Choking On Sapphires

47 Snap Out Of It

You didn't remember the last time you'd been so covered in sweat. You could feel it run from your hairline, where your hair rested atop your head, braided and pinned, wrapped in a scarf that held your long, wild tresses together. You're bent over the stove, the heat and steam from cooking the cause of your sweat. With under a month left before Hanukkah, and this being the first, you'd been practicing, You'd gotten out your bubbe's old book's, finding the recipe's in them and trying to dig through your brain for memories of anything that your mother's family or your nurse Ida might've shared with you about the traditional dishes for the holiday. You didn't have much to go off of, but you were feeling invigorated to explore a part of yourself that had been forbidden.

You'd never been expected to cook as a married woman when you were growing up. You'd had lots of training to be a prize wife. You'd been taught an instrument, all the proper dances, etiquette and worldly conversation that should be expected of a Lady. But because of the expectation that you'd be married off to someone wealthy, you hadn't been taught to do much for yourself.

Luckily for you, your mother and your uncle would never allow a daughter that took after them so much to be so useless should she find herself alone. Taking after the rebellious streak that your mother had always told you came from your uncle, you'd never been one to do as you were told. After your lessons you'd run off to the barn, you'd fence with your brothers or learn cards and gambling from the farm hands that seemed to find your interest very amusing. And you, a black sheep, look just like the rest of the Lafitte's, dark hair, dark eyes and olive toned skin, looking perfectly in place amongst them in your family's summer house in France as you nipped sips of rum from your cousins as it was passed around the room.

You have some of Alfie's white rum uncorked on the countertop, humming old songs to yourself as you'd take a sip and lean back when the heat became too much.

He follows the smell of fried food to the kitchen, finding the last thing he expected to see there...you. Your hair pulled back and covered as if you were married, a modest and simple cotton dress that swung back and forth as you moved light on your toes about the kitchen.

"What's all this now?" he says with an amused face.

"Just a moment darling...don't want these to burn," you say in an almost mumble as you moved a pan off the flames. "There we are," you say with a deep breath and a smile as you wipe your hands and approach him. "I'm cooking, silly what does it look like?" you grin at him, placing a light kiss on his cheek before moving to wet a washcloth and wipe over your face. "How was your day?" you ask, taking a drink from one of his bottles of rum.

"As busy as yours, it would seem." he says with a gravelly inflection, eyes darting around the kitchen. It'd been a very long and particularly hard day full of annoyance and fighting desperately to control his anger. The head of the Greeks, Demitri was growing older, and becoming more and more difficult to deal with each time they had to work together. He wasn't the only powerful man in London to think that it was time he was put out to pasture, letting his son Niko take over as he was less ill-tempered and had a better mind for modern business.

After growing tired of arguing over every line of the contract, Demitri showing no signs of negotiation at all, Alfie had told him to fuck off. To come back when he wanted to do some fucking business and not waste his time. Demitri took to that about as well as one could expect an old head of an organization to.

So his day had been much harder than he was letting on, but he knew you'd worked with the Greeks, no use in whining about things that you already understood. Not like it would enlighten either of you to anything at this point to discuss it.

As you lean on the kitchen island, giving him a warm and supportive smile that said you understood his problems, his brief moment of indulgence in seeing you playing the role of a perfect little housewife is broken into pieces, remembering himself and finding it hard to meet your eyes. Not only were you keeping house, making dishes his mother would make, he could tell there were latkes by the smell, you also understood him on a level no woman had before. You understood his business. You understood the men he worked with and for and no other man in the life had that. All the wives were kept mostly locked in ivory towers, shielded from their own helplessness and ignorance so they could be a bed warmer for gangsters when they decided to leave their mistresses for the night and come home to the woman who'd born them children. He hadn't judged their behavior, they were gentile men, after all, only a step above an animal. He knew he was truly not much better than them and didn't deserve a goddess that understood him in the way you did.