Chapter 22 Last Waters #2
It surprised her. I felt it surprise her, the held breath, the small confused pause.
She braced on the marble and took me deep and didn’t throw a single sound at a door, because there was no door tonight worth throwing it at, and somewhere in the slow deep roll of it she discovered she didn’t need an audience to feel it land.
The sounds she made were low and private and meant for me alone, my name and a soft Portuguese murmur pressed into the crook of her own arm, and it was the first time all season she’d made love in that room instead of made a point of it.
I worked into her slow and worshipful, the warm white water rocking against our hips, both hands full of her heavy gleaming ass, and she pushed back to meet me with nothing rationed and nothing performed, only the two of us in the steam.
“I don’t have to be loud,” she said, half-wondering, like a woman finding money in an old coat. “Huh. Look at that.” And she laughed, soft and surprised at herself, and neither of us stopped moving, my cock driving slow and deep, the white water running warm off the small of her back.
When she was close I pulled out of her, my cock slick and glistening, and turned her and hauled her up off her feet into the buoyant deep end, and she wrapped around me, weightless, the water taking all of her strong heavy frame and making it light as nothing, her thick thighs locked at my hips, her arms around my neck.
She reached down to guide me back into her and settled onto my cock with a long groan, and like that she was mine to move, and I moved her, slow and deep, lifting her on the water and settling her back down onto me, sinking deep into her on every roll, her face against mine, her breasts pressed warm to my chest, the white water rocking around us in slow waves.
“There,” she breathed, all the volume gone soft now, just for me, “there, like, just, sim, sim, querido, assim…”
She finished face to face in the deep water, her arms cinched hard around my neck and her thick thighs gripping my hips, the deep clutch of her fluttering and gripping tight around me, her body shaking, and she said my name once, low, right against my ear, no echo, nothing thrown at any wall, just the one quiet syllable meant for the one person it was for, and the grip of her milking me dragged me over, and I gripped her down onto me and buried deep and emptied into her, spilling deep in thick hot surges as I held her there, until the white water gradually stilled around us and the lamps burned low and gold.
She didn’t stay in the water to say it. That was Greta’s way, the floating and the still surface, and Bianca had watched it work all season and decided it wasn’t hers.
She hauled herself up onto the warm marble lip instead, reached for a towel and a fresh candle, and set about putting the chamber back to rights with her hands, the way she handled everything heavy, in motion, and she said the real thing over her shoulder while she worked, wrapped in nothing for once, which from Bianca was a nakedness all its own.
“I came here for a job,” she said, wringing the water out of her dark hair.
“Ten years ago. Twenty-one years old, off a plane from Florianópolis, following a Swiss hotel contract because it paid in francs and the sun in Brazil doesn’t pay anything.
A contract, a hotel, a paycheck, somewhere warm-ish to land that wasn’t home.
” She lit the new candle off the dying one.
“And somewhere in the ten years I stopped imagining wanting anything more than this. The work, the meninas, the mountain, the good oil I hoard and pretend I don’t.
I decided that was all of it and I was lucky to have it, and I was, I want to be clear, I was lucky.
Most people don’t get a family from a job in a foreign country.
I got one. I stopped reaching because my hands were already full. ”
She folded the towel, evened the edges, set it down. A small ordinary motion she made suddenly very careful.
“And now.” She kept her eyes on her own hands, on the work, not on me, because looking at me would have made it a Greta confession and she was set on it being a Bianca one.
“Now I’m imagining. More. Here. All of it, querido, the part past the job.
The thing Greta has, that she carried up that cable car and that I scrubbed her bath while she carried it and never once let myself want for me, not in ten years, because wanting it would have meant admitting the family I had wasn’t, quite, the whole of the one I wanted.
” Then she did look at me, finally, over the candle, and there was no joke anywhere on her face this time, none of the volume, none of the performance, just the warm dark eyes gone serious and a little frightened of their own honesty.
“I’m not asking you for anything. I want to be very clear about that, because you’re a man who’d try to give it to me tonight if he thought I was asking, and I’m not.
I’m just telling you the water’s changed.
There’s a horizon in it now that wasn’t there a season ago.
I can see it from here. That’s all. That’s the confession, every word of it, and I’ve never made it to anyone standing up dripping wet with a candle in my hand, so don’t you dare make it weird. ”
“I won’t make it weird.”
“You’re already making it weird, your face is doing a thing.”
“That’s just my face.”
“Mm.” She came back to the edge of the bath and sat, her feet in the water beside me, the warmth flooding back into her voice. “Keep it, then. I’m fond of the stupid thing.”
I reached up and she took my hand, and I didn’t fill the silence, because some silences you don’t fill, and she sat there with her feet in the white water and her hand in mine until the bath went cool.
Later, near midnight, raiding the kitchen for the cake Ute always left out, we passed Marlene’s office, and the light was on.
She was at the board. Alone. And she had the blank white magnet in her hand, the lonely one, Falk’s old slot, the one that had migrated one square closer over a fortnight, and she was holding it over the Thursday column, her eyes on the grid, the pen in her other hand, and you could see the whole eight months in the stillness of her.
Bianca grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise and whisper-screamed, into my ear, the line the entire house had been waiting all season to say.
“PAY UP, POPPY.”
Then she pulled me back from the doorway, gently, before Marlene could feel us watching, and steered me toward the stairs and my own room, alone, with a hand flat on my chest and a look I’d never seen her wear, fond and serious at once, the first woman of the season giving me the wisdom about the last.
“Go to bed,” she said, low. “Alone. Don’t you dare go in there.
Don’t you dare knock.” She glanced back at the lit doorway, the woman with the magnet in her hand.
“When she’s ready, she’ll write it herself.
She signs everything in this house with her own hand, you understand me?
Everything. This too. Don’t you take the pen out of her hand on the one thing she needs to sign alone.
” She pushed me toward the stairs. “Thursday. It’ll keep.
She’s earned the right to do it her own way. ”
I went up alone. Behind me on the stairs I could hear Bianca padding back toward the kitchen and the cake, humming something low and Brazilian and pleased with itself, a woman who’d just won a season-long bet and decided not to collect on it tonight after all.
Don’t you dare knock, she’d said, and I didn’t.