“What do you want, red or white?” Gian asked, holding up two bottles of wine for Cara to choose between.
“I thought we were grabbing beer?”
“We are, but you like wine more. Which one?”
Cara eyed the two bottles and said, “Which one do you think I’d prefer?”
“The red for tonight. White for a meal.”
“Lucky guess.”
“Or I pay attention,” Gian replied just as fast, slipping the bottle of white wine back on the shelf. “Red wine is good for rich dishes, too, you know.”
Cara crossed her arms as she rounded the corner of the aisle, plucking the red wine from Gian’s outstretched grasp. “How can you say you love someone when the only thing you’ve ever done with them is fuck?”
Gian cleared his throat, glancing at a customer in the next aisle who looked their way. A simple glare from him sent the patron heading in another direction, fast. Then, his gaze was back on hers, the intensity pinning her in place.
“You know that’s not true,” Gian muttered.
“What—that all we do is fuck? It’s very true.”
“Wrong. We do a hell of a lot more than that. I can’t help that all of the things we do happen to get mixed up in the fact we like to fuck a lot, Cara.”
“Well—”
“So I’ll never read to you in bed again, or in the bath, or anywhere else. We won’t stay in bed, talking and talking and fucking talking, about everything and anything that comes to your mind. I’ll act like you don’t enjoy being quiet, and that you smile even when you’re sleeping. You don’t need to tell me shit about your mother and father, or your brother, and never mind even thinking about saying something when it comes to your dead sister. I’ll pretend like I don’t know shit about what you like, the things you do, or who you want to be when you graduate in a year. And—”
“I get it,” Cara interjected softly. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Be more specific.”
“I’m being difficult, Gian.”
“Clearly,” he responded dryly.
“Say it to me again.”
“Say what?”
“What you told me in the car earlier.”
“That I love you?”
“Yes, that,” Cara said.
Gian didn’t hesitate. “I love you, Cara.”
His inflection didn’t change a bit. Neither did his expression. He said those three little words so easily, as though it should be obvious to her, him, and the world that he felt for her in that way. He felt so deeply, so intensely, that he could tell her he loved her privately in a Mercedes, where no one could hear or in a liquor store, where a cashier waited for them to pay and customers milled around.
He said it.
He said it like he meant it.
He said words Cara didn’t understand.
Oh, she got the love bit—that she understood well. Too well, probably. She understood that he did love her, because she felt that way, too. She felt alone when he wasn’t there, she heard his voice in her dreams, and she felt him all around her when he was gone. She missed him constantly, she worried where he was when he wasn’t with her, and her best moments had been spent in comfortable silence and sweet whispers with this man.
Of course, she loved him.
It was all the hows that made her pause.
It was the how did this happen that stopped her from saying it back.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Gian asked.
“Why don’t you ask me to say it back?”
“I don’t need you to.”
Cara glanced away from the honesty in his gaze. “But you want me to.”
“That’s not what you asked. You asked why. I don’t need to hear you say something that I already know, Cara. And do you know how I know?”
“I’m listening.”
“I know you love me because I can count on one hand the times you’ve asked me for something, or needed something from me, or wanted just me until tonight. I can count on one hand, but I’d only need one finger to do it. Just tonight—that’s the only time you’ve ever taken something from me that you wanted. You called, you wanted me with you, and that says more than anything else you ever say possibly could.”
“And why is that?”
She didn’t mean to be so goddamn defensive, but it was hard. Her walls were her go-to defense for anything that seemed like it might reach too far inside her emotions or cut her too deeply, when it was all said and done.
Gian was definitely one of those things for Cara.
On both accounts.
“Because you don’t need me,” Gian said, his tone lowering an octave with the frankness his words took on. “Not in the grand scheme of your life, you really don’t. It might fuck you up for a while to send me on my way, but you would come out fine in the end. That’s what women like you do, right? You get hurt, brush yourself off, and get on with it—with life. Everybody fails you in one way or another, that’s what you’ve been taught.”
“Gian—”
“It’s true. Even if they don’t mean to, or it’s a by-product of someone else’s actions, they hurt you. Your parents, your siblings, or friends. And so you prep for the next person you let in to hurt you, too, and when they do, you get to fall, dust it off, and keep going with a few more bruises on your soul.”
She almost hated how he saw those things.
She wanted to hate that she had never needed to tell him those things.
“But what’s more amazing,” Gian continued, “is that you let me in. And that, in some crazy way, you still lower your walls enough to let someone climb over for a time. So here we are, you waiting for me to fuck up, even if I do love you, and even if you do love me, because it always happens, regardless. And you’ll be fine when it does—if it does—because that’s who you are, Cara Rossi. And we don’t get to be anything but exactly who we are.”
Cara’s exhale felt painful as it rushed out, but with that pain came a sense of relief. “Saves me the trouble of explaining all of that to you.”
Gian shrugged. “I never asked for an explanation.”
“No, you didn’t,” she agreed quietly. “Don’t you think it’s a little sad that you love someone who is just waiting for the other shoe to drop?”
“I think it’s sad that the woman I love feels like she has to wait on that at all.”
Well, then …
“What about all the shit I don’t like?” Cara asked. “The business you do, the things that life has taken from me, and how it hurts me? What if that bitterness I feel and the distrust that’s settled deep inside of me never goes away? Doesn’t that—in a way—reflect on us? Doesn’t that make us doomed?”
“There are a million things that could doom us, Cara,” Gian said, stepping forward to stroke her cheek and push a stray curl behind her ear. She smiled at his touch, feeling that familiar shiver race down her spine at his contact. “You know what else could doom us? That instead of taking that risk with me—jumping off the cliff that scares you—you want to debate how and why I love you inside of a liquor store at ten at night. Because that’s what you’ll keep doing, about everything, on all the little details about us, instead of just being.”
Cara frowned. “You don’t know that.”
“I know you worry about details all the time. Right now, you’re worried about the details of us, of something like love. That should be the easiest, most honest thing you can feel. And your very nature is to question it, Cara, and to question me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“But you do. And you know what, that’s okay, too. As long as you be with me, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about those details and the nonsense. I don’t hear the noise of everyone else telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing with you. I don’t give a single fuck about any of that, because I love you. Nothing else matters. The rest will figure itself out on its own. I believe that entirely.”
“Why would anyone tell you not to be with me, Gian?”
That time, he was the one to look away.
Cara didn’t miss it.
“Like I said, it doesn’t matter.”
She wondered if it should, though.
“Say it, again,” Cara demanded.
Gian—once more—didn’t hesitate. “I love you, Cara.”
It became easier to hear each time he said it.
It became easier to believe.
It became easier to understand.
“I want you to say it back,” he told her, “but I don’t need you to say it because I want you to. I don’t need you to say something that scares you enough to send you running away from me for three weeks, only to call me when you can’t take it anymore. I don’t need you to justify what I already know, amore.”
“But?”
“But I do need you to be with me, Cara. That’s all.”
An older gentleman slipped down the aisle, making Cara move closer to Gian to avoid being bumped into by the guy’s shoulder. She didn’t mind.
She liked it there.
“I do, though,” she said.
“Hmm?”
“Love you, Gian.”
His smile grew and he kissed her quickly before pulling her into his side. Heading toward the cash with a six-pack under his arm, and a bottle of wine in her hand, Cara felt … settled. For the first time in weeks, she was okay.
“Now do we go back to pretending like we’re good and the last few weeks didn’t happen?” Cara asked.
“There’s no need to pretend. We’re perfect, mon ange. We always were.”
“In a crazy way, maybe.”
“In our way,” Gian murmured before he kissed the top of her head.
So, maybe loving this man wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
Maybe.
“Now, we’re going to go to your place, put one of those ugly fucking rom-com things on you like, get drunk, and then fuck tomorrow morning away,” he told her as he sat the liquor down on the counter.
The cashier’s eyes widened, and her cheeks pinked as she reached for the wine first to ring it through. “Usually, I’m supposed to greet customers, but I’m not sure what to say right now, so excuse me for saying nothing.”
Gian flashed the girl a smile. “Just tell me what I owe.”
“Thirty-five, twenty-two,” the girl said faintly.
Cara couldn’t even bother to feel embarrassed as she shook her head. “You are awful, Gian.”
“Yes, and you love it.”
They did exactly as he said they would—shitty movie, liquor, and all. But even when the morning came, and Cara was sure she was going to die from the way Gian’s tongue fucked her senseless, she still wanted to hear him say it.
Again and again.
Over and over.
“Say it again,” Cara demanded in a whisper.
Gian’s chuckles rocked against her inner thigh, and then higher as his lips kissed a path from her pubic bone to below her right breast. “Again?”
“Again.”
“Ti amo. Je t'aime. I love you. I can say it in three languages, donna, what more do you want?”
Cara wasn’t sure what she wanted, really.
Not entirely.
More mornings like this, definitely.
Soft sheets. Sunlight on her face. Gian in her bed.
Was that how love was supposed to go? Cara didn’t know.
If it was, she had already been doing this with Gian for months.
So why did it feel different now?
Why was it better?
“Again?” he asked, hovering over her on the bed.
Cara smiled, pushing up on her elbows to kiss his mouth that tasted like her. “I love you.”
Gian smirked. “Again?”
“Always.”