CHAPTER TWO
707 Words
What He Doesn't Give Me
My best friend Camille said I was lucky.
She said it the way people say it when they mean something else, when "lucky" is the polite word for “I don't understand your life but I want to.” She said it over wine on a Wednesday evening when I told her I was thinking of going back to work at the shop part-time, and she looked at me like I'd suggested swimming across the Hudson.
"Elena." She set her glass down with the weight of a woman about to give advice she'd been holding for months. "You live in a penthouse. You wear Chanel. The man sends you flowers that cost more than my car payment. What exactly are you going back to work for?"
"Because I liked it," I said. "I liked making something. I liked having something that was mine."
She was quiet for a moment. "Doesn't he let you?"
Let. I turned that word over in my mind like a stone I'd found at the bottom of a river. Does he let me? Such a small word for such a heavy thing.
"It's not about permission," I said carefully. "He just... prefers I stay close."
Camille looked at me with the expression of a woman who had grown up in a normal family with a father who coached Little League and a mother who asked about her feelings. She didn't understand the architecture of Dante's world, how everything in it served a purpose, including me. How love in his language wasn't expressed through words or time or genuine presence. It was expressed through proximity. Through ownership dressed up as protection.
"Are you happy?" she asked.
I smiled. "The apartment has heated floors."
She didn't laugh.
I went home that night and stood in the bathroom for a long time, looking at myself in the mirror above the marble sink. I looked good, I always looked good now. Dante made sure of that, in the quiet, controlling way he made sure of most things. The right skincare. The right wardrobe. The right version of Elena Vasquez for the world the Moretti family occupied.
But underneath the good lighting and the expensive moisturizer, I looked tired.
Not the kind of tiredness that sleep fixes. The kind that comes from holding yourself a certain way for too long, from being careful and composed and “appropriate” every hour of every day, because the man you live with runs an empire and the people around him are always watching.
I couldn't cry in this apartment without wondering if someone would notice.
I couldn't be loud or messy or uncertain. I couldn't wake up at two in the morning and make toast and watch terrible television. I couldn't call my mother and talk for an hour the way I used to, but Dante didn't like long phone calls he couldn't account for.
I had given up so many small freedoms that I no longer remembered exactly when I'd handed them over.
The worst part wasn't that Dante was cruel. He wasn't, not to me. He was simply absent even when he was standing right next to me. He gave me everything material and almost nothing real. No late-night conversations about fears. No questions about my childhood or my dreams. No moments when the walls came down, and he was just a man, and I was just a woman, and we were just two people trying to figure each other out.
He didn't need to figure me out. He'd decided who I was and built a frame around that image, and somewhere in the past eight months I had slowly, quietly grown into it.
I sat on the edge of the bed that night and thought about what I actually wanted.
Not the apartment. Not the car waiting downstairs. Not the safety of being Dante Moretti's woman in a city where that name meant something.
I wanted someone to look at me like I was still becoming something. Like I wasn't finished yet. Like the story of who I was still had chapters left that hadn't been written.
I didn't know the next chapter had a name.
I didn't know it was Luca.
- Writer
