CHAPTER 6 #2
Nobody reacted to the number, which meant all of them had been carrying it already.
Then Matteo took his right hand out of his pocket and held it out, closed, and waited until I put mine underneath it.
What he dropped into my palm was a spent nine-millimetre case.
It was brass gone dull, the color of a coin that has lived in a coat, with a bright nick near the base where an extractor had taken it and the mouth of it a little out of round.
The primer had been struck off-center. It was warm because it had been in his pocket, and it weighed almost nothing.
“Hold this when you cannot use your mouth,” he said. “If your hand opens and it hits the floor, everything stops and nobody asks you why.”
I waited for the rest of it, for why a man carries a fired case in his pocket, and it never came. His fingers left mine the second the handover was done, and that restraint was the loudest thing anybody did to me all day.
“Cassian,” I said. “There’s one more item and you know what it is.”
He took it out of his breast pocket and held it out flat on the burned right hand, in front of Sasha and Rian and Matteo, which was the only reason I let myself take it slowly.
The gray key. A matte hardware token the size of my thumb, with the hairline crack across the barrel that was in it the week the security desk issued it to me.
“It is yours,” he said. “I took it off you and I am giving it back where four people can see me do it, so that nobody in this room ever gets to describe it differently later.”
Rian pulled a bootlace out of a drawer and cut it with his teeth and handed it over without a word. I threaded the key and knotted it at my throat under my shirt, where the cold of it took a long time to go.
Back up on seventy-one it was cold again, and the long room was down to one lamp and the screen glow off the sideboard.
The amended protocol was typed clean and lying on the ash desk, and Cassian was behind me before I had finished the first recital.
“You will read from the top and you will not stop reading,” he said. “If you stop, I stop.”
“That is a strange incentive structure and I want you to know that I can see the design.”
“Tell me what you are consenting to, in the words you drafted yourself, before I put a hand anywhere on you.”
I picked the pages up in both hands. The casing was inside my left palm, under the paper, warm again from me instead of from him.
“I’m asking you to make it difficult,” I said, “and I’m telling you that I will not stop reading.”
“I am going to count you down. Three. Two. One.”
He had counted a thing out loud once before, in a way I haven’t stopped hearing, and after those three numbers he counted nothing at all, and I heard the missing ones.
He opened my shirt to the waist and left it on me.
The burned right hand went flat on my sternum, over the bone, holding nothing and going nowhere, and his other hand found one nipple and worked it between finger and thumb while I read the first struck clause aloud.
My voice held. The paper shook at the top corner, and I kept reading.
He pulled my skirt up in one long motion. He found me already wet, and he said nothing about it at all, and I have thought about that silence more than about most things anybody has said to me. Two fingers went into my pussy while I was in the middle of a sentence about custody of documents.
I stopped reading. His hand stopped.
I learned that fast, and the second I picked the sentence back up he started again exactly where he had been. My mouth had gone dry in the middle of a document I was not allowed to stop reading, and there was no water in that room and neither of us was going to mention it.
His thumb found my clit and he timed it to my sentences.
Slow through the recitals, where the language is decoration.
Harder on the operative words, on shall and may and terminate, on every verb that did any work.
He had read it closely enough to know which words those were, which is a kind of attention I’ve wanted my whole life and never asked for.
His cock was hard against the small of my back through his trousers. He left it where it was. He said nothing about it. He did not shift away to spare either of us the fact of it, and that refusal was the whole architecture of the night.
“Third finger,” he said. “You may come when you reach the clause you added, and I want to hear it in your mouth while you do.”
I read the last of page six with my knees going, and the clause was three lines down on page seven and coming towards me like a floor.
“Nothing about me,” I said, “gets decided in a room I am not in.”
I came on his hand with the rest of it still in my mouth, and the last words I said were the last words of my own drafting. My hand closed hard around the brass instead of opening. That was the first thing I checked, and I checked it without deciding to.
“Perfect.”
He turned me around, lifted me onto the desk, and then he talked, which is what he did afterwards, always.
“I opened your shirt before I touched anything else, because I wanted your hands full and your chest bare while you were still using a lawyer’s voice. That was deliberate and it worked on you exactly as I intended.”
“You’re giving me an accounting.”
“I am giving you an accounting, and you are going to hear all of it.” His breathing was not even either, and he did not pretend otherwise.
“I timed my thumb to your sentences and not to your breathing. If I had followed your breath I would have been handling a body. I wanted the part of you that drafts, because that is the part of you that is actually here.”
“And the part you didn’t do.”
“I did not put my cock in you tonight, and I am going to say why before you work it out and decide it was pity.” He put his forehead down until it was nearly on mine.
“Your name is not on that instrument yet. Until it is, the only paper between us is a card you did not write, and I am not taking that from a woman who has not signed.”
I breathed. He kept talking, in order, through every piece of it, until my breathing had come back to something that belonged to me, and then he stopped.
Luca’s pen was where he had left it that morning, on the corner of the ash desk, a black Aurora with the engraved name worn clean off the cap. He had told me to keep it until the thing was executed, and then left before I could give it back.
I sat on the desk with my legs still unsteady and my shirt hanging open and the brass warm in my left hand, and I turned to the signature page, and my torn nail caught the paper one last time.
I signed it with Luca’s pen, and my hand did not shake, and I have never once decided whether that was courage or appetite.