Chapter 11Caterina #2
Two fingers. He works them into me with my wrists still pinned over my head, and I am already wet enough that there is nothing for either of us to pretend about, and the heel of his hand settles against my clit in a rhythm so patient it is going to kill me.
The sound that wants out of me is enormous. I bite it in half behind my teeth.
"Don't." His mouth at my ear now. "Don't make a sound. Look at me."
I look at him.
That is the cruelty of it. He holds my eyes while his hand works me, so the thing I cannot do with my voice I do with my face instead, and he watches every degree of it happen, his own breath going short at the side of my neck while he keeps his hand slow and his eyes on mine and leaves me nowhere to put any of it.
"Whose," he says.
I shake my head. Not no. The word is just gone.
"Caterina." Clipped. The real one. " Whose. "
"Yours." I shape it with no air behind it. His thumb presses and my hips break their stillness and chase him, once, twice, and then his hand goes still on purpose right at the edge and holds me there shaking on nothing.
"Not yet," he says.
I get one wrist loose. I do not use it to push him off. I fist his shirt and drag him in and lock a leg behind his thigh and hold him to me, and against his ear, on the last steady breath I have, I give him his own instruction back. "Then don't stop. "
He does not stop.
His fingers curl and find the place that takes my knees out from under me and the heel of his hand keeps its line and I come around his hand with my mouth shut and my face turned into his shoulder and my teeth in the wool, all of it routed down and in instead of out, silent, shaking, his other hand flat at the small of my back because I have stopped holding myself up.
He works me through it until there is nothing left to wring out of me.
Then he lifts me to the next shelf by the waist like I weigh nothing, the height comes even, he frees my other wrist, and I get his belt, his zip, take his cock in my hand. Hard, hot, the breath he pulls in through his teeth the first sound he has lost hold of since the door.
"Forty minutes is more than enough," he says against my jaw, and it is not smooth now. It is rough at the edges.
I wrap both legs around him. Against his ear: " Then use it. "
He pushes into me slow, because slow is the only volume this house allows. I take all of him on one long pull of breath I am not permitted to let go, and he holds there, buried, his forehead dropped to my shoulder, his pulse going hard enough that I have it against my own chest.
" There. " Just that. Confirmed.
Then he moves.
We are quiet the way people are quiet in a house full of ears, which means the whole conversation goes through the body instead of the air.
His mouth at my ear. My nails set in the back of his neck.
His hand splayed between my shoulder blades, pulling me onto him on every stroke.
The slick where we meet is the only honest sound in the room and even that we keep down.
"Whose," he says again. Ragged.
"Yours." Into his collar. "Yours."
He gets a hand between us. The heel of it back on my clit, the same patient pressure, while he keeps the slow drive of his hips, and the second finish starts building where the first one left off, faster this time because my body already knows the way.
"Again," he says against my ear. Not asking. "You give me one more."
I cannot answer. I am breathing through my nose, fast and shallow, every sound rerouted down and in, the pressure climbing with nowhere to go but through me.
"Caterina." The name. The pace breaks once and he hauls it back. " Now. "
I go. I come around him with my teeth in his shoulder and my whole body locking, silent, shaking apart on him with nothing getting out but the breath I finally lose through my nose.
That is what takes him. I clamp down around him and his control goes all at once, where I can watch it: his rhythm stutters and drives deep and stops, his hand fists hard in my hair, his spine pulls tight under my hands, and the long shudder that goes through him is the loudest thing either of us has done in this room and it does not make a sound.
His mouth opens against my scalp on a breath that catches and does not release.
He spills into me on it. His forehead drops to mine and stays.
His mouth shapes my name there, the real one, without voicing it, because to voice it would put us in the room with everyone else, and so he keeps it, pressed into me, silent, his.
His breath at the side of my neck, two counts slower than mine, then three.
When it is over we stand among the napkins. He straightens my collar. He resets the camera pin with two careful fingers, the same two fingers, and the pin sits flat. I button his cuffs. He does not say anything. I do not say anything.
He unlocks the door. He checks the corridor with one look. He steps aside.
I press my thumbnail into my left palm twice on the way down the corridor and once on the stairs.
The blue sitting room door opens before I can knock. Cosimo is in the frame in his shirtsleeves, smiling the way men smile when they already know the answer to the question they are about to ask.
"You're early," he says. "Good."