Chapter 10Caterina #2
"I should have told you yesterday."
His voice low against my mouth.
"I know."
"I am telling you now."
"I would have done this yesterday too."
His forehead drops to mine. His breath comes out in one piece against my mouth. The small piece of him that has been holding goes slack at the temple where his weight is on my forehead. Then he pushes in.
Slow. All the way. He stops when he is all the way in me and I am tight around him and the bed underneath us is taking the slow even weight of two people who have decided to be in a bed together, and we hold there.
The morning is the wrong color through the window.
The boxwood does not move. Somewhere downstairs Pino is doing what Pino is doing. We hold.
"Move," I say.
He moves.
Slow first. The bed is the bed and we are not in a hurry.
The slip is somewhere on the floor and the cardigan is somewhere on the floor and the page is on the bedside table where one of us put it during the part I did not log.
My hand is on the back of his neck and his hand is at the back of mine and we are moving slow together the way two people move when they have agreed on the pace.
"Tell me what you want."
"This. Slower."
"Slower."
"Tell me you hear me."
"I hear you."
He goes slower. He goes slower the way a man goes slower when he has heard her and decided to give her exactly what she asked for and not what he wanted to give her, and that is the part of him I am going to need to be careful about loving too.
His mouth is at my temple. The pace changes once and goes back.
The bed takes it. I take it. I am tight around him and the pressure is moving up the inside of me in the slow way pressure moves up the inside of a woman who is being taken on purpose by a man who has decided to take his time, and I am the woman who is being taken, and I am the woman who is taking back, and I do not let go of the second one even at the moment when the first one is the only thing in the room.
"Harder."
"How hard."
"You'll know."
He drives in harder. I make a sound against his throat. His mouth goes to my collarbone.
" Caterina. "
"Don't slow down."
"Never."
He does not stop.
I come the second time with his hand at the back of my neck and his mouth at the underside of my jaw and his cock as deep in me as it goes.
My back arches off the sheets. My legs lock around his waist. I say his name once into his hair, plain, the way I said I hear you on the terrace an hour ago, and the way I said I'm here in this room, and the way I say his name when there is no one in this house but us.
" Massimo. "
He goes.
He goes inside me and his hand fists in the sheet by my ear and his forehead drops back to mine and the first sound of my name comes apart against my mouth, the rest of it lost into the pillow, and I take it the way I take everything else that has been mine today.
His weight settles. His breath shudders once. The bed takes both of us.
We hold.
The morning room downstairs makes a small noise that is probably Pino. Or maybe it is not. Neither of us moves to check.
He does not pull out for a count. I do not want him to. He stays where he is, his forehead at mine, his hand still at the back of my neck, his breath in my hair. The pulse at his throat is fast. The pulse at my own is faster. They do not match.
Then he moves. Slow. He rolls off me onto his back and his arm comes under my shoulders and pulls me into his chest and I go because I am going, because the morning has been long and is not over and there is still Saturday on the other side of it and I do not want to spend the next eight hours processing this in a chair downstairs by myself.
The wool blanket has come down off the foot of the bed. He pulls it up over us. His mouth is in my hair.
He is the man who told me what my father did. I am the woman who fucked him afterward. Both are true. Neither one is the whole sentence.
The ceiling is the same color as the morning. The east window faces a tree I have not learned the name of in the days I have been looking at it. The page is on the bedside table and the chip is on the page where I do not remember either of us putting it.
His breath evens. Mine takes a count longer. Then it does.
"Saturday," I say. Quiet. To the ceiling.
"Saturday."
"Together."
"Together."
A beat.
"And before Saturday," he says.
"Yes."
"Linen room. 3:50 p.m. Chiara will find you."
"All right."
He does not explain. I do not ask. He has set me up to walk into a room of his father's making and he has told me when and how and Chiara is going to be there to put me into it.
That is the morning we are having and the day we are going to have and that is the part of him I have stopped pretending I am not going to walk into.
He moves. Slow. He sits up. He puts his feet on the floor.
I watch him dress. The same shirt. The same coat.
The same wool. The two-inch piece of his hair at the back of his head that does not lie flat for the first hour after he wakes up.
The way he tucks the page into the inside pocket of the coat without looking at it, the way he tucked the photograph into the inside pocket of his jacket in the boathouse without looking at it.
The repetition is not a tell. It is signature.
He does the same small things in the same small order because he is a man who does not waste motion.
He goes to the door.
He stops at the door.
He does not turn around. He says, against the wood:
"I would have done this yesterday too."
"I know."
He goes out.
The door clicks. The corridor takes his step. The east stair takes his next two. Then he is downstairs and I cannot hear him anymore.
I do not move for a long count.
The ceiling is the same color. The page is on the bedside table.
The chip is on the page. The morning is going on without me and Saturday is coming and the man who has just walked out of this room is the man who is going to be standing next to me on the other side of it, and I am the woman who is going to be standing next to him, and both of those things are true at four in the morning on Sunday and at four o'clock today and now.
I run new math.
What I will do at 3:50 p.m. What I will say to Cosimo and what I will not. What I will give Massimo Saturday night and what I will not. What I would tell my father if he were on the other side of the table where the espresso pot was.
I do not cry.
I am still here.