Chapter 4 #2
His fingers find the edge of my panties. The fabric is soaked through and we both know it, and he goes still for a second when he feels it, a real stillness, not a technique, and when he speaks his voice has dropped into a register I've never heard from him.
"Your hero," he says, "would keep going."
"Yes."
His thumb drags across me through the wet cotton, once, slow, with the whole flat weight of his hand behind it. My vision whites at the edges. My thighs clamp around his wrist and I hear myself say please, which is a word I had not planned on.
His phone buzzes against the desk.
He ignores it. His mouth is at my throat. His thumb makes a second pass and I break apart around the beginning of a sound...
It buzzes again.
He goes rigid. Lifts his head.
"Don't," I say.
"I have to."
He takes his hand from between my legs and picks up the phone and looks at the screen for exactly one second, and everything in his face closes like a door.
"Dove?" He turns away from me toward the window, and his voice has changed. Flatter, older, the vowels gone somewhere else entirely. He listens for a long moment. "No. Non lui."
Another pause. Whoever's on the other end is talking fast.
"Tienilo lì. Aspetta me."
He hangs up.
He stands with his back to me, looking out at the city, and I sit on his desk with my skirt around my hips and my mouth stinging and watch a total stranger's shoulders.
Whatever that call was, it wasn't a quarterly projection.
Somebody, somewhere in this city, has just been told to keep somebody else exactly where he is.
I should be frightened. It's a measure of how thoroughly I have lost the plot that I mostly just want him to turn back around.
He does.
And he's wrecked. Two seconds, maybe three, before he gets it back under: his jaw is locked, his chest is moving too fast, his hair is out of place where my hands were, and his right hand, the one that was inside my skirt, is not steady at all.
He looks at me sitting on his desk and he closes his eyes briefly, like a man doing arithmetic he doesn't like the result of.
"Get up," he says quietly. "Slowly. Or I'm going to finish this and neither of us is going to be able to pretend it was research."
I slide off the desk. My legs hold. Barely.
He hands me my laptop and doesn't let go of it right away.
"Did you get all that?"
"The gasp." My voice is not my own. "It comes later than I thought."
"Yes."
"I'll fix it tonight."
"Good." He releases the laptop. He's already rebuilding himself; I can watch it happening, layer by layer, the cuff shot and the waistcoat buttoned and the door shutting behind those eyes. "Tomorrow night. Same time. We'll do chapter twenty."
At the door I stop.
"Mr. Russo. Your hand's shaking."
He looks at it. Then at me.
"Yes," he says. "Good night, Miss Wolfe."
It's past ten by the time I get home. The apartment is dark and smells like tomato sauce. Rudi's left the hall light on and a note on the counter: he ate a carrot, ask him about it.
Patrick is a hot starfish in the middle of his bed with one foot out from under the dinosaur duvet.
Red curls stuck to his forehead. I kiss him and he doesn't stir, and I stand there for a minute in the doorway doing the thing I do every night, which is counting all the ways this small person is the reason I am not currently in Nebraska under a fourth name.
Then I close his door and go into my room and get out of my clothes, and I am so wet that peeling off my underwear is its own humiliation.
I lie down on top of the covers in the dark.
I don't pretend to resist. There's nobody here to perform for; I've been performing since four o'clock yesterday afternoon, and the performance is over.
I don't touch myself right away. That's his fault too.
I lie there with my thighs pressed together and my hands flat on the sheet and make myself wait, because that's the lesson, isn't it.
She stops breathing entirely, because she doesn't know where his hand is going.
And I want to know if it's true when I do it to myself.
It is. God. It is.
When I finally put my hand where his was I'm so swollen and slick that the first touch is almost too much, and I flinch from my own fingers and then go back, slower, and let his voice do it.
Not the memory of his hands. The voice. Low, patient, instructional, explaining my own body to me like a paragraph I'd punctuated badly.
Now she gasps. I gasp. Alone in the dark, I do exactly what he tells me.
I think about the wall. His forearm beside my head, the five inches he wouldn't close, his knuckle resting over my heart while I stood there and let him listen to it.
I think about use your words, you're a writer, aren't you.
I think about being told to leave my skirt where it was and doing it instantly, without a single thought in my head, and how good it felt to have no thoughts.
I'm close fast. I make myself slow down.
I take my hand away entirely and lie there breathing and aching and pressing my heels into the mattress, because he took his time, and because part of me, the part that's been writing him since the day I met him, wants to know exactly how much of this I can stand.
Then I think about the second his fingers found the wet cotton and he went still. That half-second. A man like that, losing his footing, over me.
That's what does it. Not the domination. The crack in it.
I come with my other hand over my own mouth and my son asleep down the hall, silent and shaking and thorough, my whole body pulling tight around nothing and then letting go in long, dragging waves that leave my thighs trembling and the sheet damp under me, and for about ten seconds afterward there is nothing left in my head at all.
Then I lie there in the dark, breathing, sticky, entirely undone.
And then, because I am, before anything else and possibly beyond saving, a writer, I reach over the side of the bed for my laptop.
The screen lights my face at eleven-forty at night. Chapter nineteen. The back seat of the car.
I delete she gasps and grips the leather seat.
And I write it the way it actually happens.