Chapter Nineteen #2
Inserting a couple of his fingers into me, he starts crooking them just right to reach my g-spot. I hear the whimper leave my mouth.
Detaching his mouth from my pussy, his fingers are still inside me. His thumb rubs over my clit as he watches me closely with those grey eyes of his.
"You like this? Want me to make you cum?"
I nod fervently, but he shakes his head.
"You know that I want to hear your sexy voice," he tells me. "Answer me with your words."
"I want it," I whine. "I want it so much."
Nodding, he sucks my clit into his mouth. He starts moving his fingers inside me, almost ruthlessly, and I can't even tell how much time is passing by. He feels so damn good, and he's sucking on my clit. When his teeth scrape over it, I'm gone.
I let out what would technically classify as a scream as I cum around his fingers.
He detaches his mouth from me, leaving a couple open-mouthed kisses on my inner thighs as he removes his fingers from my body. He makes sure he's watching my eyes as he brings his fingers up to his lips, sucking my essence from his skin.
"You’re always so fucking good," he tells me."We can stop here if you want "
"Please," I cut him off. "I wanna feel you inside me”
Valentino works on removing his clothes. Reaching into his pocket for a wallet as he does so, he grabs a condom out of it. He rips the foil with his teeth before rolling it down his cock.
"Are you sure you want to cross this line?" he asks me again. He rubs his cock along my oversensitive pussy, watching me closely. His eyes are eating me up and I've never felt sexier.
I nod. "Yes, I do," I say to him. "I want it more than anything. Don't make me beg."
He starts thrusting into me slowly at first, soft and slow. He's taking his time to savor the way I feel around him as his hands slowly move up my body to grab at my breasts.
"I love your breasts," he tells me. He pinches my nipples in-between his fingers and I groan at the feeling. "God, you feel so damn good."
I can't seem to form a worded response, but I let out a loud moan.
It isn't long before I can hear the slap of skin on skin and the feel of him really fucking me. I’m so close,
He is gentle in ways I didn’t expect from a man built entirely out of contingency plans, attentive in a way that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with actually seeing the person in front of him.
I say his name more than once, and each time something in him seems to come further undone, like the sound of it is dismantling some structure he’s spent years reinforcing.
"Cum for me," he murmurs in my ear. "C'mon, I want to feel it. Cum for me now."
Opening my mouth, I let out a wordless scream as I cum around him. Unconsciously arching my back, I can literally feel the wetness gush from me.
"That's my girl," he groans out, and only a few more moments pass before he's cumming inside the condom.
Afterward, we lie tangled in the dark, his heartbeat slowing gradually beneath my ear, his hand moving in absent, unhurried strokes along my spine.
Neither of us speaks for a long time. There’s a tenderness to the silence that feels more dangerous than anything that came before it, because desire I understand.
Desire has rules, has an end point, has a name I can file it under.
This doesn’t have a name yet. And that terrifies me more than anything Dante said in that corridor this morning.
I think about the man who carried Nico’s racetrack pieces into the cottage without being asked, who learned which corner of the rug Nico prefers to crash his cars into, who sat on the edge of a child’s bed last night and spoke in a language he reserves, I suspect, for things that actually matter to him.
I think about the boy on a Calabrian hillside who decided at eleven that he would never again be a person, things simply happened to, and how completely undone that decision looks tonight, with his arm heavy across my waist and his breathing slow and even against my hair.
I know I have to tell him. The thought arrives clear and unwelcome, cutting through the warmth of his arm around me, the weight of his hand against my back.
I have known it since the moment his fingers found mine in the dark and some old, buried part of me recognized the shape of his touch like a language I’d been told I’d never use again.
It was me in Venice. It has always been me.
I open my mouth.
There’s no good way to say it. I have rehearsed a hundred versions of this confession in the dark over four years, in the shower, in the car, in the quiet after Nico’s bedtime when the apartment goes still and my own thoughts get too loud to outrun.
None of the versions I rehearsed account for this — his bare shoulder under my cheek, the particular weight of his arm, the unbearable tenderness of a man who doesn’t yet know what he’s protecting.
“Livia.” His voice is heavy with sleep already, low and unguarded in a way I’ve never heard from him, the version of his voice that exists only in the last few seconds before consciousness lets go. His hand stills against my back. “I knew your mouth before.”
I freeze.
The words land soft and slurred, half-formed, the kind of thing said by a man who doesn’t yet know he’s said anything at all. His breathing evens out almost immediately after, deep and steady, his arm heavy and warm across me, completely unaware of what he’s just handed me in the dark.
I lie there, perfectly still, staring at the ceiling, my heart slamming so hard I’m certain it will wake him.
He knows.
Some part of him, buried under exhaustion and four years and a hundred locked doors, already knows.
And I still haven’t said a word.