23. Nico
NICO
The rain hits the windows behind her head, and I stay where I am, on my knees, her thighs open around me, her answer still hanging in the air between us.
Your wife.
Two words. I've heard them a hundred times, from priests, from clerks, from men who wanted something out of me and used the title to grease the ask. From her mouth, tonight, they knock the air clean out of my chest.
I press my mouth to the inside of her knee and start to pull back. "Give me one second," I say. "I need to get a condom.”
"No." She catches my jaw in both hands and hauls me back up over her, like she doesn't trust me to make it to the door and back. "Stay."
"Piccola, I don't have anything on me down here. I need a condom. Give me two minutes."
"No condom." Her eyes are dark, wet at the edges, crying under cover of the storm. "I want you. All of you. Nothing between us. I'm your wife, Nico. And you're going to fuck me like I'm your wife."
I go still over her.
I've been careful about this, and she just took the choice out of my hands like it was never mine to guard in the first place.
"You know what you're asking."
"I know exactly what I'm asking."
Cazzo.
I kiss her instead of answering, and she opens her mouth for me the second our lips touch, like she's been waiting all night for permission to stop holding anything back.
The house is airless tonight, the storm outside pressing all that heat back down through the open windows, and her skin is already damp under my hand, a fine sheen of sweat gathering at her throat, at the small of her back where my palm settles.
I take my time with it. My hand slides up the inside of her thigh first, slow, memorizing her, and I feel her shiver under my palm before I even get where I'm going.
I kiss along her jaw, down her throat, and settle my mouth over the pulse hammering there.
She fists both hands in my hair and drags me lower, down over her collarbone, over the swell of her breast, and I take her nipple between my teeth and bite down just hard enough to make her gasp my name into the rain-loud room.
"Nico." Half a warning, half a plea.
I move lower still, mouth trailing over her stomach, and I feel her hips already lifting to meet whatever I'm about to give her. I drag two fingers through her, and she's soaked. She has been since the second she said your wife, and I groan against her skin at how ready she is for me.
"You're already so fucking wet for me."
"Shut up and do something about it."
I laugh against her hip bone, low, and give her exactly what she asked for.
I lick a slow line up her center and she arches clean off the table, one hand slamming flat against the wood to keep herself from sliding, her thigh already sticking to mine where sweat's gathered in the crease of it.
I don't rush it. I taste her properly, tongue circling her clit while I push one finger inside her, then two, curling them until she's shaking and swearing at the ceiling, her whole body slick with heat that has nothing to do with the storm.
"Fuck, Nico, I need you inside me. Now."
I come back up over her, mouth wet with her, and she pulls me down to taste herself on my lips, moaning into the kiss. I line myself up against her entrance, and she wraps her legs around my waist and drags me forward before I can even ask the question I already know the answer to.
I sink into her with nothing between us for the first time in this marriage, and the sound she makes against my mouth isn't one I've heard from her before. Rougher. Closer to true.
The table creaks under us. Rain streaks the glass at her back, and lightning throws the room white for a second, her face, her throat, the fist she's got in my hair, all of it lit up and then gone dark again.
The air in here is thick as bathwater, no breeze to cut it, and both of us are already slick with it, her chest damp against mine every time I drop down over her.
I move slow at first, because slow is the only thing keeping me from finishing like a kid with no discipline left in him, and then she wraps her legs tighter and drags me deeper and slow stops being something I get to choose.
Skin on skin, nothing to blur any of it, I feel every part of what she does to me plainly.
The clench of her when I hit some spot that arches her back off the wood.
The drag of her nails down my sweat-slick spine.
The heat of her, wet and open and mine, gripping my cock like she's trying to keep me there forever.
Her thighs stick to my hips every time I pull back, skin catching on skin, and neither of us cares enough to slow down for it.
"You feel so fucking good, piccola. Christ, you feel like nothing I've ever had."
"More," she says, breathless. "I want all of it."
"Don't stop," she says against my mouth.
"Wasn't planning on it."
"Harder," she says. "I'm not made of glass."
"Never said you were."
I give her harder. She takes it, meets it, digs her heel into the small of my back and pulls me in like she's trying to get closer than a body allows.
Her hips rock up to match mine, and the table knocks against the wall in a rhythm neither of us set out to make.
I don't care if it wakes the whole coast. Sweat runs down the channel of my spine, drips off my jaw onto her collarbone, and she drags her tongue over it when I lower my head, like even that's something she wants a taste of tonight.
"You take my cock so well," I tell her, teeth at her throat. "Look at you. Taking every fucking inch."
"Don't you dare stop talking like that."
"No?" I bite down harder on her shoulder. "You like it when I talk dirty to you, piccola? Tell me."
"I love it. Fuck, I love it, don't stop."
"I'm not going to last," I tell her, voice wrecked. "Not with you talking like that, not with you squeezing me like that."
“Then don’t stop. Keep fucking me until you come.”
I don't stop. I go faster, deeper, my thumb finding her clit and pressing hard circles against it. Her whole body pulls tight under mine, and she breaks apart with a ragged cry, my name cracked in half in the middle of it.
The grip of her around me drags me straight over after her.
I empty into her with nothing between us, forehead dropped to her shoulder, both of us shaking and slick with sweat, our skin sticking together everywhere it touches, and for one second there is no Don here. No wife bought under threat. No dead father standing between us.
Just this. Just us, choosing it.
"Cazzo," I breathe against her skin.
"Yeah," she says. "That."
I laugh, and it surprises both of us, low and a little wrecked. "I had a whole speech ready about being careful with you."
"Good thing I don't listen to your speeches."
"Clearly, or we'd still be looking for a condom.”
She laughs too, breathless, and the sound of it undoes something in my chest that her sharp tongue never once touched.
Her skin is still slick against mine when I gather her up off the table, her legs still wrapped around me, both of us sticky and spent and not caring in the slightest, and she yelps against my ear.
"Where are we going?"
"Upstairs." I carry her through the dark house, past the ruined dinner, past the window where the storm is still working itself into something bigger. “I’m not done with you yet.”
"Promises, promises."
"Piccola." I set my mouth against her hair. "I don't make promises I don't keep."