Chapter 6 #2
There was a low couch in the shadow of the parapet, an old thing the club hauled up there for the summer nights.
He walked me back toward it without ever quite letting go of me, kissing me the whole way, and the backs of my knees found it, and I pulled him down with me into the warm dark, and the weight of him settling over me — solid, deliberate, his hips fitting to mine like he'd been built to the exact shape of the space against me — was the first thing in fifteen years that had ever made me feel held instead of trapped.
"I came here to bury you," I said, into his shoulder. My hands were already at the hem of his shirt, dragging it up, wanting him out of it. "All of it. The town. You. I had it written before I landed."
"I know." He drew back just enough to pull the shirt off over his head, and I let myself look at him in the hazy moonlight, all that warm bare skin, and put my hands flat on his chest just to feel his heart going as hard as mine.
He spread his own hand against my ribs, his eyes dark and certain.
"And you put it all down. Every lever you came with.
You're up here with nothing under it, same as me.
" He kissed me, slow this time, deep, his thumb stroking up beneath the linen until I arched into it.
"Two stubborn people with nothing left to win," he murmured against my mouth. "Took us long enough."
After that there were no more clever lines, from either of us, which between the two of us was the loudest thing that had ever happened.
He undressed me the way he did everything that mattered — unhurried, attentive, his eyes following his hands, the linen peeled away inch by inch and his mouth chasing after, down my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast where he lingered until I had a fistful of his hair and was past caring how undone I sounded.
The hot night moved over my bare skin and then his mouth did, lower, and his hands, learning me like he was committing me to memory in case the dawn took it all back.
I'd braced, somewhere deep, for it to feel like surrender — like the thing I'd refused my whole life, the giving-up, the being-bought, the woman who got charmed by the local color and lost herself. It didn't feel like losing anything.
It felt like being found.
He took his time. He took so much time it became its own argument — me pulling him up and against me, faster, him refusing, pinning my wrist gently to the cushion and going slow on purpose, watching my face in the hazy moonlight like the watching was half the point.
"Look at you," he said, low and wrecked, when I finally stopped fighting it and just let him, let the slow build of it, the heat layered on heat until I was trembling under his hands.
"All that cold. And underneath —" he kissed the center of my chest, over the hammering of my heart, then lower, until my breath broke apart entirely "— underneath you run hotter than the whole summer. "
When the moment came that there was nothing left between us, no clothes, no cold, no report, no breath of space at all, he braced over me and stilled, his forehead against mine, both of us shaking in the dark.
"Mila." Just my name. A question and an answer at once.
"I know," I said, my hands fisted at his back, pulling him down, pulling him in. "Me too. Don't stop."
And then we stopped pretending — about everything, all of it, the report and the war and the two weeks and the whole defended length of my life — and there was only the two of us on a rooftop above a sleeping town, his body moving with mine, slow and deep and certain, the far storm flickering, the moon enormous and hazed.
I wrapped myself around him and met him and matched him the way I'd matched him at everything, gasp for gasp, the old argument turned all the way over into this, until his careful slowness broke and mine did too and there was nothing left of either of us but heat and breath and the sound of my own voice saying his name into the dark.
It crested like the heat itself, unbearable and then unbearably good, and I held onto him through it, shaking, undone, the cold woman gone clean out of me, while he buried a rough sound against my throat and came apart in my arms a beat behind.
After, the heat lightning was closer.
I lay against his chest in the warm dark, both of us wrecked and damp and not letting go, his heartbeat under my ear going slowly back to ordinary, his hand moving up and down my spine in long absent strokes like he couldn't quite believe he was allowed to.
The tile still held the day's warmth. The air had gone soft and thick and somehow kind, and for the first time since I'd come down that coast road with the cold packed around me like ice in a cooler, I felt the want to be exactly where I was and nowhere else, which is a feeling I'd spent my entire adult life making sure I never had to feel, because it's the feeling that gets you trapped.
It didn't feel like a trap. That was the thing I kept turning over. I'd spent fifteen years certain that wanting to stay was the first symptom of the disease that killed my father. And here I was, wanting to stay, and it felt like the opposite of dying.
"That," I said, when I could speak, "was not in the brief."
He laughed, and I felt it move through both of us.
"No," he said, and kissed the top of my head. "It was not."
I propped myself up to look at him. The moon had drifted; half his face was silver and half was dark, and the charming-one was nowhere in it, just the man, open all the way down, looking at me like the math had come out somewhere he never expected and he was glad.
"I meant it," I said. "The report. I'm going to write the truth, Rafael.
The real truth, the one that protects the harbor, with my name on it.
Not because of this." I touched his chest, over the heart.
"Because of Battista. Because of the boats.
Because the true thing changed and I'm done lying about which things are alive.
" I held his eyes. "But I need you to know I'd already decided before I came up the stairs.
So you can never wonder. This —" I gestured at the two of us, the wrecked couch, the night "— didn't buy the report.
The report was already true. This is just — mine.
The thing I chose. After the math. With my eyes open. Exactly like you wanted."
Something moved across his face that I'd never seen there, and it took me a second to name it, because I'd never been the cause of it before.
It was relief. And under the relief, plain as the moon, something I wasn't ready to name out loud and neither was he, but that we both, lying there in the heat, knew was in the air with us, getting closer like the storm.
"Stay up here with me," he said. "Till the rain comes. They say it'll break tonight."
So I stayed. We lay tangled on the old couch under the enormous hazy moon, the heat lightning stepping closer across the water hour by hour, the sleeping town dark below us, and we talked the way we'd argued — without stopping, without winning, just for the pleasure of the other one talking back — until the first real lightning split the far sky and the air finally, finally changed.
He told me things up there I don't think he'd told anyone.
About riding in at twenty-three with nothing, about what it was to come to a thing late and love it harder for it.
About the night Reaper had given him his colors and he'd gone out to the harbor alone and cried like a child because for the first time in his life there was a place he wasn't going to have to leave.
I told him about my mother's hands raw from other people's laundry, about the bank letters my father couldn't read, about the two hours he lay tipped into the rope before anyone found him.
I'd never told anyone the two hours. I told him on a rooftop in my bare skin with his arm around me, and he didn't try to fix it or soften it.
He just held on tighter, which was the only right thing, and turned out to be the thing I'd been waiting fourteen years for someone to do.
The storm was coming. The heatwave was going to break.
I didn't know, lying there in his arms with my eyes open and my whole defended life put down at last, that two hundred kilometers away a draft folder I'd forgotten about was about to do its automatic, scheduled, perfectly innocent thing.
I didn't know that the cold woman who'd typed her verdict in the first week was still in the machine, waiting.
I only knew that I'd come to Cala Sirena to win, and that I'd lost everything I came with, and that losing had been the truest thing I'd ever done.
The first drops hit the tile just before dawn, fat and warm and slow at first, then faster, and we lay there and let them fall on us, two people who'd run out of reasons not to.
I should have known better than to trust a heatwave that had been planning something all along.