CHAPTER 61 - STAY WHERE I CAN SEE YOU

The kitchen doorway smelled of bread and rosemary when Luca stepped into it the following evening, and Elena, plate already balanced in her hands, felt the room shift the instant his voice cut across it.

She'd been avoiding this exact confrontation for five days, timing her meals around his schedule with a precision she hadn't fully admitted to herself she was practicing, and some part of her, hearing his voice now, understood immediately that the avoidance had finally run its course.

"Put that down," Luca said.

Elena turned, surprised. "Excuse me?"

"You're not eating in the kitchen tonight." Luca crossed the room, and Elena watched him with a wariness that had become second nature over the past week. "You're eating with me. In the dining room. Where you belong."

"I don't belong anywhere, Luca. That's kind of the entire point of what we were arguing about."

"I don't intend to relitigate the argument." Luca's voice stayed level, though something underneath it carried a hard edge she hadn't heard directed at her in weeks. "I intend for you to sit at my table tonight, the way you did every night before I said something that upset you. Whatever remains unresolved between us doesn't require you eating alone in a kitchen like staff."

"I'm not eating alone. Elias joins me sometimes." Elena said.

Something flickered across Luca's expression at that, and he took a slow breath before continuing, visibly reining in whatever sharper response had risen first. "I'm aware," he said. "I've noticed considerably more than you seem to realize, this past week."

"Then you've noticed that I'm not particularly interested in sitting across from you right now." Elena said.

"I've noticed that too." Luca held her gaze. "I don't care much for it. Five days, Elena. Five days of you rearranging your entire schedule to avoid a room I might be standing in, taking meals like a stranger in a house you've lived in for nearly half a year. I don't like it."

"You don't get to decide what I do with my own time because you don't like it." Elena said.

"I don't recall claiming I did," Luca said. "I'm telling you plainly that I dislike it, and that I'd like it to stop. There's a difference, even if you're currently too angry to hear it."

Elena studied him, something in his unusually direct honesty catching at her despite her lingering anger. "You could have just asked."

"I did ask, three days ago, in the hallway. You walked away before I finished saying your name." Something dry entered his voice, though it didn't fully mask the frustration underneath it. "I've concluded asking politely isn't going to work on you this week, so I'm not asking."

"That's not exactly an improvement." Elena replied.

"Perhaps not," Luca admitted. "It's honest, at least. I'm not accustomed to being avoided in my own house, Elena, and I find I don't handle it particularly gracefully."

Something almost like a smile threatened at the corner of Elena's mouth, gone before it fully formed. "You're doing that thing where you admit something vulnerable and then immediately dress it back up as an inconvenience."

"I'm aware I do that," Luca said. "I haven't yet found a way to stop."

She joined him at the table that evening, more out of exhaustion than any genuine change of heart, and found the silence between them considerably less comfortable than it had been in weeks, both of them picking at the meal in front of them without much appetite for either the food or the conversation neither seemed willing to start.

"You haven't apologized," Elena said finally, when the silence had stretched past the point of bearable.

"No," Luca agreed. "I haven't decided yet whether I owe you one."

"You told me I'm not allowed to be comforted by anyone but you when you're the one who caused the pain in the first place. If that doesn't warrant an apology, I don't know what would."

Luca set down his fork, considering the accusation with more visible effort than he usually spent on anything. "I've turned it over," he said finally. "More than once, this past week. I still don't fully understand why it bothered me the way it did. I only know that watching him comfort you, for something I'd caused, felt considerably worse than the argument itself."

"That's not an apology." Elena said plainly.

"No," Luca agreed. "It's an explanation. I'm not certain I have the apology fully assembled yet."

"How long have you been turning it over?" Elena asked.

"Since the night it happened," Luca admitted. "I've found myself returning to it more than I'd like. I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion, that I reacted the way I did because some part of me understood, instantly, exactly how little control I actually have over whether you choose to come to me when something hurts you. I've never once had to consider that before, with anything I own. Property doesn't choose where it goes for comfort. You do."

"That should have told you something." Elena said.

"It did," Luca said. "I'm still working out what."

"That's honest, at least," Elena said, echoing his own words back at him, something wry in her voice despite everything.

"I thought you might appreciate that," Luca said, and for a moment, something almost like the old ease flickered between them, brief and uncertain, neither of them quite ready to trust it yet.

"Have you reconsidered? About my mother?" Elena asked, careful, watching his reaction.

Something shutted slightly behind Luca's eyes. "No."

"Luca..." Elena said.

"The answer hasn't changed, Elena. I'm not willing to risk you outside these walls, regardless of how much distance you put between us here to punish me for it." Luca said before Elena finished her word.

"I'm not trying to punish you." Elena said.

"Aren't you?" Luca studied her. "You've spent five days making certain I understood exactly how displeased you were. I understood it considerably before the second day. I'd like to understand, now, whether there's a version of this where we manage to disagree without you disappearing from every room I occupy."

Elena said nothing for a moment, some of her earlier resolve wavering under the plain, unadorned honesty of the question. "I don't know," she admitted finally. "I don't know how to be close to you and still tell you no, Luca. Every time I try, you make it feel like I'm choosing someone else over you, when all I'm actually doing is wanting something for myself."

"I understand that isn't the same thing," Luca said, quiet. "I'm working on understanding it more completely."

"That's not nothing," Elena said.

"No," Luca agreed. "I don't suppose it is."

"Can I ask you something else?" Elena said.

"You can ask." Luca said.

"Were you jealous? Honestly. Not possessive, not territorial, however you want to frame it in your own head. Were you simply, plainly jealous that someone else comforted me?" Elena asked.

Luca was quiet for a long moment, turning the question over with more visible effort than he usually spent on anything. "I don't know the difference well enough to answer that honestly," he admitted finally. "I've never had reason to learn it. Every version of wanting I've ever practiced has worn the same shape, control, possession, the right to decide how something is used. If jealousy is different from that, I don't yet know how to tell them apart."

"That might be worth learning." Elena said.

"Perhaps," Luca said. "I'm not certain I know where to start."

"You could start by asking yourself which one you felt, instead of deciding in advance which one you're allowed to feel." Elena said.

Something in Luca's expression shifted at that, considering, and he said nothing further, though Elena understood, watching him, that the question had lodged itself somewhere he wasn't going to easily set aside.

They finished the rest of the meal in a silence considerably easier than the one that had started it, and when Elena rose to leave, Luca didn't ask her to stay, though something in the careful way he watched her go suggested he'd wanted to.

"Elena." She paused at the door. "Thank you for sitting with me tonight."

"Don't thank me," Elena said, something almost gentle in the old rule turned back on him, and left before he could answer, though she thought, walking back toward her own room, that she'd seen something shift behind his eyes at the sound of his own words handed back to him.

Elias noticed the change the following morning, the particular, careful ease that had crept back into Elena's shoulders, something lighter in the way she moved through the kitchen.

"You look rested," he observed, finding her at the counter.

"I had dinner with Luca last night," Elena said. "The actual dining room, for the first time in nearly a week."

Something flickered across Elias's face, there and gone before she could fully read it. "That's good," he said, and meant it, though something underneath the simple words carried a weight Elena didn't have the context to notice. "I'm glad the two of you are finding your way back to each other."

"It's not fixed," Elena said. "Not entirely. But it's something."

"Something's usually where it starts," Elias said, and turned back to whatever task had brought him into the kitchen in the first place, and Elena, watching him go, thought nothing further of the particular, careful stillness that had settled over his shoulders as he walked away.