18. Real #2
I get my belt open behind her, pants down, and grip her by the back of the neck, light, just there, running the head of my cock through her wet folds from behind. She moans.
"Tell me how."
"Hard, Leo. Don't be gentle. I don't need that from you tonight."
I take her wrists off the parapet, pinning both in one hand at the small of her back. The position arches her over the wall. Her cheek presses against cold stone.
"Last chance to ask me to be careful."
"Don't be careful."
I push into her in one stroke, and she cries out into the city, the kind of cry that doesn't ask permission. Then I bottom out and hold there for a beat, feeling her flutter around me, her heat on every inch of my cock.
Then I fuck her.
Hard, slow, dragging almost all the way, then slamming back home. Her wrists in one hand, her hip in my other, the slapping of skin, her breath, the wet slick of her on me. I lean over her, my mouth at her ear, and I tell her everything.
"Look at this slut. Bent over for me on a roof in the middle of New York City, taking my cock."
"Yes."
"This is what you came up here for. To get reminded who you belong to."
"Yes, Leo, yes, yes."
"Whose is this pussy? Say it, filthy. The words you can't publish."
She laughs, broken. "It's your fucking pussy, Leo. Every inch of it. Use me. Ruin me. Sono tua. I'm yours."
I bite the back of her neck. She shudders. I let go of her wrists and grab both her hips, driving into her so hard that the parapet creaks. She's making sounds that have no language, her hand slapping the wall once for balance, then staying there, palm flat.
"You're going to come again." My hand slides around to her front, finds her clit. "On my cock this time. Right now. Like a good girl."
"Leo. Leo, I can't, I just..."
"You can. You will. Brava ragazza. Good girl. Come on me. Now."
I work her clit and slam into her at the angle I've learned makes her shatter, and she does, her whole body locking around me. Teeth clenched, I hold, not done yet.
After pulling out of her, I’ll hear that helpless, guttural sound from her throat in my sleep for a year.
She slumps over the parapet, panting, hair stuck to her cheek. I turn her by the upper arm, and the look on her face wrecks me: swollen mouth, blown eyes, completely undone.
"Down."
I spread my jacket on the tarpaper, the pocket flat against the roof, page two between my coat and the building. When I lay her back on it, she doesn't know what she's lying on, only that I'm coming down over her.
Now.
The roughness has done its work. I've ridden the thing in me that needed to take her, so I wouldn't speak. We've burned it down between us, and what's left is the part I've been most afraid of all night.
I kneel between her thighs, push them apart with my palms, and slide back into her slowly, all the way home. We both groan into each other.
"Look at me."
Her eyes open.
I brace on my forearms. The city light puts her cheekbones in silver. I move inside her slowly, every stroke long and unhurried, and her hands come up to my face the way they did the first time, when we were still pretending.
"This is the one." My voice comes out low and bare. "The others were how I kept myself standing. This is the one I came up here for."
"I know." She's breathing in time with me now. "Show me."
So I show her.
I make love to her on the roof of a tailor shop in Hell's Kitchen, with my dead brother in my chest and her mother's worst sentence under her shoulder blades. She has no idea. I love her so completely in the not-telling of it that I think it might kill me.
"Sei vera tu," I whisper against her mouth. "You're the real one. The only real thing in twenty years."
"Sono tua." She says it back, ragged. "I'm yours. Tell me the rest."
"Sei mia tu." Slow, the way I'd teach a language to someone I love. "You're mine, too."
"Sono tua, Leo." Her hands frame my face. "I was yours before you even walked into the brownstone. I just hadn't met you yet."
I break inside her. Not visibly. Just the part of me that's been locked in a closed room for two decades.
Her thighs lock around my back, her hand fisting in my hair.
I move inside her slowly and deeply, and she comes again, quiet and almost gentle, a soft, drawn-out cry into my mouth.
My forehead presses to hers as I follow her, emptying into her with her name on my breath.
I have never been less of a fixer in my life.
After, I don't move. I just stay inside her, my weight braced on my forearms over her, both of us breathing each other's air. Her hand strokes through my hair. Tarpaper under my jacket, my jacket under her, page two under that.
"Strong scene," she murmurs into my throat, after a long while, dry and exhausted. "Pacing was excellent."
I laugh, a sound that rises from somewhere I thought the family had concreted over, loud enough that she lifts her head to watch it happen. The look on her face says she's collecting it for the days to come.
"I want to go to the estate," she says quietly.
My arms tighten before my mind weighs in, every instinct I own going off at once. She feels it and keeps going, calm and decided. She wrote the scene before she lived it.