CHAPTER 15 #3
“Luca first, then Rian, then Luca again, then me. That is the order you gave me and that is the order you are getting.”
He said it once at the beginning of the waiting and once in the middle of it, in exactly the same words, so that the waiting had a shape.
His hand was spread on my ass and the other one was open flat between my shoulder blades, holding me down onto my own forearms. I was aching in a way that had stopped being about any one part of me.
“Say it now,” I said. “I am not going to get through it a third time.”
“Now.”
I came on that one word with the whole room in front of me, and he came with me and did not make a speech out of it. He put his mouth against the back of my neck.
“Perfect.”
My hand never opened, and afterwards, with the brass still shut inside my fist, I worked out that I had never once wanted it to.
Rian got the blanket off the foot of the bed, got in behind me and put it over both of us. Then he laid his arm across my ribs and left it there. He had not spoken since he came off that wall, and none of them said anything about it, which is a thing they do for him.
“You have gone quiet on me again,” I said, “and I am not going to make you talk about it.”
He answered by tightening the arm once and leaving it exactly where it had been.
Luca came back with two oat crackers broken into small pieces and the grapes pinched from their stem. He fed me one thing at a time and held the water while I drank, his free hand steady under my chin.
“The salt first,” he said. “Then the grapes, because you have earned something that tastes awake.”
He tried to say more, lost the sentence, and gave me another grape instead. From Luca, silence was its own form of aftercare.
Cassian sat down on the edge of the bed on the west side with his elbows on his knees, and he talked, out loud and in order, the way he does everything.
“I put Luca first because his hands are the ones you open for,” he said, “and I put myself last because I did not trust the order any other way.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Rian second, because he was always going to be the hardest on you and I wanted you rested for him. Luca third because by then you needed something you were driving yourself. Me fourth, because at the end of it there was nothing left in that room for me to hold except myself.”
“And you held it,” I said.
“I have run details for a long time and I have never written an order of operations for a room I wanted to be inside.” He was looking at the floor when he said it. “I wrote this one out twice.”
He did not hear himself say that. I heard him. He kept going, in sequence, until my breathing had evened out under Rian’s arm, and then he stopped, because the evening out was the point of it.
Matteo took the chair out first and carried it back to the kitchen, and I heard the legs go down on the tile.
He came back and folded my clothes properly, which I had not.
He laid the Rules card on top of the pile with the torn corner facing out.
He wrung a cloth out in warm water at the basin, put it into Luca’s open hand, and stepped back into my sight line.
He stacked the towels, set the glasses back on the tray and carried the basin to the door.
He pushed the wardrobe shut on his way past and the runner drew itself the last inch closed, the only sound that room ever made on its own.
When he was finished, the room had returned to itself.
That was his part, and he did it without putting a hand on me.
Then he took the collar out of his pocket and held it flat on an open palm with the footboard between us. It is a matte steel band with no ring and no buckle, hinged at one side, and there is nothing cut or written anywhere on it. He did not open it and he did not bring it anywhere near my throat.
“I made it on fifty-nine,” he said. “It closes with a magnet and it comes off whenever you want it off.”
“It is too soon, Matteo, and that is not the same thing as no,” I said.
“Noted, and nothing about tonight changes,” Cassian said.
“She said too soon, which is a date and not a door,” Luca said.
Rian said nothing at all. The arm across my ribs came in once, hard, and then went back to where it had been lying.
“Good,” Matteo said. “I would rather have your no tonight than your yes.”
I did not get up. I did not open the argument again either, and I could have, because every one of them would have sat through it to the end. My hand stayed shut around the brass.
“Sleep now,” Rian said, and those were the only two words he gave that room after he came off the wall.
Luca put the lamp out in the north-east corner and got in on the far side of me.
Cassian lay down along the edge and put his back against mine and stayed there.
Matteo sat down on the floor against the west wall where the chair had been, three strides off the foot of the bed, exactly as far away as he had been all night.
He put the collar back in his pocket without a single word about it, and I lay in the dark between them and understood that nothing in that room had been done to me.