Chapter 12
Serafina
The door opened and I crossed it.
I was wet before I was fully in the room.
The door clicked shut behind me. I heard the lock turn. Not loud.
“Stand there.”
His voice was low. I stopped on the rug at the foot of the bed, two paces in, and I stood there. My feet were bare on the wool. The Henley brushed the top of my thighs. The gold chain at my ankle was cool against the bone. The grey lamb was still in my hand.
He walked around me.
Slowly.
I felt him pass behind me. The weight of his gaze on the back of my neck.
The weight of it on the line of my spine through the thin cotton.
My pulse moved into my palms. Into the arches of my feet.
Into the soft skin behind my knees where I had never in my life been aware of having a pulse.
My nipples tightened against the Henley and I knew he could see the shape of them through the fabric.
I did not cover myself. A muscle low in my belly contracted in a slow pulse that went down and down and ended somewhere I could not name, and another contraction followed it, and another, and by the time he was in front of me again my thighs were damp.
He had not touched me.
He stopped a foot away. Looked at me. Really looked. His eyes moved over my face slowly, thoroughly, as though he was taking me in.
“Tonight,” he said, “you don’t have to think. Not about a single thing.”
My breath caught.
“I’ve already thought about everything.”
He lifted one finger. Put it under my chin.
My chin came up.
His eyes were very close. Dark. The irises I had cataloged across desks and booths and dinner tables, now two inches from my own.
“Do you trust me.”
“Yes.”
“Out loud,” he said. “Full sentence, please. Call me Daddy.”
The lamb was warm in my hand. The chain was cool at my ankle.
“I trust you, Daddy.”
He looked down at my hand.
The lamb.
He reached for it—carefully, the way he reached for everything he intended to handle properly—and his fingers closed around mine around the small grey body, and for one second we held it together between us.
Then he lifted it from my palm. Carried it to the nightstand on my side of the bed.
Set it beside the glass of water, sitting up, facing the pillow, the stitched black eyes pointed at the place my head would be.
“We don’t need this now. Little Sera isn’t here right now.”
“No, Daddy, she’s not.”
He came back.
His hand found the side of my throat. His thumb rested on my pulse. It was jumping.
“Good girl,” he said. Very quiet. “Now we begin.”
His fingers found the hem of the Henley.
Not a grab. Not a pull. He lifted the cotton up the length of my body the way you lift a page you don’t want to tear—two hands, both hems, even pressure, the shirt rising past my hips, past my ribs, past my breasts, over my head, and for one second I was inside it, the dark brown weave above my face, the smell of him on the cotton, and then the shirt was gone and the air of the room touched my skin and I was bare to the waist except for the plain black bra I had chosen this morning in a life that had belonged to someone else.
He did not drop the shirt on the floor.
He folded it.
Sleeves in, hem up to collar, a tidy square. Walked three steps to the armchair by the window. Laid the square of his Henley down on the cushion with the folded edge forward. Came back.
My nipples were hard. I could feel them against the bra, the cotton of it tight and rough and wonderful, and he looked down at my chest for a long second and did not touch. His eyes did the touching.
“Turn around, baby girl.”
I turned.
I faced the bed, and behind me I felt him come close, and his knuckle drew a single line down the column of my spine from my nape to the clasp of my bra, and the line of that knuckle undid me in a way his palm had not yet undone me.
The clasp opened under his fingers. One hand.
A small sound, two small sounds, the hooks coming apart.
The straps fell off my shoulders. He slid the bra down my arms without lifting it—a patient drag of elastic over skin—and then carried it to the chair and folded it and set it on top of the Henley, and the stacking of two folded pieces of me on a chair in his bedroom was the most precise thing anyone had ever done with my body.
I breathed through my mouth. I had to.
He came back. Knelt.
One knee on the rug, then the other, the same grave descent as the morning at the kitchen counter when he had put the anklet on me.
His hands went to the waistband of my leggings.
His thumbs hooked inside the band. Took my underwear with them—both, at once, a single motion begun—and then he stopped.
He looked up at me.
“Lift.”
His voice was hoarse. I was moving him too.
I lifted my left foot. He drew the leggings and the cotton underneath down past my knee, my calf, my ankle—the gold chain glinting as the fabric passed over it—and I stepped out of one leg. I lifted my right foot. Same again. Slower.
His face was level with my hip. His breath was warm on the inside of my thigh.
He did not put his mouth on me. He looked.
He looked at the soft of my belly and the small dark at the center of me and the line of my thigh, and I stood there bare except for the thin chain above my ankle, and the ache between my legs grew so much, I felt it in my teeth.
I wanted him inside me. I wanted him to fill me so completely that there was no space left for the woman I had been before I met him.
I wanted his weight on top of me and his hand in my hair and his cock pushing into me slow and then not slow, and underneath that wanting, underneath all of it, was a hunger older and filthier and more honest than any hunger I had been permitted in my life—I wanted him to come inside me.
I wanted his seed in my body. I wanted to feel him finish, deep, the warm surge of him kept, held, his, and I did not know where that wanting had come from and I did not care, and I could feel the wet of it spreading on the inside of my thigh while he looked up at me from the floor.
He rose.
Slowly. His mouth traced the inside of my thigh on the way up—a slow warm drag that was not a kiss and was not nothing, the soft brush of his lower lip, the scratch of a day’s worth of stubble—and past my hip bone, and up the center of my stomach, and between my breasts where his breath fanned hot against the skin, and he stopped at the hollow of my throat and pressed his mouth there, closed, warm, for one long held second, and he was still fully dressed.
The shirt he had worn to the office. The black trousers. The belt. The shoes.
I was naked and he was clothed. It felt uneven, but right, too.
My hands moved. Reflex. My fingers found the top button of his shirt.
He caught my wrist.
Not hard. The grip of a man who had been waiting for the move and had a plan for it.
“No.”
He brought my hand down between us. Held it against his chest for one beat so I could feel his heart—it was fast, it was not a steady heart, he was as undone as I was and he was only choosing not to show it—and then he set my hand back at my side.
“You don’t get to yet.”
“Daddy—“
“Shhh.”
He walked me backward.
Three small steps, his hand light at my waist, my bare heels finding the rug, the edge of the bed meeting the backs of my thighs. He turned me gently and sat me down on the edge of the mattress. The sheet was cool under me.
He crouched in front of me. Put one hand on each of my knees. Closed them.
“Hands flat on the mattress.”
I put my hands flat on the mattress. Palms down, fingers spread, the bed solid under me.
“Knees tighter together.”
My knees were already together. I pressed them together harder.
“Don’t move them.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
He stood up.
Took one step back. Then another. He was three feet from me now, fully dressed, his hands loose at his sides, and his eyes moved over me—the hair coming loose from the twist, the bare shoulders, the tight peaks of my breasts, the stomach rising and falling fast, the pressed-together thighs and the shine I knew was already visible on them—and he looked at me for a long time.
A full minute. More.
I did not move. I did not cover myself. My hands stayed flat and my knees stayed together and the air of the room moved over every inch of my skin, and the wetness between my thighs built until I could feel it on the sheet under me, and I understood, somewhere underneath the want, that this was a discipline—that sitting bare and still under his gaze and wanting him this badly and not being allowed to do anything about it was a form of surrender.
His mouth moved. Just the corner.
“Good girl. Now, wait for Daddy.”
He left the room.
I heard the door open behind me. Heard his footsteps down the hall—unhurried, the same even cadence he used walking into any room he owned—and then the distant clean sound of the brass key turning in the lock of the room I had seen once, in daylight, and had been carrying in my head ever since.
The creak of the cabinet door. The soft shift of leather being lifted off a rail.
I did not move.
My hands stayed flat on the mattress. My knees stayed together.
The sheet was damp under me now and I could feel the wet spreading a little with every pulse of my body.
The lamb on the nightstand watched me with its stitched black eyes and I almost laughed because it seemed suddenly very important not to let the lamb down, not to be caught moving when he came back, not to be a girl who could not hold her knees closed for ninety seconds while she waited for Daddy.
His footsteps came back.
I did not turn my head. He had not told me to turn my head. I heard him enter, heard the soft click of the door, heard him cross the rug and stop in front of me.
“Look up, baby girl.”
I looked up.