Chapter 19Caterina #2
I reach for him.
Not the way I have reached for him in any other room.
Not a fist in the shirt, not a hand hooked at the back of his neck to drag him down to where I want him.
These are the hands that gripped a gun at an altar rail and pressed thumbnail half-moons into my own palm to keep from shaking and fisted his collar in a linen room with the whole house listening.
Tonight I open one of them flat against his bare chest and leave it open, and I let him come the rest of the way to me on his own, because for the first time since I walked into his father's house I do not have to take hold of a thing to be sure that it is mine.
He comes down to me.
I let myself be wanted without a cover story.
I do not count the exits. I do not count my breath.
There is no wire on my sternum, no name in my mouth that is not mine, no clock ticking on the far side of any door, and the absence of all of it is a kind of falling that I lie still inside while he settles his weight over me.
His mouth goes to the pulse at my throat.
Down to the collarbone, the dip beneath it.
When he closes his lips over my breast I make a sound and catch it behind my teeth on reflex, the old reflex, the one that kept me alive in a house of ears for nine days and in other rooms for years before that.
Then I let the next one out. Just to hear what it does in a room where no one is listening for it.
It does nothing. Nobody comes through the door. Nobody writes it down. The ceiling holds.
So I let the one after that out too, and the one after that, and somewhere in there the catching-behind-the-teeth stops, and I do not start it up again.
His hand is the one I watched come empty into a chapel at three in the morning.
His mouth is the one that said my name against my temple in a corridor I have walked past twice since.
Now both are on me with nothing in the world to do but this, and he takes his time about it the way he takes his time about everything that matters to him, like there is no train to make and no man at any gate, because there is not.
He moves down the bed. His mouth at my ribs, my hip, the crease of my thigh, his breath there ahead of his mouth so I have it twice.
Then his tongue on my clit, slow, and the sound I make is not one I choose.
It gets away from me before I can rule on it, loud in the quiet apartment, and the shock of my own unmanaged voice is half of what takes me apart.
He works me with his mouth and slides two fingers into me, slow, and I put my hand in his hair, open, not steering.
He does not hurry it. He lets me come up at the pace my own body sets, his tongue steady and his fingers crooked into the spot that takes the strength out of my legs, and the sound is one I have never heard before.
It is loud and it fills the room. My spine lifts off the bed, my heels dig into the mattress, I tighten around his fingers in long pulls, and the sound keeps coming and I do not reach up to stop it the way seventeen years of practice tell me to.
My open hand closes in his hair once, at the very end, because there are things a body holds onto on the way over.
He stays with me until I am past too much and push his forehead away with the flat of my hand. My chest is heaving. My ears are ringing with how loud the apartment just was, and no one is at the door, and the not-being-anyone-at-the-door is its own thing happening in my chest.
Then he comes up the bed. He settles between my thighs, hard against the inside of one, and I reach down and take his cock in my hand and bring him to where I want him, because I want my hands to manage one last thing tonight and then put management down.
He waits there, the question in his eyes he has never once put in his mouth, until I answer it with mine.
He pushes into me slow. All of him, one long fill that I take on a breath I do not hold and do not hide, and I keep my eyes open the whole way.
I watch his face do it. The seam in his control that I found at the desk is wide open now.
The enforcer is somewhere else entirely.
The man underneath is here, on his elbows over me, looking at me the way he has looked at me for nine days and is only now allowed.
I say his name. Out loud, in my own bed, at a volume I have never once spent on it.
He moves and I move with him. He sets it slow, and for a while I take slow, because there is nothing on the other side of this and nowhere either of us has to be, and we use that.
He learns the bed I have slept alone in for three years.
I learn the weight of him with no part of my attention held back for the door, which is the first time in my adult life I have given a man the whole of it.
Then I am done with slow. I tell him so with no plan in it, just more , just there , just my knee pulled higher and the new angle taking the breath straight out of me, just the unmanaged run of sound I have apparently been saving my whole life without once knowing it was savings.
My hand finds his at the side of my face and our fingers go through each other and stay.
The second time comes up through me with my eyes open and his name at full voice in my mouth, and it goes all the way down to the soles of my feet, and I let every sound of it out into the room without shaping a single one.
He says something into the hollow under my ear that is not a sentence, two syllables of my name and a breath, and I hold his wrist while he follows me over, and I keep my eyes open one second longer than I have to, because I want his face in the second after.
I get it.
Afterward.
The gray light has not changed. My hand is on his chest where my palm fits exactly. His thumb moves slowly along my shoulder. My phone is face down on the nightstand beside the cam pin. His is in the coat pocket on the chair across the room. Neither of us reaches for either one.
The radiator clicks on. Somewhere on the floor below a kettle starts to whistle and then stops.
He turns his head and kisses my temple once.
I close my eyes.
For the first time in nine days I do not set an alarm.
I think about the closed page in a steel box on Ditmars Boulevard, row fourteen, third from the floor. The names still breathing on the list. The work that is mine now, the work I do not have to do behind anyone.
The exits can wait.