CHAPTER 24 #3
The bench is steel under me; the pillows hold my head; his metal palm at my hip is the temperature of a held cup now where it had been cool against the throat, and the temperature climbing in it is how I count him.
When I go over the edge again it is because he stops me at it and will not let me fall until he chooses.
He stalls fully seated, the head of him pressed to the front of me and held there, and the climb that was coming hangs suspended on the stillness — and then he restarts, one half-degree steeper, and the wave that he kept on the lip breaks the instant he moves, which is the instant he meant.
It is a discipline, this stopping; it is the opposite of Luca's continuous hands.
There is a catch in my breath at the throat that I do not let anyone see.
Marcus has been listening for it, his ear at my temple the whole minute, and his hand finds mine and laces our fingers and brings my knuckles to his mouth.
Luca's mouth at my breast bites the gentlest beat.
The wave breaks and I make the sound I have been making and underneath it I hear Adrian say it — soft, controlled, gentle, his voice the only one of the three that can hold the word tonight without it collapsing into something else.
"Good girl."
Two words. The frame is tender; he is naming the well-done of me, not labeling me, and the inflection is his and only his. Luca and Marcus do not echo it. It is what Adrian has, here. He says it once, against my mouth, and does not say it again.
He comes when I come. Inside me. His head goes down to the curve of my throat and stays there.
His metal palm flattens against my sternum, the lattice the warmest I have felt it, a slow bronze pulse against the bone.
He withdraws careful. Marcus has a folded towel ready — one of Wren's three, white, cool — and hands it across my body without looking.
Adrian wipes once, slow, considerate. The towel goes onto the workbench beside the knife.
"Two for her," Adrian says, soft. "Hold position. You don't move; we come to you."
I stay. My ribs lift and fall. The pillow at my head smells of the soap Wren brought up at nineteen-thirty.
I want Luca.
I have been wanting him like the inside of a held breath since he stood between my thighs at the foot of the bench an hour ago.
I turn my head against the pillow toward him.
The platinum bleach at the front of his hair has come loose.
His hazel-brown eyes are wide. The medallion swings warm at my throat as I turn — his disc, on me — and his eyes drop to it on reflex, a maker counting the one piece of himself he has let out into the world and finding it safe.
"Querida," he says.
He climbs onto the bench with me — not over me; with me — and lies between my thighs, propping on his forearms, face above mine.
Marcus has shifted to the head of the bench, one hand on my forehead, the other pulling the cobalt-blue ends of my hair clear of my cheek.
Adrian sits down again in the chair at my right hip, the metal hand loose at his thigh, the human hand on the inside of my right knee, a slow circle drawn with the thumb.
Luca's eyes find the gold rim of my left iris and hold there, the loupe ring steady at the edge of the lamp-pool. "I have you mapped, querida," he says, low — "every reading off your face — and I am not letting one go. " He waits. I give him the small dip of the chin, and he has it.
He slides into me, slow, the slow Luca has been since the first time he closed the workshop door behind me.
I am swollen and oversensitive from the two before him and the stretch of him now pulls a thin sound out of my throat I do not try to stop; he feels it and goes still inside me for a breath, letting my body take his measure before he asks it for anything.
His index finger touches once against my hip — one soft beat, the smallest signal he has, fainter than Morse and meaning more than any of it — and then his hands quit their patterning altogether, the thing they only do when he has lost the ability to count, and rest open and unmoving on my face for the length of one breath.
Then he moves.
Luca in heat is the most lyrical of the three.
The technical language burns off; what is left is the lyric of his hands.
He maps me — the angles, the ratios, the there of me, the place where the system answers back — and stays at that angle.
His forehead comes down to mine and he speaks against my mouth, a thread of Spanish under the English, his grammar coming apart now that the subject of every sentence has stopped being a system and become the woman he loves.
"Querida. Dios — no te me vayas. Aquí. Aquí conmigo."
Adrian's thumb circling slow at the inside of my right knee. Marcus's hand still on my forehead, a thumb at my hairline. Luca's hand under my left thigh, lifting, finding the angle.
The last one Luca draws out of me is the long one — building along the spine and across the hips and up through the throat and out at the temples in a flare of heat, slower to crest and slower to fall because by now my whole body has been worked open and there is nothing left in it that resists.
My left hand finds his shoulder; the right finds Adrian's wrist on my knee; my mouth finds Marcus's at the head of the bench.
All three touching me at once, and me touching all three of them at once, every limb of me closing a contact, the circuit shut at last and live. The wave breaks.
Luca comes inside me when I come. His hands fall still on my face once more — and this stillness is the loudest thing he has, the count gone out of him entirely — and then he says my name. Just the name.
"Eliza."
His forehead at mine.
He stays inside me a long beat. The chestnut of his hair has fallen past his ear and lies against my cheek; Adrian's thumb on my knee is steady; Marcus's mouth at the corner of mine.
Time leaks back into the workshop. Lamp on the arm. Hum of the air-handler. The faint hiss of the sub-level seal — not a sound but a pressure, the bunker holding. Three pairs of hands on me, none of them moving. The breath of three men slow around mine.
Luca withdraws careful. He kisses the inside of my left wrist, then the silver-wire tattoo down the inside of my left forearm, then the crook of the elbow where the line of ink runs out into skin. He lays my arm back at my side.
"Bath," Adrian says. The calibration of after, returning to him.
"Bath," Luca says. "Then sleep."
"Bath," Marcus says, dry, "then this workshop nest, then a country I do not yet know the name of."
Luca laughs against my temple. Adrian's mouth goes up at one corner and stops there. The small dry not-quite of it is worth more to me than another man's full laugh would be — I catch myself smiling back at the ceiling before I have decided to, and the smile makes the choice for me.
They lift me together, and there is no cargo in the handling of it; three men who have spent a night learning one body between them gather it up carefully.
Adrian under my shoulders, the metal palm spread at the small of my back; Luca under my knees; Marcus at the sink already, water warm, the cake of plain soap unwrapped from its waxed paper.
The cobalt blanket folded at the head of the nest, Adrian's charcoal shirt folded at the foot.
They wash me at the workshop basin, no tub tonight — just the steel sink and the three of them and the late hour pressing us toward sleep.
Luca rinses my hair with warm water from a chipped ceramic pitcher that must be Wren's too.
Adrian washes my face with the cloth, the metal palm cupping the back of my head, the prosthetic cool against my scalp.
Marcus washes my hands and forearms, slow, and kisses the surgical scar at the inside of the left wrist soft as a sentence ending.
"Paid in full," Marcus says against the wrist, low, pitching the broker's phrase down into something that for once means exactly what it says. "Nothing owing tonight, Eliza. Account closed."
They dry me with the second white towel and put me in Adrian's charcoal shirt — the buttons fitted by the metal palm at the throat, the human hand at the second — too long, the cuffs to my fingertips, the collar his.
Luca picks up the brush from my bunkroom; it has waited on the bench all night and I had not seen it.
He sits behind me and brushes my hair with the precision he uses on a calibration board, laying each cobalt-blue end against my back as if mounting wire on a substrate.
Marcus, at the sink, washes the three small white towels in cold water and wrings them with the care of a man who knows warm sets and cold lifts.
He brings out the small white pill-case of breath mints he carries in private, takes one, sets the case on the bench beside the knife.
Mint and citrus solvent and the soap on me — the room's whole inventory in three breaths.
Adrian builds the nest. He layers the cobalt blanket and a gray wool one and a thicker one Luca produced from a corner cabinet, across the bench's clean steel and along the floor at the foot, because the bench is not big enough for four.
He kills the main overhead — the only light now the warm filament of the bench arm and the cobalt floor-strip pulsing slow at the seam of the wall — turns the lock, one slow click, and comes back.