8. Cassian
CASSIAN
Ihave been awake since four. I have read three reports I did not need to read, sent one email I should have sent yesterday and two I should not have sent at all, and at six fifteen I am downstairs in the kitchen because the alternative is staying in my bed thinking about a woman who is sleeping, currently, two doors down the hall in a t-shirt I am not allowed to think about.
The villa kitchen is enormous and quiet at this hour.
White marble, warm wood, a copper hood over the range that catches the first slant of dawn through the eastern window and turns the whole room the color of brandy.
The staff doesn't come in until seven. I have the kettle on.
I have, embarrassingly, no plan past the kettle.
She comes in at six twenty-three.
She is in the t-shirt. And shorts. Her hair is in a loose braid that has half come undone in the night, and she is barefoot on the cool tile, and she stops in the doorway when she sees me and the look on her face is the look of a person who was not, in fact, expecting to find me here either.
"You're up."
"I'm up."
"It's six in the morning."
"I'm aware of the time, Maren."
"I was going to make tea."
"I am, currently, making tea."
"For yourself."
"Yes."
"Cool."
She doesn't leave. She crosses to the cupboard and gets down a mug — another mug, on top of the one I already have out — and she sets it on the counter with a small, pointed click, and then she crosses her arms over the front of that t-shirt, which is faded blue and has a pocket and is, I will note, his, in the sense that it is large enough to belong to a man and is not mine.
"Whose shirt."
"What."
"Whose shirt."
"It's mine, Cassian."
"It's a man's shirt."
"It's an old shirt that I bought from a gift store in a town I went to in college. It's my shirt."
"Mm."
She looks at me. She looks at me with her head tilted half an inch, with that bright, sharp, slightly tired face she has been wearing for three days now around her family, and I realize, distantly, that I have crossed a line in the conversation already and have done it because I wanted to know.
"You are in a mood," she says.
"I am in my own kitchen."
"You are also in a mood. What is going on with you."
"Nothing."
"Cassian."
"Make your tea, Maren."
"You can't snap at me at six in the morning and then tell me to make my tea."
"I can. It is, technically, my kitchen."
She laughs once, sharp, no humor in it. She walks past me to the kettle, and she pours her water with the deliberate calm of someone choosing not to slam a door, and I stand at the island with both hands flat on the marble and watch her shoulders, and I think — clinically, with the part of me that has been keeping the books on this for a week — I am not going to make it through today.
"You are angry with me," she says, with her back to me.
"I'm not."
"You are."
"I am angry with myself, Maren. There's a difference."
She sets the kettle down and turns. Her braid has come loose over one shoulder, her T-shirt slipped low along her collarbone, and she’s looking at me with a steadiness she didn’t have sixty seconds ago—like fear has simply fallen out of her hands.
"Why."
"It doesn't matter."
"It does."
"Maren—"
"It does, Cassian, because for a week you have been telling me what to do, and how to stand, and where to put my hands, and last night you almost kissed me in a room with the lights off and Sebastian was the one with the dignity to walk out of it, not you, not me, Sebastian, and now this morning you can't look at me. So which is it."
"Which is what."
"Are we performing or are we not performing."
"That is the question."
"That is the question. Yes. That is the question I am asking you. Right now. With my tea."
I push off the island. I don't move toward her. I don't have to. The kitchen is not large enough for me to need to.
"You want me to tell you what this is."
"Yes."
"You want a clean answer."
"Yes."
"You will not get one."
"That is not?—"
"Maren. You will not get one because I do not have one.
I have, in three days, rewritten my entire schedule around your sleeping habits.
I have replaced two staff members because I did not like the way they looked at you on the dock.
I sat in a phone call yesterday with a man who could end my expansion with one sentence, and I missed half of what he said because you were in the grass.
The grass, Maren. With your sister. Drinking something with an orange in it.
And I do not know what to call that. So I am calling it nothing.
I am calling it nothing because I am running out of language for it. "
She has gone still. Her hand is on her mug. Her chest is rising and falling under the soft cotton of her t-shirt, and her mouth is open a little, and she is not, currently, saying anything.
"Maren."
"You changed staff."
"I changed staff."
"Because of me."
"Because of how they looked at you."
"That's — that's insane, Cassian."
"It is."
"That's controlling."
"It is."
"You can't do that."
"I did it."
She sets the mug down. She walks across the kitchen.
She walks across the kitchen until she is standing in front of me with her bare feet next to mine on the cool tile, and she looks up at me, and her eyes are bright and very clear and she says, "I am tired of you telling me what this is. Tell me what it isn't."
"Maren."
"Tell me what it isn't."
"It isn't an act."
"Say it again."
"It isn't an act, Maren. It hasn't been an act since the boat. I have been lying to your family, and I have been lying to my staff, and I have been lying to Roland Vance, and somewhere along the way I started lying to you, and I am — done. I am done with the lying. That is the answer."
Her hand comes up. She puts it flat on my chest. She has done this once before, on the beach, with the fire crackling behind us and her family watching, and she did it then like a woman holding on. She is doing it now like a woman pushing back.
"Then stop."
"Stop what."
"Telling me what to do. Stop handling me. Stop calibrating me. You don't get to do that anymore."
"All right."
"All right?"
"All right."
She stares up at me. I stare down at her. The kettle ticks as it cools. Somewhere upstairs a door closes — a guest, a maid, I do not care.
"Cassian."
"What."
"Kiss me."
"Maren—"
"Don't make me ask twice."
I lift her.
I lift her with one arm under her thighs and the other braced behind her shoulders, and I set her on the marble of the island, and the cool stone meets the back of her bare legs and she gasps once into my mouth as I cover hers, and I am not — to be clear — kissing her the way I kissed her on the beach.
I am kissing her the way I have wanted to kiss her since Tuesday.
Which is to say, badly, in the sense that there is no choreography to it.
My hand is in her hair, the one that was braided, and the braid comes apart entirely, and I can feel her fingers fisted in the front of my shirt, and her mouth is open under mine and she tastes, faintly, of toothpaste and sleep and the warmth of a person who has just woken up in a house that I own and has come down to find me anyway.
"Cassian."
"Mm."
"Cassian, the staff?—"
"Seven."
"What?"
"They come in at seven. We have thirty-seven minutes."
"That is not — Cassian?—"
"Tell me to stop."
"I'm not going to tell you to stop."
"Then stop telling me about the staff."
She laughs into my mouth. It is the most undignified sound I have ever heard her make, and I will, later, be grateful for it, because it is the sound that ends the part of this where either of us is pretending.
I press her back against the island and her hands come up under the hem of my shirt and her palms are cold against my stomach and I hiss through my teeth and she — she — the woman who, a week ago, called me sir, smiles against my mouth.
"Take this off."
"Bossy."
"You said no more handling."
"That isn't what handling means, Maren."
"Take. It. Off."
I take it off. She watches me — watches my hands at the buttons, watches my chest as the shirt comes off my shoulders, and her eyes do something I have not seen them do before, and her mouth softens, and she reaches out and puts both hands flat on my chest.
"Oh."
"Oh?"
"Just — oh."
"Articulate."
"Shut up."
I bend and take her mouth again, and she opens for me, and her arms go up around my neck, and I lift her off the island and walk her backward into the hall — her legs around my waist, her bare heels braced low at the small of my back — and we make it as far as the door of my study because the bedroom is up a flight of stairs and the staff comes in at seven and I am, currently, not capable of waiting that long.
I push the door open with my shoulder. I kick it closed behind me.
I sit her down on the wide leather couch, and I drop to one knee in front of her, and her hands come up, fast, as if to stop me. They don't stop me. They land on my shoulders, light, and she is breathing hard, and I push her knees apart with my palms.
"Cassian."
"Yes."
"What are you?—"
"I told you I was done lying. Let me show you, Maren."
I drag her shorts down her hips. She lifts for me without being told.
They come off, and I let them fall on the rug, and I look at her — at the soft, flushed line of her thigh where the cotton has just been, at the way her belly rises and falls under the hem of the t-shirt, at her bare cunt warm and pink and already wet for me — and I bring my mouth to the inside of her knee and bite, gently, and she makes a small, shocked sound that is not, I note, a sound she has made for me before.
"Cassian—"
"I have wanted this," I say, against her skin, "since you slipped on my deck."
"That was — that was Tuesday?—"
"I am aware of what day it was."
I move up. I kiss the inside of her thigh.
I kiss the soft, secret place where her thigh meets her hip.
I kiss lower, lower, and when my mouth finds her she makes a sound that I will, for the rest of my life, hear in rooms when she is not in them.
Her hand goes into my hair. Her thighs lock around my shoulders for half a second and then — because she has decided, evidently, not to be afraid of me — open, and her hand presses my head closer, and I taste her and I taste her and I taste her until she is shaking under my mouth and saying my name like it is a sentence she has not finished yet.
"Cassian — Cassian, please?—"
"Please what?"
"You know what?—"
"Say it, sweetheart."
"I want — God, I want — I want you?—"
I rise. I pull her down the couch by the hips until she is half-laid out for me, and I work my belt open with one hand while she watches, her eyes hooded, her cheeks the color of the inside of a peach.
I free my cock and I stroke once, slow, with my own hand, and her eyes go to it and then back to my face, and her mouth does the small thing it does when she is about to say something and chooses not to.
"Tell me," I say.
"Tell you what."
"Tell me you want this. Out loud. I am not assuming, Maren. Not with you."
"I want this." Her voice is raw. "I want you. I have wanted you, I think, since the office. With the ring."
"Maren."
"Please, Cassian."
I press the head of my cock to her and I feel her, hot and slick and ready, and I push in — slow, slow, watching her face — and she opens around me like she was made for it, and I have to stop, halfway, because the look on her face is not a look I have seen on her before and I need, need, a beat to file it.
"You all right."
"I'm — yes — keep — please?—"
"Look at me."
She looks at me.
I press the rest of the way in, and she makes a sound against my collarbone, and her arms come up around my neck and she holds on with the grip of a woman who, three minutes ago, was making tea.
"Maren."
"Mm."
“You feel—Christ. You feel like?—”
“Like what.”
“Like something I don’t know how to return.”
She laughs, helpless, eyes wet at the corners, and she presses her forehead to mine, her hand finding the back of my neck, and the small, instinctive shift of her body toward mine knocks loose the last of whatever I was using to hold myself together.
I move. I move with her, and she meets me, and the leather creaks, and somewhere through the open window I can hear the first gull of the morning, and I lean down and put my mouth at her ear.
"Mine."
"Cassian—"
"Say it back."
"Yours."
"Again."
"Yours, Cassian."
"Good girl."
She comes apart underneath me with a small, shocked cry, and I follow her — fast, helpless, with my face in her hair — and I do not pull out for a long time after, and she does not ask me to.
The kitchen kettle, somewhere down the hall, is still ticking as it cools.
It is six fifty-one.
The staff comes in at seven.