“Isabella, you are so flushed,” one of my aunts said, making me stiffen.
“It is so hot in here,” I complained, fanning myself.
“I told your mother we needed to crack a window, but no. Now her daughter is going to pass out,” my aunt went on, already walking off to find something else to be mildly irritated about.
“Shut up,” I snapped in a low hiss as I felt his gaze on me.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your eyes are being profane right now.”
To that, a chuckle moved through him as he walked me to an empty seat and pulled out my chair for me, then pushed me in, a move that I saw Emilio watching from across the table.
When he took his seat, his hand went to my thigh, giving it a squeeze, then just sitting there as my mother finally got everyone quiet enough to give her annual, emotional speech, thanking more saints and angels than I realized even existed, before declaring it was finally time to eat.
And then this man who technically belonged to me, he did an unfathomable thing.
He told me to stay where I was.
And then he went to get me a plate.
I was pretty sure I stared at his back with bug eyes as he lined up with all the women who were making their men plates.
“That’s a keeper,” a great, great aunt told me from her position at the head of the table in her wheelchair, likely getting tended to by one of her daughters.
“He cooks too,” I said, disbelief in my voice. “Don’t ever tell him this, but he cooks better than me,” I told her, shaking my head at myself.
“What a blessing,” my aunt said, absentmindedly patting her wedding band, likely thinking of her husband she’d lost a decade before. “And don’t you worry, dear,” she said, leaning closer like we were sharing some great secret. “I won’t tell him you said that about him.”
“Talking about me, ladies?” Primo asked, making my aunt’s eyes go comically wide at possibly being caught.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, giving him a smile as he placed a heaping plate in front of me before putting his own down.
“One of your cousins elbowed me in the rib to get the last dinner roll,” he said, shaking his head.
“Don’t worry. In about… three-point-five minutes, my mother is going to pop up in her seat and gasp about forgetting the rolls in the oven. Then before she goes to take them out, she will scold all of us at large for not reminding her about them.”
When about three minutes passed and my mother did exactly that, Primo’s amused gaze slid to me.
“Told you,” I said, nodding.
Dinner was what Christmas dinner always was.
As was the rest of the night.
Loud, over-the-top, funny, and amazing.
And I had to admit to myself that it was maybe even nicer to share the evening with someone else, someone who I would share laughs and smiles and eye rolls with.
“I told you, lamb,” Primo said as we got on our coats and made our way onto the front path after about thirty whole minutes of goodbyes. “You didn’t need to be nervous.”
“I’m worried about Emilio,” I admitted, linking my arm through Primo’s because the ice had only gotten worse thanks to a freezing rain that had started sometime while we were inside.
“Why?” Primo asked, seeming genuinely interested as our car pulled up, and Primo pushed me in before sliding in beside me.
“He seems really unhappy,” I told him, shrugging. “And that isn’t how my brother is.”
“This was all sprung on him,” Primo said, shrugging. “He didn’t get a chance to work through his thoughts on it. “Next time, it will be better.”
“By next time, do you mean next Christmas?” I asked, heart sinking a little at the idea.
“I meant the next family function,” he said, shrugging. “I imagine there are going to be many of them.”
“You’re going to let me go?”
“Let,” he repeated, sighing at the word. “The current lockdown situation aside—and I’ll remind you it is for your own safety—I don’t want you to think of this as a prison anymore, like I’m the warden you need permission from to go places or have people over. That’s not how I want this to be.”
“Why the change of heart?” I asked, and for some reason, my own heart fluttered a little at the idea of his heart. But we were going to go ahead and just call that indigestion from all the food because anything else was just too much to consider right then.
To that, Primo sighed. “I, perhaps naively, thought that your connection to your family would keep you from making this marriage work. That was a miscalculation. I underestimated you,” he said, giving my knee a squeeze.
“A man who admits when he’s wrong,” I said, pressing a hand dramatically to my chest. “Now I’ve seen everything.”