Page 33 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

It shakes a little and I let it.

“Then stay,” I say. “Stay until your body is not angry anymore. Stay until you know where to go next that doesn’t use me as a compass.”

“Compasses are useful,” he says, and he tucks a curl behind my ear with a tenderness that feels borrowed from a future we don't have yet. “I forget what North feels like when I spend too long under the ground.”

I don't tell him I have a small map inside me that points to the things my mother loved.

Kitchens.

Church bells.

The smell of orange peel at Christmas.

I don't tell him that North for me is the sound of a man saying my name in a room that could swallow it and choosing not to let it go.

I tell him I will make breakfast if the power remembers how to work.

We drift through the hours like that, in a haze of coffee and whispers and the soft shock of being two people who did not plan anything and yet found themselves here.

The morning gets louder outside and the bakery holds the sound like a bowl.

I fix his bandage and he accepts my bossy face like it's part of the furniture.

He sits up when I tell him to.

He rests when I push my palm flat to his chest and tell him that rest is not surrender.

He argues only when it's unavoidable and he wins exactly twice, which is a decent rate for a man who wears a lion on his ribs.

We doze on and off through the day because nights like the one we had take hours away and don't return them.

When I slip into sleep beside him, it's the good kind, the kind I used to have after big family dinners when the house smelled like roasted tomatoes and Nonna’s hands.

He breathes slowly.

I curl into the blank space between his shoulder and his jaw and pretend I'm not making promises I can't keep.

In the evening, after we have managed to eat and pretend we are normal people who handle normal food and normal jokes, he makes me tea.

He insists on it with a look that says argument will be an unwise use of energy.

He says it's for my nerves.

He says I have been carrying more than a person should carry on four hours of rest and a slice of pecorino.

The tea tastes faintly bitter under the honey and I blame the water because the pipes are older than the oven doors.

The cup warms my hands.

The warmth spills into my chest and grows heavy in my limbs in a way that feels like kindness.

I don't notice that I lose the thread of his sentences.

I don't notice that the blanket is tucked higher than usual and that he presses a kiss to my hairline with a care that makes my eyes sting.

“Sleep,” he says, and his voice goes through me like a lullaby I forgot I knew.

I don't mean to fall hard.