13. Chapter Thirteen Carmelo #2
The kiss tastes like blood and salt. My blood. Her tears. She pulls me off the stool and I stand and she's small against me and her hands go from my jacket to my belt, and she unbuckles it with the fast, angry efficiency of a woman who needs to feel something that isn't this.
"Grace. Don’t"
"Shut the fuck up. Don't say my name in that tone. Don't tell me what to do. Don't be gentle."
"Grace."
"I said don't. We didn’t finish last night and now that you’ve destroyed my whole fucking life the least you can do is FINISH what YOU started.
" She pulls my belt free and drops it on the floor and the knife clatters on the tile.
"I just found out my entire life is a lie and the man I've been, I don’t know what to even call this, killed my foster parents.
I had a name I don't remember and a father I've never met and I've been drugged for eleven years and I don't know what's real anymore except you.
You're real. This is real." She grabs my hand and puts it on her hip. "Make it real."
Grabbing her hips, I lift her onto the bar.
She sits on the edge with her legs open.
I step between them and her hands go to my face, both of them, holding my jaw, thumbs pressing into my cheeks.
She kisses me again and the kiss is hard and angry, and her teeth catch my split lip, and it bleeds again and she doesn't stop.
Neither do I. My hands are on her thighs, pushing her pants down, and she lifts her hips to help and kicks them off one leg and leaves them hanging on the other ankle because neither of us cares about the other ankle.
I push her underwear to the side. She's wet. Despite the rage, despite the tears, despite everything. Her body wants mine and the contrast between what she's feeling emotionally and what she's feeling physically is written across her face, fury and desire occupying the same space.
Pulling down my pants, I pull my cock out and push into her and she grabs the edge of the bar with both hands.
Her head drops back and she says "Fuck" and it's not pleasure.
It's not a moan. It's a declaration. Fuck this situation.
Fuck these revelations. Fuck the pills and the Marinos and the trafficking and the lie.
Fuck everything except this, right now, a man inside her who she's furious at and can't let go of.
I grip her hips and pull her to the edge, and thrust hard.
She wraps her legs around me and locks her ankles behind my back and pulls me deeper.
The bar glasses rattle. A cocktail napkin holder falls off the far end and crashes to the floor.
Her nails dig into my shoulders through my shirt, and she leans forward and bites my neck, hard, and I feel her teeth break the skin and I fucking love it. Every mark she puts on me is earned.
She comes first. Fast, hard, her body clenching around me and her forehead against my shoulder and her teeth still in my neck. The sound she makes is muffled by my skin and I feel it in my throat and my spine and my chest.
I follow her. Deep inside her, my hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave bruises that match the ones from two nights ago. She holds me inside her with her legs locked behind my back and neither of us moves for thirty seconds.
Her finger starts tapping. My shoulder. Slow. One. Two. Three.
She pulls back and her eyes find mine. Red, wet, exhausted… but also certain.
"Tell me everything," she says. "From the beginning. All of it. Don't leave anything out."
I lean my forehead against hers. My lip is bleeding. My neck is bleeding. Her tears are on my shirt. We're in the restaurant where we met, her sitting on the bar with her pants around one ankle, me standing between her legs with cock softening inside her.
"Your name," I say, "is Graziella Ferrara."
A sharp inhale and then she’s asking for more.
So I do. I tell her everything. From the beginning.
In the empty restaurant with the cracked window and the neon clock.
The chairs stacked on the tables and the CLOSED sign on the door.
I tell her about the records and the placement files and the Social Security number and the pharmacy that doesn't exist. I tell her about the Marinos and the check-in logs and the photographs, surveillance photos taken every year from a distance, her at fourteen, seventeen, twenty, documented but never known.
I tell her about the Silent and the placement network.
I tell her about Renzo, who asked Emilio to keep an ear out, and about me, who heard it and couldn't stop.
I tell her almost everything. I don't tell her about the trafficking. Not the details, anyway. Not what happened between eight and thirteen. That isn't mine to tell. That's hers to remember, on her own terms, in her own time, when her body gives it back.
She listens. She doesn't interrupt. Her finger taps my shoulder the entire time, and the rhythm gets faster when the information hits harder and slower when it settles, and by the time I'm done, an hour has passed and the restaurant is still empty.
The CLOSED sign is still on the door and she's still sitting on the bar and I'm still standing between her legs and neither of us has moved.
"Graziella," she murmurs.
"Yes."
"That's my name."
"Yes."
Her finger taps my shoulder one more time. Then her hand opens flat against my chest, palm down, and the tapping stops.
"I need to go home," she says. "Alone. I need to think."
"Okay."
"Don't follow me. Don't watch me from your window. Don't come to the restaurant tonight."
She knows about the window. She knows about the apartment. I don't ask how because it doesn't matter.
"Okay," I say.
She slides off the bar and pulls her pants up. She picks up my belt from the floor and holds it out to me, and I take it and our fingers touch and she doesn't pull away but she doesn't hold on.
She picks up her bag and walks to the door. She stops with her hand on the handle. "Carmelo."
"Yes."
"If I had known the truth from the beginning, I still would have wanted you to walk me home. You never needed to lie to me."
She opens the door and steps into the cold and the bell rings. The door closes behind her and I'm standing in the empty restaurant with blood on my lip and her teeth marks on my neck and the smell of her on my hands.
I pick up the knife from the floor. I put it back on my belt. I right the cocktail napkin holder. I wipe the bar where she was sitting.
Then I go back to the apartment, and I don't stand at the window because she asked me not to.
It's the hardest thing I've ever done.