He pushes his chair back, rises to his feet, gestures for me to come to his side. I do and he takes my hand, draws me closer, stands me between himself and the desk.

Sergio closes his hands over the backs of mine, takes the pointer finger of my right one and traces a line up to his father, to another name I don’t know. Presses it over the red cross—it’s shaped like a cross from the days of the crusades. Gothic almost. Like he spent time shaping each one. Outlining each with darkest black, colored each in deepest red.

“The cross is a mob killing,” he says. And, without a word, we trace ever single macabre cross on the sheet, he and I. I don’t count. I lose track. I feel him behind me, feel the weight of his silence. The meaning of it.

When we get to his name, he traces the erased line. He’s standing so close, I feel the heat of his body behind mine, the tickle of his warm whiskey-breath on the nape of my neck. The light kisses there.

“You know what I didn’t intend?” he asks, picking up our earlier conversation, just before he’d abruptly left. “I didn’t intend on falling in love with you.”

The song begins again, the tone and lyrics dark and heavy.

It makes me shudder, makes an icy chill run the length of my spine.

I should be happy, right? Aren’t these words every girl wants to hear?

Why does it feel like a cement brick has just landed in my belly?

“This one,” he starts, releasing my left hand, wrapping his around my middle, pulling me to him, while using our right hands to point to the remnants of an erased box connected to his. “It’s for you.” His hand snakes up to cup my breast, squeeze it, then wrap around my throat, fingers gripping my jaw just a little too hard, like he wants me to look, to really see.

A moment later, he extends my right arm out, forcing us both to bend forward as he wraps my fingers around the edge of the desk, releasing my throat and taking my left arm to stretch it to the opposite side.

He pushes my hair off to the side and I lay my cheek on the drawing, knowing it’ll come away smeared with charcoal. Maybe a little red, too.

“Stay,” he says, his breath warm on my ear, lips soft when he kisses my cheek. He straightens, and I see him in my periphery, watch him loom over me, watching me. It’s so dark, he’s almost a shadow wrapped within a shadow.

His eyes glisten, and when the next part of the song plays, he sings along, the words cold and dark and wet make my heart hurt.