CHAPTER 15 #2
The shirt. The soft cotton thing under it.
He leaves the bra. His eyes find the silver-wire tattoo on my inner left forearm and his hands stop.
The constant small busyness of them simply quits, the way it only does when something has reached all the way through him, and then he sets his mouth on the surgical scar on the inside of my wrist, the way he did once before.
The wire-and-grief line under his mouth.
Marcus comes to the head of the bench, sits on the workshop stool I climbed off, slides it close so his thighs are by my crown.
He slides one spread hand beneath my skull and takes the weight of it, the way you cradle a thing you have been entrusted with.
With the other he lifts my wrists above my head, the way you take a violinist's hands before they play. He does not pin. He holds.
Then he holds, and lets the holding be a question.
His mouth stays in its level, unhurried line, his version of patience, the one that costs him something.
I press my crown up into his palm, the body's slow yes, and he bends and kisses me from above.
Upside down. His top lip on my bottom, his bottom on my top, blond hair falling toward my forehead.
Amber and cardamom. He tastes like the white-pill mint from the case in his jacket.
Luca, between my thighs now, has worked the trousers down, careful, two hands at the hipbones, and laid them folded on the workshop chair. The mother-of-pearl knife in the left back pocket clinks once against the chair leg. It does not break anything.
He puts his palms flat on the inside of my thighs. He waits, the loupe ring half-raised against his temple now, eyes up the length of my body. I press the inside of my left thigh out into his palm, the answer his hands can read.
He puts his mouth on me.
The first contact is careful, but it is the careful of a man who has wiped a surface three times since dinner so he can put his mouth on a woman without thinking about whether it is clean.
He licks slow. He opens me with his tongue and uses two fingers very lightly at the entrance of my cunt and slides them in.
I make a sound. Marcus, upside down at my mouth, hears it. He goes very still for one breath, and then he kisses me softer than the first time. "Eliza. Up here a moment, darling. Give me your face while he does that."
I look at him. His pale green eyes are inches from mine. He has not smiled at all. "Tell me what you want me to say."
"Anything," I say, and the word comes out frayed at the edge, the warmth of all of him gone still and pointed at me sliding through my ribs like a slow tide. "Anything. Just stay there."
"Bought and held," he says against my mouth. "I am not going anywhere."
Luca has found an angle. He is working clit and lips and tongue, fingers inside me at the angle that means he has, of course, mapped me with patience. He pushes deeper, very steady. Mouth on my clit, soft. "Querida — casi — quédate conmigo —"
"I am. " Marcus has let one wrist go because I made a fist with the other. I put the free hand into Luca's hair, in the platinum bleach at the front, and hold him there.
"She is — Renner, slow," Marcus says against my temple.
Luca slows.
"Tell him."
"Slow," I say. "Slow."
Luca slows by a measurable degree, keeps the angle and the pressure. His eyes, when I look down, are half closed, watching me up the length of my own body. I have not let anyone watch this way.
I come.
Quick, hard, the kind of come that knocks the breath out at the front and folds the spine in at the back.
I press my heels into the drop-cloth. My left hand reaches up two-finger to the inside of my own left wrist before I have thought about it, twice, the mirror tell I had never once caught in myself until they began to watch for it.
Marcus catches it. He kisses my forehead.
"She is letting you keep going," he says, low. "Renner. Keep going."
Luca keeps going.
I come a second time, less sharp, deeper, the kind that opens a door at the base of my spine and lets the room in.
Luca eases his mouth off, eases the fingers out, looks up at me.
There is a smudge of me on his mouth. He looks at me the way he looked at me on the server-farm floor that first 3 a.m., the way you look at a system you have built well, and it has come up green.
Then he climbs onto the bench. Knee between my thighs, then moved to the outside, the other one inside. Braces above me on both arms. The loupe ring is gone now, pushed up into his hair, and he finds my hand on the bench and squeezes it once, palm to palm. I squeeze back, twice.
He slides into me. Slow, because he has been precise all night and he is not going to ruin himself by being fast now, until his hipbones are flush to mine.
"Dios. " Just the one word. He stops.
Marcus, at my head, both his hands on my wrists now, very lightly, thumbs at the soft inside skin, says, "Stay with me, darling. Right here. I want to watch the ledger settle."
I look at him. Then at Luca. Then at Marcus again.
"Both of us," Marcus says, very quietly.
You are with both of us, in different ways. I have spent twelve years counting the exits in any room before I count the people; here I have stopped counting exits and started counting hands, and there are two of them, and they are both mine.
Luca starts to move. Long strokes. He holds my left hip with his right hand, loupe ring warm against my hipbone, and keeps the angle.
Marcus is kissing me again upside down from above, mouth tracking mine through Luca's rhythm.
Marcus is the verbal one and he is not speaking, except, occasionally, a word — that — exactly that — you are worth every hour of this, darling, every one —
Luca's thumb on the inside of my hipbone has stopped moving in any pattern at all. It is just pressed there, warm and still, because he has stopped counting anything. His hands have quit their patterning, and that is the only thing that has ever told me he means it.
He comes inside me after. Three minutes?
Four? I am not counting either. "Querida," he says against my mouth.
Once. Then nothing. He is shaking very slightly in the shoulders.
I lay my palm flat between his shoulder blades, over the place where his breath is coming too fast, and hold him there until it slows.
Marcus's free hand finds Luca's shoulder for the span of one breath, a brother's weight, I have you, and then lifts away, back to the side of my face.
The workshop is silent except all our breathing.
Luca eases out, slow, careful. Sits back on his heels at the foot of the bench. Looks at me. Looks at Marcus. "Marcus."
"I know."
Luca presses his forehead to my knee and breathes out.
I reach for Marcus. I find his hand at my wrist and his other on my face and I pull. He bends down. I get my fingers into the front of his slate button-down, undone now, when, I do not know, and pull him closer.
"Marcus."
"Not tonight, darling."
I open my mouth. He puts his finger gently against it, kisses the finger, then kisses my mouth around it. "Not tonight. Tonight was Renner. I will have you later. I want to watch you sleep. That is enough. I am — bloody hell. That is enough."
He has used the mid-stress swear. He is choosing to be the witness tonight, the full weight of his focus set on me and nothing else in the room.
I look at him. I let him see me looking. I say very low, because I have decided, in this moment, what I am going to call him: "Marcus."
His green eyes go wider by a fraction. The throat scar moves once when he swallows. He kisses me, slow. "Eliza Quinn. You will be the absolute end of me."
He sits back, picks up the workshop towel from the lower shelf, hands it to Luca without looking. Luca takes it. He cleans us both, me first, gentle, the inside of the thighs, the lower stomach. The towel comes away pink-streaked and warm. He folds it and sets it aside.
I lie there. My ears are humming, and a slow loose-limbed heaviness is moving outward from my hips through the long bones of my thighs, the kind of heavy that arrives only after a body has stopped guarding itself.
Luca pulls a clean fleece blanket off the rack, the soft gray one Marcus brought down last week, and unfolds it over me to the collarbone. "Eliza. Bath."
"Bath."
He picks me up. Wiry-strong in the forearms, lifting me like he is moving something he has built. Marcus has unlocked the door for him ahead of him, neat, and he carries me toward the bath.
Over Luca's shoulder I see Marcus at the workshop bench. He has picked up my mug, the over-steeped black tea, the bitter, mostly-gone last sip, and he sets it down again with the small ceremony he gives a thing he has quietly decided to keep.
Then he walks out and closes the workshop door behind him.
---
The bath is steam and hot water and Luca's hands. He tests the water on the inside of his wrist — thirty-eight degrees, querida, all right? — and helps me over the rim. He kneels outside, sleeves shoved up, washing my back with a soft cloth.
Through the small vent above the basin, a distant foghorn comes across the harbor on its four-second cadence, long, pause, long, the city above us breathing without knowing we are here.
"Are you hurt anywhere."
"No."
"Cold."
"No."
"If the contact is wrong anywhere, break it. Just say."
"That is a very you way to ask."
"It is the only way I know the connection is good."
I laugh once, and the laugh catches in my chest and turns into something else, and I close my eyes against the side of the basin and breathe out longer and warmer than I expected.
The shake that has been sitting in the long muscles of my forearms since the server farm — the one that arrives when a decision is queued and will not stand down until the body has made it — goes out of them all at once, like a current cut at the wall.