Cellie's POV
We moved away from the group and I kept pace beside him and did not say anything until we were far enough from Manuel and his company that conversation wouldn't carry back.
"Thank you," I said, and the words came out before I could reconsider them, quiet and genuine.
He glanced at me sideways. "For what."
"For stepping in back there." I kept my voice level. "I know you did it for the family optics and not for me specifically, so you don't have to pretend it was personal, but it got me out of a conversation I had no way of ending on my own, so. Thank you."
He was quiet for a moment. We were walking along the edge of the courtyard, the party noise around us providing a kind of privacy, and his hand had dropped from my back when we started moving, which I was choosing not to have feelings about.
"The right marriage, when the time comes, will be your choice," he said finally, and his voice was flat and factual in the way it got when he was saying something he meant. "I told them I would handle it because that keeps them from handling it themselves. It doesn't mean I'm going to force you into anything."
I looked at him. "Does Manuel know that's what you meant?"
"Manuel trusts me to do what's best for the family." A pause. "I intend to."
"And you think my choice is what's best for the family."
"I think a woman who makes her own choices is considerably less likely to become a liability than one who resents the choice that was made for her." He glanced at me again, something brief and direct in it. "I've seen what the other version looks like. It doesn't end well for anyone."
I absorbed that quietly. It was not what I had expected him to say, and the habit I had developed of expecting the worst from him was making it difficult to know what to do with the moments when he didn't deliver it.
"Your dress," he said, and the shift in subject was so abrupt I almost missed it.
Here we go.
"What about my dress," I said, with the particular patience of someone bracing for impact.
"You don't own anything with a back to it, apparently."
"I own this one," I said. "Which has a back. It's just lower than you'd prefer."
"It's lower than anyone in that group would prefer," he said, and his voice had an edge to it that was not quite irritation and not quite something else. "Half of them spent the first thirty seconds of that conversation looking at you instead of listening to Penelope."
"That's their problem."
"In this world," he said, quiet and even, "it becomes yours."
I wanted to argue with that. I had an argument ready, about autonomy and the fundamental injustice of women being responsible for managing other people's responses to their existence, and it was a good argument, and I believed every word of it. But I was also standing in a courtyard full of men who had just discussed my marriage prospects without making eye contact with me once, and the argument felt slightly less satisfying in context than it did in theory.
"Fine," I said. "Next time I'll wear a turtleneck."
The corner of his mouth moved. Just slightly. Just enough.
"You really don't know how to let anyone have the last word," he said.
"Neither do you," I pointed out.
He turned to look at me fully for the first time since we had walked away from his father's group, and something in the look was different from the composed, controlled assessment he usually aimed at me, warmer and less armored, and I felt it land somewhere in the middle of my chest and do something unhelpful there.
I was about to say something, I'm not sure what, something that would have moved us back onto safer conversational ground, when a voice cut across the space between us.
"Demetrio?"
It was a woman's voice. Warm and musical with a lilt in it, the kind of voice that arrived in a room and rearranged it slightly just by being there. I turned toward it before I had processed the instinct to do so.
She was walking toward us from across the courtyard and she was, without any exaggeration, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in person. Dark hair swept back, a red dress that fit like it had been made for her specifically, the kind of confidence in her stride that came from knowing exactly what effect she had and having made peace with it long ago. She moved through the party the way certain people did, with everyone registering her passage without being able to say exactly why.
Her eyes were fixed on Demetrio with a brightness that was entirely personal.
She reached us and bypassed any greeting entirely, stepping forward and wrapping her arms around him, pulling him into a hug that was long and certain and completely at home in his space, her head tipped up to say something close to his ear that I couldn't hear.
"I've missed you," she said, warm and sure, like it was simply a fact she was reporting.
I looked at Demetrio's face.
His expression had shifted. Not into the cold blankness he used as armor. Into something more complicated than that, something that looked like history, the specific expression of a person encountering someone who knew them before they became who they currently were.
He knew her. He knew her well. That much was written in every line of his body.
I looked back at the woman.
She was still holding onto him, her hand resting against his chest with the ease of long familiarity, and she was beautiful and certain and completely unaware of me standing two feet away, and I was holding a champagne flute and feeling something in my chest that I had absolutely no right to be feeling and no intention of naming.
She turned, finally, and her eyes landed on me with a curiosity that was friendly and entirely unintimidated.
"And who is this?" she asked, looking between me and Demetrio with a smile that managed to be both warm and assessing at the same time.
I kept my expression exactly where I had trained it to be. Composed. Pleasant. Revealing nothing.
"Cellie," I said, before Demetrio could answer for me. "Cellie Bianchi." I held her gaze and smiled back. "And you are?"
She blinked, something shifting in her expression at the directness of it, and then she smiled wider, the kind of smile that meant she was revising her first impression upward.
She opened her mouth to answer.
I had never wanted to know someone's name and hated it at the same time as badly as I wanted and hated it in that moment.