29. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - Our Anniversary
The elevator is full of people from the gala.
We stand at the back of it without touching, staring straight ahead at the mirrored doors.
A woman in diamonds keeps glancing at us in the reflection, her eyes darting between my smudged lipstick and Anthony’s flushed face, and I can practically see her storing up details to share with her friends later.
You’ll never believe who I saw in the elevator.
They couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
Except we’re not touching. We’re standing six inches apart with our hands at our sides, and the tension between us is so thick I can barely breathe.
Anthony’s knuckles are white around the brass rail. I can see the muscle jumping in his jaw, can see the way his chest rises and falls too fast. He wants to touch me. He’s dying to touch me. And he’s not going to, not until I tell him he can.
The elevator stops on the twelfth floor. Two people get off. The woman in diamonds stays, still watching us in the mirror.
By the time we reach the twentieth floor, I’m so aroused I can feel it on my thighs, and I haven’t let him touch me once.
The hallway is empty. I walk ahead of him to the room, slide the key card into the slot, and push the door open. The room is standard hotel luxury - king bed, city view, minibar I’m not going to touch. I don’t turn on the lights. The glow from the windows is enough.
Anthony follows me in. The door clicks shut behind him.
He reaches for me, and I put my palm flat on his chest.
“Rules,” I say.
He stops instantly. His whole body goes still, waiting.
“No more locked drawers.” I hold his gaze in the dim light. “If I ask you something, you answer. Even when it’s ugly.”
“Okay.”
I push his jacket off his shoulders. It falls to the floor with a soft sound.
“Sometimes I’m going to need space. I might not want to see you for days.” My fingers find his bow tie, work it loose. “That doesn’t mean I’m leaving. It means I’m thinking.”
“Okay.” His voice is rough, strained. “I’ll hate it. But okay.”
I unbutton his shirt slowly. One button at a time, the way he undid my wedding dress on our wedding night, taking his time, making me wait. He stands there and lets me, his chest rising and falling fast, his hands clenched at his sides.
I put my mouth on his collarbone, and he shudders.
“And I might never trust you completely again,” I say against his skin. “I’m going to try. I can’t promise.”
He cups my face and tilts it up so I’m looking at him. His eyes are dark in the dim light, full of something that looks like grief and hope and desperate, terrified love.
“Then here’s mine,” he says. “I’m going to mess up. I’m going to push when I should wait and say the wrong thing when I should keep my mouth shut. But I will never lie to you again. Not about anything. Not to protect you, not to keep you.”
His thumbs brush my wet cheeks. I didn’t realize I was crying.
“Especially not to keep you,” he whispers.
He doesn’t say anything else. He takes his hands off my face and drops them to his sides and leaves them there, and I can see exactly what it costs him to do it.
I pull my dress over my head and let it drop.
He makes a sound like he’s in pain - a low, broken groan that goes straight through me. I’m standing in front of him in nothing but silk and lace, and his eyes travel down my body like he’s trying to memorize every inch of me.
I walk him backward to the bed and push him down onto it.
He falls back against the mattress, and I climb on top of him, straddling his hips. His hands come up automatically, reaching for me, and I catch his wrists and press them down against the sheets.
“Not yet,” I tell him.
He’s hard against me already, a thick shameless line through his trousers, and I’ve had this man like this once in four months, against a wall in a service corridor, and I ran. I have thought about it. I have hated myself in the dark for thinking about it.
I roll my hips once and his head goes back.
“Fuck.” The word tears out of him, raw and wrecked.
“I missed this.” I say it into his mouth, honestly, meanly. “Not you. This. I missed being split open by you and I have been furious about it since the day they took my father.”
His eyes open. Dark. Burning. “Then take it. It’s yours. It was always yours.”
“You don’t get to give me permission.” I roll my hips again, slower this time, dragging myself over the length of him through too many layers of fabric. “You lost that right.”
“I know.” His voice breaks on it. “Take it anyway.”
I get his trousers open and he springs free, heavy and flushed, bigger than my own memory of him even now, and I have to laugh or I’ll make a sound I don’t want him to have.
“I’d forgotten how big it was.”
“You didn’t forget.” His voice is gravel. “You thought about it. Say it.”
“I thought about it.” I wrap my hand around him and watch his stomach jump, watch the way his whole body arches off the mattress. “In my cousin’s spare room. In the shower. With my own hand, and it was not close, and that is how stupid my body is about you.”
“Christ.” His wrists flex under my hands and he doesn’t break the rule. “Put me in. I’ll beg. I’m not proud anymore.”
“Then beg.”
The sound he makes is barely human. “Please.” His hips shift beneath me, chasing friction I’m not giving him.
“Please, Alessia. I have been going out of my mind. I have been sleeping alone, without your smell, and I have been waking up hard every single morning with your name in my mouth, and I can’t-” His voice cracks.
“Please. I need to be inside you. I need it more than I need to keep breathing.”
I stroke him once, base to tip, and his whole body shudders.
“More.”
“I’ll give you anything.” He’s panting now, chest heaving, and I have never seen him like this.
I have never seen him undone. “I’ll sign over every account.
I’ll testify. I’ll stand in front of cameras and tell them everything I did and everything I should have done and I will let them bury me if that’s what you want, just please-” He breaks off, and when he speaks again his voice is barely a whisper.
“Please let me feel you. I’ve been so cold without you. I’ve been so fucking cold.”
He groans again, his hips shifting beneath me, but he doesn’t fight me. He just lies there, letting me hold him down, letting me be the one in control.
Tonight I’m the one who decides. I decide how slow. I decide when.
I position him at my entrance and hold there, just the tip, and watch his face contort.
“Alessia-”
“Look at me.”
His eyes snap to mine. Wild. Desperate.
I sink down onto him inch by inch, and halfway there I have to stop, the way I have always had to stop halfway with him. The stretch of it burns through me, that particular ache that only he has ever given me, and my thighs are already shaking.
His jaw goes slack. His hands fist in the sheets because I haven’t told him he can touch me yet.
“That’s it,” he whispers. “Breathe. You can take me. You’ve taken me for years.” His voice drops lower, rougher. “You missed that, didn’t you. Missed being this full. Missed the way I open you up.”
“Be quiet.”
“Make me.”
I drop the rest of the way down and we both come apart with it.
The sound that leaves him is obscene. The sound that leaves me is worse.
I am so full I can feel him under my ribs, and I ride him the way I wanted to in that gravel lot above the flooded highway and a hotel corridor and every single night I hated him and woke up wet anyway.
Hard. Punishing. Taking everything I’ve been denied and making him feel every second of what it cost me to go without.
“You have no idea,” he grits out between his teeth, “what it’s been like. Lying in that room. Knowing you were somewhere in this city. Knowing you were sleeping alone and hating me and maybe, maybe touching yourself and thinking about this-”
“Shut up.”
“-and I couldn’t do a single thing about it. I couldn’t come to you. I couldn’t beg. All I could do was wait and want you until I thought I’d lose my fucking mind.”
I clench around him deliberately and watch his eyes roll back.
“I said shut up.”
“I can’t.” He’s gasping now, meeting my rhythm from below even though I didn’t say he could, and I should punish him for it but it feels too good. “I can’t shut up. I’ve been quiet for months. I’ve been so goddamn careful and patient and I have been dying, Alessia. I have been dying without you.”
His eyes open and lock on mine. “I love you. I’ve loved you every day since I was sixteen.
And I have thought about taking you through the whole of this grovel like an animal, flipping you over and fucking you until you can’t remember why you’re angry, and I didn’t, because you hadn’t said I could, and it has very nearly killed me. ”
I feel myself clench around him at the image, involuntary, traitorous.
He notices. Of course he notices.
“You like that.” His voice is dark velvet.
“You like thinking about it. Me losing control. Me taking what I want.” His hips snap up hard and I cry out before I can stop myself.
“I could. Right now. I could put you on your back and make you take every inch of me until you’re screaming my name and I still wouldn’t do it unless you told me to, because you own me, do you understand that?
You own every single part of me and you can use me however you want and I will thank you for it. ”
“Now touch me.”
His hands are on me instantly, on my hips and my breasts and the back of my neck, pulling me down to his mouth. He kisses me like he’s starving, like I’m the only thing keeping him alive, and I ride him until I’m shaking, until my thighs are burning and my breath is coming in sobs.
His thumb finds my clit and presses, circles, and I shatter around him so hard my vision goes white.
When I finally break, he rolls us over and takes me through it with his forehead pressed to mine. Moving so deep and slow that I cry, and he’s crying too, and he keeps saying I love you while he’s inside me, like it’s the only true thing he knows how to say.
He comes with my name on his lips like a prayer, like a curse, like the last word he wants to say before he dies.
Afterwards he pulls the sheet up over both of us and doesn’t say anything clever about it, which is new.
“Tomorrow you’ll be on the courthouse steps in front of all of them,” he says quietly.
“I know. This wasn’t about that.”
“I know.” He kisses the inside of my knee. “I’m glad you’ll have had tonight first.”
We lie tangled in the ruined sheets with the city glowing through the window.
His heartbeat is slowing under my ear. My body is loose and satisfied, and for the first time since the arrest, my mind is quiet. No racing thoughts. No endless questions. Just this. Just him.
“The verdict comes in tomorrow,” he says finally, very carefully. “Or the day after. They told the families it’s close.”
I think about Papa in the orange jumpsuit. I think about Zia Carmela and the cameras and everyone who’s been waiting to see me fall apart on those courthouse steps.
“Come with me,” I tell him.
He lifts his head. “In front of everyone?”
“Yes. In front of everyone.”