Chapter 10 #3
At the door he held my coat. I slid the lamb into the inner pocket of it, where I could not see it and could still feel its small weight against my ribs as we walked back to the car.
We got back at three.
I waited for ten minutes while he edited the document.
Every clause I had altered. Incorporated.
Ten p.m. instead of eight. Her choice on the movement clause.
My addendum on self-touch—permission may be requested and is not to be denied arbitrarily—in its own neat line.
The full relocation protocol on the safeword.
All of it, his clean black type, on one page now instead of twelve, because he had rebuilt the document as a single dense page of agreement.
The red pen was gone. Only the black one remained, lying horizontally at the foot of the page.
“Time to sign,” he said. “If you’re in agreement.”
I picked up the pen.
Signed my name, Serafina Maria Scordato.
Each letter placed. The tall spine of the f, the clean bowls of the two as in Maria, the forward-sloping capitals my mother had taught me at seven on the kitchen table in Palermo.
I passed the pen across.
He signed his own name, Marco Caruso.
He capped the pen.
Folded the page once, along the center crease, cleanly. Opened the drawer beside the cutlery. Placed the contract in, beside the napkin rings and a box of wooden toothpicks and a small screwdriver for the tightening of handles.
Closed the drawer.
It felt like the whole room breathed out with gentle, soft relief.
“Come here. I have one more thing for you.”
I came.
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out something that gleamed thin and gold between his fingers.
An anklet. Fine chain, no charm, plain as a wedding band without the ring.
He knelt.
On his kitchen tiles. One knee, then the other. His shirt fell open a fraction at the collar when he bent. He took my left ankle in his hand—his fingers closed around it, warm, sure—and lifted it gently so he could thread the clasp.
He fastened the anklet just above my ankle bone. It was fine enough that the clasp was nearly invisible.
He tested the fit with one finger.
“Nobody sees it but us.”
I did not trust my voice.
I nodded.
He stayed kneeling for one more breath. Kissed the anklebone above the chain. Then stood.
And stripped off his tie.
Black silk. Knotted four-in-hand this morning, as he always knotted, the small neat dimple under the knot his one unconscious vanity. He pulled the knot loose, drew the tie out of his collar in a single long motion that made a soft sound like a breath.
He looped it.
“Give me your wrists.”
I held them out, crossed at the wrist, palms up. The blue vein on the left still carrying the ghost of the shearling cuff.
He wrapped the silk around me twice and tied it off with a knot I did not recognize—a small, specific thing, flat, not decorative, the kind of knot someone who sailed would tie. It held without compressing. The silk was warm from his skin.
He walked me backward.
Three steps. My bare heels on the tile. The back of my thighs met the edge of the marble counter. He lifted me.
Both hands at my hips. The shirt rode up. My bound wrists settled in my lap between us. The marble was cold under me through the thin cotton. The anklet clinked once, softly, against the stone.
He pushed the shirt up to my hips.
Looked at me. The look was not ceremonial. It was the look of a man who had been waiting for this particular image and now had it, and was not going to rush through it.
“So much restraint. Time for some pleasure, baby. Lean back.”
I leaned back on my bound hands. The silk of the tie pressed into my palms.
He knelt for the second time in ten minutes.
On the tiles again. At the counter now. His shoulders parted my knees as wide as his shoulders were wide, which was wide. His hands slid up the outsides of my thighs and held me at the hips, thumbs pressing in at the hinge of me.
His mouth found me without preamble.
No teasing. No circling. He knew where I was and he went there, the flat of his tongue, slow, deliberate, the way he did everything, and the sound that came out of me was a sound I did not know I contained.
I arched.
He held my hips down.
His mouth worked me open in slow, unrelenting passes.
He was not performing. He was cataloging.
He was memorizing the rhythms that made my bound hands tighten on themselves, the rhythm that made my head fall back against the cabinet behind me, the rhythm that made a small helpless please rise in my throat before I could stop it.
When it came he was ready for it.
He felt it before I felt it—the tension at the hinge where his thumbs pressed, the fine tremor across my belly—and he held the rhythm steady and did not slow and did not speed up, and I came with my wrists bound in his tie on his kitchen counter with my head against the cabinet and his hands on my hips and his mouth at the center of me, and the sound I made was not quiet but it also was not a performance, and he took it and he did not stop until I was shaking through the aftershocks and he had worked me through the last one.
He pulled back slowly.
Laid his cheek for one breath against the inside of my thigh. Kissed the soft place there. Stood.
Lifted me off the counter by the hips. Set me on my feet. My knees held, barely.
He brought my bound wrists up between us. Looked at the silk knot. Worked it loose with the patience of a man untying a fresh bow on a gift. The tie came free. He set it on the counter without ceremony.
Then he took my left wrist. Turned it. Kissed the faint pink imprint the silk had left on the skin. Turned my right wrist. Kissed the imprint there. The marks were not real marks, not the kind you noticed an hour later — just the soft memory of pressure, pink where the silk had been.
“Good girl. Now,” he said, “take my pants off. With your teeth.”
I felt my heart stutter. Fuck. I wanted this so badly. I knelt in front of him, opened my mouth . . .
And my phone chirped from my bedroom. That particular melody that meant only one thing.
Gianni. Emergency.
The first message was simple. Manageable.
Papa needs the preliminary recommendation on the Caruso alliance by end of day Friday. Remember whose name is on the door, piccola.
Little one. His word for me since I was seven. It had never been a kindness. It was a marker, a flag planted on top of me to remind me, and him, and whoever else was reading, that the order of things had been established a long time ago and was not up for revision.
I read it twice.
The second message was neither simple nor manageable.
He is talking of meeting with Valenti’s people Thursday evening. It would be wise to send the report before then.
I read that one three times.
The water at the bottom of the bottle rocked very slightly, because my hand had begun, very slightly, to shake.
Thursday evening.
Valenti’s people.
Something inside me woke up.
I felt it come on the way you feel a light come on in a back room of a building you thought was empty.
Things were moving so much more quickly than I thought. Papa didn’t say anything about such a quick meeting. But now I had work to do, and fast. No time for fucking around.
Marco knock on the door.
“Babygirl, what’s the matter? I’m waiting for you. Got unfinished business.”
Oh it would be so easy to forget the report and give myself to him.
No. I had to tell him.