Chapter 6Massimo #2
She comes against my mouth. Not quiet. Her hand fists hard in my hair and she says fuck once, sharp, like she has not said it in a year, and her thighs close on my shoulders and open again and her hips move against my mouth in three small rolls she has not authorized.
The sound she makes the third time is the one I am going to want at four in the morning for the rest of my life.
I do not stop until she pushes my forehead with the flat of her hand because she is past where stopping was a choice.
I stand.
I undo my belt. Trousers. Her eyes are on my hands. Tracking. The reporter is back already, three breaths after she came, and that is the most dangerous thing about her and I want her again because of it.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. Steady.
I push into her slow. All the way. Her breath goes out in one piece and her hand comes up flat against my chest, not stopping me, marking the place where it landed in her.
I hold a second so she can have it. Then another.
The bulb hums. The water moves under the floor.
I am inside her and my hand is at the back of her neck and her other hand is on my hip pulling me closer and the burn book is six inches from her shoulder and I do not look at it.
"You feel," I start, and then I do not finish the sentence the way I would have finished it for anyone else, because there is no version of the rest of it that is not the truth, and I have not told her the truth about anything except her father yet tonight. "Tight."
"I know."
" Wet. "
"I noticed."
She does not smile. Her hand pulls me in.
I move. Not fast. The bench takes it. So does she.
Her palm on my chest, then my jaw, then the back of my neck.
Reading me. I read her. Her hips at this angle, not that one.
Her breath going short when I drive deeper.
The small clean way her teeth come down on her bottom lip and let go and come down again.
The longer I take the more of her I get back. So I take.
" Harder. "
"Say it again."
"Harder."
I give her harder. Her head goes back. The pearls click once on the bench beside the page where I set them and her hand finds them blindly and pushes them aside.
Not the page. The pearls. The second clean thing I will remember from this boathouse forever.
She does not move the page. She moves the dead woman's necklace.
She comes the second time with my hand at the back of her neck and my forehead against hers and her breath in my mouth.
Her thighs close on me. Her hand fists in the back of my collar.
She says fuck again, lower this time, and then the thing that breaks me.
"Massimo." Plain. Not a question. Not a performance.
The way she said I hear you earlier with the book between us.
I go.
I do not pull out. I do not pull back. My forehead stays against hers and my hand stays at the back of her neck and what comes out of me when I come is not a word but the start of one, her name again, the real one, half in her hair and half against her mouth.
Caterina. Like the first time I read it on a page at 4:00 a.m. and did not say it out loud because I had not earned it yet.
She holds. I hold. The bulb hums. The boathouse breathes. Somewhere outside the gravel settles where I walked over it an hour ago and there is no other sound for a count of five.
After, I do not move. She does not move. Her back's against my chest, my mouth in her hair, the dress half on her shoulders again because one of us got it there and neither of us remembers which. The pearls are on the workbench. The page is open three inches from her hand. Neither of us closes it.
Her breath evens. Mine doesn't, for a count. Then it does.
"Why a witness who has a reason," she says. Quiet. To the wall.
"Because a witness without one tells it for money."
"And one with a reason."
"Tells it for the reason."
Her hand comes up and rests on my forearm where it's across her waist. Light pressure. Her thumb moves once.
"You haven't asked," she says.
"I know."
"I haven't said."
"I know."
She slides off the workbench. Slow. Her feet find the floor. She buttons the dress from the bottom up, fast, fingers that don't shake. I watch her hands. I watch the pearls. She picks them up off the wood and fastens them at her nape without looking in any mirror because there is no mirror.
She presses two fingers to her mouth. I don't read it.
She walks to the door.
She does not turn around. She does not say Sunday. She does not say yes or no.
The burn book stays open on the workbench. Her father's name. Her uncle's. The red.
I stand where I am.
I hear the gravel under her flats. Eight steps. Twelve. Gone.
I pick up the chip off the bench. I roll it once across my knuckles. I set it down on the page, on the red beside Amato, Rocco.
The lamp hums. The water moves.
And on the dress, against her sternum, all the way back up the gravel path: the small black eye of a button-cam I clocked the second she walked in. I wanted to know what she'd do with it. Now I know.
She did what she did.
I close the book. Then I open it again to the page with her father's name on it, because tomorrow I stop running her and start running with her, and she does not know that yet.