CHAPTER 13 #2
“Tell her I asked about her mother twice, and tell her to think about why.”
She went down. I stayed in the cold of that stair a good while longer, which is not like me.
Twenty-two minutes on the road and I spent all of them badly.
There was a shop once, and a man in the back of it with his fist in my father’s collar.
Out on the pavement there were four adults and a boy.
There was a bell over that shop door and it rang when nobody was going in or out.
I remember the bell better than I remember his face.
The adults let the boy do the talking, because the boy was good at it.
I was good at it. That was already true of me and every one of them could see it, which is the kind of sentence that reads like a joke right up until the end.
Rian held the inner door with his left arm straight over his head and asked me nothing at all, which from him is an embrace.
She was at the long table with legal pads squared in front of her, hair up on the one pin.
The gray key hung on its bootlace at her throat and the casing was closed in her right hand, where it lives now.
The thin white scar through her left eyebrow goes pale when she has been reading too long.
Gray-green eyes came up off the page and did the thing they do, which is arrive before the rest of her arrives.
“Thorne offered me a job.” I sat down on the edge of the table, because I have no manners in that room. “He also told me the truth, which is more expensive, and I have not finished paying for it.”
“Tell me the part you are performing around.”
“I was fourteen and I talked a man out of the back of a shop.” I got it out fast, with a laugh in the middle of it, because that is the only way it comes out at all.
“Everybody agreed afterwards that I had been remarkable.” I spread my hands.
“I said the word patient. I should have said the word paid.”
“And he did it anyway.”
“He did it anyway,” I said, “and I have spent every year since being certain the difference was mine to make.”
Her hand came across the table and stopped short of me and did not go back, which is worse.
“I will not be handled, Luca,” she said, “and I will not be handled by you least of all, because you are the best at it.”
“I know.” I did not smile, and it cost me. “I have known since you marked up my contract and made me laugh in front of Cassian.”
I stopped at the door of my room with a hand on the frame and did not open it. She stood close enough that I could hear her breathing change.
“Everything in here has a toll and the toll is that you say it.” I turned my palm up on the frame. “I am not lowering it and you would not respect me if I did.”
She lifted her chin at the door. That is an answer and it is not the answer.
“In words, tesoro.”
“I want you to take my clothes off yourself and tell me what you are doing while you do it.”
Her right hand stayed closed on the brass. I said Rule Seven by its number, and she said she had it, and I opened the door.
“I am taking this over your head now, and I am going to be slow about it, because I want to watch your arms come down.” I did exactly that and no more than that. “There. You put your hands down like a woman setting an argument on a table.”
She got a sound out ahead of the sentence. I waited, holding her sleeve, until the sentence came.
“I want your mouth on my throat, under the key, and I want to feel your teeth in it.”
“You will feel them.” I put my mouth under the bootlace and worked down from there. “You will not feel much of them, because I want you talking, and teeth end conversations.”
Her nipples came up before I put a hand anywhere near them, and I told her so, because a woman should be given her own evidence. Then I stopped, mouth still against her, hand still where it was. She had stopped speaking. That is the arrangement.
“Tell me what you want next and use a whole sentence for it.”
“I want you on the bed and I want your mouth lower than it is.”
“I am going to put my mouth on your pussy and I am going to be extremely slow about it.” I put her thighs over my shoulders and told her that too. “Flat tongue. No fingers yet. You will have to ask me for those.”
She had to hear every word of what I was doing while I did it, and I kept my tongue wide and flat on her clit until her heels came off my back. She came on my mouth saying my name inside a whole sentence, which I had asked for and had not expected to get.
“Two fingers now,” I said against her thigh, “and tell me what they find.”
“They find me wet and they find me wanting more of them than that.”
“Slick to the second knuckle, and gripping.” I gave her the third. “Say that back in your own words and do not be tidy about it.”
“Three of your fingers, and I am furious at how obvious I am.”
I laughed against her hip and kept going.
Her hand got into my hair and stayed. I told her what her thighs were doing around my forearm.
I told her the sound the third one made and made her lie there and hear it.
Before I moved anything at all I said what I was about to move, and then I waited, and she gave me the sentence every time.
“Say the word cock and tell me exactly what you want done with it.”
“I want your cock in my cunt, slowly, from behind, and I want you talking the entire time.”
So I put her on her side and came in behind her, one palm flat and warm across her belly.
I went in slow enough to be unkind about it and said so out loud on the way.
She was hot around me and I told her that.
I told her what her back was doing against my chest, and what her hand was doing on my wrist, and I did nothing she had not put into a sentence first.
“I am not going to stop talking, so you are going to have to come with my voice in the room.”
She did, with the casing still shut in her fist and my name coming apart in the middle of it. I came after her, saying things I would not repeat in daylight. Then, for the first time I can remember, I ran out of sentences.
I brought bread back to the table and tore it in my hands rather than cutting it.
I cut a pear with the pocket knife and fed her the pieces off my palm.
I held the glass while she drank, because her hands had gone useless and it pleased me to be the reason.
She ate everything I put in front of her mouth.
Nothing on a plate. I started to say something about the pear and lost the end of it somewhere, and let it go.
“Colette Hargrave took the stairs today.”
I told her what Colette had said about her mother, and she put her hand flat on the table and held it there, which is what her hands do when she is working out an answer she does not want.