Chapter 10Caterina
Caterina
Pino sits. The chair takes him because the chair was made to. The tray is between us now. He has not looked at me yet. He is looking at Massimo, the two-inch gap between our hands on the iron, the empty espresso pot, the page-shape pressing through my sweater. Doing math.
I stand.
I do not say excuse me. I do not say where I am going. I am twenty-nine and I have just been told that the man whose name I was raised on was the down-payment on a woman in a canal, and Pino can wait for his audience or he can take it up with the head of the house, whichever pleases him.
Massimo does not stop me. His eyes track me for the length of one stride and then go back to Pino, which is the right move and the only move and which I store for later. That he can read a room with me in it without making it about me.
I go through the French doors. The east stair. Treads three and seven creak, which I have known since the second night I slept in this house because I am still the kind of woman who maps stairs.
Second floor. The corridor runs gray-pink with the wrong color of morning. I have seen enough boxwood this week.
The door of the room I have been sleeping in is the third on the left. I open it. I close it. I do not lock it because if Massimo comes upstairs, which he is going to do, I do not want a locked door to be the first thing he reads about me this morning.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
The cardigan is wool. Gemma's. It still smells like the cedar of whatever closet Chiara pulled it from on day one. My hands are flat on my thighs, palms down, the way Nonna saw them this morning on the garden bench, and the way they always go when the rest of me is doing math behind a closed face.
What he said. What it means. What it costs. What I still owe Rocco, who I have not called since the chapel, and who is going to want to know what I learned this morning, and who I am not going to tell.
My father's name was not on a contract. My father's name was a contract. There is a difference and the difference is the part that does not let go.
Antonio Amato did not sign Gemma Fioretti into a canal.
Antonio Amato's reputation, the reputation he spent forty years building by doing the small clean things he did, walking the back rooms in Bay Ridge with cash in an envelope and a courtesy on his face, was what Rocco put up so that Piero would accept the deal and call it square.
My father was the collateral on his own daughter's blue dress.
He may not have known. The footage does not say.
But the last summer I had him he came home different, three months of it before he stopped coming home at all.
I was twelve. The gray weight in his shoulders that I called grief at the time, because I was twelve and I did not have a better word, I am going to spend the rest of my life cataloguing under other words.
I do not cry. I am not going to. I am one of the quiet ones, which my father was too, and which is the part of him I got that is mine and was never anyone else's to spend.
I run Saturday. I run what I owe him. I run what I owe me. I run the version of Saturday where Massimo and I move together, what he said on the terrace, what I said back, together or not at all, and I find I do not unrun it, which is what I was checking for.
Then the door opens.
He does not knock. He stands in the doorway. He does not come in until I look at him.
I look.
He is in the same coat and the same shirt and the same wool over the same shoulders he had on the terrace, but the shoulders are sitting differently in the shoulders now, which is the way Massimo looks when he has decided something he does not yet know whether I will let him decide.
He crosses the room slow. Three steps to the bed. He stops a foot off my knees.
He does not touch me.
"Are you here," he says.
The half-question. The one Massimo asks instead of asking the whole thing. I have been logging it since I got here.
"I'm here."
He goes to his knees in front of me.
His hands come up flat against my thighs through the wool of the cardigan, palms wide, the heat of his hands settling into the muscle and not moving. He is not asking. He is also not taking. He is parked.
"I should not be doing this today," he says.
"Today is the day to do it."
He looks at my face. I look back. His mouth tightens at the corner the way it does when he is reading something he had not planned on reading, and then it does not tighten and his thumb moves on the inside of my thigh once, light, the way a man asks a question without making her answer it out loud.
I take the front of his shirt in both hands.
I pull.
He comes up off his knees the way I knew he would, which is without resistance, and his weight settles between my knees on the bed and his mouth is on my mouth before I have decided where I want it.
The cardigan comes off my shoulders. I do not help him.
He takes it off the way he opened the buttons of Gemma's dress in the boathouse, slow, with the small respectful patience of a man who has decided to take his time in a house that does not have time, and the wool slides down my arms and pools at my elbows and I let it.
The dress underneath is the gray slip Chiara left in the wardrobe yesterday.
He looks at it once. He does not name it.
He does not name the woman who wore it before, who probably did not.
He puts his hand at the back of my neck and lays me back against the pillows the way a man lays a glass down on a table he respects, and the bed takes me, and that is the part I take. That this is a bed.
We have not been in a bed.
The boathouse was a workbench. This is sheets and a wool blanket and a bed that has been waiting in this room for two months for someone to use it for what it was built for.
He braces a forearm by my ear. His other hand goes down the length of me through the slip, slow, mapping.
Collarbone. Sternum. The space between my breasts where the page is pressing against my ribs.
He does not move the page. He goes around it, because he is not the man who takes the page out of her sweater while he is taking the rest off her, and that is the part of him I am going to need to be careful about loving.
"Slow," I say.
He stops at my hip. Looks up. Reads my face.
" Slow. "
"I heard you."
"Take your time."
"I have the morning."
He puts his mouth at my throat. Then under my jaw.
Then back at my mouth because he is not in a hurry and because he has worked out that today I want all the steps.
He gets the slip off me one strap at a time.
The strap on my right shoulder catches on the page pressed inside the cardigan that is no longer on me, and he stops to free it without taking his mouth off my collarbone, and I keep that too.
The slip comes off. I am in nothing under it because the bra Chiara left was the wrong size and I did not put it on because the dress underneath does not need one and because I am the kind of woman who has stopped wearing things that do not fit.
He looks.
He looks the way a man looks at a thing he is going to remember even if it is the last thing he sees. Not greedy. Not performing. Steady.
"Caterina."
"Don't say anything."
"All right."
He puts his mouth at the inside of my breast. Then the nipple. Then the other one. Slow. He is taking the morning. He has decided. I let him, which is its own decision, and I am still making decisions inside of letting him, because that is the line I am holding.
His hand goes between my legs. The flat of his palm first. Pressure. Then his fingers, slow, parting me, and he makes a sound at the back of his throat that is not the clipped Massimo sound, that is one of his undefended sounds, and his forehead drops to my hip and stays there.
" Wet. "
"For you."
" Caterina. "
"I know."
He moves down. The wool of the carpet meets his knees again and the sheets settle around me and his mouth is at the inside of my thigh and his breath is on the place his mouth has not gone yet.
He takes his time with it. He kisses the inside of my thigh and then the crease of my hip and then he takes me into his mouth and his tongue finds my clit and stays there.
Two fingers slide in.
I make a sound I have not made before. Not loud. Long. The kind of sound that comes out of a woman who has been holding it together for seventeen years and who has just been touched by a man who knows the math she has been holding. My hand goes into his hair and stays.
He works me slow. Pressure first. Then the rhythm.
Then the rhythm faster. His fingers crook against the front wall of me and find the place that makes my hips lift off the sheets and they keep finding it, and his tongue does not stop, and I do not tell him to slow down because today is not the day for slow.
I come against his mouth in waves I cannot stop and do not try to stop.
My thighs close around his head and open again because he is pushing them open with his shoulders and I let him because I want him to see it.
I want him to see what he is doing to me.
I want him to see the woman who came to him in the bedroom of a dead girl on the morning after he told her what her father did, and I want him to see that she came anyway, and that her body knows what her body knows, and that no version of this is happening to her without her consent.
I am the woman who came to him. I am still the woman who came to him.
He stays at me through the third wave and the fourth and the small fifth one that is just my body remembering, and he does not stop until I push his forehead with the flat of my hand the way I would push aside a curtain.
He comes up the bed.
He braces a forearm by my ear. His other hand is at the back of my neck. His weight settles between my thighs and I open them around him and his cock is against me, hot, and he pauses, and that is the moment.