Did You Really Expect Me to Believe You Had Never Used a Pasta Press Before?
I watched the way your thumb smoothed over the flour on the marble, a rhythmic, unconscious erasure of everything but our immediate proximity.
8 min read·1,564 words
0:000:00
Sofia, it is exactly 5:48 AM, and the light over the Val d’Orcia is doing that thing my students would call heavy-handed—all bruised purples and ostentatious golds, like a filter someone applied because they did not trust the raw footage. I am sitting at the iron table in the courtyard, the one with the rusted leg that wobbles every time I lean forward to sip this espresso. The coffee is bitter, probably because I did not bother to time the moka pot, my mind being somewhat occupied by the fact that you are still upstairs, tangled in those impossibly thin linen sheets that felt like sandpaper on our skin last night, though neither of us seemed to mind. I am writing this on a legal pad I found in the kitchen, and I will probably never show it to you, but if I do not get the syntax of last night down on paper, I am going to lose the thread of my own pulse. It started with the flour, didn’t it? I watched you in that kitchen, the air thick with the smell of roasting garlic and the kind of high-end olive oil that actually tastes like grass. You were standing next to me, your elbow occasionally brushing mine as we tried to make sense of Gianni’s instructions. He was shouting about the 'soul of the dough' in a dialect that sounded more like a threat than a recipe, and you were laughing, your head tilted back, showing the long, elegant line of your throat. I noticed then that you were wearing a dress that was entirely too expensive for a cooking class, something silk and the color of a burnt orange, and I wondered if you had come here to learn how to make pici or if you had come here to be seen. Then you picked up the knife. You handled that blade with a precision that suggested you knew exactly how to find the softest part of a thing. You looked at me, caught me staring at the way your knuckles went white as you diced the shallots, and you didn't look away. You didn't even blink. You just pushed a pile of herbs toward me and told me I was falling behind. I remember thinking that you were the first person in three years who hadn't asked me what I taught. You didn't care about my tenure track or my unpublished novel or the fact that I spend forty hours a week explaining the difference between 'show' and 'tell' to twenty-year-olds who think 'sad' is a personality trait. You just wanted to know why I was overworking the dough. 'You're squeezing it like you're trying to win an argument,' you said, and I realized my heart was hammering against my ribs for the first time since the plane touched down in Florence. I watched the way your thumb smoothed over the flour on the marble, a rhythmic, unconscious erasure that reminded me of how I’ve spent a decade trying to edit the rougher parts of my own pulse out of my prose. Flash forward two hours. We were three carafes of the house red deep, and the other tourists—the couple from New Jersey and the retired architects from Leeds—had drifted off toward the terrace. The kitchen was just us and the cooling ovens. The heat was different then. It wasn't the dry, industrial heat of the stove; it was the humid, heavy weight of two people realizing they are about to do something they’ll have to think about for the rest of the week. You reached for the wine, and your hand didn't quite make it. Instead, your fingers landed on my forearm, right over the blue ink of my tattoo. You traced the lines as if you were reading them, and the friction of your skin against mine felt like a low-voltage current. 'You have flour on your eyelashes,' you whispered. It was such a cliché, such a trope, and yet, when you reached up to brush it away, your thumb didn't stop at my eyelid. It dragged down my cheek, slow and deliberate, until it hooked the corner of my lower lip. I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I was too busy calculating the distance between the marble counter and your hips. You tasted like the wine and the salt from the pasta water when I finally stopped thinking and started moving. I pulled you into me, my hands finding the curve of your waist, and the sound you made—that soft, sharp intake of breath—was better than any line of dialogue I have ever written. I remember the way the silk of your dress felt as I hiked it up. It was cool against my palms, a sharp contrast to the heat radiating off your thighs. I hoisted you onto the counter, the marble probably freezing against your ass, but you didn't flinch. You just wrapped your legs around my waist and pulled me closer, your teeth catching on my neck. I could feel the ridge of your pubic bone pressing into mine through my chinos, a hard, insistent promise. 'Bennett,' you said, and the way you said my name made me feel like a different person, someone less worried about metaphors and more worried about the way your hands were fumbling with my belt. The sex was not the polite, literary version. It was messy. It was loud. It was the sound of my palms slapping against the marble as I pushed into you, and the way you arched your back, your fingers digging into my shoulders so hard I know there will be marks there when I look in the mirror later. I wanted to see everything. I pulled the straps of that orange dress down, exposing your breasts to the dim light of the kitchen. They were perfect—heavy and warm, your nipples dark and hard. I took one into my mouth, my tongue swirling around the tip before I sucked you in deep, and you cried out, your head hitting the cabinet behind you with a dull thud. You didn't care. You just gripped my hair and pulled me back up so you could kiss me again, your mouth tasting like desperation and Brunello. I moved my hand down, sliding it between us, finding the place where you were already slick and waiting. You were so wet, Sofia. The friction of my thumb against your clit made your whole body shudder, your legs tightening around my back until I could barely breathe. I used two fingers to find your opening, stretching you, feeling the internal heat of you as you began to pulse around me. You were coming before I even got my pants off, your body racking with these long, stuttering tremors that you tried to swallow against my shoulder. I didn't let you. I wanted to hear it. I wanted to hear exactly what I was doing to you. When I finally stepped out of my clothes and pushed into you, it felt like coming home to a house I had forgotten I owned. You were so tight, the muscles of your walls gripping me as I buried myself to the hilt. I stayed there for a second, just feeling the throb of you, the way our heartbeats were trying to sync up. Then I started to move. It was a slow, grinding rhythm at first, my cock sliding through your heat, bottoming out with every stroke. You were making these tiny, high-pitched sounds, your eyes blown wide and focused on nothing. I watched your face, the way your expression shifted from pleasure to something closer to pain, then back again. I reached down and found your clit again, my thumb working in circles as I drove into you, and that was the breaking point. You started to sob, just a little, your breath coming in ragged gasps as you hit your second climax. I followed you a moment later, my vision going white as I came inside you, my forehead resting against yours, both of us sweating and shaking in the middle of a kitchen in a country where we didn't speak the language. And now, the morning after. The sun is higher now. I can hear the shutters clattering upstairs, which means you are probably waking up. You will walk down here in one of my shirts, or maybe that orange dress, and we will have to decide if we are going to talk about the way you looked at me when I was between your legs, or if we are going to pretend it was just the wine. I can hear your footsteps on the stone stairs. My heart is doing that stupid, rhythmic thing again. I am going to fold this paper and put it in my pocket. I’m going to look at you and ask if you want coffee. But I want you to know, Sofia, that even if we never speak of it, the way you tasted last night is the only thing I have ever written that was actually true. I can see you in the doorway now, squinting against the light, your hair a disaster, and God, you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I'm stopping now. You're looking at the pad. You're smiling. I'm in trouble, aren't I? Yours, Bennett.
