Page 38 of Empire
Old terracotta tiles, a carved wooden table scarred by use, and copper pots hanging above the stove. The windows are open because we never bothered to close them last night. It lets in the smell of earth and herbs from the garden.
I start the coffee and turn when I hear him shuffling into the room. He’s wearing nothing but his silk boxers and one of my shirts, unbuttoned and showing off his chest and the marks I left.
The sight of him barefoot in my kitchen, wearing my clothes, hits me harder than it should. I am so stupidly in love with this man.
He notices and tries not to smirk. “What?”
I shake my head once. “Nothing.”
“That face says otherwise.”
“It says I’m considering whether I should keep you here forever.”
His mouth twitches despite himself. “You’d get tired of me in three days.”
“Wrong, it’s nearly been three.”
“In five, then.”
“Also wrong.”
I set the moka pot on the stove and turn to face him fully. “In two months you’d still be bitching at me about how I cut bread, and I’d still want to bend you over this table.”
That earns me the look I’m after—offended, amused, and a little flustered.
He leans against the counter and folds his arms. “Your domestic fantasies are vile.”
“My domestic fantasies are honest.”
The worddomestichangs there for a beat too long. That’s the danger of this place—it lets words stretch into shapes they have no right to hold between men like us.
Domestic. Morning. Kitchen. Us.
Small, stupid things that feel harmless until you realize they’re the foundation of every life we’re not supposed to have.
Salvatore glances away first, toward the open window, the herbs outside, the sun striking the edge of the sink. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a kitchen with someone like this.”
I tilt my head. “Like what?”
“Like this,” he says again, and gestures vaguely between us, the room, and maybe the whole impossible idea of it.
I walk slowly toward him. “That’s because your family treats kitchens like they’re built for servants and poison.”
He scoffs. “They’re not wrong.”
I stop in front of him and hook a finger under his chin, my gaze sliding down the length of him and my shirt on his body. “And mine treats them like another place to conduct business.”
“Yes, well. We come from charming stock.”
I kiss him before he can retreat into the irony, and feel the smile he tries to hide break against my mouth.
Coffee brews, bread gets sliced, and eggs go into a pan. Salvatore acts insulted when I slap his wrist away from the tomatoes I’m cutting, but steals one anyway, glaring at me while biting into it as if he’s making a point.
It feels so dangerously normal that I start hating it even while I sink into it.
He sits opposite me as we eat, and every so often, he refills my cup even before I can, without comment. As if he’s been doing it all his life.
It’s such a small thing; that’s what gets to me. Not sex or the violence we know how to turn into devotion. Small things—refilling coffee, handing me salt without looking because healready knows when I’ll want it. Leaning over to steal a bite off my plate, even while he still has plenty on his.
