9. Isadora
CHAPTER NINE
ISADORA
Icome to him the next night.
I have read the folder, alone, through the whole of the morning, with Yia-Yia bringing tea every two hours and saying nothing.
Sophia came in once, at noon, with a flower from the south garden, laid it on the corner of the desk, and left on her bare quiet feet.
She knew the room wanted no talking in it.
I read every page. I looked at the photograph of the broken hull.
Then the photograph of my father from 2019, clipped to the wire transcript, my father in a gray suit outside a bank in Patras, the man who read me Homer by lamplight.
Then the names of the men he paid, ordinary names, taxi drivers, school friends, sums at the bottom of a page that ended with a woman dead in the water at Mykonos.
He loved me, but he still ordered the killing of a mother with a baby below decks. I spent the morning learning that both of those things are true, and that neither one cancels the other, and that I am going to have to live my whole life carrying both.
I did not weep, but I should have.
When the light went long across the floor, I closed the folder and set it on the table. I washed my face and put on the black dress I arrived in, and at midnight I walked down the south corridor to Konstantine’s study.
He is at the desk. He looks up, and stands. I cross the study and stop a distance from him, and I lift my chin.
“I choose. I am asking.”
“You have read it?”
“All of it. I am not him. I am here.”
“Come.”
I close the distance. I lift my hands, take his shirt at the throat and hold it.
“I was raised for one of two things, Konstantine. The first was a convent in Switzerland. The second was the bed of a man my father chose. The convent did not take. My father did not choose. I have chosen for myself, finally, tonight, and I have chosen you. Take me to your bed.”
He does not speak. He carries me across the study, through the door, up the back stair to his own wing, down the corridor, into his own room.
I have never seen it. It is austere, stone and dark wood, the bed wide, the windows open to the night with the sea moving somewhere below.
A man who keeps his dead wife’s study untouched keeps his own room bare, and I understand both rooms at once.
He sets me on my feet at the side of the bed and steps back.
“Tell me to stop, mikrí mou.”
“No.”
“That is not an answer. That is a refusal of the request.”
“No, Konstantine. Do not stop.”
He nods once.
“Do you understand what I am going to do to you tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“You are going to take me to this bed. You will put your mouth on me, the way you did on the rug. Then this dress comes off, and the slip beneath it, and you will look at me. You will take me, slowly, with your hand at the place where you have not yet put your hand. At the height of it you will ask me once more to tell you to stop. I will say no, do not stop. Then you will come undone above me. That is what we are going to do.”
He does not move for a long moment. When he speaks, his low voice has gravel in it.
“Yes, mikrí mou. That is what we are going to do if that is what you want.”
My legs almost give up from the want of this man.
“There is a thing I will do tonight that I have never done with another woman. I am going to lay my signet on its chain at your throat, with the flat of it against your skin, over the place where your pulse is. That ring is my office, Isadora. Men have been ended on the weight of it. You will feel my hand at the chain, a man’s hand at your throat, at the one place where I could end you, and you will know that I will not.
This is the only holding I know that says mine and safe in the same touch, and it is the holding I have refused myself for five years.
I will do it once. If you do not want it, tell me now. ”
“I want you to do it.”
“Isadora.”
“I want you to, Konstantine.”
He bends and unbuttons the black dress at the throat, one button at a time.
He has been going slowly since the start of this conversation; he goes more slowly now.
The dress, then the slip beneath it, then the thin chemise beneath that, each piece laid on the chair at the foot of the bed, the way my mother used to lay my school clothes on the chair at the foot of my own bed.
I stand bare in the lamplight.
He does not move. He looks. He looks the way a man looks at a thing he has been told all his life he was not allowed to want, his pale eyes going over me slowly, my small breasts with their tips already drawn tight, the hollow of my belly, the place between my thighs that no man has seen, and he takes his time about it.
“Theé mou,” he says. My God. “Mikrí mou.”
I close my eyes.
He lifts me and lays me on the bed.
He undresses standing beside it, unhurried, watching me watch him.
He is heavier than I expected, broader across the chest, marked across the ribs, carrying the scar from collarbone to sternum that I read about in a file and never let myself imagine.
Fifty years old. He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen.
I had seen hundreds of pictures of him before but nothing prepared me for the sight of him naked.
I say so with my face, because my mouth has stopped being reliable.
He kneels on the bed and takes me with his mouth first, the way he did on the rug, patient, thorough, my thighs over his shoulders, his hands holding my hips to stillness while the heat builds in me wave over wave.
My fingers find his hair while small moans come up out of me.
He works me toward the edge with tongue and lips until I am shaking.
He stops.
He lifts his head, and I make a sound of protest that is not small at all, and something moves through his face that on another man would be a smile.
He reaches to his own throat. The chain is already off him; he has taken it at some point I did not see.
He lays the fine gold across my collarbones and turns the signet so the flat of it sits in the soft hollow at the base of my throat, cool as seawater, and he holds it there with two fingers.
He looks at me over it, one long moment.
“Yes,” I say, before he can ask.
He moves over me.
The weight of him settles between my spread thighs, the scarred planes of his chest brushing my nipples until they tighten.
He goes slowly. One finger first, circling the entrance he has already made wet with his mouth, then pressing inside.
He watches my face the whole time, his eyes fixed on every flicker of expression, until the second finger joins the first and the ache in me shifts, fear dissolving into pure want.
He curls them, finds a place that makes my hips jerk and a broken sound slip out of me.
His free hand stays at my throat, the heavy signet warm against my pulse, holding me present while he works me open on his fingers.
“Breathe,” he murmurs, archaic Greek low and rough. “Let me feel how ready you are.”
I am. Dripping around his knuckles, clenching when he opens me gently, the wet sounds filthy in the quiet room.
When he withdraws them, I mourn the loss of his fingers until he settles lower, the blunt head of his cock nudging against me, thicker than his fingers, velvet-smooth and insistent.
He pushes in by slow degrees, inch by burning inch, letting me feel every ridge, every pulse of him as he claims the space no one has ever taken.
It hurts once, briefly, a bright line that draws a single gasp from my throat. He goes still at the sound, forehead dropping to mine, the signet pressed hard now between his fingers and the frantic beat of my pulse. His cock throbs inside me, stretching me around him until I can feel nothing else.
“Isadora.”
“Do not stop.”
He begins to move, long, slow, deep strokes that drag the full length of him against places inside me that I did not know existed an hour ago.
The hurt melts into a fullness so complete it steals my breath, a being-had that makes my toes curl and my nails dig into the hard muscle of his back.
I lift to meet him. Every thrust seats him deeper, the wet friction building heat that spreads from where we are joined up into my belly and my breasts.
The small bitten sounds stop being small.
There is no convent here, no Patras, only this room above the sea and the heavy slide of his body into mine.
“Louder,” he says against my mouth, still in that old Greek, voice rough with restraint. “There is no one in this wing but me, mikrí mou, and I have waited five years to hear a living voice in this room.”
I give him my voice. Moans that rise with every deeper thrust, gasps when he angles his hips and grinds against that newly discovered place inside me, soft broken cries when he pulls almost all the way out and sinks back in to the hilt.
He takes me with his hand firm at the chain and his eyes locked on mine, deeper now, harder when I ask for harder.
“Harder, please Konstantine, fill me?—”
He gives it to me. The pace turns demanding, the slap of skin on skin joining the wet sounds of how thoroughly he has opened me.
His cock strokes every sensitive spot on every pass; the head of him kisses something deep that makes stars burst behind my eyelids.
The wave that stops being separate waves gathers under my skin, coiling tighter, hotter, until I am shaking beneath him, thighs clamped around his hips, heels digging into the backs of his thighs to pull him deeper still.
At the height of it he says it, wrecked, barely a voice at all.
“Mine, mikrí mou.”
“Yes, Konstantine. Yes. Do not stop. I am yours, and I am no one’s daughter anymore.”
He breaks above me with the signet hard at my throat, my name torn from his mouth, driving deep and spilling into me in long, shuddering pulses.
The hot flood of him triggers my own climax; I break with him, cry going up against the stone walls, body clamping down around his cock again and again in rhythmic, milking spasms while he holds me through it, forehead still pressed to mine, breath ragged.
He is alive. I am alive. The chain at my throat is not Marta’s chain.
Marta’s chain is in a box on his desk. This one is the signet of a man I have decided to keep.
After, he stays buried inside me for long moments, softening only gradually, as if reluctant to leave the place he has just claimed.
Then he rolls carefully and gathers me onto his chest, arm locked around me, mouth buried in my hair.
I can feel the slow drip of him between my thighs, the pleasant ache of being taken for the first time, the residual throb where he stretched me open.
He leaves and returns with a cloth warm from the tap.
He cleans me himself, one big hand cupped under the small of my back to lift me while the other gently wipes away the evidence of what we have done.
The care in it undoes me almost as much as the sex.
He brings me water. I drink half. He finishes it.
Then he pulls the sheet over us both and settles me against him again, my leg thrown over his hip, his half-hard cock resting against my thigh.
“Mikrí mou,” he says into my hair. “You are mine. I am yours. I will never give you back.”
He lifts the signet from where it has slid against my collarbone, and he fastens the chain at the back of my neck.
“Tomorrow we will have one made that is yours. Tonight you wear mine. Sleep, écheis tin kardiá mou.” You have my heart.
I sleep, exhausted and satisfied.