CHAPTER 10 #2
“I’m going to leave marks on you and I want you looking at them tomorrow.” I put my thumb on the place. “There’s going to be one here, where your neck goes into your shoulder. I’m telling you before I do it and not after.”
Then I put my teeth into it hard enough that she came up on her toes and swore at the ceiling.
I got my mouth on her nipples, one and then the other, tongue first until her breathing came apart, and then teeth after it.
“That was the good version of it. Do that again and don’t be careful this time.”
“Louder than that.” I did it again and she gave me something better. “Nothing that comes out of you leaves this room, so let me hear all of it.”
I say what’s coming before it comes, because it’s the only warning I know how to give. “You are going to come on my hand first and then on my cock, that way round, because I said so.”
Her pussy was wet before I had a hand anywhere near it. I worked two fingers into her and they went easy, and the heel of my hand went hard against her clit and stayed there, and I didn’t let up when she asked me to and I didn’t let up when she stopped asking.
“I’m not going to stay standing.”
“You’re not going anywhere at all.” I got my forearm locked across her ribs before her knees finished going. “I’ve got you.”
She came on my hand standing up with her heels off the floor and her mouth open against my shoulder.
I put her face down over the end of the bed with her ass up off the frame, my left hand flat between her shoulder blades, and held her there while I got my belt open.
“Open your legs wider than that or I’ll open them for you.”
She did it herself. I got into her cunt in one go and she took all of it, and then I did it hard and fast with no manners in it anywhere.
My left hand came up to the side of her throat, under the jaw, never across the front of it. The bootlace was under my palm and the gray key with it, and I left the pair of them exactly where they were.
“Say my name.”
She said it into the sheet with no air behind it. “Put air behind it. I want it coming back off the walls, and I’m not moving again until I get it.”
She gave it to me the second time loud enough to go through the middle of me, and I don’t know what my face did.
“Still with me?”
“I’m with you. Don’t slow down on my account.”
I had gone still with my hand where it was, and I waited until she had answered me, and then I moved.
My right hand came round the front of her and found her clit while I was still inside her. She came on my cock and she was loud about it, and my name was somewhere in the middle of the noise.
I pulled out and finished on her lower back and I did not say one word while it happened. Then I got her water. She drank half of it sitting on the edge of the bed with her hair stuck to her neck, and she handed the glass back without me asking her for it.
I turned her over onto her back and took both her wrists in one hand and put them above her head. I got into her again, slower, and no softer for it.
“Look at me while I do this.” I let go of her jaw. “I’ve been looking at you all afternoon and I want some of it back.”
“Then don’t close your eyes at the end of it.” Her right hand was open on the sheet, the torn nail catching, and the casing hadn’t moved. “I want to see your face when it happens to you.”
My mouth on her mouth this time, which I hadn’t done once all afternoon, and she made a sound into it that I’ll be hearing for a long time. I stayed inside her when I came. She had her thighs locked round the back of me and she didn’t let me go anywhere.
“This changes nothing.”
“Nothing at all.”
She said it at the ceiling. I said it into the side of her hair. My hand was still open on her hip and neither of us shifted it.
I got in behind her and pulled the blanket up over the pair of us and put my arm across her, and I said nothing.
“There’s a mark coming up on your forearm and I don’t remember putting it there.” I kept my mouth shut and let that one go past me.
“You’re allowed to talk. I wouldn’t hold any of it against you afterwards.”
I didn’t answer that one either. I had the sentence ready.
It was sitting behind my teeth with the shape already on it and I kept it there, and keeping it there took more out of me than the whole afternoon had.
I’ve carried grown men down stairwells with all their weight gone dead on me.
Lying still was harder work than that was.
The wardrobe runner drew itself the last inch closed on its own, the way it does when nobody is near it. She was asleep before it finished.
She got up when the corridor light came on and went and made coffee and put a mug into my hand in the doorway. Made the way I take it. She still hadn’t asked me how, and I still hadn’t told her, and I was standing there turning that over when the channel changed.
At twenty past six Sasha’s voice came up on the open channel in a different shape. There had been one shot before that. It came through Owen’s own mic flat and small, like a door going shut two rooms away.
“Kestrel Six, this is base, say your position again for me.”
Nothing came back off it. The fan down the corridor was the loudest thing on the floor.
“Kestrel Six, respond.” She said it twice more with the same weight on it. “If you can’t get to your mic then key it twice for me and I’ll find you.”
Then the other voice on the open channel, soft, German-shaped, in no hurry whatsoever. A man saying a thing the way you say something about the weather to a stranger at a bus stop.
“Somebody should have waited.”
What came into my head was not Owen. It was a timetable behind cracked plastic with the corner peeled up off the board, and how narrow a pavement gets when you are running down the middle of it, and a road in another country going black with rain.
I made no sound and put my hand through nothing; holding both cost everything. I set the mug by the door frame because my hands were useless and I did not trust them with it.
Owen was twenty-six, sunburned across the nose in September, grinning at everything—even me, when almost nobody did.
I stood in her doorway, coffee cooling, while Sasha called into silence.