7. Stellan
STELLAN
Idrive in from Stamford at eleven PM with nothing on my hands.
Nothing. No blood, no ash, no powder, no residue.
The job was paperwork—a man in a Stamford office I’ve known for nine years signing off on the handoff of a list of names that used to be mine and are Lucas’s now.
I sat across a desk from him for ninety minutes.
I drank one cup of tea. I signed in twelve places. I drove home.
I haven’t done a wet contract in twenty-eight days. I’m not going to do another. Whatever I become next, I’m not going to find out by hurting people I don’t have to hurt.
I’ve driven this route home for nine years. Tonight it feels different. The bridge feels different. The shape of the city feels different. I used to drive home from a night like this with a list in my head—next thing, next thing, next thing. Tonight I’m wondering whether Clementine ate dinner.
She’s at the apartment. She’s been there since six PM, when I left her on the couch with a blanket and an entire pot of soup.
She’s eight weeks pregnant. She’s still working—opens the bakery at six, closes at three now instead of four because I asked, sleeps in the afternoon, eats food I bring her, lets me carry her up the side stairs at the bakery once a day to lie down because the bakery floor is hard on her hips now and standing for nine hours is too much.
She’s fine. She told me so this morning. I’m fine, Stellan, please, you can’t put me in a hammock for the next seven months. I’ve considered the hammock anyway.
I park in the garage. Antonin nods. He’s also leaving the old job—eleven years he’s been with me.
Next month he’s stepping into a new role, running security for the small firm I’m setting up.
He and his wife are moving into a brownstone two blocks from the bakery.
He doesn’t know yet. I’ll tell him next week.
I take the elevator up. I open the front door. I don’t call out—she’s sleeping, I can tell from the quiet of the apartment—and I move through to the bedroom in my socks.
She’s on the bed. On her side. One hand under her cheek. Her hair is loose. The lamp on her side is on, low. There’s a book on the comforter where it dropped from her hand.
I stand in the doorway and I look at her.
I’ve looked at this woman across a counter for six months.
I’ve looked at her on my kitchen table, in the front seat of my car, behind the booth in her bakery in the dark, and in this bed every night for almost a month.
I haven’t gotten used to looking at her.
The center of my chest still does a thing every time.
I don’t name the thing. I don’t need to.
She opens her eyes.
“Stellan.”
“Mm.”
“You’re home.”
I cross to the bed.
She reaches a hand toward me across the bed, half asleep still, and something in my chest pulls tight at the sight of it.
“Was it?—“
“It was a desk and a teacup. It’s done.”
“Done done.”
“Done.”
She smiles. The smile she does when she’s more than half asleep is open and unguarded and slightly stupid in a way she wouldn’t allow if she knew I was watching. I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
“Come here,” she says.
“I’m taking a shower first.”
“Now?”
“I want to come to you clean. The shower is a part of this. It’s a part of what I’m doing now. I’ll explain. Wait.”
“Stellan.”
“Yes.”
“Hurry.”
I hurry.
I take a six-minute shower. I scrub the hands that did paperwork tonight as if they’d done worse, because they have, and tonight’s the first night in a long time I’ve come back to a person. I’m going to come back to her clean from now on. Hot water. Soap. Out. Towel. Bare. The bedroom.
She’s sitting up in bed. The lamp is on. She’s in one of my t-shirts. The shirt comes to mid-thigh on her. She’s impossibly small under the cotton. Her belly has the faintest curve. I only see it in this light because I look for it.
“Lay down,” she says.
I lay down.
She climbs over me, slow, careful, the only way she moves now. She pulls the t-shirt off over her head—her breasts heavier than a month ago, her belly with the small curve—and her hand goes between us and finds me, already hard, hard since the elevator. She guides me to her and sinks down.
“Oh,” she says.
A sound catches in my throat. The heat of her closes around me so completely my hands tighten on her thighs without my say-so.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You smell like soap.”
“Mm-hm.”
She leans down and presses her nose to my throat, breathing me in. The small clench of her around my cock when she does it nearly undoes me.
“You usually smell like—like you. Like cold mornings.”
“I came home different tonight.”
“Yes.”
She fits her hands on my chest. She’s on top but isn’t moving yet, sitting on me with my cock fully buried, her hair in her face, her belly soft above where I’m inside her—and she is, I’m not exaggerating, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
“Stellan. I want to claim you back.”
My hands flex on her thighs, then go slack, giving her the room.
“You’ve claimed me. I haven’t claimed you.”
“I know.”
“Tonight I’m going to.”
I nod.
She moves. She rides me slow—not like a tease, slow like she knows exactly what she wants and means to take her time getting it.
And I let her. I’m the one who moves, always; I can’t remember the last time I lay back and let a woman work herself on my cock.
She’s tight and wet, unhurried, and every time her pussy clenches at the top of a rise I feel exactly how much she’s feeling.
It takes me apart as much as anything I’ve ever done to her.
“I love you,” she says.
“Yes.”
Her thumbs trace small circles on my chest.
“I love that you came home with nothing on your hands.”
“Mm.”
“I love that you took a shower because you wanted to come to me clean.”
I keep my hands open on her thighs and let her work.
“I love that you smell like soap.”
“Mm-hm.”
She bends. Kisses my throat. Comes back up.
“I love that you call me Clementine.”
“Yes.”
“I love that you’re not pulling out tonight.”
“I’m never pulling out.”
She rocks down onto me, slow, taking the last inch, the wet grip of her pulling a breath out of me.
“Stellan. Say it.”
“I love you, Clementine.”
She bears down on me when I say it, a slow wet clutch that drags the breath out of my chest.
“Again.”
“I love you.”
She comes. Slow, soft, a long shudder rolling through her—and her pussy grips me in deep wet pulses, the wettest she’s been all night.
I let her have it. I don’t move. Her hand finds my hand and I put mine on top of hers on her belly, both of us on the curve where our baby is.
She comes on me with both our hands there.
“Once more,” she says, when the first finishes. “On you. With you.”
“With you.”
She rides me into a second one, and this one I move with her—slow up, slow down, the wet drag of her the only sound in the room.
She tightens on every downstroke, comes again bearing down on me, and that’s what takes me—her doing it, her using me to get there.
I come up into her while she holds me down with her own weight, claiming it out of me. She stays seated. We breathe.
I don’t pull out.
She lays down on my chest. I keep her on my cock. I pull the comforter up to her shoulders. I cradle the back of her head in my palm.
“Stellan.”
“Yes.”
“It’s done.”
“It’s done.”
She breathes the word out slow. Her hand fits flat over my heart.
“All of it.”
“All of it. There are three things left and they’re all paperwork.
I won’t lift a hand to anyone again unless they come for you.
If they come for you, I’ll lift several.
The work I did, I’m not doing anymore. Lucas has it.
He’s the cleanest in the trade. He’ll do less of it than I did.
He’ll refuse what I would have refused. He’ll do what I would have done.
I’m not a part of it. I’m here. I’m yours. ”
She doesn’t speak for a moment. I feel her swallow against my collarbone.
“Stellan.”
I tip my chin down against her crown.
“No more contracts.”
“No more contracts. Just you. Just this.”
“Just this.”
She presses her face to my throat.
I roll us. Slow, keeping her on me. I lay her on her back. I prop on my forearm above her. I look down at her. Her face is flushed. Her eyes are wet, just at the edges.
“Clementine.”
“Yes.”
“There’s something I’ve been waiting to do until tonight was over.”
“Stellan.”
“It’s in the drawer. I’m going to reach for it. Don’t move.”
“Okay.”
I reach.
I’ve had the ring for nineteen days. It’s been in the drawer of the bedside table since the morning after she took the test. I bought it at a small shop in the Diamond District—quietly, no record anywhere anyone would look.
Single stone. Clean cut. Plain setting. It’ll fit.
I had her hand measured three different ways while she slept.
I take the ring out of the box. I don’t get out of bed. I don’t pull out of her. I prop on my elbow above her with my cock still in her, take her left hand in mine, and put the ring on her finger.
She looks at it. She looks at me. She looks at it again. Her thumb finds the band like she’s checking it’s real.
“Stellan.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t even ask.”
“You said yes the first time on the prep counter. You said it again in a parked car in Queens, the night I closed out the last of the threat and you told me you weren’t afraid of me.
You said yes the third time in this apartment when I asked you whose you were.
You said yes the fourth time when I asked if my coming inside you was still yes.
You said yes the fifth time when I told you my mother was going to call you.
And every day since for the last month. I’m not asking. ”
A laugh slips out of her, half disbelief.
“You’re insane.”
“Mm.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
She turns her hand over in mine. Looks at the ring like she’s never seen anything like it. Probably hasn’t.
“It fits.”
“I had your hand measured.”
“Of course you did.”
I move once, slow. Inside her. With the ring on her finger. The stone catches the lamp and throws a small white shape across the wall and disappears again. Her hand comes up to my face.
“Stellan.”
“Yes.”
“Say it one time.”
“What?”
“Tell me you’re done.”
“I’m done. No more contracts. Just you. Just this. Just the bakery. Just our baby. Just this bed. Just this morning and the next morning and every morning. Just you.”
“Again.”
“Just you.”
She closes her eyes. Her hand finds the back of my neck and holds.
“Stellan.”
“Yes.”
“Say my name.”
“Clementine.”
Her pussy flutters around me at the sound of it, and I feel the shiver go all the way through her.
“I love it when you say my name.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to be the kind of husband who says his wife’s full name out loud at every possible occasion.”
“I am.”
She laughs into my throat. The laugh is small and a little wet.
“Mrs. Petrosyan is going to get a kick out of that.”
“Mrs. Petrosyan has been knitting things for our baby since the second day.”
I shift slightly inside her. She gasps.
“Stellan.”
“Yes.”
“Will you fuck me again?”
“Yes.”
She goes warm and tight around me as she asks it, already wet again, and my cock thickens where it’s buried in her.
“Slow?”
“However you want.”
“Slow.”
I fuck her slow. The ring on her finger catches the lamp once, twice.
The river outside is dark and still beneath the windows.
I take her until she comes again, and one more time, and until I come in her.
The whole time I’m not thinking about anyone I used to know or anything I used to do.
I’m thinking about my wife. About her belly under my hand.
About the smiley face she’ll draw on my coffee cup tomorrow morning at six AM at the corner table by the window of her bakery.
After, she sleeps with her cheek on my chest and her hand on the side of my throat where she can feel my pulse. I keep her on me. I pull the comforter up to her shoulders. The clock on the bedside table goes from one to two to three.
I sleep that night. Eight hours.
I sleep eight hours every night for the rest of my life.