The hotel room was Nico's idea.
Everything was always Nico's idea. That was the thing about him, he moved through the world like consequence was something that happened to other people, like the particular weight I had been carrying my entire life simply didn't exist in his version of reality.
It wasn't recklessness exactly. It was something closer to faith. Nico believed things would be okay in a way that I had never once managed to believe anything.
It should have been irritating. Most of the time it was the thing I couldn't stop thinking about.
We'd been meeting like this for four months. Hotels in the middle of the city, always different, always with the particular careful choreography of two people who understood without discussing it that this could not exist anywhere outside these walls.
I had been the one to establish that. Nico had accepted it without arguing, which I had been grateful for and also slightly unsettled by, because Nico accepting something quietly usually meant he was waiting for the right moment to revisit it.
Tonight was apparently that moment.
"I'm tired of hotels," he said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, jacket off, watching me the way he always did."I'm tired of different rooms and acting like this is something to be ashamed of."
"That's not what this is," I said.
"Then what is it?"
I looked at him. Nico was twenty-three years old and beautiful in a way that he seemed genuinely unaware of, which was one of the first things I had noticed about him. The second was that he actually listened — not the polite kind, but the real kind, where he took in what you said and sat with it before responding. I hadn't met many people who did that.
"It's careful," I said.
"Careful," he repeated. Not mocking. Just sitting with the word like he was examining it from all sides. "Your family and my family have been circling each other for fifteen years, Elio. You think careful is what's standing between us and a problem?"
"I think careful is the only reason there isn't one yet."
He looked at me for a long moment. "And if I don't want to be careful anymore?"
I felt something pull tight in my chest. Not anger. Something worse than anger, more complicated,the particular ache of wanting something you'd already decided you couldn't have and having someone ask you why, simply and directly, in a way that made all the reasons sound smaller than they felt.
"Then I'd tell you that wanting something and being able to have it aren't the same thing," I said. "And that some things cost more than they're worth."
"Is that what you think this costs?"
"I think if the wrong person finds out, it costs us both things we can't get back."
Nico was quiet for a moment. Then he stood up and crossed the room and stopped in front of me and looked at me the way he did sometimes that made it very difficult to remember why any of the reasons were reasons.
"I know the risk," he said quietly. "I'm not asking you to be stupid about it. I'm asking you to stop acting like what's between us is something that should stay in a hotel room forever."
I didn't answer.
I didn't have one that would have been honest and also safe, and I had spent my entire life choosing safe, and standing there with him looking at me like that, I was beginning to understand that safe and right were not always the same thing.
I stayed. That was all I did. I stayed and I didn't say the thing that would have ended it, because I didn't want to end it, and that was the most honest thing I had in me tonight.
Nico seemed to understand. He didn't push further. He sat back down beside me and we stayed like that in the quiet, close enough that it meant something, neither of us saying anything more about the future or the cost of it.
I looked at the window and thought about Andrea's face in the entrance hall two weeks ago. The way she had looked at me and said nothing except my name and let that be enough. She hadn't asked for an explanation. She hadn't looked at me differently after.
I thought I might love her for that for the rest of my life.
* * *
Andrea's POV
The ball was the Castellano family's annual event, which meant half of New York's underworld were in formal wear pretending to be something else for an evening. I had been to three of them now. I knew how to dress for it, how to move through it, how to exist in it without giving too much away.
I put on a navy dress and left my hair down and didn't think about anything.
That was the plan anyway.
The venue was everything these things always were — high ceilings, expensive flowers, the particular kind of lighting that made everyone look like a better version of themselves.
I moved through it the way I'd learned to, easy and calm, accepting a glass of something I wasn't going to drink and finding a place near the edge where I could see everything without being in the middle of it.
That was where I saw him.
Anthonio was across the room near the far end of the bar, and he was not alone. The woman beside him was tall, dark-haired, the kind of put-together that looked put together without trying . She was saying something and he was listening with that focused attention he gave things and she put her hand briefly on his arm when she laughed.
I looked away.
Found something on the opposite wall to look at and kept my expression exactly where it needed to be and told myself that what I was feeling was nothing. He was allowed to talk to people. He talked to people all the time.
I had no claim on where he stood or who touched his arm and the feeling sitting in my chest was not what it felt like.
I was quiet the rest of the evening. Romeo came to stand with me for a while and talked about the Castellanos and I responded at the right moments and he didn't notice anything wrong, which meant I was doing it well enough.
Matteo noticed. He gave me a look across the room, the kind that said he'd registered something he wasn't going to bring up here but hadn't forgotten. For Matteo, who usually let everything slide off him, that meant something.
And Anthonio noticed.
I felt him notice the way I always felt him in a room — that shift, that awareness, and then a few minutes later he was beside me, not quite close enough to be obvious about it.
"You've been quiet," he said.
"I'm always quiet at these things."
"Not like this."
I looked at him. He was looking at the room, not at me, which somehow made it worse. Like he could read me without even having to look.
"I'm fine," I said.
"You're somewhere else."
"Anthonio."
"What happened?"
"Nothing happened." I kept my voice even. "I'm standing here having a perfectly normal evening."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he turned and looked at me and I made the mistake of looking back and his eyes did what they always did — found something I hadn't meant to show.
"You saw me talking to Camille," he said.
I didn't answer.
"Andrea."
"It's none of my business who you talk to."
"No," he said quietly. "It's not." He held my gaze a second longer. "But it's bothering you anyway."
I looked back at the room. At the chandelier, the flowers, the crowd of people all performing their own versions of fine.
I didn't answer him.
Because the honest answer was yes and I had no good reason for yes and giving him yes felt like handing over something I couldn't take back.
He didn't push it. He just stood there beside me for a while, close enough that I was aware of every inch of it, and neither of us said anything else.
It was worse than an argument would have been.
I held my glass and stood in the middle of all that noise and light and felt something sitting in my chest that I wasn't ready to name. It had been there for weeks. I had been calling it something else and running out of convincing names for it.
Tonight I didn't have a new one.
I was in trouble. I had known that for a while. Tonight just made it harder to pretend otherwise. And standing there next to him, saying nothing, I wasn't sure how much longer I could keep doing that.