Chapter 12 #3
The world came back in one warm flood. His face above mine, six inches away, his dark eyes wide, his mouth open, the careful Marco gone, the Nero smile gone, the boardroom smile gone, the warm host and the calibrated Daddy and every polished version of him stripped off like the clothes on the chair, and what was left was a man being undone by what he was doing to a woman.
His face was not control.
His face was wreckage.
He was fucking me in slow, unrelenting strokes with his forearms braced on either side of my head and his hips driving into me and his eyes held mine and there was nothing strategic in his eyes—there was hunger and there was reverence and there was the look of a man who had stopped planning, who had given up the plan, who was being pulled through the act by the same current that was pulling me, and the recognition of that—that I had done this to him, that I had brought Marco Caruso to this face—tipped me over.
I came.
Around him. Hard. A long pulsing clench that rolled up out of my pelvis and shook my thighs and locked my ribs and emptied my lungs, and my wrists pulled against the tether above my head and his hand came up into my hair and made a fist and held me, and I said his name, Marco, Marco, Marco into the warm space between our mouths, and his face contorted above me and his rhythm broke on the third stroke after mine and he pushed in deep and stayed.
I felt him finish.
The long warm pulse of him inside me. His forehead dropped to mine.
His shuddered in and out. His hand in my hair loosened, re-gripped, loosened.
I felt him come inside me the way I had wanted him to—the filling, the keeping, the weight of his body in mine and his seed warm and held and his, mine, ours, the thing I had not known I could ask for and had been given anyway—and I held him there with the muscles of my body and I did not let him go.
His mouth found my forehead. Stayed.
“Sera.”
“Marco.”
“Sera.”
He stayed inside me for a long time.
I felt his breath slow. Felt the fast hammer of his heart against my ribs gradually find a rhythm closer to mine.
His forehead stayed on mine. When he finally moved it was to draw out of me slowly—slow enough that I felt every inch of the leaving, slow enough that I made a small sound at the emptiness of it—and he lowered his hips to the side and lifted himself onto one elbow and looked at me.
His hand went to the tether first.
The small steel clip between the buckle-rings.
He worked it open with his thumb. The cuffs separated.
My arms dropped apart — the first independent motion I had made in what felt like an hour—and the shoulders complained a little and he caught that, of course he caught that, and he took my left wrist in both hands and worked the buckle open slowly.
The shearling lifted. The leather fell away.
He brought my wrist to his mouth.
Kissed the pulse. The same spot he had kissed when he had fit the cuff on me in the toy room for the first time. The same kiss, now heavier, now meaning a thing it had only hinted at then.
He took my right wrist. Same ritual. Same kiss. The leather fell onto the sheet somewhere beside us.
“Come here.”
He sat up. Drew me up with him. My legs were not going to hold me and we both knew it.
He slid his arms under my knees and behind my back and lifted me off the bed in one clean motion, and my head found the hollow of his throat and I felt the pulse there—still uneven, still the one thing his body could not edit—and he carried me out of the bedroom and across the hall to the bathroom.
I tried to reach up.
My hand went for his jaw. The instinct older than the contract, older than the four rules, older than anything—the reflex of a woman who had been trained from the time she could speak that a thing given must be answered with a thing given back, and that the accounts must always be balanced, and that a debt unmet was a failure of being.
He caught my hand at the wrist.
“No.”
His hand settled on the back of my neck. Warm. Broad. Holding my head against his throat without pressing.
“Let me.”
“Daddy, I want —“
“I know. Let me, Sera.”
I let him. The bath was already running—he’d started it before he’d even laid me back on the bed—and when he lowered me into the shallow water, it felt just right. It came up to my hips, hot without scalding, scented with the rosemary soap on the ledge.
He knelt beside the tub. “Does that feel okay?” he asked, tilting a small pitcher of warm water over my hair, his other hand shielding my eyes.
“I love how soft it is.” His fingers worked the shampoo into my scalp in slow, careful circles—the practiced care of someone who’d once watched another tend to me.
He rinsed until the water ran clear. “All done,” he murmured, brushing wet strands aside.
Next, he washed my shoulders with a soft cloth, lathered in rosemary soap.
“You’re so easy to care for,” he said as he drew the cloth down each arm.
Then he lifted one leg at a time, gently cleansing the backs of my knees.
“Such delicate skin here,” he whispered, setting each foot back into the water.
He paused at the arches, where the gold chain at my ankle glinted wet. He didn’t unclasp it.
When he was finished, he lifted me from the tub.
“Let me wrap you up,” he said, enfolding me in the cream towel folded at the foot of the bed.
He carried me to the bedroom, laid me down, and dried me with tender strokes.
“Almost there,” he cooed, pulling the sheet over me.
He left briefly and returned with a small white plate and a glass of water.
On the plate lay four slices of fig, the pale seeds bright against the deep rose flesh.
He sat beside me. “I thought you’d like something sweet,” he said, lifting the first slice.
“For you, amore.” He brought it to my lips; I opened, and he placed it on my tongue.
“Nice?” he asked softly. It was cool and almost floral.
I nodded, and he fed me the remaining three slices, one by one.
Then he tipped the glass to my mouth, cradling my head. A droplet escaped at the corner of my lip; he caught it with his thumb. “There you go,” he whispered, wiping me clean. He set plate and glass on the nightstand and slid in beside me. “Mind if I stay?” he asked.
He pulled me close—the arm under my head a pillow, the arm across my waist the weight I didn’t know I needed. I pressed my ear to his chest and heard his heart, steady and deep. “Sleep now,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”
The good kind of sleep came, unbidden, and I drifted away to the rhythm of his heartbeat.
I spoke before it could close.
“Marco.”
“Mm.”
“I don‘t want to go back to Palermo.”
My voice was very small.
He did not answer in words.
His arm tightened around my waist. Not hard. A degree. A single firm pull that brought me a quarter-inch closer into the length of him. His mouth found the crown of my head and pressed there—closed, warm, the same seal he had used on my wrist and my ankle and the inside of my elbow—and stayed.
He did not say stay. He did not say I know.
He did not say we’ll figure it out. He held me and he kept his mouth on my hair and he let the sentence I had given him sit between us without answering it, because the answer was in the tightening of his arm and in the steady hammer of his heart under my ear, and I did not need it in language.
I fell asleep.
The last thing I registered was the pulse in his throat against my cheek—steady, the steadiest thing I had ever felt.