I Bought His Love, Then He Became the Don novel · Chapter 4 of 76

Chapter 4: The Formal

On my twentieth birthday, Damiano gave me a pair of tailor's shears.

They were heavy, black-handled, and so sharp they hissed through paper.

He'd waited tables for two months to pay for them.

I held them in both hands, and I couldn't think of a single thing to say.

"I love you, Lucia," he said.

I looked up.

He said it plainly, standing in his own doorway with his hands in his pockets.

"You don't have to say that," I said. "It's not in the deal."

His face went still.

"Okay," he said.

He never said it out loud again.

I was twenty. He was twenty-one.

I cut the red dress that winter on my dorm room floor.

Red silk charmeuse, a sweetheart neckline, three-quarter sleeves.

I cut it for the body I had, size twenty-two, every curve of it, and I didn't take it in once.

I sewed the zipper in by hand on the bus home from spring break.

The spring formal was the third Saturday in April, in the old ballroom of the student union.

I'd hired three black cars for the floor.

I'd bought the whole third-floor table, and a bottle of champagne for each end of it, and I told everyone it was nothing.

At the coat check I emptied my clutch into the tip jar.

Twelve hundred-dollar bills.

"Smile," I told the girl behind the counter.

She smiled.

I watched her do it.

"She didn't want to," Damiano said in my ear, as we walked into the ballroom.

"She took the money."

"People take money. It doesn't mean they wanted to smile."

"It's the same thing."

He didn't answer.

His hand stayed at the small of my back all night anyway.

He wore the black suit I'd paid a tailor to finish in one day.

It fit him.

Everyone looked at him, and then at me, and I loved it.

Serena found us at the end of the night on the quad.

The trees had that first green on them, and the lamps were on.

"Smile, you two," she said, holding up her phone.

Damiano turned and put his mouth against my temple.

I hadn't asked him to.

It wasn't in the deal.

I laughed, because I couldn't help it.

The phone clicked.

"Perfect," Serena said. "That one's going on the wall."

I'd had six months of him by then.

Six months of Sunday dinners at his apartment, and his hand in mine in front of my whole floor.

He had kissed me goodnight against every door I owned and gone home with his hands in his pockets.

At the bottom of his stairs, over the laundromat, I stopped.

I'd handed him my shoes at the corner when my feet gave out.

He was holding them by the straps.

"I'm not going back to the dorm tonight," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Okay," he said.

The pink light from the laundromat sign came through his one window and lay across the ceiling.

His room was a narrow bed with a gray blanket, a drafting table, a radiator, and a corner with a sink and a hot plate.

He shut the door and leaned back against it.

"Tonight counts," I said. "Month seven. Five to go. I'll put it in writing tomorrow."

"It's not in the deal."

"Everything's in the deal. That's what a deal is."

"Not this."

He didn't move off the door.

"Nobody paid for this, Lucia," he said. "Tonight isn't on the contract."

My heart was going too hard.

"What is it then?"

"You and me. Because you walked up my stairs."

I had no answer for that, because it didn't have a price on it.

So I did what I always did.

I opened my clutch and took out four hundred-dollar bills.

I fanned them across his drafting table.

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