CHAPTER NINETEEN
ADELINA
I sit on the edge of my bed in my mother-in-law's coat for two hours and eleven minutes.
I do not take it off. I sit there with the two buttons done and my hands in the pockets and my feet flat on a rug that a man carried up two flights of stairs by himself a week before I arrived and has never mentioned to anybody, and I go through it.
I am good at this. This is the thing I am actually good at.
I do the arithmetic on other people's lives at two in the morning.
I have done it on the rent and the light bill and the clinic card and a nine year old pair of lungs, for nine years, and I have not got it wrong yet, and I am going to do it now on myself, properly, out loud in my own head, and then I am going to do what it says.
So.
One. I am married to him and I did not choose it.
That is true and it is going to stay true. There is no version of tonight that makes it not true, and if I go down that corridor I do not get to un-know it, and in twenty years when I am thirty-four I am still going to be the girl whose father put her on a table in a back room.
Two. He knows that.
He knows it so completely that he stood in a shed with his mouth on mine and his hand on my leg and stopped, because he worked out, faster than I did, that if he took it tonight I would spend the rest of my life doing the arithmetic and never trusting the answer.
Three. Nobody has ever done that for me.
Not once. In twenty-three years nobody has ever looked at a thing I was offering and said no, because in six months you will understand what it cost you. Everybody takes it. Everybody has always taken it. My father took it in twenties off a table.
Four.
Four is the one I keep having to come back to, the one I have been walking around for two hours.
He did not stop because he did not want to.
He stopped because he wanted to too much.
At twenty past two I stand up.
I take the coat off and put it on the chair and I stand there in the middle of the room in a T-shirt and a pair of leggings I have had since I was twenty, and I look at myself in the mirror over the chest of drawers.
There is not a single romantic thing about this.
I have flour under two fingernails. My hair has been up all day and has gone the shape of the clip.
There is a burn on the inside of my left forearm from August of the year I turned nineteen and eight faded ones nobody can see, and I am five foot two and I am soft through the middle and my front tooth has been chipped since I was eleven.
I put my hand over my mouth.
Then I take it down, on purpose, and I look at it in the mirror, and I keep looking until I can do it without wanting to put my hand back up.
It takes about forty seconds.
And then I go.
There are nine doors between the east stairs and his room.
I count them because I count things, and I do not hurry, and the floor is cold because the heating goes off at thirty in this house and nobody has ever questioned it.
The light is on under his door.
Of course it is. It is half past two in the morning.
I stand outside it.
And I have a speech. I have had it since the second hour, and I lift my hand and I knock twice, and the light under the door moves, and he opens it before I have got the first word anywhere near my mouth.
He is in trousers and a shirt with the collar open.
No shoes. No jacket. The bandage off his hand and the split closed over, and there is a book face down on the arm of the chair behind him and a lamp on and nothing else in that room at all, no television, no picture, no glass, nothing.
He does not say anything.
"I am going to talk," I say, "and you are going to let me finish."
"All right."
"You don't get to decide this one."
"Adelina."
"You decided in the shed and you were right, and I have been sitting on a bed for two hours working out that you were right, and I hate it, and you were right." My voice is doing something. "But you don't get to decide it twice."
Salvatore fills up the whole of that doorway.
"No," he says. "I don't."
"Here's what I want."
"Say it."
"I want to say what happens." I have my hands in fists at my sides and I make myself open them.
"Everything. All of it. Every single thing that happens in that room tonight, I say it first, and if I don't say it, it doesn't happen.
And you don't get to be kind about it and you don't get to decide I've had enough, because you've been deciding what I can carry since the night you sat down in my section, and I have carried everything that has ever been put on me. "
He is very still.
"That's the whole thing?" he says.
"That's the whole thing."
"Then yes."
"You don't get to."
"Adelina." He puts his hand flat on the door frame above his head, and he is so big in that doorway that the corridor light goes. "I said yes."
I come into the room.
He shuts it behind me the way my uncle shuts a door, both hands, no sound, and something in my chest goes sideways.
Then I turn round.
"Stand there," I say.
He stands there.
"Don't touch me yet."
"All right."
And I go up on my toes with my hands flat on his chest and I kiss him, and he lets me, and his hands stay down at his sides, and I can feel what that is costing him under my palms, and it is the single most powerful I have ever been in my life.
I do it for a long time.
I do it until my mouth hurts and until the breath is going out of him in a way that has nothing polite left in it, and his hands are still down.
"Okay," I say. "Now."
He gets both hands under the backs of my thighs and picks me up like I am nothing, and I make a noise I have never made, and my back goes against the door.
"Say it," he says, against my throat.
"Say what."
"Every single thing. You said you'd say it first."
And he waits.
He waits with me up against a door and my legs round him and his mouth on the side of my neck, and he waits, because I said that was the rule and he is a man who does rules, and I have to laugh, actually laugh, out loud, with my face in his hair.
"Take my shirt off," I say.
He takes my shirt off.
"The rest."
"Say it properly."
"Salvatore."
"Say it properly," he says, "because you are going to be very sure about this in the morning, and I want you to hear yourself."
So I say it properly.
I say all of it, out loud, in a room with one lamp on, and my voice goes thinner and thinner and I do not stop, and by the end of it I am saying words I have never said to anyone in my life and he is doing every one of them exactly as I say it, in order, with his eyes on my face.
He puts me on the bed and he goes down onto the floor at the end of it and pulls me to the edge by the backs of my knees.
"This isn't."
"You said it."
"I said it about eleven minutes ago, I didn't."
"Adelina." He has his mouth on the inside of my knee. "Do you want me to stop?"
"No."
"Then say the other thing."
I say the other thing.
And I have been told, by girls at the restaurant, on smoke breaks, for years, what this is supposed to be like, and I have nodded along and I have never once had anything to add to it, and the truth is that it is nothing like any of it, because none of them ever mentioned the patience.
That is the whole thing. That is what nobody says.
He does not hurry, and he does not perform, and he does not once do anything that is for him, and when I put my hand in his hair and pull he makes a sound against me that goes through the bones of my hips, and he still does not hurry.
It takes a long time.
I say stop twice and he stops both times, instantly, with his hands flat on the tops of my thighs and his head down, and both times I say no, keep going about four seconds later, and both times he waits until I say it before he moves at all.
The second time I say it I am crying a bit.
"Adelina."
"I'm fine."
"Look at me."
"I'm fine, it's not." I get my hand over my eyes. "It's not a bad one. It's just a lot of things at once."
And he comes up the bed and lies down next to me on his side, and he does not touch me anywhere except one hand flat on my stomach, and we stay like that for about two minutes while I sort it out.
"Can I ask you something," I say, to the ceiling.
"Mm."
"How long have you wanted to do that."
His hand does not move off my stomach.
"Adelina."
"It's not one of yours. It's not about what you do." I turn my head on the pillow. "How long."
And there is a silence in that room that goes on for about nine seconds, and I lie there in the dark of it and I understand that I have walked, by accident, in a T-shirt I have had since I was twenty, right up to the edge of the only thing this man has.
"A while," he says.
"That's not a number."
"No," he says. "It isn't."
"You give me a number for everything. You gave me a number for the light bill. You gave me the date of a light bill in a restaurant in October and you did not know me."
He is very quiet.
"Go to sleep," he says.
"I'm not going to sleep."
"Adelina."
"Fine," I say. "Fine. One day I'm going to ask you that in my own words at a time of my own choosing, and you are going to answer it, and you know you are."
"Yes," he says.
And that yes is so flat, and so immediate, and so completely without any defence in it at all, that I have to lie still for a second.
Then I say, "Okay," and roll over on top of him.
Here is the thing I did not expect.
He is frightened.
Not of me, obviously, not in any way that makes sense, but I get his shirt off and I sit up on him with my hands flat on his chest and I look down at forty years of what has happened to this man, and there are nine or ten things on his body that I do not have names for, and he goes absolutely still under me and looks at the ceiling.
"Salvatore."
"Take your time."
"Look at me."
"In a minute."
And I understand, sitting on top of him in the dark, that nobody has ever done this either.
That he has spent his whole adult life keeping his shirt on in every sense there is, and that he has been naked in front of people and has never once been looked at, and that a woman sitting up and taking her time is something he has no defence against at all.
So I take my time.
I put my hand flat over the small round one near his wrist, and the one under his jaw, and the one on the left side of his ribs that is low and bad and old, and I do not ask him about a single one of them.
He is shaking.
The most dangerous man in New York is lying on his back in his own bed with his hands down by his sides shaking like a dog in a car, and he does not say one word, and when I finally lean down and put my mouth on his he makes a sound into it that I am going to hear for the rest of my life.
I say the last thing.
And he rolls me over and does it, and after about a minute of it I cannot say anything at all anymore, and he stops.
"No," I say. "No, no, don't."
"You have to say it."
"I can't, I can't do the, Salvatore, I can't."
"Then put your hand on my face," he says, "and that means yes, and if you take it off I stop. That's it. That's the whole thing."
I put my hand on his face.
I keep it there.
I keep it there through all of it, and he watches me the entire time, and somewhere past the middle of it he says my name.
He says all three of it.
Adelina Renata Silvestri, in a bed, at twenty past three in the morning, like it is costing him money, and that is what does it, that is the thing that finishes me, not anything he is doing with his body.
Afterwards he holds my wrist.
Not my hand. My wrist, in his whole fist, loose, with his thumb over the inside of it where the burn is, and he does it without appearing to know he is doing it, and every few minutes his thumb moves once across the scar and stops.
Neither of us speaks for a long time.
"You'll want the light off," he says eventually.
"I don't care about the light."
"You've got an early."
"Salvatore."
"Mm."
"I want to say something and I want you to not answer it."
He goes quiet.
"I didn't do that because I owe you," I say.
"I want it said out loud in this room tonight so that in three weeks when I've talked myself into something stupid I can come back and remember that I said it.
I didn't do it because of the house, or the inhalers, or the doors on Halloween, or any of it. "
He does not answer.
He has been told not to answer, so he does not, and that is somehow the most he could possibly have done.
I sleep.
I do not mean to. I have not slept in another person's bed since I was fourteen, and I have not slept before four in the morning in about six years, and I go out like somebody has turned a switch.
And at some point, in the grey, I half wake up.
The lamp is off. It is maybe twenty to six. He is exactly where he was, flat on his back, one hand round my wrist, and his eyes are open, and he is looking at the ceiling.
He has not moved.
He has not moved in two hours and he has not slept, not for one minute, and he is lying in his own bed in the dark at twenty to six in the morning with his thumb on a burn scar, wide awake, listening to the house.
"You have to sleep," I say, into the pillow.
"I will."
"You're lying."
"Yes," he says.
And his thumb moves once, across the scar, and stops.