Page 72 of The Savage

In the dream I’m not in Ortigia.

I’m barefoot on cold stone, a church smelling of lilies and sharp-smelling oil and candle smoke. A choir is singing the Kyrie as if the notes can sew time back together.

Someone is shouting – Run! – a woman’s voice, sharp and urgent, love and terror braided into one thread. I look down. My hands are wet. Red slicks my palms, sliding through my fingers like a sacrament I might not fully deserve.

I open my mouth but no sound comes. But I reach for it, frantically.

And the sound that drags me up from the dream is not mine.

It’s Renzo’s roar, rough and furious, ripped from somewhere primal. I’m already moving when my eyes open, knocking the throw aside, feet hitting cold tile, the world narrowing to the corridor and the door at the end where the therapist sets up every afternoon.

I burst in.

The therapist with kind eyes and soft hands is hovering with a resistance band and the kind of soothing voice that would have calmed me and does nothing for a man built to go to war.

‘Out,’ I say, breathless but firm. ‘Please. Give us a moment.’

The man hesitates, glances at Renzo, then nods and slips past me.

The door eases shut.

Renzo’s half-sat on the treatment table, chest heaving, cast glaring white against tanned skin and bruises. Sweat slicks his throat and his eyes are too bright. He looks like a storm ready to boil over.

‘You can’t keep doing this,’ I say, crossing to him. ‘You’ll tear something.’

‘I’m racing in a few weeks. I want my life back,’ he snarls, and it isn’t for me, not quite; it’s for God, fate, anyone foolish enough to hold the other end of his leash.

‘What life?’ The question leaves before I can soften it. I plant my hands on my hips, because anger is easier than fear. ‘The one where you bleed on asphalt and call it glory? The one where you make men jump when you lift a finger? The one where you decide who breathes near you?’

His mouth twists. ‘All of it,’ he grates, then reaches out, lightning fast to snare but surprisingly careful with it. ‘It’s what I know and what I love, what I’m fucking good at, and I won’t apologise for it.’ His fingers close around my wrist and tug; I stumble forward, catching myself against the table, caught between his knees.

‘Renzo,’ I warn, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine.

‘That’s it. You want to soothe me, baby? Say my name again.’

I press my lips together to resist the fierce temptation to give him what he wants. And as if he knew my response would be to deny him, his lips twist.

Before his eyes rise to linger for an age on my wimple.

But then he cups the back of my neck, palm hot, thumb at the hinge of my jaw. It straddles hunger and cruelty. It’s a claiming, and I should hate it. Instead, every muscle from my scalp to my toes tightens as if remembering choreography.

‘You want to know why I’m fucking impatient, bedda? Because I want the life that includes this,’ he says, low and lethal, and pulls me down.

The first kiss… my first kiss as memory will permit, is a catastrophe.

Even with no basis to hang it on, I know it’s messy, wild, too much and not enough. We collide. We breathe each other’s breath. My hands, fuelled by a distressing dream and its own uncontrollable hunger, go useless for a second before they grow frenzied, clutching at his shoulders where the muscle flexes under sweat-slicked skin.

He tastes like sweat and oranges and relief.

He groans, an awful, beautiful sound that goes through my chest like a blade and hooks something soft behind my ribs.

And I free fall.

I don’t mean to. I’ve spent days arranging my virtue like flowers in an austere vase. He knocks it over with the tilt of his mouth and a simple, decadent slide of his tongue, and I’m scrambling for fallen petals that dissolve under my frantic hands.

His lips coax then command; mine answer with a hunger I can’t overcome and which I’m shocked to register is annihilating me this quickly.

This completely!