33. Delilah #2
He alternates between soft sucks and hard, relentless licks, his tongue plunging deep into my entrance, tasting my wetness, then pulling back to lap at my folds with broad, hungry strokes.
My hips start to move on their own. I’m grinding on his face. In the past, maybe I would’ve been shy or embarrassed about that and stopped myself.
But Kane cups my butt cheeks and pulls me toward him. I’m gushing with desire and he laps up every drop with filthy noises.
“Fuck, you taste so good,” he says in a muffled grunt. “Tell me when you’re close.”
My nails dig into the edge of the sink. The tension keeps growing. I’m going to snap soon, and there’s no telling what’ll happen when I do. I’ve never gone quite this high before.
“I… I’m… close,” I breathe, my voice shaking.
He puts a hand on my hip and holds me down when my knees start going. His other hand spreads flat and hard across the top of my thigh.
The noise of the house drops away.
Inside me, another noise is coming.
It builds up in me the way it never has with anybody else, because with anybody else, I was always half-present. The other half of me was watching the time, wondering if he was bored. Wondering how I looked from that angle, from this one, from every angle at once.
Right now, there’s none of that. I have enough brain cells for one sentence and one sentence only:
“I’m—”
“I know.”
“Don’t—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I clamp the heel of my hand over my own mouth and come so hard that my leg slips off his shoulder.
It goes through me like that first blast of heat when you open the oven. A searing, otherworldly sensation.
My spine bows. My heels bounce against the undersink cabinet. Kane keeps devouring me through it as the blood rushes in my ears like a rocket ship launching into space.
Everything below my ribs clenches and lets go, clenches and lets go, in a series of sweet, aching pulses that spread out through my thighs, my belly, the soles of my feet. My vision goes white at the edges.
He catches me. One arm behind my knees, one across my back, his mouth still gentle on me while the last of it shudders through and out.
Kane presses his forehead against my hip and stays there a moment, breathing. Then he kisses the inside of my knee and puts my dress down over it.
He stands up. I get one look at him and go hot all over again. His mouth is a wet, swollen mess. His hair is wrecked, because at some point, I got a fistful of it and I was not gentle.
I reach for his belt.
He catches my wrist. Again.
“No,” he says simply.
“I… You… What?” I say, confused in a particularly stupid post-orgasmic kind of way. “Don’t you want—”
“Of course I do,” he replies with a choked laugh. “Do you think I wouldn’t fuck those pretty lips if I could? Do you really think it’s not killing me not to feel you clench around me?”
“Then why not—”
“Because it’s not my time. It’s yours. This is mine to give and yours to receive.”
“Kane, I’m not just going to—”
“Yes, actually, you are.” He puts my hand against his chest and holds it there. His pulse pounds under my palm. “This is not a transaction, Lilah. You don’t settle up. You don’t return the favor. You don’t thank me. You came, and that was the entire point of it. That’s all.”
I look at him.
“Then what did you get out of it?” I say, because I can’t help myself.
Kane looks at me for a second, weighing whether to be angry.
“You have no idea,” he says.
He turns me around by the shoulders to face the mirror. I’m even more wrecked than he is. Hair in all directions, face blotchy and flushed. There is lipstick nowhere near where lipstick should be.
“Look,” he says. “That’s what I got.”
Then he lets go of me and picks up the seashell soaps from the floor and puts them back in the basket, one by one, the way they were.
Like no one will ever know we were here.
No one except for us.
We go back separately.
That’s my idea, though Kane doesn’t like it. I make him take it anyway.
He wants to walk me down the stairs and into dinner with his hand between my shoulder blades and my hair looking exactly the way it looks. He wants my mother to see it. He wants Vivian and Connor to see it.
“No,” I tell him at the top of the stairs.
“Why not?”
“Because if we do it that way, it stops being mine and turns into a whole big move.” I get my hair pinned back up. “It becomes something I did to her. And then she’s in it. I want her to know it had nothing at all to do with them. With any of them.”
Kane’s jaw grinds, but he acknowledges my point with a brief nod.
“I’m not giving her that,” I say. “She’s had enough of my things.”
“Alright,” he concedes. “Go. I’ll follow in a minute.”
I go down first. I stop in the powder room, which Aunt Sherry has vacated, and put my face back together with what’s in my purse. Then I come out, take my chair, and chug half a glass of water.
Kane comes in two minutes later. He sits down beside me, puts his hand back on my thigh, where it was before, and takes up his fork.
Nobody says anything.
But my cousin Jenna looks at me and then at him and then very quickly back down at her plate. Her ears go red.
Vivian doesn’t take long to chime in. “Well!” she says brightly. “Dee, we should talk about the wedding. Because obviously I have to ask you about cake.”
Everybody looks at her. Then back at me.
I take a bite of potato. “No.”
“No, what?”
“No, we shouldn’t talk about the wedding.” I chew and swallow. “The potatoes really are good, Mom. Did you use butter or the margarine?”
“Um… butter,” my mother says faintly, every bit as confused as her youngest daughter.
“You can tell.”
Vivian sits there with her mouth open, waiting, but I give her absolutely nothing, and my God, it feels so good to do that.
Under the table, Kane’s thumb strokes once across my knee. “There’s one more thing for you,” he says, near my ear. “After dinner. Outside.”
“A gift?”
“Mm.”
“You have got to stop doing that.”
“Never.”
Dinner breaks up around eight. There’s no dessert, as promised, so people drift toward coffee and the freezer-burned Entenmann’s that Uncle Bub chiseled out and defrosted in the microwave. It comes out with a cold middle.
I get my coat out of the hall closet myself.
Kane holds the storm door and we go out onto the stoop into the cold. He takes a folded sheet from his inside pocket.
“For you,” he says.
I unfold it under the porch light. It’s a printout.
One column contains the names of casinos. Atlantic City. Foxwoods. Mohegan Sun. Bethlehem. A block of them in Vegas. Places I’ve never heard of in Connecticut and upstate and Louisiana and Mississippi.
And in the last column, beside every single one: BARRED — SUBJECT: BOYD, CONNOR J.
“This is—” My breath comes out white. “Kane. This is every casino in the country. You…”
“Got Connor 86’d from every one of them, yes.”
I’m in shock. “How?”
“A phone call to a man who owes me. Then a phone call from him to a man who owes him.” He looks out at the street. “His name is on a list now. He will not get through a door with a card table behind it. Not in Atlantic City, not in Nevada, not in a basement in Marine Park.”
“Why?”
“Because he sat at that table tonight with his hand on the back of your sister’s chair,” Kane says, “and he thought that the worst of it was over. I intend to show him just how wrong he is.”
I fold the printout up. “You keep taking things off him.”
“Yes.”
“Are you doing that for me, or for him?”
Before he can answer, the storm door bangs behind us. Connor comes out onto the top step with his jacket half on and his keys in his fist. He looks at Kane, then at the printout in my hand.
“So you know,” he says.
“I just found out.”
“Great.” He laughs miserably. “That’s great, Dee.”
He comes down two steps. He stops on the one above me, which puts him at Kane’s shoulder height, though he keeps his eyes on me and only on me.
“You think this is you winning,” he says, bending close and speaking fast. “You think he’s doing all this for you.”
“Connor—”
“Ask him why me.” His jaw is trembling. “Four million dollars, Dee. To me. A guy who plays forty-dollar hands in a basement. You never asked yourself why he ever said yes?”
Beside me, Kane is silent.
Connor looks up at him and then away, fast. He looks more terrified of Kane than ever.
“You still don’t know why he picked me,” he whispers. “You still don’t fucking know.”
Then he turns around and goes back inside.