Page 32 of My Mafia King

We returned to the olive orchard and sat on a blanket under a tree.

I could swear it was the same blanket. It looked the same, anyway.

And then she started to talk and tell me about her family, how they’d lost her father and struggled to work the land and support themselves.

And I heard every word coming out of her mouth, yet I couldn’t make sense of anything she was saying.

I was so affected by her presence.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she finally came out of her shell and showed me that she liked me as much as I liked her.

We became friends and confined in each other.

And I immediately felt like she’d have my back if something bad happened, and my mind ran away with that idea.

And for the first time ever, I imagined someone like her to have a family of my own with one day.

Have a wife and children.

And it quickly dawned on me how impossible that was.

Like her hair being tamed, sitting nicely in her ponytail, it was simply impossible.

I had a family and a life.

And I was there on vacation.

While she was living there.

A Sicilian.

A girl.

A beautiful girl who liked to pick olives and chat, wearing oversized dresses and fighting her hair into submission.

We lived on two different continents. That was a fact. And I was a visitor in her life. And she was a visitor in mine.

That made everything bittersweet.

I wanted to kiss her that day.

I’d planned that for a while, but I couldn’t find the right moment and didn’t want to scare her.

I didn’t have something sexual in mind. Like an open mouth kiss and my hands moving over her lithe body.

No.

That’s not what I had in mind.

Despite being sexually active since I was fourteen and becoming restless that summer, I just wanted to feel her peach-like skin under my lips and feed on her reaction.

Experience the tremor in her frame.

I was sure she’d never been kissed before.

I don’t know why I wanted to believe that.

Maybe because it suited me.

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