Page 129 of Knight
"He's going to lose that knight piece."
Romeo's voice comes out of the dark — low, almost amused, carrying the particular warmth of a man who is choosing, deliberately, to think about something small while something enormous waits outside the glass.
"He sleeps with it every night." I trace a circle against his chest. "It'll turn up inside a couch cushion in a month and he'll tear the apartment apart looking for it."
"I'll buy him another one."
"He won't want another one. He wantsthatone."
Romeo's laugh is quiet. A huff of air against my hair. "Kid's a loyalist."
"Wonder where he gets it."
Silence. The good kind. The kind that lives between two people who have said everything that matters and are resting inside the echo of it.
His fingers are tracing the line of my spine. Slow. Absent. The touch of a man whose hands need something to do even when his body is still. I press closer. His ribs expand beneath my cheek.
"Marisol is going to destroy Guido by the end of the month," I say.
"She already destroyed him. He just hasn't admitted it."
"He reset the board three times yesterday. She cracked the Sicilian Defense in two days. He looked physically ill."
"That's pride. He's proud of her, and he doesn't know how to say it because Zina's kids express emotion through chess moves and meaningful silences." His thumb brushes across a vertebra. "She's terrifying. Your sister is genuinely terrifying."
"She gets that from me."
"I know." He presses his mouth against the top of my head. "That's what makes it terrifying."
I smile against his skin. The stubble on his chin catches in my hair, and I do not move because the small friction of it —rough, real, the texture of a man who has been too busy saving his brother to shave — is the kind of detail I want to carry with me past dawn.
"Do you think Guido knows she braids his hair because she likes him?" I ask.
"Guido knows everything. He just pretends he doesn't because it's strategically useful to be underestimated." A pause. "Also, because he likes having his hair braided, and he will deny it until the day he dies."
I laugh. Quiet. The sound barely reaches the walls, but Romeo's arm tightens around me, and I feel his chest move beneath my cheek and the vibration of his own laughter — held, careful, the volume of two people who are choosing joy at two in the morning while a war waits at sunrise.
"I still have the dress," I say.
"What dress?"
"The gas station dress. The one I wore to the courthouse."
His hand stops on my spine. "You kept it."
"It's in the closet. Behind your nine-hundred-dollar jackets."
"That dress cost eleven dollars."
"Twelve. There was tax."
He is quiet for a moment. I feel him breathing. The rhythm has changed — slower, deeper, the cadence of a man holding something inside his chest and turning it the way Guido turns chess pieces. Examining every angle.
"Twelve dollars," he says. "And you walked into a courthouse and signed your name next to mine and changed my entire life in a dress that cost twelve dollars."
"I also had gas station coffee."
"Nova."
