The party was a massive success.
It was incredible to have our friends under one roof for the festivities, eating delicious food and talking about things I never had as a university student. Philosophy, literature, the importance of cultural celebrations like the Feast of San Lorenzo each year, and the relationship Italians had with their food. It was enriching. All of it. Rich, verdant earth to dig my roots into so I could suck up all the nutrients of this place and these people before I had to leave.
If I had to leave.
Raffa was aloof for the first half of the party, but he spent the last two hours with me, a hand around my low back sewing me into his side. He spoke to my friends in slow, patient Italian so they could understand him, and even indulged Fergus in a debate about the Italian football league.
At one point, Greta had leaned into me and whispered, “Good job, Guinevere. He is an Italian dream.”
Now everyone had gone, leaving only the mainstays in the palazzo. Servio and Annella were already at work cleaning the space even though it was after midnight, but they refused to go to bed before it was done.
I would have liked them to join us, but it was enough to have the others.
They were gathered in a loose knot in the study, speaking quietly, when I found them after setting everything up for my Perseids tradition, but they went quiet as soon as I entered.
For some reason, I was nervous, hands wringing together, damp fingers tangling. Maybe because I was homesick twice over, for the family I had back in Michigan that wasn’t speaking to me and the family I’d made here that I had an uncertain future with.
“Back home, my family spends most of the summer at our cabin in Gun Lake,” I explained in Italian, because it was natural now after weeks of practice. “During the meteor shower, we lay in the grass together and make wishes on shooting stars.”
I could feel Raffa’s gaze on me like warm hands, sliding over my face and body possessively. His look said, “I love you.” It said, “You are my shooting star.”
“Will you come and lay with me on the terrace and make a wish with me?” I asked softly, feeling slightly childish but pushing past the embarrassment because I knew how to do that better now.
Ludo moved first, walking toward me and then beyond, straight out the door.
I knew he was going to the terrace, and his action was his response.
A smile pulled through my mouth as I looked back at the others.
“Is there a limit on wishes?” Carmine asked as he walked to the door too. “Because I can think of five or six.”
I snorted. “No, Carm, I don’t think there is a limit on wishes. It’s a galaxy, not a genie. The scale is a little different.”
Martina and Renzo followed close behind him. The latter bumped his arm gently into mine as he passed, but Martina hesitated to brush a sweet kiss along my cheek.
Which left Raffa leaning his narrow hip against his desk, arms crossed, brow raised in a facsimile of the way he’d been before I knew who he was under that cool look and expensive armor.
I tiptoed over to him in my bare feet and offered him my hand in question.
He stared at it for a moment before raising his own, gently engulfing it in his much-bigger palm. When he looked back up at me, there were lines of strain beside his eyes and a wealth of disquiet in the autumnal brown.
“I could use a wish or two,” he confessed.
I squeezed his hand in answer and led him quietly through the house out onto the big terrace off the kitchen. I had cleared some space on the corner of the deck, laying down thick blankets and a few pillows because the flagstone was not as comfortable as grass.
Ludo, Martina, and Renzo were waiting, heads tipped back to look at the milky spill of bright stars tossed on the black-velvet night sky.
“Um, we usually lie head to head,” I mentioned as I stepped on the blankets and folded to my knees, tugging Raffa down with me.
There was zero hesitation as everyone stepped forward and lay down with me. Martina on my right, Renzo beside her, and Carm beside him, and then Ludo on the other side of Raffa on my left. The moment we were all settled, I sucked in a deep breath, feeling the closed circuit of our energy wash over me.
Raffa inhaled deeply, too, as if he hadn’t had a breath of fresh air in much too long. He brought our tangled hands to his chest and pressed them over his heart.
I could feel his heart thump beneath my palm.
“Ah! Did you see that one?” Carmine exclaimed, raising his hand to point at a spot in the sky. “My first wish is about a brunette I met in Pistoia.”
“You aren’t supposed to share wishes,” Ludo muttered. “It is unlucky. They won’t come true.”
“I make my own luck.”
A touch to the cornicello charm around my neck that I never took off. I looked down from the sky to see Raffa’s other hand reaching across to finger the pendant.
“Promise me you will wear this forever,” he said quietly but strangely intensely.
“I didn’t know you were such a superstitious Italian,” I teased, but the graveness of his expression made my smile wane. “Certo, Raffa, se desideri.”
Yes, Raffa, if you wish.
“I do.” His hand dropped away, and he propped it behind his head to stargaze once more.
“Oh, that one looked like it would crash into the Duomo,” Martina exclaimed as a large streak of white exploded across the sky.
We spent at least an hour out in the dark, counting our lucky stars, before people started to trickle off to bed. Martina stood first, pausing briefly before offering her hand to Renzo to help him up. He took it and did not let go when they walked into the house.
Carmine left next, face splitting in two around his yawn, complaining that a dalliance from earlier that night had worn him out.
When Ludo left, he did it quietly, only stopping to knock his foot against mine in good night.
He closed the balcony doors behind him.
Leaving Raffa and me under the blanket of starlight.
We turned our heads to each other simultaneously, and the next moment, we were kissing. He took my mouth like a man dying of thirst, sipping at my lips, drinking deeply from me as if he would not survive without my lips on his. He tugged me onto his body without breaking our contact, pressing my lower back to flex his hardening cock against my belly.
I moaned, sinking my hands into his hair as I shifted to straddle his hips so I could grind down on him properly.
When we broke apart, we were both panting.
He pushed a hand into my sternum, so I sat up, and then he gathered my short dress in his hands, pulling up until I had to curve my body and raise my arms as he took it over my head.
“Così bella immerso nella luce della luna,” he murmured as he studied me with black, sparkling eyes, as if chips from the star-strewn sky had fallen into them.
So beautiful bathed in moonlight.
“Voglio bagnarti di sborra,” he continued in that same silky voice that wound around my body like bondage.
I want to bathe you in my cum.
His hand collected both my wrists behind my back so that my chest was arched, nipples pebbled in the cool night air. He knifed up to suck hard at each and then blew cooler air over them so that I shivered.
He continued his smoky refrain, explaining everything he was going to do to me under the face of the moon as he alternated between sucking and biting my breasts. The flesh turned red, ringed in teeth marks I could see even in the dim light spilling out from inside and the silver glow of the sky.
I wished I could have his teeth marks on my skin every day for the rest of my life.
“Ti scoperò ovunque.”
I am going to fuck you everywhere.
I gasped as his free hand slid between my breasts down to my belly, delving beneath my thong to cup my pussy. It was one of his favorite moves, curving that big hand around my sex in a display of total ownership that always made me leak into his palm.
“Ti scoperò la bocca. La tua figa. E il tuo culo stretto,” he continued, the words guttural now as he worked two fingers inside, twisting them into that sensitive ridge on my inner wall that made my vision produce its own stars.
I am going to fuck your mouth. Your pussy. And your tight ass.
My hips rocked unconsciously against his fingers as he added another and fucked me harder.
“Would you like that, cerbiatta?” he murmured against my throat, nipping the skin there, too, so I knew in the morning I would be decorated in the jewelry of his lust. “Would you like me to own you everywhere?”
“Yes,” I hissed instantly, bending to try to catch his lips. “I want you everywhere. I do not want a single inch of my body to belong only to me when we are done.”
The thought of taking his big shaft in my ass was darkly alluring. I’d fingered myself there before back in the States, curious about the tightly furled entrance, shocked by the swell of wet that pooled in my pussy from the illicit contact. In my room, alone at night with my fantasies, I was free from the shackles of being the good girl, and I could indulge in all the ways I secretly was not.
I gasped as Raffa flipped me suddenly onto my back, his hand breaking my fall so I landed gently. He knee-walked up my body even as his hands went to his pants, deftly undoing his belt and fly until he was free to take his cock from the tight confines.
It looked beautiful painted in silver light, the veins raised and mouthwatering around the wide shaft, the precum on the head the same color as the moon.
“Open wide for me.”
I shivered at that biting tone and let my mouth drop open, tongue peeking out to greet his skin as he slid straight into my opening. My eyes fell softly closed as I hummed around the salt bite of his taste. I relaxed my jaw instinctively, used to this now. He had taught me well how to take him deep and hard and often.
One of my favorite feelings was the wedge of his cock impaled balls deep in my mouth and throat. The triumph of taking every inch soared through me straight to my groin so that I squirmed and rubbed my thighs together, desperate for friction.
Sensing my rising desperation, he tore his shirt off and leaned back, bringing my hand to the abdominals cut starkly into his skin. I groaned when he cupped my head in one hand to raise it higher and used the other to slap my legs apart so he could dip fingers into my slick folds.
“You look so pretty with your lips stretched tight around my cock,” he told me in growling Italian. “Like you were made to suck me. Made to take my cock.”
He groaned when I sucked him on the backstroke, flicking my tongue over his slit to gather the cream spilling out. His fingers curled inside my pussy, and the heel of his hand ground down on my clit so that my legs started to shake.
“Yes, little fawn, come with my cock down your throat,” he ordered.
As in everything with Raffa, I had no choice but to obey. My cries were muffled by his shaft, and I gagged once, so his cock slid even deeper, and he moaned at the way my mouth gripped tight around his driving dick. My orgasm was sharp and short, an exclamation point at the end of my lust that only made it stronger.
Raffa pulled out of my mouth a moment later, squeezing a big hand around the root of his drool-slicked, reddened cock to curb his climax.
“Take off your panties and get on your hands and knees,” he instructed as he stood. “Wait for me like that and do not touch yourself.”
I let loose a slight whimper at that order but did as he asked while he went to the doors, peered inside to make sure everyone was in bed, and disappeared inside.
When he returned, I was in position, my figa and culo framed high in the air between my spread legs.
“Così carina,” he praised as he dropped to his knees on the blankets behind me, and a glass bottle landed next to me. Olive oil.
I turned my head to watch as Raffa lifted the bottle, uncapped it, and poured some into his palms. He rubbed them together to warm the liquid and then smoothed his rough-slick hands over the globes of my ass until they gleamed with a high shine under the starlight.
“Che bella,” he murmured, his voice almost punch drunk with lust, taking in the sight of his oiled hands on me.
I gasped, head dropping between my shoulders as the head of his cock kissed my entrance and then slid smoothly into my pussy, the way eased by his thick fingers so I could take him all in one stroke. I thrust my hips back into his, grinding down, but he only moved in deep, slow circles that shuddered desire through my hips in shocky waves.
He was too preoccupied with massaging his oiled thumbs over my crinkled hole, pressing deeper and deeper on each pass until one sank inside. I jumped at the unfamiliar burn, but his other hand held me steady at my hip and hushed me with soft, nonsensical praise in Italian.
“Be good for me,” he intoned, and I realized I was panting, working my hips in useless palpitations because sensation was bombarding my body.
I could feel it in the curling ends of my toes. At the roots of my hair and the base of my teeth. It was everywhere, around me and inside me.
Raffa, Raffa, Raffa in my mouth like the only word I knew in any language.
He replaced his thumb with a finger and then slowly worked another one inside the rim, stretching me enough to make me hiss before I sank into the burn.
“I know my girl loves pleasure,” he said as he pumped those fingers into my ass, holding me still and open with his other palm, and I knew without looking that his eyes were fixed on the way he split me open on his cock in one hole and his fingers in the other. “But she loves some pain too.”
I couldn’t disagree. Mostly because my brain had short-circuited and my mouth had stopped working except to form the shape of his name and the occasional plea.
“Do you want my cock here, mia dolce cerbiatta?” he cooed to me, a third finger pressing, massaging at the tight clutch of my hole until it gave way and closed tight around the added digit.
I cried out, head snapping up as my back bowed and unexpected pleasure knifed through my pussy and ass, the edge meeting in the middle and driving deeper so that I shook and shook and shook with climax. My teeth snapped together with the force, and all I could see behind my wrenched-closed lids was the night sky imprinted in my brain, a galaxy of pinprick color.
“So good,” he crooned as I spiraled back down into his grip like a feather. “I am going to fuck you here and own this piece of you. No matter where you go from here, your first moments of pleasure will always be mine.”
I opened my mouth in lazy protest, to tell him the only place I wanted to go was to bed in his room—our room—for the rest of forever.
But then his fingers were leaving me, except one hooked into my slightly stretched hole as if to hold it open for the press of his searing cock. I held every muscle so still, I seemed to vibrate as he gradually stuffed my tight hole full with his steely length.
I cried out softly, head limp on my neck as his balls pressed to my soaking pussy and he was finally deep inside me. The heat and burn of him in my most forbidden place felt like a brand of ownership on the inside of my skin. It made me feel his in a way I never had before.
His hands cupped the flare of my ribs and traced them to the small of my waist and up over my ass to hold my hips.
“I am going to fuck you hard, now, mia stella cadente,” he warned me, voice threadbare with the same longing I felt coiled around my hips and soul. “Going to own you now and forever.”
“Yes,” I gasped, tipping my hips even higher so he notched deeper and made me shiver. “Own me forever.”
The way he fucked me then was as savage as he promised. Pulling himself slow and smooth to the hottest, tightest point of my entrance in a way that made saliva pool behind my teeth and then snapping his hips hard to drill back into my depths.
Over and over.
Harder and harder.
The hands on my oiled hips slipped under the intensity and became claws, fingertips stamping oval bruises and nails giving me half-moon scratches that I would wear as if on a gemstone Renaissance belt.
I locked my elbows so I could drive back against his thrust, falling deeper and deeper into the debauched act, lost to the all-consuming feel of the deep, earthy pleasure.
And when he reached down with his cleaner hand to thrust two fingers into my steadily leaking, swollen cunt, I threw my head back and howled my orgasm to the moon.
Seconds later, he came, too, pulling out carefully before fisting his cock until he rained hot seed over both my holes.
And when he came, he shouted my name to the same moon as in a pagan union, a marriage under the stars that felt more eternal than if we had signed any kind of legal document and binding code.
I was his.
Completely, unutterably, until my dying day.
After, when he cleaned me up as best he could with his discarded designer shirt, ruining it without a thought, he collected me in his arms and carried me through the dark, quiet house to his palatial bedroom. He got into bed without allowing me to the leave the circle of his arms and then settled me curled up on his torso like a kitten.
I was completely exhausted, but I clung to wakefulness, waiting to hear those three little words I was now so certain he would ask me.
Will you stay? Will you stay? Will you stay?
I repeated them in my mind like a spell, and when he spoke, at first, I thought he himself had spoken them.
But no.
“You are brighter than any star we saw tonight,” he confessed as he stroked my hair with one hand and my hip with another. As if he couldn’t bear for any inch of me to be unloved for even a moment. “Please, promise me something.”
“What?” I whispered around the hope lodged in my throat.
“Segui la tua stella,” he murmured. “It means ‘follow your destiny.’ Do not go home and let your parents dictate your life any longer just because you feel guilty about their loss of Gemma. Just because you feel you should be able to make their lives easier by being good at the cost of your dreams. Whatever wishes you made in the safety of your head tonight, follow them for me, even when I am not there to show you how much I am cheering you on.”
I blinked at the flood of tears that attacked my ducts, trying to keep them back through sheer force of will.
The only wishes I had made tonight were to stay here with Raffa forever, but it seemed he didn’t have the same dream.
“Your dreams mean more now to me than my own,” he said quietly before kissing the top of my head.
A few minutes later, his hands went limp on my body as sleep swept him and my hope for those three little words away forever. When I was sure he was deeply asleep, I turned my face into his chest and let myself anoint him with my tears as I whispered, “I love you, Raffa. In any language, across any distance. And I always will.”
