Chapter Thirty-four – The Mug Incident
MALIA
I stared after him once he was out of the door. My heart was still pounding, and I avoided thinking about the reason why for too long. He did something to me that I couldn’t put into words. Or maybe I didn’t want to.
It would make things more complicated. Make them worse than they already were. With a sigh, I shifted my attention to my books. Focusing on my homework had been an idle idea. It didn’t work, because I remained worked up about my latest encounter with Marcello.
The role I had tried to play was more challenging to uphold than I’d thought. I hated him. Hates everything about being stuck in this house, so close to him. Right? I must hate everything about this place. After what they did to my father. After he had stood by watching the Don hurt him again and again. No muscle in their faces shifting. If I had seen emotions in their faces, it came closer to joy than to horror.
The opposite of what I had felt. I did hate them. All of them. I hated the Don and his son, whom I was yet to meet. I hated Marcello and Gabe, who had brought me here like the prisoner I was and kept a close eye on me.
Today had been an exhausting day, I reminded myself. Convinced myself that my exhaustion was the reason why my defiance had been so hard to uphold.
It was for the sake of my friend’s safety that I had pretended to like Marcello. At the memory of his hands on my thighs, the blood rushed into my cheeks. Nobody had ever touched me like that. It had startled me, and I knew that he had done it to tease me.
But I hadn’t hated it. Worse even. It had excited me somewhere deep within. Not that I would ever admit that to him or anyone. I pressed my hands to my face, groaning about my raging thoughts.
I am not attracted to Marcello. I am not attracted to Marcello. I am not attracted to Marcello.
I repeated the thought again and again, followed by a reminder that I was engaged to another. But then Marcello’s words from the other day shot back into my mind.
“Oh, principessa… You think Blaine would care if I touched you?”
I gulped at the memory. Distraction. I needed a distraction. Badly. Needed to calm myself down somehow.
Tea usually helped me to calm my mind, so I decided to go to the kitchen and see if there was any tea in the house. Claire was standing at the stove, stirring in something that smelled heavenly. My mouth watered thinking about the dinner ahead. Isabella was sitting at the kitchen counter, working on her homework. Just what I should be doing.
When I walked by her, I took a peek at what she was working on. Chemistry. One of my favorite subjects.
As soon as Claire spotted me, she gave me a gentle smile. “Hello, principessa. Can we help you with anything?”
“I was wondering if you have any tea in the house?”
“Well, of course! We have a whole cabinet of it”, she explained, cleaning her hands on a kitchen towel and crossing the room. When she opened one of the cabinets behind me, my mouth dropped open. The simple shelf concealed something that resembled the storage of an old apothecary shop. I had always wished for something similar for my herbs.
“I will boil some water for you”, Claire said as she filled a kettle with water and put it on another platform of the stove.
Nodding in understanding, I read every label, surprised to find all sorts of fruity teas, one of them my favorite. Cherry Blossoms. Somehow, I doubted that it was a coincidence, but I would not complain about getting fresh tea leaves.
I rounded Claire and opened a series of cupboards to get familiar with where everything was located. Claire had wanted to tell me, but I had cut her off, telling her not to mind me, as I tried to get acquainted with everything myself.
Once I found the right cupboard, filled with cups. Two different sets of different sizes and some random cups that looked a little out of place. One cup pulled my attention in particular. It was wide, nearly like a bowl, a mat-black surface with three words written across in white ink: “Family is Everything.” Around the words, roses were raked in different stages of bloom.
The words resonated with me, and I took the mug. Turning to fill it with the leaves, I stop in my tracks when I see Claire and Isabell’s gaze. “Not that one,” Claire said. When I looked at her, questioning, she explained, “It’s Marcello's cup.”
I looked at the cup again, still wondering why it seemed to be a big deal. It was just a cup after all, and Marcello didn’t seem the type to care about something like a favorite cup.
“Weird, I don’t see a name written on it,” I say sweetly and place it on the counter next to where Isabella was working on her homework. When I turned back to the tea, I could have sworn that Isabella was pushing her work materials away from the cup, as if they could accidentally touch it. Why did they behave so weirdly about a cup? But neither of them said anything else about it.
I filled a tea egg with the cherry blossom leaves and poured hot water into the pot, watching as the water took on the color of the leaves, giving it a pinkish hue. The smell alone managed to calm me down a little. Till now, I had always only bought teabags, because fresh leaves were too expensive. I tasted the difference instantly. This was delicious.
Closing my eyes, I calmed a little as the warmth of the tea spread in my body. The warmth vanished as soon as I heard the steps behind me. I opened my eyes to confirm my suspicion, and there he was. Marcello was walking past Claire and steering right towards the cupboard with the mugs.
His hand moved with routine, opening it and grabbing it precisely to the spot my mug had stood just minutes before.
He halted in his movement.
“Claire,” he started, his tone edged, “where is my…” When he turned towards us, his gaze met mine, then dropped down to the mug. I moved towards my lips.
I enjoyed his confusion when I put the mug to my smiling lips and took a delicious sip of my tea. Noticing the seriousness in his looks, my smile faded away.
The corners of his mouth twitched in restraint. His jaw clenched and unclenched repeatedly. Then he turned around and walked out of the kitchen without a word or another look.