HIS ABSENCE

~~Sofia~~

My eyelids flutter open to afternoon light.

The room is soft and peach-warm, the kind of glow that makes everything look gentler than it is. For one long, drowsy moment I just lie there, blinking at the ceiling, aware of a pleasant ache in my body that I've never felt before and a smile spreading across my face before I'm even fully awake.

Rafael.

I turn over.

His side of the bed is empty, which I expected. Of course I expected it. He couldn't have stayed, and I knew that before I ever said stay. But the sheets still hold the impression of him, the faint warmth of a body recently gone, and I reach out and press my palm flat against it like an idiot.

Then I see the rose.

A single red rose. Petals unfurled and vivid against the white pillowcase, like something bleeding.

The smile dies.

The air leaves the room.

I scramble back without meaning to, my back hitting the headboard, and I press my hand over my mouth as the familiar cold sweeps through me, the same cold that comes every time, without warning, without mercy. The color red. Always the color red.

I can't look away from it. I never can.

The memories don't knock. They never knock. They just arrive, the smell of the road, the dark spreading stain, my mother's blonde hair matted and darkening at the roots. I was the one who found her. I have never told anyone exactly what that means, what it looked like, how long I stood there before I could make myself move or make a sound. I was sixteen. The metallic smell stayed in my nose for months no matter what I did.

Father buried her with red roses draped across her casket. He filled the foyer with them after, a standing bouquet in the center of the entrance hall that I had to walk past every single day until I finally moved them myself and said nothing to anyone about why.

I hate red.

I don't say that lightly. I despise it the way you despise something that has taken something from you and never given it back.

Rafael couldn't have known. Of course he couldn't, how would he? He left a rose for a girl he'd just spent the night with, which in another life would have been the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me. He meant it kindly. I know he meant it kindly.

It doesn't stop my hands from shaking.

I don't hear Francesca come in until the mattress dips beside me.

"Who brought this in here?" She reaches across me for the rose, already prepared to throw it across the room, and I grab her wrist.

"Wait."

She stops. Looks at me, really looks, the way only Francesca does, the way that means she's already calculating how angry to be on my behalf.

"Sofia. Who would give you a red rose? After Mamma. After what you saw."

"He didn't know," I say quietly.

A beat of silence.

"He." Francesca sits up slowly, and I watch the shift happen in real time, the concern folding back, a smile beginning to take its place. "He didn't know. Sofia Romano, who is he?"

I take the rose carefully from her hand and hold it in my lap, looking down at it. My heart is still doing something complicated.

"Rafael," I whisper.

Francesca inhales so sharply it sounds like a scream. I clap my hand over her mouth before it becomes one.

"If I move my hand," I say, very calmly, "you have to whisper. Do you understand me? Nod if you understand."

She nods. Frantically. I remove my hand.

She grabs both of my arms. "You slept with Rafael De Luca."

"Francesca-"

"Was it-" she pauses, arranging her face into something approximating composure. "Tell me everything. In order. Leave nothing out."

"We had sex," I say simply, watching her try to contain herself. "Last night."

She fails at containing herself entirely. I tackle her before she can make a sound, and she whisper-screams into the pillow while I hold her down.

"Was it good?" she hisses. "Was he-" She sits up and places her palms together, beginning to spread them apart slowly with raised eyebrows.

I slap her hands. "It was perfect." I look down, remembering. His hands in my hair. The way he whispered against my temple. The rose on the nightstand that I still can't decide what to do with. "He was gentle. And passionate. And-" I pause. "Possessive. In a way that felt like being chosen."

"So it wasn't just a kiss," Francesca says, quieter now, reading my face.

I'd told her it was just a kiss. I'd hoped it was, for both our sakes. Something that could be filed away and forgotten, something that didn't have to mean anything in the cold light of morning.

"No," I admit. "It's more than a kiss."

She launches herself at me and we fall back onto the bed together, laughing into the pillows so no one can hear.

---

Two weeks.

Two weeks of nothing.

No call. No text. No Enzo mentioning his name in passing. No rocks against windows in the dark. No sign that the night existed at all except for the ache that's mostly faded now and the rose I dried and pressed between the pages of a book I will never lend to anyone.

I cannot believe him.

I sit at my vanity and draw a careful line along my upper lash, steadying my hand through sheer willpower. Sunday dinner is always black-tie, one of the few things that survived Mamma. We kept every tradition we could, even the painful ones, especially the painful ones. For the first year after she died we sat through every Sunday dinner in near-silence, Father excusing himself early, all of us pretending we didn't notice. Now it's almost normal. Almost.

Tonight I'm wearing her dress.

Bronze and glittering, fitted through the bodice with a skirt that pools at the floor and a slit that climbs to my hip. I remember watching her get ready in this dress when I was small, the way Father would appear in the doorway and just look at her, like she was the only thing in the room, like he forgot for a moment that anything else existed. I used to think I understood what that meant. I don't think I did until recently.

I finish with a sweep of pink gloss and step back to look at myself.

Enzo knocks.

"Sofia, come on. You're not meeting the Pope."

I turn around to say something cutting and find Rafael standing in my doorway.

He's in a black suit tailored like it was made for the specific purpose of making me forget my own name. Collar open three buttons, hair slightly loose, that easy expression on his face that I now know is not as easy as it looks.

His eyes move over me once. Slowly. The way they did at the pool, except now I know what comes after that look and my entire body remembers it whether I want it to or not.

"I think she's dressed like a queen," he says.

Enzo smacks him in the stomach. "No. Stop. That's my sister. Absolutely not."

Rafael laughs and looks at me like I am the first thing he has genuinely wanted to look at in two weeks, and I hate that I notice, and I hate that it does what it does to me.

"Five minutes, Sofia." Enzo steers Rafael back out into the hallway and pulls the door closed behind them.

I turn back to the mirror.

Let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding since the moment I saw him.

Two weeks of silence. And he shows up in my doorway looking like that, like no time has passed, like he didn't leave me waking up alone to a red rose and an empty bed and absolutely no explanation.

I press my fingertips to the vanity and look at myself steadily.

Get it together, Sofia.

I pick up my lip gloss and touch it up, even though it doesn't need it.

Then I go downstairs.