CHAPTER 8
Ana
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Rian took my left hand, folded my thumb inside my fist, and held it up between us like evidence. The mat room smelled of chalk and hot vinyl, and behind him the chain on the heavy bag was resettling link by link, outlasting the hit that had set it going.
“Fold your thumb inside your fist like that again,” he said, “and you will break it on the first thing you hit.”
“Nobody has ever told me where the thumb goes.” I flexed it against his palm. “I have had this hand for a while now.”
He laid my thumb flat along the outside of my fingers and shut my hand over it. Three of his knuckles were split, old splits opened and healed and opened again. He did not give the hand back straight away.
“Show me the one where the other person is bigger than me,” I said. “That is the only one I am ever going to need.”
He rolled his neck until it clicked. “Everybody bigger than you is also slower than you. That is the whole of my religion.”
He took my right wrist and told me to get out of it. I pulled, because pulling is what a person does, and my arm went nowhere at all. He waited through a second attempt and a third, and did not say anything smug, which I had braced for.
“You are leaning on a door that opens the other way,” he said. “Take your elbow toward my thumb, and not away from my hand.”
“Your thumb is the weak part of it,” I said. “It is the only piece of that grip that is not four fingers working together.”
“That is the entire trick.” He reset my arm. “It cost me a great deal more than one morning to learn it. Again, and stop watching my face while you do it.”
My wrist came free with an ease I did not trust, and I made him hold it again until I believed it. Then he stood behind me, put both arms around me, and told me to get out of that.
The tatami weave burned a stripe across my right knee when I went down, raised and red. I stayed on all fours until my breathing came back down.
“Drop your weight first,” he said. “You are trying to be strong, and you are never going to be strong.”
“That is an unusual sales technique.” I got a knee under me. “You want me back in here tomorrow.”
“You will be low and fast and mean instead. That beats strong in every room I have ever stood in.” He put a hand under my elbow and lifted, and I was upright before I agreed to be. “Water. Then the same thing four more times.”
We stopped twice for water. He worked my right side and only my right side, turned me by the right shoulder every time, and pressed the heel of his hand into my right ribs to show me where the weight went.
The bruise on my left cheekbone had gone yellow at the edges, and the split in my lip had dried to a dark seam.
He came nowhere near either of them, and he was careless about the whole rest of me and exact about that.
“You are allowed to say the word bruise out loud,” I said. “It has been on my face since Friday.”
“I would rather work the side that will not teach you to flinch.” He handed me the bottle.
He drank half of his own, and then told me the next thing in the settled voice men use when they have already closed a conversation.
“There is a tracker going into your boot heel this afternoon. Matteo has the cavity cut already.”
“You are telling me and you are not asking me,” I said. “I would like you to notice that you did that.”
“Asking you would have taken all morning. I would have won it in the end anyway.”
“Then win it now.” I stayed where the bag would have swung. “Tell me what the model does with my position, and tell me who else is standing inside it.”
He wiped his face on his shirt and did not answer straight away, which was the first mistake he had made in that room. The chain on the bag had gone quiet, and I could smell the tape on his knuckles.
“The model holds this building, the route, the operations floor and the people we cover.” He looked at the wall. “Your mother’s house went onto it the Sunday after we took you.”
“You have men outside my mother’s house.”
“Two of them, in rotation. She has not seen either one.”
“She does not know.” I was aware of my own breathing and of nothing else in that room.
“She does not know. That was Cassian’s call, and I agreed with it, and I would agree with it again.”
The card had been in my left pocket since Cassian wrote it, and my hand was around it before I had decided anything. I threw it into his face from about a foot away. The corner caught him high on the right cheekbone, opened a thin line there, and the card came off him torn.
He did not move. The cut beaded once and he let it. Then he crouched, picked the card up off the tatami, pressed the torn corner flat between finger and thumb, and held it out.
“Do that again, properly, and put your shoulder behind it this time.”
“You are bleeding,” I said. “I did that on purpose, and you are giving me notes.”
“You threw it like a piece of paper.” He pushed it into my hand. “It is not a piece of paper to you. Throw it like the thing it is.”
I put it back in my left pocket with the torn corner under my thumb, and pressed until the edge bit. Then I came at him the way he had spent all morning telling me to, low and fast and mean, and I got my shoulder into his chest and moved him half a step across the mat.
He let me have the half step. Then he took my wrist and turned me under his own arm. He put me flat on the mat with his forearm across my collarbones and his weight behind it, and the vinyl was warm from the overheads.
I stopped fighting and he did not get off me, and neither of us looked anywhere else. The room turned into something else entirely, and not one word was spent on it.
I could feel my own pulse where his forearm crossed me. His face was above mine, ruddy from the work with the freckles gone under it, and the cut on his cheekbone had started beading again.
“I want you to stop being careful with me,” I said. “I am saying it out loud so that it counts.”
He breathed out through his nose. His weight came down another fraction, and he held me there a moment before he asked it.
“Still with me?”
“Yes.” I got a hand into the front of his shirt. “I have a torn card in my pocket and I am not confused about one thing that is happening.”
He shifted to let me up and I did not go up. I took his wrist the way he had taught me, drove my elbow toward his thumb, got my shin across his hip and turned him. For a moment I intend to keep for the rest of my life, I had him.
He grunted, and he had to put his shoulder into the mat and spend his whole size to break it, which is not what a man does when he is being generous.
“That was the real thing,” he said, breathing hard. “You very nearly put me over.”
“I know exactly how nearly.” I was grinning, and it pulled the split and I tasted iron. “I intend to be insufferable about it.”
He hauled me up off the mat by both arms and walked me backward into the wall hard enough to empty my lungs. The brass casing was in my pocket. I got it out and closed my fist around it, and he waited, watching my hand, until it was shut.
His hand stopped at the waistband. “The lesson is over. Tell me what you want now.”
“Your hand under my leggings,” I said. “Yes. Now.” He obeyed without ceremony, and his breath left him. “Christ. You are soaking wet.”
“You told me all morning to be low and fast and mean about things.” I got my mouth near his ear. “I consider this entirely your own doing.”
He put his mouth at my throat and used his teeth, and worked down the right side of my jaw and back. He came nowhere near the left side of my mouth, not once, the whole way through.
His mouth went to my nipples through the shirt until the cotton was wet through and stopped meaning anything. Then he shoved the shirt up under my arms and put his teeth on my nipples with nothing in between, and the sound I made arrived before I had decided to make it.
“Tell me to stop and I will stop, and I will not be gentle about how fast I do it.”
“I heard you the first time.” My head went back against the wall. “I am not going to say it, so stop putting it on the table.”
He went down onto his knees, took my leggings off one leg, and left the other cuff at my ankle. He put my thigh up over his shoulder, and my back went flat to the wall to carry what was left of me.
His mouth came onto my pussy flat and broad and unhurried, the whole tongue, once and then again.
Then he narrowed it and went fast and exact on my clit, and my hand went to the back of his cropped head and stayed there.
I said a number of things. Some of them were his name and most of them were not sentences.
He came up off his knees, got two fingers into me with his thumb working my clit, and put his mouth against my ear. His cock was hard against my hip through his trousers, and he did nothing whatsoever about it.
“Louder. There is nobody on this floor and I want the room to hear you.”
“You are going to have to earn that.” My heels came off the floor. “I am closer to giving it than you deserve.”
He earned it, and it came up through me from the backs of my knees. I came on his hand against that wall with the casing shut in my fist, and he held me through all of it with his forearm across my hips.
“Say my name.”
“Rian.” I said it again into the side of his neck, and then a third time, quieter, because the first two had been for him and the third one was not.
He got my leggings back onto both legs before he did one thing for himself, which turned out to be nothing. He sat down on the mat with his back against the wall, pulled me sideways into his lap, and put one hand between my shoulder blades. He said nothing.
He said nothing for a long time, and I could feel what it cost him.
“You did not take anything,” I said. “You could have, and you did not, and I want to know why.”
“Ask me something else. Ask me anything else in the world and I will answer it.”