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“You know,” Cha Young says, “you could have just emailed me, instead of sending all those postcards.”
They’re lounging on the bed, a cheese platter between them. Vincenzo offered to order ramyeon from room service—again—but neither of them want to leave the bed for too long, and a cheese platter is easier to eat like this. Plucking a grape from the spread, she offers it to him; he closes his mouth over it and her two fingers, his tongue sliding along her skin as it rolls the grape out of her grasp.
She yanks her hand away, ignoring the soft pop as her fingers are freed. He smirks—of course he knows exactly what he’s doing—and takes his time chewing the grape, humming as if it’s a particularly delicious one.
God, she missed him. And how much he sometimes makes her want to shove him into a ditch.
When he’s finally done, he arranges some cheese and ham on a cracker and offers them to her. She narrows her eyes; he shakes them a little in front of her nose, and she takes them if only so he wouldn’t take another five minutes crunching on a cracker. With her hand, though. Not her mouth. If he thinks he can already get her eating off his hand after one round of—admittedly really good—sex, he’s got another thing coming for him.
She lifts the cracker as if for a toast, then says, “Come on. You said you thought about me every day, but you didn’t even try to contact me beyond a postcard a month?”
“It wasn’t safe,” he says, which is just like him.
She rolls her eyes. “Surely you have a hacker on your payroll. Have them set up a—” she waves around, gesturing, “—deep web thing, or whatever it’s called. Unless you didn’t actually miss me?”
Then, she punctuates her argument by unhinging her jaw and shoving the entire cracker and ham and cheese into her mouth all at once, chewing as loudly as she can.
“Cha Young-ah,” he says, reaching across to ghost a fingertip down her arm, leaving a trail of goosebumps in its wake. “Haven’t I proven to you how much I missed you? Or should I take this platter away and present more evidence to the court?”
Making a face, she says with a full mouth, “Answer the question, Cassano Byeonhosa-nim.”
He wrinkles his nose at her blatant breach of table manners, but she can’t really be bothered. They’re wearing flimsily tied robes while lounging like ancient romans in a bathhouse. The sheets under them—and under their midnight snack—is still damp with sweat and other fluids. And, most importantly, he just tried to distract her with sex so he doesn’t have to answer her question—and she almost fell for it. Speaking with a full mouth is self-defense.
He sighs. “It wasn’t safe,” he says, and raises a finger when she opens her mouth to protest. “It wasn’t. I uprooted the family and reestablished it not only in a different locale, but an entirely different country. I dealt with the fallout of Paolo’s incompetence. I fought people who thought I didn’t deserve to be where I am now, for prejudicial reasons or otherwise.”
She already knows all this. “The deep web—”
“You already took a bullet for me. That’s one too many.” He leaps off the bed, pacing, running a hand over his face. “I wanted to leave you alone. If you didn’t know where I was—if you didn’t know if I was even alive—I thought you might just move on. After all, you already treated my promise to return as if it was a joke.”
It’s hard to breathe, with the lancing pain in her chest. She pushes herself up, leaning on the headboard and wrapping her arms around her knees. “You wanted me to forget about you?”
“No,” he says. “I wanted you. But I know better than to expect that I could have everything I want.”
“Then why the postcards?” she demands. “No, actually, why return at all? You push me away, then you come to me—is this a test? Do I get an A, gyusu-nim?”
“Because I keep my promises,” he snaps.
“Promises can be broken, if necessary.” At his flinch, she twists the knife and adds, “And you never promised me postcards, anyway.”
The words, barbed as they are, hurt on their way out of her mouth.
He stares at her for a long second before taking one inexorable step after another toward her. His gaze pins her in place, and for a moment, she wonders if it’s what it’s like to be his enemy.
To be his prey.
But when he arrives, he doesn’t devour her. Instead, he falls to his knees next to the bed and reaches up to carefully tuck her hair behind her ear.
“I’ve never been good at altruism,” he says quietly. “And I’m too selfish to let you forget about me entirely.”
She sags, sinking her cheek into his waiting palm and sighing at the warmth. “Do you really have a room for me on your island?”
He bites his lip, then admits, “A wing.”
“An entire wing for myself?” she echoes, incredulous. “And what would you have done if I had moved on like you’d expected?”
He shrugs helplessly, and she thinks she knows: he would leave it empty, a monument of his success in keeping her away, a mausoleum for what they could have been.
“Oh, Vincenzo,” she sighs. “And what if I don’t want just a wing?”
“I’ll build you—”
“No. What if I want a whole island? The whole island,” she says, closing a fist around the front of his robe, tugging him up, “and everything on it?”
His eyes are wide and dark and astonished. He licks his lips, and says, “Then it’s yours.”
And in his voice, she hears another promise: and so am I.