Chapter 10 #2
His hands found the waist of my jeans and drew them down, slow, over my hips, and I let him, I held the marble and let him, and then his palm was warm flat over the cotton of my underwear, just resting there, weighing, and he made a low sound and said, “Look at you. Already.” And then he hooked his fingers in the cotton and tugged that down too, and the air of the cooling kitchen touched me, and I gripped the stone.
The first spank was nothing.
A tap. Barely a sound. A demonstration, the way you’d show someone where a thing sat.
“That’s all it is,” he said, low, his other hand spread warm on my lower back. “This is me telling you where the edge is. Nothing more than that. Breathe.”
The second one was more than nothing, but not much, and he talked through it, steady, this far, no further, I’ve got it, and the steadiness of him was its own thing, the calm of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and wasn’t in any hurry to do it.
The third one wasn’t nothing at all.
The sound that came out of me wasn’t a sound I planned.
It came up out of somewhere I didn’t have access to, a thing I’d never have made on purpose, and I heard it in the quiet kitchen and was appalled at it and could not call it back—because the heat went down through me, all at once, the dawn coming up over the valley, slow and total and unstoppable and warming everything it touched, low in my belly, the want rising so fast and so complete that I had no defense against it, none, the whole bench-gripping length of me lit up by a thing I’d have sworn an hour ago, a minute ago, I’d never in my life want.
My hips pushed back.
Into his hand. Without my permission. Chasing it.
He went quiet behind me.
I could feel his breath change. I could feel the heat of him crowd closer, his other hand sliding off my back and down to my hip, gripping, and the radio sounded very far away, and the tension racked up and up past anything either of us could sit inside, my forehead dropping toward the cold marble, my whole body a wire pulled to the screaming point, and I waited—God help me I waited—for the next thing, for his hands, for the voice—
The bell over the door went.
Fuck.
I came up off the marble so fast I cracked my hip on the bench, hauling my jeans up with hands gone clumsy, and Tonio stepped back and put himself between me and the front in the same motion, a wall, smooth, and through the doorway from the dark front of the shop a woman’s voice came, dry as ash, before either of us had got a word out.
“Door wasn’t locked,” the voice said.
She came through into the gold of the kitchen light. Red lipstick like armor, an expensive coat, an antique ring she was turning on her finger, dark eyes that went over the two of us once and missed exactly nothing, my flushed face, Tonio’s wall of a body, the air in the room you could’ve cut.
“Tella,” Tonio said, and there was an annoyance in it I’d never heard, what are you doing here. “Nobody told me—”
“Nobody tells you anything, Toe.” She said it without heat, dropping a designer bag on the marble like she owned it.
“Dante sent me. Two hundred and forty covers, a cake, and a wedding in two weeks, run by one woman and one man who can’t laminate—or so I hear.
” Her eyes flicked to me, and the corner of her painted mouth went up, sharp and not unkind.
“Word travels. I do logistics. I’m here to make sure this doesn’t fall apart, which—” another glance between us, devastating, “—it appears to have been about to.”
Tonio’s jaw worked. He hadn’t known. He was off-balance, the steady man knocked sideways, and a part of me, a low warm part still humming from the marble, enjoyed it.
But the rest of me—the boss, the woman who’s never let one finger of help past the door until Tonio—the rest of me looked at this sharp red-lipped stranger sent to work in my kitchen, and felt the old refusal come up, I’ve got it, I don’t need, jobs you do right or you don’t take them, and then felt it falter.
Because I was so tired.
“Fine,” I said. And meant it. “There’s a spare apron on the hook. The Greek things are mine, you don’t touch those. Everything else, you’re useful.”
She blinked, like she’d braced for a fight and not got one. Then she smiled, full, and it was Tonio’s family in it, the warmth under the sharp. “Oh,” she said. “I like her.”
Tonio caught my eye over Donatella’s head while she was already in the bag pulling out a planner, and he didn’t say anything, just held my look one beat, two, the heat still banked behind it.
We’re not done yet, his eyes said.
I looked back at him and didn’t argue.
After a few hours of planning and briefing, Tonio took me back to his place.
He lived a few blocks south, in an apartment above a shuttered print shop that looked like it had been closed since before either of us was born.
The stairs up were battered and gray, the banister scarred with a hundred angry keys, and the entryway smelled like whatever had died in the radiator in 1983 and then been perfectly preserved.
It was a building for men who worked with their hands and kept their tools in plastic bins by the door. It was a building for Tonio.
The place was neat. Not clean, exactly, but organized, lived in. The living room was one long rectangle, with a battered blue sofa and a television. Weirdly, I felt at home. But that didn’t stop me from freaking out.
I was wound to the wick and I couldn’t stop it, the way you can’t stop a kettle once it’s set.
My head was a kitchen with every burner on. I came up the stairs talking, I think. Listing. The way I do, low, to myself, except out loud now because he was there and the door had stopped staying shut. I was three sentences into trying to analyze the loaf when he spoke to me.
“It’s time to stop, Baby Girl. You don’t manage anything in here. You hear me? Not the wedding, not the loaf, not the numbers, not Donatella. None of it’s yours tonight. I’m taking it.”
“Tonio, the cake still isn’t—”
“It’s not yours tonight.” Flat. A door closing on the burner. “I’ve got it. Give it to me.”
“I’ll try.”
“I will show you something about letting go. Do you trust me?”
“I trust you.”
“Good girl. Can you feel your hands? Make a fist.”
I made a fist.
He took my wrist in his hand and brought it up, then the other, and overlapped them like I was about to pray.
Like I’d ever done that. Then he reached behind, and I felt a whisper of rough cotton slide over my skin.
He was binding my hands together, wrists crossed, with a kitchen towel from his own counter.
He tied it firm, but not tight. Just enough that I couldn’t pull free without asking.
The restraint was nothing, a joke—if I’d wanted out, I could have been out.
But the minute it was on me, the world changed.
“Hands stay here,” he said. “Nothing to manage, nothing to hold but this. You let go. That’s the job. ” I nodded.
“Too tight?”
“No.”
He checked it again anyway. Pulled again, watched my fingers, watched the color in them.
Twice. He did it twice, and the doing-it-twice was the thing, the proof in the body of what he’d said across the marble—the wall under everything—a man who would rather check too many times than once too few, and something in me that had been braced for a year began, very slowly, to come unbraced.
Then the dark.
He had a blindfold, soft, and he drew it over my eyes and tied it behind my head, gentle in the hair, and the world went out.
The gold of the lamp gone. His face gone.
The kitchen in my head—I reached for it out of habit, for the loaf, for the list, to count something, to manage something—and there was less of it to reach for, because there was less of me pointed outward to do the reaching with.
He took the sight and then he took the rest, one at a time, his voice moving around me in the dark so I lost where he was, his hands going quiet so I couldn’t track him, until there was nothing left to run, no room to keep, no number to hold, no edge to find.
“Say it for me,” he said, from somewhere. “The word. So I know you have it.”
“Kataifi,” I said into the dark.
“Good girl. That word stops everything. Anytime. You don’t have to earn it and you don’t have to explain it. It’s yours.” A pause. “Everything else, you hand to me. You don’t decide anything in here. You don’t do anything but what I say. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
“There it is,” he murmured, close now, his breath at my ear. “There you go. Put it down.”
And then he took me apart, slow, in the dark.
His mouth on my throat where the pulse goes.
His hands—I never knew where they’d be, that was the whole of it, I couldn’t track him, couldn’t get ahead of him, couldn’t run the choreography, and so I stopped, I just stopped, and let the dark hand me each thing as it came.
The drag of cloth off my shoulders. The cold of the room and then the heat of him over it.
A hand spread flat on my belly, low. His voice, constant, the only fixed point in the world.
That’s it. You don’t have to do anything. I’ve got you. I’ve got the counter.
The counter. The same words. They went through me like warm water every time.
He guided me down—a knee, a cushion, his hands telling me where, and I went where his hands told me because there was nothing else to be, no boss, no books, no Katerina who runs everything, just a body in the dark being moved into place by someone I trusted enough to move it—and then his hand was in my hair, gathering it, and I felt him close, the heat of him.
I heard a zip, and I knew his pants were down. He said, low, “Open.”
I could smell him, musky and raw, and it made my mouth water. I didn’t hesitate. I leaned in, lips parting like I was taking communion, and wrapped my mouth around him.