“Did you want to send him a thank you?”
“Oh.” I glanced over his shoulder. “I probably should.”
I snagged the yellow lined pad of paper and a pen from the corner of the desk.
Marcello,
Thank you for the bracelet. I’m a little confused, though. Which one of us is the light and which one of us is the darkness?
Emilia
I folded it in thirds. “Do you have an envelope?”
He opened his top drawer and handed it to me. “I’ll mail it for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, setting the sealed envelope in his outbox. “Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?”
“That’s all.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Over the last four months, Sal had shuttled me to and from my piano lessons twice a week, and we somehow managed to elude my father’s watchful eye with enough regularity to feed my Sal addiction. He found hundreds of nearly deserted spots on the route home where we could be together uninterrupted. Most of the time we kissed until my entire body shimmered with need and my nerve endings were zinging like a live wire pleading for more.
Predictably, Sal refused to take our intimacy to the next level. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t done anything other than kiss me since that night at his apartment. His constant rejections didn’t prevent me from pushing him. He had an absurd amount of willpower because, without fail, every encounter ended with me craving more and him declining to cross some invisible line. We never discussed his reasoning, and frankly, we didn’t need to. My engagement party loomed over us like a thunderstorm, especially recently. We both knew if I couldn’t find a loophole to evade the marriage, this thing between us would be over before it went anywhere.
Without a doubt, Marcello wouldn’t like the idea of his wife being used goods. The men in our world expected virtue and obedience from their wives. I suspected that was why my father had kept me under lock and key since my mom died. He didn’t want anything to taint my future husband’s opinion of me. Simply put, I was a commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder.
That said, for some reason, my dad trusted Sal, particularly after the incident at the warehouse. It didn’t hurt that Sal did everything he could to foster the perception we were platonic friends. Except for the stolen kisses on the way home from piano lessons, he fulfilled my dad’s orders flawlessly. In public, he kept a respectful distance, never touching me or looking at me for too long.
Even more frustrating, he always sided with my dad when I pushed to have more of a social life, not that I had people knocking down my door. My friends started and stopped with Lettie, and a call here or there from my cousin Carmela, which seemed more obligatory than anything else.
I understood Sal’s rationale for not pushing back against my dad’s orders. His deferential behavior allowed us more freedom and kept our relationship under the radar. Increasingly though, I didn’t care about the possible ramifications. I wanted to tell anyone who would listen about Sal. I fell for him more with every stolen second spent in his company. As far as I was concerned, Sal owned my heart. He might as well own my body.
My feelings for Sal likely made me the dumbest person on the planet, because the deck was stacked against us, and we couldn’t ignore the future much longer. Marcello had made plans to come to my father’s annual Christmas Eve party where we’d be formally introduced as a couple, which was only fourteen days away. According to my dad, if everything went well, I’d walk down the aisle shortly after my twentieth birthday like an obedient daughter.
“You’re distracted these days.” Mrs. Vitali sighed for the hundredth time today. “I don’t know why you bother with lessons. Your heart’s not in it anymore.”
I stuffed my sheet music into my black leather messenger bag. “It’s not. My dad won’t let me go to the music conservatory so this is a waste of time. If he has his way, I’ll be married and pregnant within the next year, and I won’t lay a finger on a piano for another decade.”
“There has to be something we can do.” She pursed her lips and settled her hands on her matronly hips. “You need to continue your lessons in Chicago. I gave you a list of new instructors. You haven’t contacted any of—”
I held up my hand, backpedaling to the front door. “We’ve already talked about this, and I don’t have time to get into it again. We’ve already run fifteen minutes over, and Sal is probably circling the block for the tenth time.”
“Fine. However, I’m not giving up on you yet.” Another stupid sigh whistled out of her mouth. I should record her so she could hear how ridiculous she sounded. I’d be doing her other students a huge favor. They wouldn’t have to learn the art of interpreting a sigh. Or better yet, I could write a handbook. Quick sigh meant disapproval, long sigh meant frustration, and so on.