Hello Gorgeous: An Enzo Origin Story

Part 2

Sunlight cascades through the window. It’s been more than a fortnight, and still I can’t quite fathom how much more light there is up here. Tall ceilings, windows the size of a grown man, space to live, to breathe, to do . . . other things. It’s as if I’m living in the heavens after years of crawling around dark, damp, dingy dungeons.

But ground floor, one-room apartments are all a cabbie’s wages allow. A doctor’s wife on the other hand . . . apparently the sky’s not even the limit.

Clara opens her eyes and immediately pulls a pillow over them. She’s less a fan of the sun than I. Which is fortunate for her since London’s scales tip toward the gray side.

Oh, focused on that little bit about the “doctor’s wife?” I found that out on our third date. Though is it still a date if you don’t leave the house?

“Morning gorgeous,” I say in the drawl I learned she loves.

That gets her. She scrambles out from under the pillow and crawls on top of me. “Climbing my Italian stallion.”

I run my hand through her gentle curls, soft as a lamb. “In blood, but not in practice. I’m a proper Englishman. Born and raised.”

She props herself up on my chest. “But love, it’s the blood that matters.” She runs her tongue along my rib cage, coming to rest at the bandage above my hip she changed last night. She peels back the adhesive and the sucking begins anew.

Did I mention her little obsession with blood? Thinks it’s the key to bonding. Some perverted version of blood brothers, I suppose. Truth is, I’d let her nip until I was wearing bandages from head to toe because I have one more item to add to the list of things of which I am certain: she is the most stunning creature to walk the earth from now until eternity.

I tell her this, and she laughs.

“A creature, am I?” She arches her back and her blond hair caresses my thigh. “What gave me away?”

She pulls away, affixing the bandage herself. She won’t ever let me change a bandage. Clara and her quirks. But they are all worth it. Especially since her husband’s away on a month-long tour of the countryside tending to those outside the city infected with the dreaded consumption.

Her husband’s a Good Samaritan, and I’m shagging his wife.

Guilt descends over me as it does several times a day. Immigrants from Calabria, my parents clung to their Italian heritage and my mother raised me with strong Catholic values. And with each year, I toss another in the rubbish bin. It is instances such as this that I am glad they are both buried on that crest overlooking the rocky coast of the Mediterranean sea.

“I used to be a good person,” I say suddenly.

She looks up from flattening the bandage against her skin. “You still are, my love.” She scurries forward and grasps both my hands. “Things are not always what they seem.”

She does this. Utters cryptic warnings one moment and then—

She hops out of bed and spins around the room, stark naked.

Then she does this. Skips like a school girl.

“Let’s take a trip!” she says. “I’ve never been to Morocco, have you? Or Greece? Let’s just go down to the docks and stow away like—”

“Like what? Criminals? What aren’t you telling me, Clara? Darling, you can trust me.”

She studies me like I’m a textbook in a language she’s desperately trying to learn. She sets herself on the opposite end of the bed and stretches out her leg so that her ankle rests against my hand. I clasp my fingers around her smooth skin and shift it closer to me.