41. Lydia
LYDIA
The bathroom door is already closed when his hand finds mine, steam already curling up from the shower he started before either of us said a word about where this was going.
We don't have to. The apology is still hanging in the air between us from an hour ago, worn soft at the edges now, and this is what comes after an apology that was actually meant. Not a reward. Just the next true thing.
Nico's fingers slide along my jaw. He tips my face up, thumb light against my chin, and looks at me for a long moment before he says anything at all.
"You're still here," he says.
"I am."
He kisses me slow, unhurried, his mouth patient tonight, gentler than I've ever felt from him.
His mouth tastes like the wine we didn't finish.
He walks us both under the water without breaking the kiss.
It soaks through my clothes before he peels them off me piece by piece, his hands unhurried even as the hot water turns the whole small room into something thick and breathless.
I unbutton his shirt with wet fingers, one button at a time, and the fabric clings to him as it falls away.
My knuckles brush the warm skin of his chest, the ink at his collarbone, the old ridge of muscle he's carried since long before I knew him.
The scar along his jaw catches the light, that thin pale line running from his ear to his chin, and I trace it with my thumb, water running down both our faces.
I've done this a hundred times before, but tonight it doesn't feel like memorizing a wound. It feels like memorizing him, all of him, on purpose.
The shower wall is cool against my back. I think about our very first night, his body pinning mine to the tile before either of us had a single reason to trust the other. The wall feels the same, but everything else is different.
Warm water runs down between us, and he lifts me by the backs of my thighs until I'm upside down and my back is flush against the wet wall.
One leg hooks high over his shoulder. I lean forward from there, bracing myself with one hand against his hip, and take his cock into my mouth just as his mouth closes between my legs.
For a long, dizzy minute, neither of us is doing anything but drinking in the other, while water runs down both our bodies. His groan vibrates against me straight up through my spine.
Together, he'd said, and this is what he means. Both of us tangled in each other's want, nothing rushed about it. His tongue pressing slow, wet, and warm against my clit. My mouth swallowing him deep until he's buried completely in my throat.
I come first, shuddering against the tile with his mouth still on me, and he doesn't stop until every wave of it has passed through me.
Then he sets me upright, and puts my legs down. Before I can catch my breath, he's lifting me again, both hands under my thighs this time. My legs loop around his waist, my back leaving the wall entirely while I embrace him against my body.
He holds all of my weight like I weigh nothing, and when he pushes inside me--suspended in his arms with nothing but him holding me up--my eyes roll into the back of my head.
"Nico." I whimper.
"I've got you." His voice is strained too. "I'm not letting go."
Then he starts to thrust, fucking me in mid-air with my legs around him and his large hands on my ass. Every thrust drives another sound out of me I barely recognize as my own voice. He keeps his pace slow at first.
But with every deep, long thrust, his pace grows faster and faster until his hips are working furiously against mine, and the room is filled with the wet sound of skin against skin.
"Do you remember Italy?" I tell him as he pulls back to my entrance, leaving me breathless and aching for him to fill me completely. "When all of this meant something?"
"I remember every fucking second, piccola." He shifts his grip, buries himself to the hilt with one smooth stroke, and I cry out against his throat. "But this means more."
His lips crash against mine, and my lungs empty themselves to his insistent kiss. My nipples scrape his broad chest, sending bursts of pleasure flowing through my body. The cool tiles kiss my back while his cock spears me over and over again until neither of us can hold back any longer.
Then I come again, and it drags him over the edge with me. A surge of wet heat pulses inside of me. My pussy flutters and clenches against his twitching cock to greedily hold in every drop of his semen.
His forehead drops to my shoulder, feathering the sensitive skin with kisses while the water runs cold around us.
We stumble out of the shower still dripping wet, my hair soaked through and plastered to my back, his cum dripping out of me with every step.
We don't make it far before he's dragging me down into bed, wet sheets and wet skin and neither of us willing to wait for dry.
I don't get long to settle against the pillows before he turns me over.
There's a mirror on the far wall, tall and old, and he angles me toward it, his chest against my back, as he reaches between my legs to guide himself back inside of me.
"Look, piccola," he tells me, nodding at the glass as he grabs a fistful of my hair. "Look at yourself when I fuck you like this."
I do, and I catch his eyes on mine in the reflection instead of over my shoulder. Something about seeing us both like that--my spine curved back into him and his fist holding my head up so I can't look away--makes me wetter than I ever thought was possible.
He pushes his massive cock inside me, inch by deliciously aching inch, and watches my face in the glass the whole time.
"Fuck, you feel incredible," he tells me, mouth against my ear, our reflection rocking together in the old silver-backed glass as he starts to move. "So wet. So perfect. And all mine."
"Don't stop," I breathe. "Oh God, don't stop. Don't you ever fucking stop."
"As my wife commands." He angles deeper, and I collapse forward, one hand fisting the damp sheets while the other reaches back to grip his heavy balls.
"Yes..." I whimper. "Yes! YES! YES!"
"Open your eyes, piccola." His voice is rough as he yanks my hair. "Look yourself in the eyes when you come for me."
I do as he commands, and see my face turning pink and red from arousal. But I don't look away. Behind me, Nico thrusts with a possessive ruthlessness that I've come to crave. A whimper bubbles up in my throat, and it turns into a long ragged cry by the time it leaves my lips.
But I don't look away. Not once.
He kisses the mole at the back of my neck when the first tremor rushes through my body underneath him, and I shudder under his mouth and pull him by his balls closer into me.
My breath catches every time he goes deep, and my body starts moving against his harder, faster, chasing it now instead of just feeling it.
"Harder." I beg.
"You want it harder, piccola?"
"Yes. God, yes."
He gives it to me, harder, deeper, his hips slamming into mine now with nothing careful left in the motion, and I meet every thrust like I'm trying to pull him all the way inside me and keep him there.
"You're mine," he tells me, low and rough against my ear. "Every fucking inch of you. Say it."
"I'm yours." My voice breaks on it. "Yours. All yours, Nico. Take it. Take what belongs to you."
And he does. He takes it like a gift.
When I come apart under him this time it's louder than the shower, a long broken cry into the sheets, my whole body clenching around him hard enough to drag him down behind me.
He follows me with my name on his mouth and my hands fisted in my hair, emptying into me in long, shuddering pulses that leave both of us emptied and filled at the same time.
Afterward he doesn't move off me right away.
He stays there with his forehead against my shoulder, both of us still damp and breathing hard while my fingers slowly unclench from the balled-up sheets.
"I need to say something," he tells me, once his heart slows enough to trust his voice.
I go still under him. His breath catches, something in his face going unsteady.
"I told you that this was never about love," he says, recalling what he told me all those weeks ago. "But that was a lie too. I love you, Lydia. And I know for a fact that I've loved you from the moment I met you, and I'll love you until the day I die."
He presses his mouth to mine.
He pulls back just enough to look at me, and there's a wetness in his eyes I've only seen once before, the night his father's name came up and broke something open in him he couldn't close again.
"Do you remember," he says, "that night at dinner. After the first time Frank tried to scare you off from me."
"I remember."
"I told you he'd never win. Because I already had." His thumb brushes my cheekbone. "Because I had you, and he didn't."
"Yes."
"For a while I didn't think it was true anymore." His voice roughens. "After everything. After what I did to your father, after I let you find out from him instead of from me, I thought I'd lost the thing that made it true."
"But you didn't."
"No," he says. "Frank's dead. And you're still here, and you're here because you chose it, not because I forced you to stay here behind a locked door." He kisses my forehead. "I love you, Lydia."
"I love you too, Nico." I close my eyes and let that settle into me, warm and solid. My heart starts up again, faster this time, for a different reason. "And there's something I have to tell you."
He tenses, reading my face, bracing himself for inevitable bad news.
"It's good," I tell him quickly. "I promise."
"Tell me," he says.
I watch his chest rise like it's already too full to hold whatever this is. Turning underneath him until we're chest to chest, I take his hand and press it flat against my stomach. "I'm pregnant. You're going to be a father."
For a second, his face doesn't move at all, and then realization breaks across it all at once. He looks down at his hand on my body, and his lower lip trembles. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
He laughs, a rough sound I've never heard out of him before, and presses his forehead against mine again, like he needs to be close to me while this settles into him. "A baby."
I nod, laying my hand over his on my stomach. "Our baby."
He pulls back, and there's a different look in his eyes now. "Marry me, Lydia."
He takes my hand off his chest and holds it against his lips, kissing the tip of each finger. "Really marry me. Do it because you want to and not because I told you that you have to. Marry me because you want me."
All this time married to this man and he has never once asked me anything that mattered. Not really. Not like this, and now he's here waiting on me like the answer hasn't already been decided.
"You're already my husband," I say, testing it.
"I want to be a husband you chose." His voice is quieter than I've ever heard it. "Not the one who chose for you."
I feel my eyes fill again, and I don't fight it this time.
"Yes," I say. "Yes, Nico. I choose you. I'm choosing you right now, out loud, on purpose. I'll marry you, forever and ever and ever."
Relief moves through his face, quiet and unguarded, something I've never seen from him before, and he kisses me like the word yes is the only thing he's ever actually needed to hear.
He laughs against my mouth, a startled, boyish sound that I wouldn't have recognized before.
"Say it again," he says.
"Yes, Nico, I'll marry you."
"Again, piccola."
"Nico, yes." I'm laughing now too, both of us giddy and wrecked and wide awake at once. "I'll say it every day if you need me to."
"I'll hold you to that promise," he says.
I think about the girl who married him not knowing what she was walking into, terrified and proud and too stubborn to say so, and I think about how far that girl has come to end up here, wanted, asked, chosen right back.
Nico presses his palm flat against my stomach again, like he's introducing himself to whoever is in there, and something in his face goes softer than I have ever once seen it, softer than even he seems to have expected.
"Hi baby," he says quietly, to nobody and everybody at once, and I have to bite my lip to keep from crying all over again.
Outside, the sea murmurs in Long Island Sound, indifferent to us, same as always. In here, there's a scar under my thumb, a hand over my stomach, and a man who's finally asking instead of commanding, and I think that whatever comes next, we get to choose it together now.
And that's everything.