Chapter 13 #3
Then her hand left my heart and slid down, over the piece for my father, over the muscle of my belly, and lower, and she found my cock through the soft cotton I’d slept in and then under it, her fingers wrapping around me, warm and sure, and she made a sound when she felt how hard I already was for her—a low groan, surprised, hungry—and I damn near came apart right there in her hand like a boy.
“Christ,” I said. The word got torn out of me.
She started to move her hand. Slow. Gentle, a long unhurried stroke, the same hands that kneaded the dough and hauled the flour and lettered nothing and commanded everything, and the gentleness of it was worse than any roughness could’ve been, the deliberate care of it, her watching my face the whole time, reading me the way she’d learned to read a room, finding the rhythm that made my breath catch and holding to it.
The furnace I’d banked every dawn for three weeks roared up the whole length of me.
I gripped the sheet. I, who held the line, who held everyone’s line—I gripped the sheet and let her hold me in her hand and stroke me slow and watch what it did.
I got my mouth to her ear. I had to tell her. The truth had been coming out of me all morning and it wasn’t done.
“I want you,” I said, low, wrecked, my voice gone to gravel.
“You have to understand—I’ve never—” The man who never runs short of words, reaching again, finding the true one.
“I’ve had everything I ever wanted handed to me on a smile.
My whole life. Bartenders, bored wives, the whole world opening for me because I’m charming.
And I’ve never wanted any of it. Not one thing.
Not really.” Her hand stilled, listening.
“And then you.” Her breath had gone shallow against my jaw.
“I want you, Katerina. I have never wanted anyone, anything, the way I want you. It scares the hell out of me.”
She turned her head and her mouth found mine, soft, and she kissed me slow, and when she pulled back her eyes were lit from underneath, dark and glassed and certain, and her hand tightened around me, the gentle gone to want.
“Then show me,” she said.
So I showed her.
I got my hands under her and lifted, easy, and she yelped—surprise and pure delight, a sound I’d never heard her make, bright and undefended—and her arms came around my neck and she laughed against my throat as I laid her down, her dark hair fanning across my pillow.
Then the lava came up.
That’s the only word for it. Three weeks of held air, months of standing wall between her and the dark, every dawn I’d kept eighteen inches and torn myself open instead of closing it—all of it broke loose at once and I could no more have held it back than I could’ve held back the tide.
I put my mouth to her throat where the pulse goes and worked down, and I took her in my hands, great greedy handfuls of her, her breasts, her hips, the strong flour-dusted length of her, and she cried out and arched up into me, and I drank the sound of it like a man who’d been dying of thirst and didn’t know.
I caught one nipple between my fingers and pinched, just enough, and she gasped and her hips bucked, and I took the other in my mouth and she fisted her hands in my hair and held me there.
I came up and caught her bottom lip in my teeth, the one I’d kissed swollen weeks ago, and bit it gentle and felt her shudder, and then I pinned her—both her wrists in one of my hands, pressed to the pillow above her head, not a rule, not a command, just because I needed her under me, because the want had gone past sense and into the body.
“Tonio—” My name like a plea, like the first time, and it nearly finished me.
I reached down and took myself in hand and dragged the broad head of me through the slick of her, slow, and she was so wet, so ready, soaked for me the way she’d been over my lap, and I pressed just the head of myself into her, the tightness of her closing around it, and she moaned—a long broken sound that I felt in my own chest, in the Madonna over my heart.
“Please,” she said. Begging now, the thing I’d never once heard from her before this week and could not get enough of. “Please, please—fuck me, Tonio, let me feel it, all of you, all of you inside me, please—”
I pushed in further.
Slow, because I wanted to feel every inch of it, because I wanted to watch her take me, and she gasped and pushed her body up into mine, chasing it, and I sank deeper, and she was so tight and so hot around me that I had to stop, halfway home, and breathe, my forehead dropping to hers, my whole body shaking with the effort of going slow.
Because no one had ever held me like this.
Women had wanted the danger. They’d wanted the charm, the family, the body, the story.
Nobody had ever looked at the whole of me—the killer, the soldier, the loud man hiding the soft one—and pulled me in close and held on.
People feared me or used me or smiled at the surface of me.
Katerina had me half-buried inside her with her ankles locking at the small of my back and her hands fisted in my hair and her eyes wide open on mine, holding me, all of me, the part nobody got to keep, and it cracked something open in my chest that I’d had nailed shut for fifteen years.
“I’ve got you,” she said, and it was my line, the words I’d said to her a dozen times, handed back to me now, and I felt them go through me like warm water down the spine. “I’ve got you, Tonio. All of you.”
I pushed the rest of the way home.
We both gasped. I was as deep as I could get, flush against her, the whole length of me inside her, and I held there a second, just held, the two of us breathing each other’s air.
Then I started to move. Slow at first, long deep strokes, trying to get deeper still, like I could climb all the way inside her and live there.
I kissed her mouth, her jaw, her neck where the pulse hammered, and she started to tremble under me, the way she’d trembled over my lap, except now it was around me, on me, with me.
“Please,” she whispered against my ear, and her voice had gone small, gone young, the Little surfacing even now, even with no rules left, because it was the truest part of her and it came when she was opened all the way up. “Let me, let me—Daddy, let me—”
And I let her.
I let her have it, all of it. I drove into her, deep and steady, the rhythm building in speed, in power, and I worked my hand down between us and found her clit slick and swollen and I held my finger there, firm, not moving, just pressing, letting her grind herself against it on every stroke, letting her chase it, letting her take her own pleasure off me the way I’d never let her before.
No holding her on the edge this time. No you don’t come till I say.
Just—have it. Have everything. Take it from me.
“That’s it,” I rasped, my mouth at her ear. “Have it. It’s yours. I’ve got you, take it, come for me—”
She came around me.
I felt it start—the lock of her, the long shudder—and then her whole body convulsed under mine and her pussy clamped down around my cock, gripping, pulsing, milking, and she cried out and buried her face in my neck and shook apart while I drove her through every wave of it, and the feel of her coming around me, the grip of her, the trust of it, the whole undefended length of her trembling and holding on—
I lost control.
I’d held the line for weeks. I held it for everyone, always, the steady one, the wall.
And I lost it completely, came so hard inside her I saw the room go white at the edges, my hips jerking, pouring into her in long pulses while she clenched around me and gasped my name, and I gasped hers, and the pleasure of it tore up out of me with the words I’d been holding all morning, all my life, the truth coming out the way the true things come, helpless, unstoppable.
“I love you,” I said, into her hair, into her neck, kissing her face, her wet cheeks, her mouth, shaking, undone, all of it. “I love you, Katerina. I love you. I love you.”
She held on. She didn’t let go. Her arms around my neck and her body around me and her breath ragged against my throat, and she pressed her mouth to my jaw and said it back, soft, in two languages, the Greek coming out the way it does when she’s flustered or grieving or telling the truth—s’agapó, agápi mou—and I didn’t need a translation to know what it was.
There was no going back now. The secret was out.
But she was mine and I was hers, fully, with our eyes open, nothing held back on either side, and I held on to that the way I held the line, the way I’d hold it for the rest of my life—the loud man who’d never been kept, finally, blessedly kept.