“I know you’re gonna like it,” she offers, but I say nothing. “I just need you to tell me if I’ve drawn everything right. Everything…to size?”
I don’t move a muscle, although my jaw is tightening by the second. I know this troublemaker is setting me up for something but I’m too committed now and I have to see what she’s got that’s so important.
“No promises,” I suggest, giving myself room to jump out of my seat and go if this gets out of hand, although I have no idea how I’m even going to be able to stand considering there’s no way I can do so right now without snapping the steel pipe in-between my legs in half.
“You’re right,” she counters. “No promises because you don’t want to hurt my feelings. But…I need to learn about a lot of things, and someone with your worldly experience can teach me. So…” she trails off, moving back toward the sink and opening up a sliding drawer. “If I’m wrong then I guess I’ll have to be punished.”
I shake my head in disbelief as she’s back at the table in a second, a lightweight wooden spoon in her hand…one that I could crack over her ass with one swat.
“I hear in Italy people aren’t afraid to discipline children, unlike here,” she adds, slowly and playfully bringing the back of the bowl of the spoon into her opposite palm.
“You’re not a child, Gabriella. You’re an adult.” I’m not taking the bait.
“Then why did you call me bambi…papà?”
But now she’s got me, hook, line, and sinker. Something inside me flips, like a light switch lighting up an entire football stadium, and my arms uncross and I grab her by the wrist.
“What did you call me?”
She licks her lips and smiles like the Cheshire Cat.
“Oh,” she says, her other hand covering her lips in fake surprise. “You liked that…Daddy.”
People say a man has two lives, and the second one begins when he knows he has only one left. The moment that word, papà, slid from her lips it was like everything that had ever existed in my life before was meaningless. It was like I had a new purpose in life…to make her mine. To protect her. To keep her safe. To be hers in all ways. To put her first, always. To leave my past behind, and start a future with her. But no way in hell can I admit that to her.
“I’m not your daddy, and I’ll remind you your father is asleep in the other room, not ten meters from here.”
“Ten meters…that's almost like eleven yards, right? Is ten…big?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Ten. Would that be considered big?” she asks, her eyes sliding down to my waist.
“Cristo,” I grunt. “What the hell’s wrong with you, cara?” I add, the Italian word for ‘dear’ slipping from my lips.
“I just want to make sure I got the proportions of my drawing right,” she says with an oversized, childish frown as her hand drops from her mouth and she yanks open her sketchbook.
And I immediately drop my hand from her wrist, my entire body feeling boneless at the sight in front of me.
2 Gabriella
Gio’s entire body freezes before he growls something under his breath, then finally something that passes for words slips from his lips. “What the…”
“It’s you,” I quickly respond, knowing he knows exactly who it is. I’ve drawn him as almost a cartoonish superhero, with oversized muscles despite the fact that his muscles are already oversized. He’s leaning forward, propping up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The picture in and of itself is good, nothing you wouldn’t get from one of those people who sit outside on a summer day and sketches you for ten bucks. Where I deviated is when it comes to one tiny thing, or in Gio’s case, not tiny at all.
“Did I get the dimension right?” I ask, flicking the eraser of my pencil toward the cock in the drawing. “I guessed about ten inches. Am I close?”
With dad napping in the other room and Gio’s eyes looking me up and down like he was just released from an Italian prison, I know I’m playing with fire. And I hope to get burned.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks.
“Too much time on my hands and no one to put my hands on?”
“What?” he asks, half of his face scrunching together.
“Undersexed and over-sexualized.”
I’ve only got one more week under this roof and I’m not pulling any punches. I’ve seen pictures of Gio and my dad for years, all throughout my time growing up. The man has been my fantasy since before I knew what fantasies were.
“Has your dad seen this?” he asks, almost letting the word Daddy slip from his lips. I want him to say it, I need him to say it. The way he called me bambi already set me off, and it’s not because it’s my favorite Disney movie of all time. I know what bambi means in Italian, and from the look in his eyes when he said it it’s more than just a term of endearment he’d throw around to anyone.
“Not yet,” I slyly reply.
“Grazie a dio.”
“Should we show him?”
“No! Madonna e dio, no!”
“You don’t like it?” I tease, trying my hardest to get him to say something positive about it, about my work, and hopefully continue down that path and eventually say something positive about me. All I need is for him to confess his feelings and I’ll be all over him like a wet dishrag.
I don’t have time to waste, and need to turn up the heat on this sauce I’m trying to get cooking between us so he devours me like he did
