31. Alessia
— ? —
Alessia
Now - Tuscany
The storm rolls over the hills after midnight, and I dream about the files again.
In the dream, there are more drawers. Dozens of them, rows of locked drawers stretching down an endless hallway that wasn’t there before. Every one I open has my name inside - not just on folders, but carved into the wood itself, burned into the metal of the locks. Alessia. Alessia. Alessia.
Anthony is standing at the far end of the hallway, and he’s telling me there’s nothing else. His mouth keeps moving after the words stop, saying things I can’t hear, and I’m running toward him but the hallway keeps stretching and I can never reach him.
I wake up screaming.
The shutters are banging against the stone walls of the old guesthouse, and thunder shakes the windows. Rain pounds on the roof tiles like it’s trying to break through. I’m tangled in the sheets, my heart racing, my nightgown soaked with sweat.
Anthony is beside me instantly.
We’ve been sleeping in the same bed since we got here - carefully, with a gap between us that neither of us has had the courage to close. But now he’s reaching for me, his hands on my shoulders, his voice in my ear.
“Hey. Hey, I’m here. You’re safe.” His thumb strokes my cheek. “It’s only the storm.”
I’m shaking so badly my teeth chatter. “I dreamed there were more. More drawers. More secrets.”
“There’s nothing else.” He cups my face in the dark and makes me look at him. Lightning flashes outside, and for a second I can see every line of his face - the worry, the guilt, the desperate need to make this better. “Alessia. You have all of it. There’s nothing left.”
“How do I know?”
The question comes out small, broken. The question I’ve been carrying since the day I found those files, the question that wakes me up at night and follows me through my days.
“You don’t,” he says. “Not tonight. That’s what I did to us. All I can give you is one more day of it, and then another one, until there’s enough of them behind us that you can look back at the pile and know. And I’m the one who has to live beside you while you count.”
I stare at him in the flickering light of the storm. Rain drums against the windows. Thunder rolls through the hills.
“I hate this,” I whisper.
“So do I.”
“I hate what you did to us.”
He closes his eyes, and I watch the words land. “I know.”
“But I don’t hate you.”
He goes very still. Like the words hurt worse than anything else I could have said - worse than anger, worse than accusations, worse than another slap across the face.
“That’s more than I deserve,” he says quietly.
He doesn’t kiss me.
He puts his mouth close to mine and stops there, close enough that I feel the heat of his lips and not the press of them. The rain is pounding on the roof tiles. The shutters are banging in the wind. His hands come up and hover at my waist without landing.
“You know what happens if you do it.” His voice has gone low. “I get my hands on you. I get this off you. I get inside you, and I am not going to be sweet about how much I want that. So don’t stand there and wait for me to take the first of it. Put your mouth on mine.”
I close the gap between us myself.
I pull him down, and I put my mouth on his, and I feel him hesitate for one second - asking permission, making sure - before he opens to me with a sound like he’s been waiting his whole life for this. Then his hands land. He pulls me in hard, and the question is gone.
“There,” he says against my mouth, wrecked. “That’s what I wanted. Now let me.”
He gets us both off the bed and walks me back until my shoulders hit the wall by the window, and the rain is pounding on the roof tiles, and the shutters are banging in the wind, and I don’t care about any of it.
I don’t let him undress me first.
I get his belt open myself. He goes still when he understands, one hand braced on the wall behind me, the other hovering.
“Alessia.”
“Don’t.”
I go to my knees with the storm hitting the shutters, and I take him out.
He is already hard. Heavy in my hand, hot, silk over something that does not give.
I wrap my fingers around him and he jerks, a rough sound catching in his throat.
I stroke him once, slow, from the base to the head, and feel him thicken against my palm.
The tip is already wet. I smear it with my thumb and he swears, quiet, like he is trying not to.
“Please,” he says, before I have even put my mouth on him.
I look up. His mouth is parted. He is watching my hand on him like he cannot look anywhere else.
I lean in and lick him. One slow stripe, from where my fist is closed around him up to the head, and the taste of him hits my tongue, salt and skin and him. His thighs lock. His hand finds my hair and does not push. I do it again, flatter, and then I close my mouth over the head and suck.
The sound he makes is not a word.
He is thick. My lips stretch around him.
I take him deeper, inch by inch, my tongue pressed along the underside, until my jaw aches and my eyes water and I still have not taken all of him.
My hand works what my mouth cannot. I pull back until only the head is between my lips, suck hard, then sink down again, wet and slow, and the sound of it is obscene under the rain.
“Fuck.” It breaks. His fingers tighten in my hair and then loosen, shaking. “Alessia. Please.”
I hollow my cheeks and take him deeper. The head of him hits the back of my throat and I breathe through it, stay there, swallow around him.
His whole body goes tight. I feel the pulse of him against my tongue.
I pull off just far enough to breathe, a string of spit connecting my mouth to him, and then I take him again, messier, my lips slick, my hand twisting at the base in time with my mouth.
“Please.” His voice has gone hoarse. “Don’t - God, don’t stop. Your mouth. I can feel your tongue. I can’t - please. I need it. I need you.”
I moan around him and the vibration makes his hips stutter. He catches himself. He does not thrust. He stands there and takes what I give him, shaking, one hand fisted in my hair and the other braced on the wall like it is the only thing keeping him upright.
“Look at me,” he says, and it isn’t an order. It’s broken. “Please. Look at me while you do that.”
I look up with my mouth full of him. His face is wrecked. Flushed. His eyes are fixed on where my lips are stretched around him, and when I suck him deeper without looking away, something in him comes apart.
“That’s it.” His voice cracks. “Just like that. God, your mouth. Please. You’re so - Alessia, I can feel your throat. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
I set a rhythm and keep it. Slow and filthy.
Taking him until my nose nearly meets my fist, then pulling back to suck at the head, my tongue working the slit, tasting him getting saltier, closer.
Spit slicks my chin. My jaw burns. I want the burn.
I want his thighs trembling under my free hand, the way he keeps saying my name like he has forgotten every other word he owns.
“I’m close.” It comes out shredded. His thumb strokes my cheek where it is hollowed around him. “Please. If you don’t want it in your mouth, stop now. I’m begging you. I’m going to come. Alessia - please - let me. Let me come in your mouth. Please.”
I take him as deep as I can and stay there.
He breaks.
A sound tears out of him, low and ruined.
His cock pulses on my tongue, thick and hot, and I swallow what I can and feel the rest of it spill, salty and endless, his hips jerking once despite himself before he locks them down.
I stay with him. I suck him through it, gentler when he twitches, too sensitive, my hand stroking the base until he is spent and shaking and still saying please like he does not know how to stop.
When I pull off, my lips are swollen. He is looking at me like I have undone him.
He hauls me up and kisses me before I can speak. Deep. Grateful. Ruined. He tastes himself on my tongue and groans into it, and then his forehead drops to mine and he just breathes. His chest is heaving. His hands are loose at my waist, heavy, not quite steady.
“Give me a second,” he says, wrecked. “You took it out of me.”
I don’t move away. The rain keeps on. He gets my nightgown off between one breath and the next, slower than he means to, his mouth finding my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my breast. He is still soft against my hip when he walks me back to the bed.
He lays me down and follows, and for a while he only touches me.
His palm down my ribs. His mouth on my stomach.
His fingers between my thighs, finding how wet I am from having him in my mouth, and the sound he makes then is different. Lower.
“Christ.” He strokes me, unhurried, two fingers sliding through me and then in, and I arch. “You did that to yourself. On your knees. With me down your throat.”
He kisses the inside of my thigh. He sucks at me until my hand is in his hair and I am saying his name into the dark, and somewhere in it I feel him against my leg, thickening again. He notices when I do. He goes still with his mouth on me, then laughs once, breathless, against my skin.
“Already,” he says. He presses his hips into the mattress like he can will it down and fails.
I feel him get harder while his fingers are still inside me, while his tongue is still on me, the weight of him returning, hot and heavy where it drags along my thigh.
“You don’t even have to touch me. You just have to sound like that. ”
He lifts his head. His mouth is wet. He is hard again, flushed, the head of him smearing against my hip as he comes up over me. He looks at my face. He looks at my mouth.
“Now it’s my turn to show you.”
His hand finds my hair.
Not a hover. A grip. He gathers it at the back of my head and fists it, firm enough that my scalp sparks, and he uses it to tip my face up to his. The tenderness is gone out of his mouth. What is left is the man I had on his knees in a different way, five minutes ago, begging.