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How Arno survived till its fifth anniversary, Vincenzo cannot wrap his head around what can only be a fluke in the matrix. What he can get behind, however, is Chef Toto’s attempt to celebrate with a smaller scale Sicilian party. It didn’t take much whining and coaxing on Mr. Nam and Chayoung’s part to drag him to the rowdy gathering after work. Vincenzo didn’t have much reason to dissent—but he did voice it a little, only enough to solidify his national pride and for Chayoung to huff and double down on him—when the cheese and tomato on the Chef Toto’s pizzas have become better friends and this party is a chance to promote the superior Italian wines. (If they’re a brand that the Cassano family manages, no one needs to know.) And a growing part of Vincenzo does want to be there.
The party is complete with the best opera music playing on an old record player courtesy of Mr. Ahn’s good taste and the pawnshop couple’s booty, and a dancing pole supplied by Larry temporarily affixed in the middle of the restaurant with long strips of leftover fabric from Mr. Tak’s shop tied to its top. That pole has been causing Vincenzo quite some trouble: less than thirty minutes ago, he was forced, with the help of Yeongho and a few YouTube tutorials, to lead an impromptu folk dance lesson; and now, Larry’s doing some interpretive contortionist dancing to the opera music and Chayoung keeps trying to contribute to the act with less cohesive pole dancing whenever she can escape Vincenzo’s watchful eyes.
Between Chayoung’s twirling and the pizza dough spinning in the air, Vincenzo feels a little nauseous too. The unease evidently has nothing to do with the fourth glass of wine he’s nursing as it spikes with his concern when the other very drunk lawyer trips over her own feet and stumbles, barely saving herself from a head dive by clutching onto a fabric string out of a bodily instinct honed by years of aerial yoga. Vincenzo puts down his glass next to her abandoned one on the counter, moves to help her, but he stops. Chayoung grumps, “Stay there.”
“Okay.”
She can focus on taking the next step and then one after that. She doesn’t need to look at his face to confirm the light smile she hears in his response, not when he is so gentle in clutching her elbow as she arrives unsteadily into his range and in taking an upturned palm in his hand to inspect its reddening from having gripped the pole too tight. Chayoung immediately reaches for her wine with her free hand and chugs the remainder of it down her parched throat. She doesn’t need to see how Vincenzo looks at her hands like they deserve to be held tender, like he wants to blow on them and massage her palms to regulate the blood circulation until the stinging on her skin and the burning in his own heart subsides.
Or was this just a vision in her drunk mind’s eyes? Something about wine makes Chayoung slip closer to sleep and sway willowy into the embraces she increasingly seeks from her Geumga family the more intoxicated she gets. She’s normally a big fan of hugs, arms that swaddle around her steady, genuine, welcoming; and when she’s through with her third glass of very smooth wine, the want to be held transitions to a sort of need to remain standing relatively vertical, leaning her heavy woozy head against someone or the other’s arm, shoulder, or sturdy chest. Chayoung’s got her fourth refill in one hand, being passed around from a friend’s arm to the next’s like she’s a big baby that the community is raising together. Somewhere in between moving away from hugging Mrs. Kang to congratulate Chef Toto once more, and again while hopping after releasing Mr. Nam over towards Mr. Ahn, she’s intercepted as one does a rugby ball, pulled straight out of the air, off trajectory, tucked neat into the crook of a familiar steadying arm. His chest, even through too many layers of expensive clothing, warms her back and it’s easy to lean into his hold. “Be careful, byeonhosa-nim,” Vincenzo doesn’t need to speak louder than a whisper with how close he is behind her. His hand politely rests on her elbow again, his feet shadowing hers half a step behind to wherever she wobbles towards. All this for her safety, only that, definitely. The first moment she looks at him, turning around in his arm so his hand falls to her waist, her chin propped up on his clavicle, her eyes too bright and clear before she scrunches up her nose at him like something about the sight of him is amusing, it takes everything in him not to—
Was this another test? What is it meant to try if not his restraint? Vincenzo won’t put it past Chayoung to have hidden cards up her sleeves, ever so greedy for a little more than he thinks he can give, so skillful in getting him on her side, increasingly cunning with excuses ready on the tip of her tongue. She pokes her tongue out at him again, grinning at him for no reason other than that she’s drunk out of her wits and she finds him amusing and he finds himself smiling back at her more often. Her arms wrap tighter around his forearm that she’s taken hostage, trapping it amidst hugging herself, but he has no desire to escape, not when it’s troubling enough to not think about how she’s snug by his side and if this is what safety feels like, how did he finally find his peace in her who is simultaneously the most dangerous part of his life. And god forbid he’s finding her adorable again.
Chayoung insists on Vincenzo looking at her in the eyes—‘Have some manners, you mafia corn salad asshole!’ she scolds not for the first time—when she wants to speak to him, and she tilts her face into his proximity, barely appropriate for the public setting if everyone wasn’t equally wasted and used to their antics, so close he can smell the dessert wine they’re now sharing from her glass in the moist warmth of her breath. It’s causing him temporary forgetfulness. Was it the red of the cherry tomatoes that earlier reminded him of the shade staining her cute little pout? What did the wine taste like again, and how would it be to test if it would be sweeter off her lips? Her lipstick is smudged; does he want to fix it or smudge it more?
“Hyung, try this!” Hanseo pops up beside him with a slice of pizza in each hand. Vincenzo curls himself further around Chayoung as if it’s a knife or poison that the equally alarmed intruder is thrusting at him and not limp cheesy slices of Hawaiian pizza. His hackles rising, he turns his head around as if to hiss at Hanseo like a cat. The younger man stumbles backward, apologies falling aplenty from his trembling lips.
The incident sobers up Chayoung who takes the proffered pizza and assuages Hanseo that it wasn’t his fault for startling Vincenzo, but rather it is the pineapples on the pizza that caused the Italian to react with visceral disgust. She elbows for Vincenzo to join her in dispelling the tension with awkward laughter but he stands rigid, lost in his considerations, this time about his own instincts and more so about his failure to notice Hanseo’s loud approach. She pokes at his side again, hard enough to knock out a coughing laugh, and extracts herself from her stunned partner to kindly guide Hanseo away.
In Chayoung’s brief absence, Vincenzo can finally breathe easier but his lungs empty quickly without her soothing scent to fill them. He reaches up to loosen his tie forgetting that he’d taken it off along with his coat when Chayoung got some tiramisu on them. He hadn’t even scolded her, too amused by her looking so apologetic with a dollop of cream also on her nose. She’s glancing at him with the same expression again though she has no fault despite being the sole reason behind the lowering of his defenses. Vincenzo undoes the top button and drops his hand, fumbling to put it in his pocket but Chayoung grasps his wrist and very obviously fakes another stumble. She falls back into his side, mimicking and laughing loudly at how Vincenzo would complain about the affront to Italian food that is pineapples to pizza. He lets her be correct.
A little less than an hour later, the moon has risen a little higher in the clear sky and everyone is now seated at the conjoined tables, winding down as they often do together after their biweekly game nights or monthly family dinners, and Vincenzo is still Chayoung’s designated backrest. When Mr. Nam comes by to bid his coworkers goodnight, Chayoung insists again that he should take the bed in the Jipuragi office instead of pushing Cheetah all the way home because drunk biking, obviously, is unlawful. It doesn’t take much convincing, and no additional planning to decide that Chayoung will be crashing at Vincenzo’s apartment as he foresaw since she chugged down her first glass of wine. They will fall asleep in his living room again, scandalously with her on the couch and him on the floor although there is a perfectly clean and pigeon-free bedroom next door and a naughtily spacious-only-for-one bed because they are not ready to go there yet. Vincenzo will wonder again as he watches her nod off mid-conversation if each time she steps into his home, she feels as she does at this moment, in his arms.
Her back is pressed right above his heart that thumps extra loudly upon her little contented sigh. Her triumphant smile when she notices, he watches it grow bigger out of the corner of his eyes. He still cannot look at her directly but when she takes his hand in hers under the table, he interlaces their fingers together. Palm to palm, twirling in her orbit, Vincenzo feels most vulnerable when he has his new world in his arms and his resurrected heart in his hands like this. Can she feel it? Does she feel it too, this vulnerability? If she does, be it a weakness or let it be a strength, at least he has her back.