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The bottle had been on the table for four days.
Abbacchio knew this the way a person knows a loose tooth, constantly, always there whether he wanted it to be or not. It was good stuff, which was the problem. Cheap wine was easier to leave alone because leaving it alone felt like a choice. He had bought this one in a better moment, the kind where buying good wine felt like evidence of something, and it had been sitting there waiting for him to do something about it.
The apartment still smelled like the previous tenant. He had cleaned it twice and was now in a different phase of the relationship with this problem, which was resentment. Outside, a Vespa owner and a man in a Fiat were conducting a twenty-three-minute dispute about a parking space with escalating volume and genuine creative commitment. The door was locked. The windows were closed. It was, by any reasonable measure, a sealed apartment on the third floor.
None of this was relevant when the wall opened.
Bucciarati came through the seam where the plaster met the doorframe with the unhurried ease of someone who uses walls the same way other people use doors, adjusting his jacket cuff as he came. He moved toward the kitchen like a man who knows where the kettle is, which he did not. This was Abbacchio's kitchen, eleven days old, never previously occupied by Bruno Bucciarati or anyone else.
He found the kettle on the second try. Filled it, set it on, and opened the cupboard.
Abbacchio sat at the table and watched all of this happen.
"You haven't eaten," Bucciarati said, to the cupboard.
"How did you get in?"
"The door."
Abbacchio looked at the door, which was locked, and then at the doorframe, which now had a zip running along it that had not been there this morning. "The door," he said.
"Mm," said Bucciarati, finding the coffee, measuring it out with the focused economy of a man who has satisfactorily addressed all outstanding questions and is ready to move forward.
The kettle boiled. He poured, set a cup in front of Abbacchio, and sat down. For the first time since arriving through the wall, he looked at the bottle in the center of the table.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he picked up his coffee, looked at his phone, and said nothing about it whatsoever.
Abbacchio sat there. Outside, the Vespa dispute achieved temporary resolution, then immediately resumed. The bottle sat between them like an uninvited guest that both parties had agreed not to introduce. Bucciarati read something on his phone. The coffee was warm in Abbacchio's hands.
It was deeply irritating. It was also something else, the part he was not examining — the specific quality of being in a room with someone who was not asking anything from him. No performance of concern or carefully worded questions, just the sound of the street outside and another person breathing in the same room, which turned out to matter more than it should have.
He had not had a great deal of experience with this recently.
He didn't open the bottle.
He also didn't tell Bucciarati to leave, which was a different kind of decision, and one he examined even less.
—
He had stopped counting days somewhere around the second week, which he chose to interpret as progress. He was on his way back from an errand in the Quartieri Spagnoli when he passed a restaurant he had never seen before. A folding sign on the pavement read FREE APERITIVO TODAY ONLY, and a man stood beside it holding a tray of small glasses with professional enthusiasm.
Abbacchio stopped.
He looked at the sign, the glasses, and the man, who was smiling with the energy of someone who had been standing in the sun for two hours and decided the smiling was load-bearing.
Something about this felt deeply suspicious. The sign was normal. The glasses were normal. The restaurant looked like a normal restaurant. And yet something at the back of his neck was saying: do not take the glass.
He did not take the glass. He walked on.
"You did well."
He stopped.
Bucciarati was leaning against the wall at the corner, arms folded, with the expression of a man who had been standing there for some time and was entirely comfortable about it.
Abbacchio stared at him. "What?"
"The aperitivo. You did well."
"You were watching?"
"I happened to be in the area."
"You," Abbacchio said, and then stopped, because he needed a moment, "have been standing on this corner watching a man with a tray of free drinks waiting to see what I would do."
Bucciarati looked at him pleasantly.
"That's what you've been doing with your afternoon?"
"I had other things nearby."
"What things?"
"Things," Bucciarati said. He unfolded his arms and fell into step beside Abbacchio as though this had been the plan all along, which it absolutely had.
"You wasted your entire afternoon standing on a corner watching a restaurant," Abbacchio said.
"I don't think it was wasted."
"You could have been doing literally anything else."
"Probably," Bucciarati agreed, and there was something in his voice that sat right at the border of amusement and something else and didn't announce itself. "But I was here. And you walked past the drinks. So."
"So," Abbacchio repeated.
"So," Bucciarati said simply, and they walked.
—
He thought about So for the rest of the afternoon like a small thing he couldn’t put down, and he was still thinking about it three days later when Bucciarati called with the Pozzuoli job. He said yes before the details were finished, which he also chose not to examine.
The job was straightforward: walk into a bar in Pozzuoli, order a drink, look like someone worth robbing. The three men Polpo wanted dealt with had a tendency to identify targets opportunistically and without a great deal of forethought. Abbacchio was good bait. He knew this about himself without vanity.
He ordered, set his glass on the bar, and waited.
It didn't take long. One of them peeled off from the group and came over with the slow, rolling walk of someone who had been drinking since the afternoon and had confused this with confidence. He said something over Abbacchio's shoulder. Abbacchio turned on the stool, unhurried, and looked at him.
He had every intention of handling it himself.
Then Bucciarati was simply there. Abbacchio didn't question it, just moved, and for the next thirty seconds the two of them worked with the quiet efficiency of people who have done this before and have no particular feelings about doing it again. The first man went down and stayed there. The second lasted slightly longer and then didn't. The third, to his credit, read the situation correctly and put his hands up before anyone asked him to.
Bucciarati crouched slightly to meet the lead man's eye. The man was trying very hard to hold his expression together and not entirely succeeding.
"You should know who you're dealing with," Bucciarati said, in a very genuine tone. "And act accordingly. Yes?"
The man nodded. It was a very sincere nod.
Around them the bar had pressed itself against the walls, chairs scraped back, a glass knocked over somewhere in the shuffle, a few sharp intakes of breath and then the specific hush of a room that has decided collectively to be very still. Someone whispered something. Nobody responded.
Bucciarati straightened up, turned to the bartender, who was standing behind the counter with the expression of a man deeply reconsidering his career, and said: "I think someone knocked over some glasses over there. You might want to check."
Then he smoothed his jacket down, walked back to the bar, and sat down beside Abbacchio with the unhurried ease of someone returning from a brief errand. He didn't say anything at first, just leaned slightly in Abbacchio's direction with the focused attention of a man following a scent, then looked at the drink on the bar, untouched, going warm.
Abbacchio stared at him. "Did you just sniff me?"
"The drink is right there," Bucciarati said, and looked at it as if he had already decided how this would end.
"I could have handled that myself," Abbacchio said.
"I know," Bucciarati said.
"You were supposed to be outside."
"I got bored," Bucciarati said simply, still looking at the drink.
"Then why didn't you just—"
Bucciarati turned to him. "Do you want to be beaten up as well? Because if you drink that, I'll consider it." He said it with a smile that was so completely genuine it had no business being on a person's face after what had just happened in this bar, and something about it short-circuited whatever Abbacchio had been about to say. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked back at the drink.
"You can't threaten me," he said, which was not what he had intended to say and was considerably less convincing than he would have liked.
"I simply asked a question."
"It was a threatening question."
"Mm," said Bucciarati, returning his attention to the drink with the serenity of a man who has already arrived at the end of this conversation.
Abbacchio looked at the drink, then at the three men, two of whom had achieved approximate vertical, then at Bucciarati's hands on the bar, completely unhurried. He pushed the glass away.
"I was going to do that anyway," he said.
"Of course," Bucciarati said, caught the bartender's eye, held up two fingers, and two coffees arrived, and that was settled.
Bucciarati drove them back. Abbacchio sat with his shoulder against the window and watched the city reassemble itself out of the dark, aware in the close quarters of the car of Bucciarati beside him. The warmth of him. The smell of whatever he used, something clean and faintly expensive, which Abbacchio filed away in the part of his mind he was not examining. It came back to him anyway over the following week, in completely ordinary moments that had no business involving Bruno Bucciarati.
Extremely rude, he thought. To occupy a person’s attention without asking permission first. Also extremely rude to smell like that in an enclosed space.
—
At some point the appearances had stopped being interruptions.
On a Thursday evening, Abbacchio was making pasta.
This was new — standing in his own kitchen at seven doing something that required more than one step and could reasonably be called cooking. He had bought actual ingredients. He had, at some point in the last two weeks, acquired olive oil that cost a reasonable amount, and he had stopped trying to determine what that was evidence of.
He had clams on, white wine going into the pan, the smell of garlic already doing what garlic does in a kitchen. He poured some in, watched it hiss and reduce, and noticed only afterward that it hadn't occurred to him to drink any of it. He held the bottle for a moment, turned that observation over, and set it back down.
He stood at the stove and stirred and thought about six weeks ago. The bottle on the table in an apartment that still smelled like someone else. The bar in Pozzuoli and the drive back through the dark, and a corner in the Quartieri Spagnoli where a man had stood in the afternoon sun with his arms folded and said you did well to no one but him, for no reason except that it was true.
Something happened in his chest.
He looked at the ceiling briefly. Thought, with the resignation of a man who has run out of energy to pretend otherwise, well. That's that then. Extremely inconvenient.
The sauce needed another minute. And somewhere in the middle of deciding whether he needed to get a grip, the quieter thought arrived that he had no idea whether Bucciarati had eaten, and that the pan served one, and that this was beginning to feel like a problem he had manufactured entirely for himself.
"That smells incredible."
The wooden spoon hit the floor.
Bucciarati was standing in the kitchen doorway, or mostly — the zip was along the doorframe again, and he was stepping through it with the unhurried ease of a man arriving somewhere he intended to be. He looked at the pan, then at Abbacchio, with the open unperforming expression that arrived without warning and did things to the room.
Abbacchio picked up the spoon. Ran it under the tap. Did not look at him.
"You're cooking," Bucciarati said, with a warmth entirely disproportionate to the observation.
"I'm aware of what I'm doing."
"You're actually cooking, with a pan, on the stove."
"This is what cooking looks like, yes."
Bucciarati leaned against the doorframe. "I'm so very proud of you," he said.
Abbacchio stared at the sauce.
Bucciarati said things like this. Without armor or irony, with the sincerity of someone who had either never learned to be guarded or had decided the guarding wasn't worth it. I'm so very proud of you, over a pan of pasta on a Thursday, as though Abbacchio's chest were not doing something he had absolutely no appropriate response to.
He thought, not for the first time, that it was probably impossible not to fall for someone like Bruno Bucciarati.
Not that he would say this.
"You need to stop doing this," he said instead.
Bucciarati looked at him with mild inquiry.
"Coming through the walls, the doorframes, appearing in people's kitchens whenever you feel like it." He gestured at the zip. "You need to stop."
"Your door was—"
"The door was fine, the door is always fine, that's what doors are for." Abbacchio pointed at it. "Stop."
"Mm," said Bucciarati, in the tone that meant noted but not actioned.
"I'm serious. What if..." Abbacchio stopped.
"What if I'm not alone?" he said.
He heard himself say it and immediately wished he hadn't. His mind had been working very hard to produce a reasonable argument, something convincing, that would explain why Bucciarati needed to stop showing up through his walls without making it obvious that the showing up was doing something to him, and this was what it had come up with. This. On a Thursday evening. While holding a wooden spoon.
He looked at the sauce.
The sauce looked back at him.
Bucciarati looked at him, and something moved through his expression before it settled. "Bring whoever you like," he said. A beat. "Someday you won’t want to."
He looked, for just a second, like a man who had not planned to say that. And then that passed, and what was left was something so plainly certain, so entirely without doubt, that Abbacchio found he couldn't look at it directly. He looked at the jacket in the doorway instead. At the floor. Anywhere else.
He picked up a second bowl from the cupboard.
He heard Bucciarati get up behind him. By the time he turned around, Bucciarati was already at the counter, filling the kettle with the quiet ease of a man who knows exactly where everything is, and there was something in the set of his shoulders, some lightness that hadn't quite been there before, that Abbacchio looked at for just a moment before looking away.
"Sit down," he said. "It's ready."
"Almost," Bucciarati said, and smiled at the kettle.
Abbacchio set the bowls on the table and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the kitchen wasn't already saying. The coffee would be slightly too strong. It always was.
The kitchen smelled like garlic and coffee, always coffee. Abbacchio sat down, picked up his fork, and found that he wasn’t thinking about Someday at all.
It was already here.