Page 78 of The Don
Thankfully, my cousins know what I mean and how I feel. Zoe kisses my cheek while Zahra grabs my hand again. We’re walking practically hip to hip. I don’t know when this will happen again, so I decide, like I have so many times this year, to just enjoy every moment I can spend with these people I love.
“You know, maybe I should write a novel instead of a memoir,” Zahra says out of the blue. “Because who the hell is going to believe this weird ass story!”
We burst into laughter at this.
“What’s so funny?” Alfonso asks as the men catch up with us.
We’ll have to tell them later. We’re far too busy holding onto one another and laughing until tears are running down our cheeks.
I’ll miss this most of all.
27SALVATORE
TWO WEEKS LATER
“How do I look?”Shae asks me for the third time since we left Zoe’s apartment.
“Beautiful,” I tell her as I have each time.
We’re walking down a quiet residential street because Shae wanted to walk to the meeting with her aunts, and I cannot say no to her. No one can. Lorenzo would always prefer that Shae travel by car, and Federico hates the biting wind, but what Shae wants, Shae gets. I often wonder who those two are more devoted to, Shae or myself. I know which I prefer, and so do they.
“You always say I look beautiful.”
“You always look beautiful.”
She rolls her eyes and smiles. “Thank you. But do I look like I let a strange older man knock me up the day we met?”
“Strange?” I gasp.
“Okay, foreign, but I mean…” She stops walking and turns in a circle, the skirt of her dress fanning out and exposing her bare thighs even though it’s getting far too cold for that.
I lick my lips and then smile as the dress settles over her rounded belly, still small, but definitely there.
She’s panting lightly when she stops. “I’m just wondering if this dress says, ‘I’m your respectable daughter who would never let my new boyfriend come in me right after doing some illegal things we don’t talk about.’”
“That is a lot to ask a dress to communicate.” I’m trying not to laugh, but the sight of Federico barely holding back his own laughter over Shae’s shoulder makes it harder to hold it in.
“I should have asked Zahra. She was always so good at putting her best face forward with the Aunties.”
“Bella.” I pull her to me, planting small kisses over her face until she smiles and opens her mouth to me.
This is the life I wanted, the life I gladly left Italy to protect. A life where Shae thinks of some new part of the city she wants to show me. Where I wake up every day with her in my arms. Where I spend every afternoon buried to the hilt inside her cunt. A life we get to build together, piece by piece.
This is the honeymoon period. Soon enough, Andrea will call me, and it will be time to get back to work. Our baby will arrive, and we will not have so many hours of freedom together. But even those moments will be all the sweeter because they will be ours. Shae and I will have the life we chose together, and since the day I met her, this has been my only dream.
“I don’t want to give them any reason not to like you.”
“You cannot control that.” I brush her cheek with my knuckles. “And they love you. If they’re anything like your cousins, they will tolerate me for that alone.”
She purses her lips. “I…guess that’s true.”
“And even if they don’t like me now, they will come around.”
“You don’t know that.”
I kiss her quickly. “True, but I think when they see how happy I make you…” I lift my eyebrows in a silent question.
“Oh, very happy,” she laughs, nodding excitedly.