Chapter 11 #3
She did not look at me. She walked around the desk—bare feet on the rug, the gold chain catching the light at her ankle — and she knelt between my knees on the wool. Put her hands flat on my thighs, high up, palms down, not sexual, just anchored. Looked up at me.
Her eyes were wet. She did not try to hide it this time.
“Please, Daddy.”
Her voice was very small.
“Please. Just — give me ten minutes of not being her.”
Not a seduction. Not a test. Not the hungry look from earlier in the day, not the straddle-and-kiss of an hour ago, not the woman who had put her hand on my cock through my pants and whispered fuck me.
This was someone else. This was the room inside people who carry too much, and she had walked herself to the door of it on her own and she was asking me to open it, and she did not know the word for what she was asking for because no one had ever given her one.
I gave it to her without making her ask twice.
I slid down out of the chair onto the rug with her.
My back against the front of the desk, the wood cool through my shirt.
I opened my arms and she came into them—sideways, the way a child climbs into a lap, her legs folded up, her head finding the hollow under my collarbone like it had been looking for the spot for a long time and was relieved to have found it.
I reached up without looking and opened the drawer of the desk above us.
The grey lamb was inside.
I had brought it home from Margie’s in the inner pocket of my jacket the way she had carried it in hers.
I had not told her. I had put it in the drawer last night after she fell asleep because I had thought—had hoped, with a specificity I would not have been able to justify to Dante or to myself — that there might be a moment for it, and that the moment would arrive on its own and I should have the lamb where I could reach it when it did.
I put it in her hand.
She made a sound.
Not words. A soft breaking sound at the back of her throat, the kind of sound a person makes when something they did not know they were holding out for arrives on time.
Her fingers closed around the lamb. She brought it up under her chin and pressed it there, between her jaw and my chest, and her whole body went loose against me in one long exhalation like a rope cut.
I did not say anything.
I put one hand in her hair. The other low on her back. I held her.
Ten minutes.
I thought about a lot of things in those ten minutes.
I thought about how hard I had been for most of the day and how little of my body was involved in what was happening right now.
I thought about the fact that I had spent all my life being the Caruso who made people comfortable and had never, not once, held another human being the way I was holding her—without performance, for nothing other than comfort.
I thought about the fact that I was falling in love with her—no, was in love with her.
I thought about how she’d hidden behind her brother her whole life, but now had the opportunity to come out from his shadow.
I did not think about burying my cock in her, which was notable, because I had not stopped thinking about it all morning.
The ten minutes ended.
I lifted her chin with one finger.
Her face was soft in a way I had not seen before. Not the careful softness of the bed last night, after. Something younger. The weight off.
“Back to the desk, baby girl. Last section. I’ve got you.”
She nodded.
She did not give me the lamb back. She stood up with it in her hand and walked around the desk and set it on the wood beside her laptop, where she could see it, and she opened the laptop and she began to type.
I sat on the rug a minute longer. Back against the desk.
The warm place on my chest where her head had been was slowly cooling.
I had given her what she asked for and the giving had bound her to me in a way I understood I was not going to be able to undo.
This was the thing I had been reading about at Nero with the chemical smell of floor cleaner in my nose. This was the sacred part.
I stood up. Went back around to my side of the desk. Opened my laptop.
Across from me, my shirt, my chain, the grey lamb at her elbow, Serafina Scordato wrote the last section of the first report that had ever carried her name.
She typed the last sentence and I saw her fingers stop and stay stopped on the keys for a count of four before she lifted them.
“I’m done.”
“You want to read it to me?”
“Yes please, Daddy.”
She did not ask which part. She scrolled to the top of the document. Cleared her throat. Took a sip of the water I had poured into her glass an hour ago and not mentioned. And began.
Sera read for twenty-two minutes.
The introduction. The market analysis. The Cicero framework.
The risk assessment. The recommendation—three pages, tight, clean, every argument carrying its own weight and none of them leaning on any of the others.
I had read it already. Hearing it in her voice was different.
Hearing it in her voice with my eyes closed was different again.
Her pacing was sure. She did not rush the hard sentences.
She did not soften the conclusions. At the end of the recommendation she read her name—S.
Scordato, Lead Analyst—without flinching, and then she stopped.
I opened my eyes.
Her hands were in her lap. The grey lamb was at her elbow.
“It’s fantastic,” I said.
“Is it?”
“It’s yours. Do you think your father will go for it?”
“I do. I think that’s why he sent me here. I think he wants to hear what I have to say, and I think that—for the first time—he wants me to publicly take a leadership role in the family.”
“I’m so proud of you.”
She opened a new window. Pulled up her email. Attached the document to a message addressed to her brother—the subject line in Italian, clean and formal, Raccomandazione preliminare. Alleanza Caruso, the Sicilian formatting of the date underneath. Her cursor rested on the body of the email.
She did not type a note. She typed nothing. Just the attachment, the subject, the address.
Her finger hovered over send.
I did not say anything.
This was not my decision.
She sent it.
The sent-mail chime was very small in the quiet office. A little bell. Three notes.
She sat very still for a long moment.
Then she closed the laptop.
Turned in her chair. The leather creaked under her.
Her bare feet found the rug. The gold chain at her ankle caught the lamplight.
She looked at me across the two laptops and the water and the plate with a single surviving wedge of manchego on it and the grey lamb on the wood beside her elbow, and there was nothing left between us.
No work. No contract to negotiate. No punishment pending. No report to file. No test to pass.
My cock, which had been hard intermittently and sometimes constantly since six-forty this morning, made its last credible argument. It was, as arguments go, persuasive.
I thought about what I had been imagining all day.
Her on the desk. Her under me. My mouth at her throat where the gold chain sat.
The Henley shoved up over her breasts. The leggings pulled off.
My hand between her thighs and her wet already, because she had been wet already for most of the day—I had seen the mark through her underwear when I bent her over the desk and I had been carrying that image like a coal in my chest for the five hours since.
I thought about pushing into her for the first time and the sound she would make.
I thought about her hands on my back. I thought about her eyes.
I thought about coming inside her while she said my name—not Daddy, not in this first one, not yet — just my name, the plain one, the one she had said at Marchetti’s the first time and had been saying in my head every night since.
I stood up.
“You’ve earned a treat, Baby Girl.”
“I have?”
“Of course.”
My chair rolled back. I walked around the desk. She watched me come. I took her hand—just her hand, not her waist, not her face—and pulled her up out of the chair. Her body came up against mine and stopped there. I did not kiss her.
“Come with me.”
I walked her out of the office.
Slow. Her hand in mine. Down the hallway, past the kitchen where the contract sat folded in the cutlery drawer beside a box of wooden toothpicks, past the locked door of the toy room with the brass key still in the shallow dish on the console, past the guest suite where her suitcase had originally been and where none of her things had lived for three days, to the door of my bedroom.
I stopped.
Put my hand on the handle.
Looked at her.
She was small under the hallway light, and loose-haired, and wearing my shirt, and the grey lamb was in her other hand—she had carried it out of the office with her and I had not noticed until this moment.
“You want me?” I asked.
“I do.”
“All of me?”
“All of you.”
“Are you sure.”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
Her eyes did not leave mine.
“I’m sure, Daddy.”
I opened the door.