Chapter 15 Natalie #2
He grips my jaw and tips it up, makes me look at him.
“The first time we met, I had a gun aimed at the asshole hurting you. The second time, I had that gun pointed at your head. You’ve known from day one who I was.
I’ve told you to stop me, to make me go.
Told you I would if you told me to. But you didn’t, did you?
The other night when I fucked you , when I told you to tell me to leave, you didn’t.
Again. You. Did. Not. Well, it’s too fucking late now, Natalie. ”
“I didn’t intend…” I shake my head, try to clear it.
“What? You didn’t intend what?”
But the words that come into my head make no sense.
“What?” he growls, this time slapping both hands flat on the wall on either side of my head, making me wince and cower, caging me in.
He must see my terror because he exhales, rubs his face with his hands. “Fuck.” It takes him a few minutes but when he speaks again, his voice is controlled. “What didn’t you intend?”
Someone clears their throat. Sergio takes a deep breath in, clearly irritated, and turns to Eric who’s standing beneath the arched entry.
“You need to see something,” he says, then adds something on in Italian.
Sergio walks over to him, and they both look at Eric’s phone.
“Fucking bastard,” Sergio mutters. “Give me a minute.” Eric leaves and Sergio comes to me. “I have to go.”
“Where?”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Are you fixing it? Is this you fixing it? Will you come back with another bruise on your knuckles? Maybe blood on your shirt this time?”
His eyes narrow and when he steps closer, I take two steps back. “Don’t fucking test me. Not now.”
I swallow. He’s warning me and for the first time since I’ve known him, I realize I don’t know the lengths this man will go to, the violence he’s used to.
The violence he’s caused. I thought I did, but I was wrong.
To think you know something but then to really understand it, to feel it, those are two very different things.
He clears his throat. “Natalie—”
I look away, fold my arms across my chest. “Just go.”
“There’s some food—”
“I’m not hungry. Just go. Go fucking fix it.”
“Trust me, Natalie.”
I walk away. I don’t want to hear anymore.
I need to get Pepper settled. I find her in the kitchen eating the last of her dinner, oblivious to the shit storm in the other room.
I don’t turn around when I hear the two men speaking in hushed tones in the hallway.
The front door opens and closes, and I hear a car’s engine start.
Pepper licks my face when I sit on the floor beside her.
I don’t know if I’m angry or hurt or scared or what.
Sergio takes liberties, assumes things, and thing is, I know that’s him.
I know this is how it will be with him. Tonight is just a preview of what I’m signing up for.
Irritated with myself, I get up, take Pepper by the collar.
“Come on, let’s find ourselves a bedroom.” Because I’m not sleeping in his.
It’s four in the morning when I abruptly wake up, bolting upright in the strange bed, gasping for breath.
The nightmare is gone as soon as my eyes open but it takes me a moment to remember where I am. Why I’m here.
Pepper’s snore comes from the foot of the bed. I draw the covers back and get up. I don’t want to sleep again. I don’t want to go back to that dream.
Quietly, I walk out the door and into the hallway. It’s dark, and I wonder if he’s back yet. If I’m alone in this big, strange house. But when I reach the top of the stairs, I hear a sound. Music. It’s muted, like it’s coming from far away.
Barefoot, I walk down the stairs without switching on any lights. It’s eerie this time of night. Old houses always are.
The music grows louder as I near the bottom of the stairs. It’s coming from his study. I go to it and stop, and I hear him. He’s singing along with the music. I recognize the song. Darlin’ by Houndmouth.
I feel like I’m intruding on something very private so I knock once, quietly, before opening the door.
Sergio’s sitting behind his desk. His jacket’s off and his shirt’s unbuttoned half way down, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. His hair’s ruffled, like he’s been running his hands through it, and his eyes are bloodshot. I know why. The bottle on the corner of the desk is almost empty.
“You’re back,” I say, when he just sits there and looks at me. I realize the song is on repeat because it dies down then starts up again.
Without waiting for an invitation, I step inside and close the door behind me. It smells like him in here. Like his aftershave and whiskey.
I look down at what’s on the desk. At the large parchment that spans the entire surface. He’s holding two pencils in his hand. Charcoal. His white shirt has smears of it and so do his hands and forearms. The triangle wedge of a worn eraser sits near his glass.
He doesn’t get up when I go to the desk. When I look down at the large sheet. It takes me a moment to realize it’s a family tree.
I begin to read the names, the dates. There are symbols next to some of them—a small cross. It’s the only thing that’s not charcoal, but red marker. The crosses are the only permanent things, I realize. All the rest can be erased.
Sergio watches me as I study his lineage, follow the line from great-grandfather, to grandfather, to his father, Franco Benedetti. To his mother. To Sergio.
His brothers’ names are beside his. Alongside those, I see lines drawn, boxes prepared for a second name. But next to his, where there was a line, it’s now just smudged, erased. Just his birthday beneath with a dash. An eerie emptiness on the other side of that dash. A sort of permanence.
When I look up, I find him watching me. “Did you draw this?”
He pushes his chair back, rises to his feet, gestures for me to come to his side. I do and he takes my hand, draws me closer, stands me between himself and the desk.
Sergio closes his hands over the backs of mine, takes the pointer finger of my right one and traces a line up to his father, to another name I don’t know.
Presses it over the red cross—it’s shaped like a cross from the days of the crusades.
Gothic almost. Like he spent time shaping each one.
Outlining each with darkest black, colored each in deepest red.
“The cross is a mob killing,” he says. And, without a word, we trace ever single macabre cross on the sheet, he and I. I don’t count. I lose track. I feel him behind me, feel the weight of his silence. The meaning of it.
When we get to his name, he traces the erased line. He’s standing so close, I feel the heat of his body behind mine, the tickle of his warm whiskey-breath on the nape of my neck. The light kisses there.
“You know what I didn’t intend?” he asks, picking up our earlier conversation, just before he’d abruptly left. “I didn’t intend on falling in love with you.”
The song begins again, the tone and lyrics dark and heavy.
It makes me shudder, makes an icy chill run the length of my spine.
I should be happy, right? Aren’t these words every girl wants to hear?
Why does it feel like a cement brick has just landed in my belly?
“This one,” he starts, releasing my left hand, wrapping his around my middle, pulling me to him, while using our right hands to point to the remnants of an erased box connected to his.
“It’s for you.” His hand snakes up to cup my breast, squeeze it, then wrap around my throat, fingers gripping my jaw just a little too hard, like he wants me to look, to really see.
A moment later, he extends my right arm out, forcing us both to bend forward as he wraps my fingers around the edge of the desk, releasing my throat and taking my left arm to stretch it to the opposite side.
He pushes my hair off to the side and I lay my cheek on the drawing, knowing it’ll come away smeared with charcoal. Maybe a little red, too.
“Stay,” he says, his breath warm on my ear, lips soft when he kisses my cheek. He straightens, and I see him in my periphery, watch him loom over me, watching me. It’s so dark, he’s almost a shadow wrapped within a shadow.
His eyes glisten, and when the next part of the song plays, he sings along, the words cold and dark and wet make my heart hurt.
I hear him open a drawer, take something out, but I can’t see what it is. His hands are on my back. Sliding down over my hips. Raising the oversized T-shirt I’m wearing high on my back.
Blood surges to my sex and I crane my neck to watch him. His focus is intent on his work as he drags my panties down over my hips, my thighs. Lets them slide to the floor and waits until I step out of them to stand between my legs. To take my ass in his hands to splay me open.
I swallow. He’s watching me there, and a moment later, his thumb comes to rest against my asshole, presses lightly there.
When I tense, and begin to straighten, he squeezes his hands over my hips.
“I said stay.”
I lay back down. He pushes the tip of his finger inside me. I realize what he took out of the drawer a moment later when I feel the cool drops fall on the cleft of my ass.
“Sergio,” I start.
“I’ve been struggling ever since I met you,” he says, beginning to rub the cream into me. It feels strange. Different, but good. “I know what being with me will mean for you and part of me is screaming to let you go. Not to condemn you to this life.”
When he slides the fingers of his other hand to my clit, I suck in a breath. He keeps rubbing, and I hear the wet sounds of my arousal, hear his own breath coming shorter. And when he pushes a finger slowly inside me, I let out a moan.
“Natalie,” he says, and I hear him unbuckling his belt, unzipping his pants.
I can’t answer though, not when he’s touching me like that.
“I need to be inside you. To come inside you.”
I’m not protected. He can’t come inside my pussy.
He’s rubbing his cock between my folds, dipping into my wet pussy as a second finger penetrates my ass. It hurts, but it feels good too, and I want him inside me. I want him to come inside me. He’s not the only one who needs this. Needs to be this close.
He sings louder with the refrain and he pulls out of my pussy and I look back, watch him pumping his cock with his hand, smearing cream all over it, watching me as he sings along, glancing away only for a moment to draw his fingers out and line his cock up to my asshole and when he pushes in, I gasp, and tense and arch my back and grip the edges of the desk hard.
It hurts, he’s so thick, but he rubs my back, takes his time, stretches me slowly.
When he strokes my clit, I find myself lifting to him, wanting him, and the sounds in the room, I think they’re coming from me, short gasps, moans, and fuck I’m going to come and he’s pushing deeper and deeper inside me and a moment later, I’m coming and he’s watching me, burying his cock inside me, moving slow and deep until it’s over, until the wave passes.
That’s when he grips my hips and fucks me. That’s when he really fucks me, drawing all the way out, thrusting back inside, the base sounds of an animal rutting coming from him, from his chest.
I know the moment he’s going to release, to explode inside me and when he thrusts one final time, laying his full weight over me, his chest and face wet with sweat, and his cock throbs and I feel him release and empty and we’re so close, so fucking close.
Closer than we’ve ever been. And when he stretches his arms over mine and intertwines his fingers with my own and he’s still throbbing inside me, I think I don’t want this to end.
I don’t want to ever be apart from him. I don’t want for him to ever go away.
For us to ever leave this room. Because here, we’re safe. Here, he’s safe.
Sweat mixes with tears and when he finally pulls out of me, I’m spent. I have nothing left. My knees buckle and he lifts me in his arms and I just cling to him.
It’s a long while later when we’re upstairs and he’s bathed me and put me in his bed when I ask him:
“Why, Sergio?”
It’s that song, the haunting melody playing in my head. He had on repeat. I don’t know how many times I heard it. Don’t know how many times he’d heard it before I got there.
“Why don’t you sleep at night?” I ask.
He doesn’t look at me when he answers. Rolls over on his back instead, and stares up at the ceiling.
“Sergio?”
He turns his head. Studies me for a long moment before answer.
“Because time is running out.”