39. Valentina
VALENTINA
Idecided, somewhere in the long blue hours of that last evening, that I was not going to spend it afraid.
I had spent so much of my life afraid, braced in doorways, waiting for the next bad thing to find me, and tomorrow was going to ask everything I had, and the one thing left in the whole world that was still entirely mine to choose was how I spent the night that came before it.
Fear had taken enough of my hours already.
It was not getting this one too. This one I was keeping.
So I went to him. He was at the window of our room with the whole cold city laid out beneath him, already half-armored in that stillness he wears before a thing he cannot fully control, and I crossed the floor and reached past him and drew the curtain shut on all of it, the gala and the ledger and my brother and Falcone and the entire grinding machine of tomorrow.
Then I turned the lock on the door, and the sound of it was enormous in the quiet.
“Not tonight,” I said. “Tonight none of it is allowed in this room. Tonight there is only us.”
He turned and looked at me for a long moment, the strategist visibly setting his strategy down on the floor, and something high in his shoulders came loose. “Only us,” he agreed, low in his chest.
We had never once said it. That was the strange thing I kept circling, standing there with my hand still on the lock.
He had knelt on a hospital floor and vowed to marry me, and I had let him, and we had moved through three weeks of war planning like a married couple already, and yet we had never stood still in an empty room and said the words plainly to each other, with nothing else allowed in.
So I said them first, before anything else, before a single button.
I put my hands on his face, that dangerous, careful, ruined, beloved face, and I made him hear me.
“I am not marrying you because of the baby,” I said.
“I need it clear tonight, before tomorrow, because tomorrow might not give me the chance to say it at all. I would choose you with no baby and no war and nothing on this earth left to gain from it. I choose you. The man. Every scrap of the wreckage of him.”
Something moved through him that I felt under my hands, a tremor in a man who does not tremble.
“For twenty years I believed I was a thing that got used and then set back down,” he said.
“You looked at me and saw a person instead. You did not save me. I want to be precise about it, because you of all people deserve precision. You did not fix me, either. You simply refused, from the first night, to treat me as the weapon every other soul alive has always seen, and somewhere inside that refusal I became a man again.” He turned his head and pressed his mouth to my palm.
“I will say the formal words in front of a priest the day after we win. But the true ones I am saying now, here. I am yours. Whatever I am, however little of it there is, it belongs to you, and it belongs to the baby, and that is the whole of me, and it is not going to change.”
And then he kissed me, and it was nothing on earth like the first time.
The first time had been a collision, two people falling into a fire neither of us would name, all heat and denial and the desperate dishonesty of pretending it meant nothing at all.
This was the opposite of that in every way.
This was slow. This was a man who had already decided, who had nothing left in him to deny, kissing me as though he had all the time in the world and fully intended to spend every second of it, his hands coming up to frame my face the way you cradle a thing you have chosen to be responsible for.
I felt the whole difference of it in my body, the difference between being wanted and being kept.
He undressed me the way he does everything once it finally matters to him, with attention.
He drew my sweater over my head and folded it, actually folded it, and set it aside, and I laughed, a little breathless, and he said, “I have rushed everything in my life. I am not going to rush this,” and the laugh went warm and low in my throat and died there.
He uncovered me piece by piece, and between each one he stopped and looked, truly looked, the way he looks at the things he has decided to defend, and under that gaze I did not feel exposed.
I felt seen, which is a far more dangerous thing, and I let him do it anyway.
When I was bare to him at last he stepped back half a pace just to look, and the hunger in his face was a physical thing, heat moving over my skin the way a hand would.
Then it was my turn, and I took it. I worked the buttons of his shirt loose one by one and pushed it off his shoulders, and I put my mouth to the old scars he has spent a lifetime keeping covered, the silvered line over his ribs, the rougher knot of one near his heart, kissing each of them the way he had taught me to kiss a thing without apology.
He went rigid under it, his breath dragging rough out of him, his hands flexing at his sides like a man holding himself on a chain, and I felt the enormous restraint in him, the iron control he keeps over every muscle he owns, and I decided, then and there, that I was going to spend the whole night taking it apart.
He pulled me flush against him then, skin against skin for the first time in the whole of that night, and the shock of it dragged a sound out of both of us at once.
He was hard against my hip and burning everywhere we touched, and still he would not hurry, not even now, not even with the proof of how badly he wanted me pressed hot against my belly.
His hands ran down the length of my spine, tracing the dip of my waist and the curve beneath it, gathering me harder into him, and he kissed me deep and slow and filthy and certain in the same breath, until the want in me turned from a warmth into an ache, low and insistent and hollow, a thing only he was going to be able to fill.
I reached down between us and took him in my hand, the hot hard length of him, and I stroked once, slow, base to tip, just to feel what it would do to him.
What it did was break something loose. His whole body shuddered, a groan torn out of him straight against my mouth, his forehead dropping hard to my shoulder, and for a moment the most controlled man I have ever known simply came undone in my hand, his hips pushing helplessly into my grip.
I did it again, slower, exploring the weight and the heat and the silk of him the way he had been mapping me, drunk on the rare and astonishing power of reducing him to breath and need.
He let me have it, for a while, his hands fisting in the sheets either side of us, until that ironclad discipline of his reasserted itself and he caught my wrist, gently, and drew it up and pressed it back into the pillow above my head.
“If you keep doing that,” he said, his voice wrecked, “this ends before it has properly begun, and I have waited far too long for tonight to spend it that fast.”
He laid me back on the bed and began, without any hurry at all, to learn me.
That is the only honest word for what he did.
He has spent his whole life memorizing faces, reading bodies for the truths they are trying to hide, and now he turned all of that frightening attention onto me, onto the map of me, and traced it like a man committing a painting to memory because he means to defend it with his life.
His mouth found the line of my throat, the hollow beneath my ear, the slope of my shoulder, and he spoke against my skin as he went, not filth but inventory, low and certain, this is mine, and this, and this.
Every claim was a vow. His wide warm hand spread over the small new curve low on my belly and went still there a long moment, reverent, and my eyes stung even as the heat climbed in me, because no one in my life had ever touched me as though I were wanted and holy in the same breath.
His hand closed over the soft weight of my breast, his thumb dragging slow and deliberate across the tightening peak of it until I gasped, and he watched my face the whole time he did it, reading precisely what made my breath catch and filing it away with that ruthless thoroughness of his.
Then he lowered his mouth to where his hand had been, his tongue and the faint edge of his teeth, and I arched up off the bed with a sound I did not know I had in me.
He moved lower, unhurried, his mouth following the path his hands had already mapped, over the rise of each breast, the soft plane of my stomach, the crease of my hip, and lower still, and when he settled between my thighs and looked up the length of my body to find my eyes, asking the question without asking it, I answered him with my hand sliding into his hair.
What he did then he gave the same ruthless, total focus he brings to anything he means to be good at.
He used his mouth and his tongue and, after a while, the slow knowing press of his fingers, finding the exact rhythm that took me apart by reading the catch of my breath and the helpless arch of my spine.
Every time I climbed close to the edge he gentled and eased me back from it, deliberately, again and again, until I was past pride and past shame and openly begging him, my hips lifting into his mouth, my fingers fisted hard in his hair, wrecked by the patience of a man who had decided to wring me dry before he gave me anything.
Only when I was shaking and pleading did he finally relent, his forearm coming down to pin my hips still, and everything that had been winding tighter and tighter in me broke open all at once in a long bright wave that went on and on, and I came apart under his mouth with his name cracking in my throat and his free hand laced hard through mine.