A/N - They're making Ferrante into a TV show!! I can't wait. It better be fucking perfect.

And now, let's begin.

***

How I imagine Nino:

***

We arrive at Bruno's house. Lila demands I come in to say hello. I hate myself for caving to my own regard for customs, for being so typically good, so polite.

 In the kitchen, Nino is cooking a sauce. The smell of slow-roasting tomatoes waft towards my nose, like simmering pheromones- sex, musk, wanting. Small beads of sweat cling to his aquiline nose. My sex contracts in desire. I clutch the counter as his eyes meet mine.

Lila has dragged me here. I wonder what infidelity has done to her? She knows things that I cannot know. I imagine her body is my own. That it was us swimming together, us lying in the warm sand, us walking under the moon talking about revolution and the neighborhood and the war. 

Would the world notice if I gave in? Would my mother sense a difference in my gait? Would my teachers hear it in my voice? I cannot let Lila win, let her ruin my future so that we are equals again.

I look towards Lila, sure she can see my yearning for Nino.

Instead I find her smiling, with a look I've never seen before. With her eyes, she is offering him to me.

Nino hands us each an Aperol spritz, the color of flames. It is sweet and bitter at once.

Nino is hungry. His eyes graze over my body, warm from the walk over here and from the heat of the kitchen. His pants bulge, a hurried knot tied in the apron on his waist. "Lenu...," he whispers, sliding across the floor towards me. In one swift movement, he has me by the hair. My neck and face are pulled towards his and he presses me against the counter. "I have always wanted you."

He traces a hand down my shivering chest, where droplets of sweat have collected. His lips meet mine, full and hungry. I grip the back of his head, his shoulders, and open my mouth. How long have I wanted this, him? Since I saw him with professor Galiani's daughter. And farther back. Since I realized that only a man with ideas could make me moan the way Nino does. We ravish each other with kisses, frantic, desperate. I am in a dream. I do not want to wake.

My eyelids flutter, tension gathering between my legs. Through my eyelashes, I catch a glimpse of Lila. Like a phantom or a ghost, she peers over Nino's shoulder, eyes trained on me. She surveys my body, where Nino's hands have torn my breasts from my suit.

She has wanted this. To give me Nino. To prove her power over me. 

I question myself and her intentions. Is Lila doing this for Nino? She knows that Nino desires me, and so she brings me to him, as a way of preserving her own power, over both of us. Like a cat presenting a half-stunned mouse to his owner, well aware that I have no escape. I offer myself to both of them, willingly or with no free will at all. Fate has brought the three of us together, and she too is ready to have her way with us.