“Not Yet,” She Said When the Capo Asked About a Boyfriend—Then the Mafia Boss Went Silent With Jealousy

PART 1

The measuring tape was still looped around his chest when she made the mistake.

It was not a dramatic mistake. It was four words, spoken around two pins she was holding between her teeth, in the flat professional tone she had spent years perfecting for exactly these kinds of appointments. The kind of appointments where the man on the fitting pedestal had a gun at his hip and a name that made other men lower their voices.

“Not yet,” she said.

The silence that followed was not ordinary silence.

Calla Voss had worked in this shop long enough to know the difference between a quiet room and a dangerous one. The tailor shop on Archer Street was always quiet — the thick walls, the heavy drape of fabric samples, the muffled sound of the street outside all conspired to make it feel sealed from the world. She had learned to read the quality of its silences. The silence before a difficult customer complained. The silence before rent came due. The silence before her father’s old clients walked through the door.

This silence was different.

The man on the pedestal — Matteo Caruso, underboss of the South End, though she did not use that word in her own head — had been turning a silver lighter over in his right hand since he arrived. It was an idle habit, the way some men tap their fingers or check their phones. The lighter caught the afternoon light as it turned, once, twice, three times.

Then it snapped shut.

The sound was sharp enough to make her jump. Sharp enough to scatter the focus she had been maintaining very carefully for the last forty minutes.

She did not look up immediately. She finished marking the shoulder seam with her chalk. Her hands, she noted with professional satisfaction, did not shake. Her hands never shook.

She looked up.

Matteo Caruso had turned his head.

He was not looking at the trifold mirror the way he had been for the past twenty minutes. He was looking at her. His eyes were the dark amber of old whiskey, and they were fixed on her face with the particular attention of someone who has asked a question and received an unexpected answer and is now deciding what it means.

“What do you mean, not yet?” he said.

His voice was low. It did not need volume. It was the kind of voice that had learned, probably young, that quiet was more effective than loud.

Calla removed the two pins from her mouth and placed them carefully on the pin cushion strapped to her wrist.

“I mean,” she said, “that I am currently single, but I don’t intend to remain so permanently. At some point, when I have time, I’ll pursue that.”

“When you have time,” he repeated.

“I work twelve-hour days, Mr. Caruso. Dating requires time I don’t currently have.”

He studied her.

She had been studied by difficult men before. The shop had belonged to her father for thirty years, and her father’s clients had not been the kind of men who paid by credit card. She had learned to hold still under that kind of attention, to meet it without flinching, to give it nothing to grip.

“Is there someone specific,” Matteo said, “that you’re waiting to have time for?”

The question was precise. Not casual.

“No,” she said. “Arm up, please. I need to finish the sleeve.”

He raised his arm.

The movement was slow and unhurried, and she was aware — in the way she was always aware of things in this shop, cataloging them without meaning to — that the unhurriedness was a choice. Men like him moved at their own pace because they had never had to do otherwise.

She knelt to measure the inseam. The floor was cold through the knees of her trousers. She pulled the tape and got the number and stood.

“You don’t talk much,” Matteo observed.

“I charge by the suit.”

“Most people talk more when I’m in the room. They get nervous.”

“I’m focused on the hem,” she said.

She was also nervous. She had been nervous since the moment he walked in, since the moment the air in the shop changed the way it always changed when men like him arrived. But she had rent to pay. She had a lease that was three months precarious and a heating system that had been failing since October and a stack of invoices she was rotating through in a careful choreography designed to keep all of them technically current.

She needed his money. His money spent the same as anyone’s.

She stepped onto the small wooden stool to reach his collar. The proximity was unavoidable — this was the job, this was what fitting required — and she was close enough now to see the small, pale scar that ran through the stubble along his jaw, close enough to smell the bitter edge of his cologne under something sharper she did not want to identify.

She dragged her chalk along the shoulder seam.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

She froze.

The chalk hovered a centimeter above his collar.

The question had no business being in this room. It landed in the shop the way heavy objects landed — with weight, with displacement.

She was still deciding how to answer when her heel found the edge of the stool.

The fall was not graceful. She pitched forward, her hand shot out to catch herself, and the nearest solid object was his arm, and her other hand — the one with three pins balanced between her fingers — hit his chest.

She felt the pins go through the fabric.

One of them went further.

Matteo made a short, sharp sound.

Calla scrambled back, the pins scattering, her heart going from anxious to genuinely terrified.

“I’m sorry. I’m — that was my fault, I slipped—”

From the door, his driver — a silent man named Gio who had been breathing through his mouth since they arrived — moved forward. Matteo raised one hand, stopping him without looking.

“Wait outside,” Matteo said.

“Sir—”

“Outside.”

Gio looked at Calla with the specific expression of a man informing her silently that her continued existence was conditional. Then he went through the glass door. The bell above it chimed.

They were alone.

Calla stood near the cutting table, staring at the small dark stain spreading through the white of his dress shirt over his left pectoral. She had stabbed a man who could have her evicted from this street. She had stabbed a man whose name made police inspectors look at their shoes.

She reached behind her for a scrap of clean linen.

“Press this,” she said, holding it out.

Matteo did not take it.

He stepped off the pedestal and walked toward her, and she was aware, with the animal awareness she usually managed to suppress during fittings, that he was significantly larger than the pedestal had made him appear. He stopped when she ran out of floor, when the edge of the drafting table was at her back.

He reached out — not for the cloth — and wrapped his hand around her wrist. His grip was very calm. He pulled her hand, the one with the linen, toward his chest and pressed it flat against the puncture.

His heartbeat came through the fabric. Steady. Unhurried. Bearing no relationship to the intensity in his eyes.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” he said.

“There’s no one specific,” she said. “I told you.”

“Not yet,” he said. “That’s what you said.”

“Yes.”

“That implies intention.”

“Everyone intends to eventually—”

“Who?” he said.

“There’s no one.”

His thumb moved along the inside of her wrist, slow and deliberate, directly over her pulse. The gesture was so plainly possessive that she felt her face go warm.

She tugged her hand. He held it.

“You don’t get to do this,” she said. “You’re a client.”

“I’m aware.”

“Then act like it.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The approximation of one.

He released her wrist.

He stepped back, adjusting his cuffs with the ease of a man returning from a brief interruption.

“Have this finished by Wednesday,” he said.

“You said Thursday.”

“Wednesday,” he said, walking toward the door. He glanced back. “And Calla.”

“What.”

“If anyone asks you out between now and then, tell them you’re occupied.”

The door closed. The bell rang.

Calla stood alone in the shop with the blood-spotted linen in her hand and the particular humiliation of recognizing that some part of her — the tired and lonely part she kept carefully suppressed — had not hated the last ten minutes as much as she should have.

She crumpled the linen and dropped it in the bin and went back to work.

—

She found the package on her kitchen counter on Monday evening.

This required some processing, because she had locked her apartment when she left that morning — she always locked her apartment — and the package had not existed when she left.

It was a matte black box, tied with a dark red ribbon, completely incongruous against the scratched Formica and the half-empty coffee jar and the dying plant she kept forgetting to water.

She stood in the kitchen for a full minute before she touched it.

The ribbon was real silk. The lid lifted to reveal a folded card on top of black tissue paper, and beneath that, heavy and cold and unmistakably expensive, an industrial-grade deadbolt lock the size of her fist.

The card was cream stock, handwriting in dark ink.

*Your current lock took eleven seconds. This one will take longer. — M*

Calla read it twice.

She set it down very carefully on the counter.

Then she stood in her kitchen and went through several emotional states in quick succession: fear, because someone had been in her apartment; humiliation, because he had been right about her lock; anger, because he had done this to demonstrate the point; and something else, something she was not going to name, because he had been paying attention to where she lived and whether she was safe.

She found her toolbox in the hall closet.

She installed the lock herself. It took forty minutes and she stripped two screws and had to redo the mounting plate, but when she was finished it worked, and she threw the bolt three times just to hear the sound of it.

—

Wednesday arrived the way difficult days always arrived: with bad coffee and worse light.

She had finished the suit. It hung on the valet stand in the center of the shop, charcoal wool with a silk lining she had selected herself, and it was the best thing she had made in two years. There were suits that were technically correct, and there were suits that were true, and this one was true.

Matteo came in at noon.

Alone. No Gio at the door. The shop felt different without the specific atmosphere of watched exits.

He looked at her first. Then at the suit.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” he said.

“I slept fine. Try it on.”

He went without arguing.

The suit, when he came out, was everything she had known it would be. It draped from his shoulders without apology. It moved when he moved.

She walked around him anyway. Professional habit. She knelt to look at the trouser break.

“The lock,” he said, from above her.

“Installed,” she said, from the floor.

“Did you read the note?”

“Your handwriting is acceptable.”

“You’re not going to thank me.”

“For breaking into my apartment to tell me my apartment is breakable into? No.”

She stood. He turned from the mirror to look at her directly.

“I didn’t break in,” he said. “I had someone assess your security. There’s a difference.”

“There is not a difference.”

“There is. A break-in takes something. An assessment tells you what’s missing.”

“It was uninvited either way.”

He looked at her for a moment. Something in his expression shifted — not retreating, but recalibrating.

“You’re right,” he said.

She had not expected that.

“It was uninvited,” he said. “I did it anyway because I needed to know you were safe. I should have asked first.”

Calla looked at him.

“I need my cuffs checked before a dinner tonight,” he said. “I want you there.”

“I don’t do outcalls.”

“You do now.”

“I’m not—”

“It’s a sit-down. If you’re visible with me, it says something about the shop. About what it means to be my tailor.” He paused. “I’ll pay you for the evening.”

“That’s not what I’m objecting to.”

“I know,” he said. “Come anyway.”

—

The restaurant in Queens had no windows in the private room. Just dark wood paneling and red leather and the smell of garlic and old cigars and men who kept their voices low because loud was for people who needed to compensate.

Calla sat in the corner booth and kept her hands in her lap and thought about all the sensible choices she had not made that had led to this corner.

About an hour in, a man across the table — shiny suit, loose jaw, the look of someone whose uncle’s position had given him more room than his judgment warranted — leaned forward and addressed the table in a way that clearly intended to address her.

“Since when does the South End bring civilians to business dinners, Matteo?”

The room went quiet.

Matteo set his fork down. He picked up his linen napkin, pressed it to the corner of his mouth, folded it, replaced it beside his plate. Then he looked up.

“Her name is Calla Voss,” he said. “She makes my suits.”

“I can see she’s a tailor,” the man said, and something in his tone made the words mean something other than what they said.

Matteo looked at him for a long moment.

“If you speak about her again,” he said, his voice entirely even, “I’ll have your seat at this table removed permanently. Yours specifically.”

The older man beside him placed a heavy hand on the man’s forearm. The man went pale. The room’s conversation resumed, cautiously.

Matteo did not look at Calla. He simply turned back to the table as though the interruption had been administrative.

Calla stared at her boots.

He had said her name like it was a fact about the world that required acknowledgment.

—

The man with the shiny suit found her on Thursday evening.

She was walking home through the garment district — she had refused the car, which in retrospect was the kind of pride that deserved to fail — and he came out of the space between two buildings with bruising on his face that had not been there at dinner and a revolver in his hand.

She had pepper spray in her coat pocket.

She had it halfway out when something happened behind him, and the gun went sideways across the wet pavement and Gio was standing over the man looking approximately as interested as someone taking out recycling.

A black car had appeared at the curb.

Matteo got out.

He walked through the rain without hurrying, in a dark suit, and walked straight to her without looking at the man on the ground.

His hands found her arms.

“Are you hurt.”

Not a question. An inventory.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t—”

“Are you hurt.”

“No.”

He looked at her face. At her hands. At the pepper spray she was still gripping.

Then he looked at Gio.

Something passed between them that she did not see and did not want to see.

“Get in the car,” he said to her.

“Matteo—”

“Calla.” His voice was not raised. “Get in the car.”

She got in the car.

There was a sound from the alley, brief and definitive.

She pressed her hands over her ears and looked at the ceiling of the car and breathed.

Gio got in the front. Matteo got in beside her. He reached across and took her hand. His grip was very firm. Her hand was shaking. She held on.

—

## PART 2

She did not go home.

The car simply did not take her there, and when she opened her mouth to object, Matteo looked at her in a way that made the objection stall.

The penthouse was cold and clean and enormous, all glass and dark materials, and it smelled like him, which was its own problem.

He told her to shower the way you tell someone who is going into shock to sit down — clinically, with a specific understanding of what was needed.

She showered.

The bathroom was larger than her living room. The water pressure was obscene. She stood under it until the cold in her bones was entirely replaced, and then she stood there a bit longer because exiting required decisions she was not ready to make.

On the counter outside the shower was a folded shirt. Black. Cotton. Extremely soft. It smelled like his cologne.

She put it on. It reached her knees.

She hated how immediately she stopped shaking.

He was in the living room when she came down. Dark sweatpants, plain shirt, a glass of something amber he was holding but not drinking. The city was spread behind the windows, rain-slicked and glittering, indifferent to what had happened below it.

She sat at the far end of the sofa.

He looked at the city.

“The man’s uncle runs the East Side,” he said. “He’ll know what happened by morning. The street will be unsettled.”

“How long.”

“A few weeks. Three, maybe.”

She absorbed this.

“You killed him,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you’re not troubled by that.”

“He pulled a gun on you,” Matteo said. “He made a choice. The choice had a consequence.” He looked at her. “You had a can of pepper spray.”

“I know.”

“Against a revolver.”

“I know. You’re right. That’s the most frightening part.” She pressed her hands together in her lap. “That I understand your logic. Three weeks ago I would not have understood your logic.”

“And now?”

“Now I can follow the argument,” she said. “And I don’t know when that happened.”

Matteo crossed the room and sat beside her. Close. His knee a few inches from hers. He reached out and took her hands apart, the way you open something that has been clenched too long, and his thumbs moved in slow circles across her knuckles.

“You are not going back to that apartment,” he said.

“I have a business.”

“I know.”

“I have clients. Appointments.”

“I know.”

“Matteo, I can’t just—”

“Not yet,” he said.

She looked at him.

“A few weeks. Until the street settles. You can work from here. There’s a room with good light. I had someone bring your equipment.”

“Without asking.”

“Without asking,” he agreed. “Because I knew you’d say no and I needed you to say yes eventually and I didn’t have time to wait for eventually.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“You understand,” she said carefully, “that you are an impossible person.”

“I’ve been told.”

“Three weeks,” she said.

“Three weeks.”

“And then I go back.”

“And then you go back.”

“Okay,” she said.

She leaned back against the sofa. He did not let go of her hands. Outside, the rain kept falling, and she sat in a glass tower above the city and thought about her shop on Archer Street and wondered if you could lose something slowly enough that you didn’t notice it was gone.

—

Three weeks was enough time to learn a person.

Not completely. Not in the ways that took years. But in the specific domestic ways that accumulate in shared space: that he drank his coffee before it finished brewing and then complained it was bitter. That he moved through the penthouse at night with the methodical quiet of someone carrying something without letting it make noise. That he read physical newspapers and annotated the margins and left them on the kitchen table like evidence of thought.

She set up in the room with good light and worked.

He came to observe, occasionally. He never offered opinions she didn’t ask for. He brought her coffee without being asked, which she suspected was in some way an apology that he didn’t have the vocabulary to make explicitly.

On the twelfth day, she finished a commission she had been behind on — a wedding suit for a client she had been afraid to lose — and she laid it over the back of a chair and looked at it.

Matteo appeared in the doorway.

“Whose is that?”

“Client. Baxter wedding.”

He looked at the suit.

“You’re good at this,” he said. Not a compliment designed for effect. An observation.

“I know,” she said.

“Your father taught you?”

“From the beginning.” She ran her thumb along the seam of the lapel. “He said you could tell everything about a person by how they wore clothes. Not what they wore. How.”

“What do I tell you?”

She looked at him.

“You dress like someone who learned early that appearance is armor,” she said. “Every suit you’ve ever worn has been built to take up space, to say something before you do.” She paused. “The one I made you fits differently.”

“How?”

“It just fits,” she said. “It lets you be the size you actually are, instead of the size you want to be perceived as.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“That’s a significant observation about a piece of clothing,” he said.

“That’s what tailors do,” she said.

—

On the nineteenth night, she woke to the sound of him on the phone in the next room, his voice too low to make out words, just the cadence — clipped, final, the voice he used when something was being decided. She lay in the unfamiliar bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the shop on Archer Street and the particular quality of light that came through the front window in the afternoon.

She thought about Matteo.

She thought about the fact that she was thinking about Matteo.

She got up and made coffee.

He came in while it was brewing, hair not yet organized, which she had learned was the only version of him that was genuinely unguarded.

“Sleep okay?” he asked.

“Fine. You?”

“A few hours.”

She handed him a mug. He took it.

They stood in the kitchen in the early morning with the city still dark below the windows, and it was domestic in a way that she was aware of and did not address, and he was aware of too — she could tell by the way he looked out the window instead of at her.

“Three more days,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And then I go back.”

“Yes.”

She looked at her coffee.

“When you came to the shop the first time,” she said. “You asked me if I had a boyfriend.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

He looked at her then. His eyes in the morning light were less opaque than usual.

“I had been in that shop twice before that appointment,” he said. “Different alterations. Small things. I don’t think you noticed me particularly.”

“I noticed you.”

“You noticed a client.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what you were.”

“The third time, I noticed you,” he said. “The way you moved around the fitting room. The way you said what you thought without building up to it. The way you didn’t treat the work like it was less than it was.” He looked at his mug. “I asked because I needed to know.”

“And when I said not yet—”

“I understood what not yet meant,” he said. “I didn’t like it.”

“You were jealous of a hypothetical person.”

“Yes.”

“That’s unreasonable.”

“I’m aware.”

She almost smiled.

“Matteo,” she said.

“Yes.”

“When I go back to the shop.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to come in for another fitting.”

“Probably.”

“You’re going to ask me about the cuffs, or the shoulders, or something specific and technical.”

“Probably.”

“And then you’re going to ask me again.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Yes,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

She picked up her coffee and walked back to the room with good light, and behind her she heard him exhale, quiet and deliberate, as though he had been holding something for exactly as long as she had.

—

## PART 3

Three weeks and two days.

That was how long it took for the street to settle and for Calla to walk back through the door of the shop on Archer Street with her keys in her hand and the particular feeling of a person returning to a version of themselves they are not entirely sure still fits.

The shop smelled the same. Damp wool and dust and the faint chemical edge of pressing steam. The valet stand was where she had left it. The trifold mirror reflected the afternoon light in the same way it always had.

She stood in the center of the room for a moment.

Then she put on her apron and started work.

The first week was relearning the rhythm of it: the clients who had waited, the alterations that had piled up, the commission she was going to have to extend. She called each client herself. She said she had been dealing with a family situation and she was back and she was sorry for the inconvenience.

Most people were fine about it.

Gio sat outside in a car on the street. This was not discussed. She had considered objecting and had decided that picking her battles was a form of intelligence.

Matteo called on Wednesday evening while she was closing up.

“How was it?” he said.

“Good. Normal.”

“Normal,” he repeated, as though testing the word.

“That’s what I wanted,” she said. “Normal.”

“Did you get it?”

She looked around the shop. The pins on the board. The bolts of fabric on the shelves. The sewing machine she had inherited from her father, which worked better than anything manufactured in the last decade.

“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

A pause.

“I’m coming in Thursday,” he said.

“I assumed.”

“The jacket from last month. Something’s off in the sleeve.”

“The sleeve is fine.”

“It’s bothering me.”

“Matteo.”

“Noon.”

She closed her eyes briefly.

“Noon is fine,” she said.

—

He arrived at noon exactly.

She had known he would. Precision was one of the things she had learned about him in three weeks of shared space. He was not early because early suggested eagerness. He was not late because late suggested disrespect. He arrived when he said he would, because that was who he was.

He came in alone.

No Gio. No coat. Dark suit, white shirt, the shoulder holster visible because he had stopped bothering to conceal it around her somewhere in the second week.

He stepped onto the pedestal without being asked.

She took her measuring tape from the pin cushion on her wrist.

She stepped onto the wooden stool and looped the tape across his shoulders. The familiar smell of him — vetiver, something sharp beneath it, the cold of the outside air still in his jacket.

Her knuckles brushed the line of his collarbone.

She did not flinch.

She read the number.

She moved to his chest, her hands pulling the tape snug. The steady, calm weight of his heartbeat came through. She knew its pace now. She had fallen asleep near it and woken up near it and she knew it the way you know things that live in your body rather than your head.

She stood.

She looked at the suit.

“The sleeve is fine,” she said.

“I know.”

She looked at him.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

The question landed in the shop the same way it had the first time. Low. Unhurried. Dropping into the quiet with the weight of something that had been thought about carefully before being said.

But she was not on a stool this time. She was on the floor, standing in front of him, and her hands were steady, and she knew what she was about to say, and she had known for some time.

She set the tape measure down on the cutting table.

She stepped forward, closing the remaining space between them, and took hold of his lapels.

“No,” she said.

His eyes darkened.

She watched him register it — not the volatile jealousy of the lighter snapping shut. Something slower. Something he had been patient enough to wait for.

His hand came up and curved around the back of her neck, warm and certain.

“No,” she said again, in case it needed to be said again. “I don’t.”

The shop was quiet around them. The afternoon light came through the front window at its usual angle. The measuring tapes hung in their drawer. The trifold mirror reflected two people standing closer than a fitting required.

Matteo said nothing.

He pulled her in and kissed her — not desperate, not fueled by adrenaline. Deliberate. He had thought about it, she could tell, in the same way he thought about everything: carefully, with attention to what it meant.

She kissed him back.

When they pulled apart, she was still holding his lapels.

“The jacket fits fine,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

“You came here for something else.”

“Yes.”

“You should have just said so.”

“You would have said it wasn’t appropriate.”

“It’s still not appropriate,” she said.

“I know.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Are you going to object?”

She looked at him.

At the scar on his jaw. At the small imperfection of his nose, broken and reset. At the dark amber of his eyes in the afternoon light of her father’s shop.

“Not yet,” she said.

And this time, the lighter stayed still.

—

*THE END*