Chapter 20 #3
The shop murmurs on the far side of the wall. Fabric, pins, his hands, his eyes at close range with no dinner table to ration them, and what happens in me isn’t melting, it’s the opposite, something aligning, load transferring onto both feet.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“That was a real answer. You get the consequences of real answers.”
I reach up, pull his mouth down to mine, pins and all.
His hand closes over my lips before any sound escapes.
“Quiet,” he says. Barely a word, mostly breath.
“Make me,” I answer into his palm, softer still, and feel the shiver that runs through him.
He turns me to the triple mirror. Three versions of him stand behind three versions of me.
His jacket is gone, collar open, color high on his cheekbones.
He holds my eyes in the glass while his mouth finds the bare slope of my shoulder.
Nothing touches the middle of me. His hands already know the new borders.
One anchors my hip. The other slips under the pinned silk, gathers the fabric at the back, and finds my pussy.
I’m already wet. His fingers push inside, two thick strokes that make my knees soften, then he pulls them free.
I hear the quiet sound of his zipper. He frees his cock, lifts the back of the dress just enough, and notches the head against me.
In the mirrors I watch him do it. Three versions of me in a pinned couture dress, three versions of him behind me, and then he pushes in.
The stretch is sudden, deep. He sinks all the way inside in one slow thrust, filling me completely, and stays there for a second with his forehead against the back of my shoulder. Then he starts to fuck me.
He moves in steady, deep strokes, hips rolling against my ass, cock dragging almost all the way out before sinking back to the hilt.
The wet sound of it is obscene in the quiet room.
Every thrust pushes the air from my lungs and I have to bite down on his fingers to stay silent.
In the triple mirror I watch myself being fucked, my body jolting forward with each drive, his cock disappearing into me again and again, the pinned silk shifting around my hips.
One hand keeps my hip, the other keeps my mouth, holding me steady, fucking me slow and filthy while the shop murmurs on the other side of the curtain.
A pin catches his palm in the bunched silk.
He doesn’t curse. His chest jumps once against my back with a swallowed laugh and mine answers it.
We stand there shaking in silence for a few seconds, his cock still buried deep inside me.
Then he starts again, harder now, deeper.
He fucks me with long, heavy strokes that make my legs tremble.
“The facilities are excellent,” I breathe against his palm when I can.
His pace changes. He drives in hard and stays there, grinding deep as he starts to come.
I feel the first thick pulse of it, then another, and another, deep inside me.
He pumps his cum into me in heavy spurts, hips jerking with each one, filling me until I can feel it leaking around his cock.
One low, ruined sound escapes him. My hand is already moving, covering his mouth in time to catch most of it. His own rule handed back.
After, stillness. Our foreheads rest together in the glass, three of him, three of me, the pins somehow still holding, him still deep inside me, his cum warm where he left it.
Bruni knocks four minutes later, or four years, one of the two.
We are composed. The dress is somehow still pinned, one seam’s chalk line smudged in a way I watch her notice and consign to the deep professional silence where women like her keep their pensions.
“The green suits madam,” is all she says, through the curtain, and I hear commerce being conducted beyond the wall while I do up buttons with fingers that have forgotten their union training.
Lev’s borrowed consulting room, at six, smells like antiseptic and other people’s nerves.
The doppler finds the gallop on the first pass, faster than my heart, indifferent to Milan.
Khristofer stands with his hand around mine, his thumb going still, completely still, at the sound.
Strong, Lev pronounces. Insultingly strong.
He says something after that about measurements at the next visit, but I’m not listening, I’m watching a man in a dark suit stare at a beige machine like it’s an oracle.
The cars run home along the dark lake, my new life in garment bags in the second car, the new gold warm on my collarbone, not taken off, his hand and mine on the seat between us, negotiating nothing for once.
Somewhere past Monza, watching the headlights eat the road home, I stop pretending not to know it.
I stopped reaching for him because of danger some time ago.
The danger’s still there. The reaching changed sides.
I’m reaching because I’m falling. The two feel identical in the dark, and only one of them ends with being caught.