CHAPTER 24 #2
She answered without any pause at all, in the level voice she keeps for facts.
“Rule Seven. Any hour, to any of you, about anything, and everything ends with no question after it.”
I let that sit where everyone could hear it. “Good. Now set the order, and we will hold whatever you give us.”
“Luca, then Rian, then Matteo, and you last, and nobody in this room trades places.”
“Nobody rushes Matteo,” she said. “That part is not negotiable either.”
I went to her and said the numbers down from three, and on the last one her hands fell open on her knees.
I took her clothes off with my left hand alone and kept the right forearm off her entirely.
The back of that right hand is shiny across all four knuckles, four fingers wide, tight where the skin healed short, and it does not tan and does not crease.
She watched me work one-handed and did not help.
Then I stepped back and kept my hands off her.
Luca knelt on the floorboards in front of the chest, put her thighs over his shoulders, and put his mouth on her cunt. She laid her left hand along the left side of his face, the side without the four stitches, and kept it there.
“You are holding the side of my face that does not hurt, and I noticed, tesoro.”
He told her what he was doing while he did it.
“Your pussy is soaking and you have not asked me for one thing yet.”
“Tell me what you want next, in words, and do not make it polite for me.”
“I want your tongue on my clit and I want you to stop describing it to me.”
She came on his tongue with her heels locked at his back. He took nothing for himself. He sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth on the inside of his own wrist.
She got her breath and used it. “I want the bed now, and I want somebody to carry me to it.”
“Come to me,” Rian said from the headboard. “I cannot come to you and we both know it.”
Luca lifted her.
“He carries you because he walked out of that building in one piece.”
Rian gave her the sentence without cushioning it, and it cost him to say. He stayed sitting, did not lift the left arm and did not try to, and Luca set her down at his right side.
“Four of them, and I am putting my mouth on every one before I touch anything else.”
He put his mouth on the four fading finger-bruises on her left upper arm and counted them out loud against her skin. “One. Two. Three. Four.”
Counting belongs to Matteo and every man in that house knows it. He watched Rian take it and did not say a word, because it was not his to say.
She straddled Rian. His right hand went to her jaw and then down to the side of her neck above the steel. His teeth went into her right shoulder and stayed, and he kept away from the bruised arm.
“Still with me?”
“I am, and I would like you to stop being careful with the parts of me that are fine.”
“Say my name.”
She gave it to him. He put his mouth on her nipples and took it again, and she gave it twice more unasked, riding him with her hands in Luca’s at the head of the bed. Matteo had moved to the end of the bed, still in her sight line.
“Louder than that.”
She came the second time with her mouth open on Rian’s throat, and he came under her with his good hand shut on her hip. I stood with my back to the door and my arms down. That was the work I gave myself for that half of it.
She went onto her hands and knees at the edge of the mattress.
Matteo knelt upright behind her with his spine straight, because two cracked ribs on the left will not let him bend forward or take weight through the chest. He reached round and tapped twice on her sternum.
She reached up and tapped twice back on his forearm. That was how he asked.
His cock went into her slowly, one hand spread on her ass to hold her where he wanted her, and two fingers of the other worked her clit while he did it.
“I am behind you and I am not going anywhere out of your sight.”
He said where he was before she could look for him. “I am still here.”
She came a third time with her forearms giving out under her. He came with his forehead between her shoulder blades, watching her face in the dark window glass.
They made room for me. She went onto her back with the collar warm now from her own skin and the casing still shut in her right fist.
I braced on my left forearm. The right I held clear of the bed with the palm turned down, because it will not turn the other way.
“I have been in the room with you every night since I took you. I am asking to be in it as a man and not as a detail.”
She took my face in both hands. “Then be in it, and do not give me the order of operations while you are inside me.”
She has never made anything easy for me and I never asked her to. I went into her slowly and then not slowly. I held her at the edge and told her to wait, and her thighs shook, and she waited, because I asked her and because she chose to.
“Wait for me now.”
“You will wait for me, and then you will have it, and you will not be quiet about it.”
She was not quiet about it. She came with her heels dug into the backs of my legs and the collar hard under my mouth and the medal cold against my lip.
“Perfect.”
I came with my face in her hair and the right arm held out over the edge of the bed where nobody could lean on it.
Nobody moved for a long time. The room stayed arranged around her: Rian against the headboard with his right side toward her, Luca holding her hands at her left, Matteo upright on the edge because he could not lie flat, and me on my left side with the injured arm along my own body.
Every hand and every silence answered her.
Luca went down and came back with warm broth in a mug, cheese cut into small squares, and water.
“Open. The broth is hot enough to make you swear at me, which I am willing to risk.”
“You talk more afterwards than you do during, and I want that on the record.”
“I do. It is how I stay in the room instead of leaving it.”
He fed her cheese from his fingers, held the broth to her mouth between bites, and kept talking about the dead apple tree in the yard that still fruits on one branch out of spite.
Rian said nothing at all. He got her along his right side with her head under his jaw and held her there, and I know what that costs a man who talks so he does not have to sit with himself.
Matteo brought warm water and a cloth and cleaned her thighs. Then he set the chair back under the window, latched the window, folded what was on the floor. He combed her hair out with his fingers until it lay flat. He put the brass casing back into her palm and closed her fingers over it.
Then it was mine to do. I talked.
I gave her the order of it, start to finish: what I decided, when, what each choice cost, and who paid it. I kept going until her breathing evened out. Then I gave her the part I have never given anybody.
“Six years ago I lost a principal in a fire in Zurich, and I wrote seven rules afterwards so it could not happen twice.”
“I know that part,” she said. “You have never given me the other part.”
“I tried to hand your detail to another firm because I wanted you, and I called it discipline. It was cowardice with paperwork on it.”
She turned her head on my arm. “Keep going. You are not finished.”
“I did it in an office with the door shut and let you find out the hard way. I am not asking you to call that forgivable.”
She did not call it forgivable. She put two fingers flat on the burn scar and left them there and went to sleep with the card on the boards beside the bed, eight lines on it now instead of seven.
I lay in the dark and understood that the card had never been a wall, and that she had just cut a door in it.