CHAPTER 18 #2
He said it the way he says the time. I thought about the arm that had taken my whole weight once, on a night neither of us has ever described out loud, and about the buckle I had done up across that shoulder that morning.
I said none of it to him. I put my palm on the back of his cropped head, held it there, and let go.
“Then be no use to me from the chair by the stove,” I said. “Be loud about it if anything happens at all.”
“I’ll be on the stairs,” Matteo said.
He went out to the hall with the screens under his arm.
Luca was in the kitchen doorway with his cuffs already turned back. Cassian had put the last plate away and was waiting, because he’d seen my mouth moving.
“I want both of you upstairs, and I want it slow, and I want to be the one who says when,” I said.
“I want it in the record that you asked me for this, in your own words, before we go up,” Cassian said.
“In words, tesoro, all of it, and do not make it tidy for me,” Luca said.
“I want to be touched by people who are not in a hurry,” I said. “I want it to take a long time. I want to be talked to the whole way through it.”
We took the room at the end of the hall and not the one over the kitchen, because Rian was asleep in the chair by the stove and a farmhouse floor sends every sound straight up. Luca shut the door slowly and wouldn’t let it click. Cassian sat down in the chair by the window and stayed in it.
“Rule Seven is live in this room the way it is live in every room,” Cassian said. “Nothing in here needs a reason from you.”
The brass casing was closed inside my right hand already, and already warm. The bedstead was old iron under flaking japan-black paint, and the paint lifted in little scales under my thumbnail while I stood at the foot of it.
“I’m going to tell you everything I’m doing before I do it, and you’re going to let me,” Luca said.
He took my shirt off over my head and told me he was doing it while he did it.
He said he would open the button at my waist with one hand, because he wanted the other in my hair.
He put his mouth on my throat and told me that first. Then he stood back and looked at me for longer than was polite, and the looking was worse than the touching.
“Luca undresses you and I stay in this chair,” Cassian said from the window. “When you want me out of it, you will say so.”
Luca put his mouth on one of my nipples and stayed there, unhurried, working with his tongue and then with the flat of it and then barely with his teeth.
He moved to the other one and took longer over it.
He kept his voice down under the level of the floorboards for the man asleep below us.
My whole spine understood why, and it made everything worse in the best way.
“Say the next thing in a whole sentence,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll stay here all night and enjoy it.”
“I want Cassian’s mouth on me, and I want you to hold my hands and tell me what he’s doing.”
Cassian came out of the chair without hurrying. He put me back onto the bed and moved my knees apart with the flat of his hand, and Luca gathered both my wrists above my head in one of his, loose enough that I could have taken them back.
“You will keep your hands where Luca has put them until I say otherwise,” Cassian said. “Three, and then two, and then one, and then my mouth is going to be on you.”
He gave me each number in that voice that drops half a register, and on the last one he was there. He kept the same pace the whole way through, and that was the whole method.
“He has his mouth on your cunt and his tongue flat on your clit,” Luca said at my ear. “His hands are under your thighs and he’s stopped moving.”
“He’s waiting for you to come up to him,” he said. “You’re going to have to want it out loud.”
I came on Cassian’s tongue with Luca’s hand loose around my wrists, and it went through me long and warm instead of sharp, and I heard the sound I made before I had decided to make it.
Then Luca turned me onto my side to face him and came into me slowly.
His hand went to my jaw and stayed there.
My hand found the left side of his face, where the dimple lives and nowhere else.
He was in my pussy so slowly that I felt every part of it arrive, and he kept talking, and his voice had gone somewhere it does not usually go.
“I have talked my way out of every room I’ve ever been in,” he said. “I don’t want out of this one.”
I came around his cock with my palm still flat on his face and my thumb at the corner of his mouth. He followed a little after, quiet about it, his forehead down against mine.
He withdrew and moved up the bed and took both my hands into both of his. Cassian came in behind me and put my back against his chest, and there was no lifting in any of it, none at all, because the man who lifts was downstairs in a chair, under the buckle I had fastened that morning.
Cassian went in slow and stayed deep, his cock hardly moving in me at all. He laid his right hand flat and open across my belly, and the scarred skin was cooler than the rest of him. I put my own hand over it and held it there, and he let me, and he was as unhurried as a man laying a floor.
“There you are.” He said it into my hair and said nothing after it.
I came a third time with Luca’s thumbs moving on my knuckles and Cassian’s hand under mine, and it came up slowly from somewhere below the ribs. He followed a stroke or two after me and made no sound about it.
Luca came back with bread and an apple and water in a jam jar, and he tore the bread with his hands and fed it to me off his fingers.
“Eat this, and then the water, and then you can tell me to stop talking,” he said.
He talked the whole way through it anyway, about the apple tree in the yard, dead for years and still making fruit near the top. Cassian sat on the edge of the bed with his forearms on his knees and did what he does, which is explain.
“I counted you down because you needed something to hold that was not the door,” he said. “You have been listening to that road ever since we came up here. The numbers gave your ears somewhere else to be.”
“And the part you got wrong?”
“I stayed in that chair longer than the room needed,” he said. “That was mine and not yours. I will not do it again.”
He kept talking, in order, one thing after the next, until my breathing had come all the way down. Luca fell asleep first, on his front, with one hand still closed around my ankle.
I went down for water a little before eleven, barefoot, with the boards cold and the stove down to its last red.
Matteo was sitting on the bottom stair with the screens dark in his lap, and he looked at me the whole way down, and he did not stop when I looked back.