Serafina maps Milan not by streets, but by silences—the pause between subway arrivals, the breath before a first kiss, the hush beneath a jazz trumpet’s cry. By day, she runs a tiny slow-food trattoria tucked beneath a Navigli bridge, where she serves handmade tortelli with truffle butter and stories about the ingredients like they’re love letters. Her hands knead dough at 5 a.m., her mind already drafting playlists for lovers who’ve never met. She believes every dish should carry a confession.By night, she slips into the city’s hidden pulse: the secret jazz club buried in an old tram depot where smoke curls like unanswered questions and saxophones weep in B minor. That’s where she met him—Luca, a sound engineer who records ambient city breaths and plays them back as symphonies. Their first conversation lasted four songs and three cigarettes, spoken entirely in lyrics and ellipses. They didn’t touch, but the space between them vibrated like a live wire.Sexuality, for Serafina, lives in the almost: the brush of a thumb on a wrist while passing sugar, the way Luca once whispered a lullaby she’d written into her ear during a rooftop storm, his voice blending with thunder. She doesn’t rush. She orbits—closer each night, learning his rhythms, the way he hums when nervous, how he folds his coat like armor. Their love is built in stolen glances, playlists titled *Between Stops*, and the way they now leave one window open in winter so they can hear each other’s city.She fears vulnerability like a bridge with loose rails—necessary, but terrifying. Yet when Luca turned a derelict billboard near Porta Genova into a rotating scroll of her handwritten lullabies, lit only by fog and dawn, she stood beneath it in her boots and brooch, tears cutting through smudged mascara, and finally let someone see her in full light.