find you.”
He’s being insanely poetic to make a simple point, and I get it, but his expression is serious. To him, death is an inconvenience to his devotion.
I’m swept up in it.
I believe every word he says.