Chapter 20
Tonio
I’d lit the candles twice.
The first time I’d lit them too early, an hour out, just as a test, to see how the space would look.
I looked at them for a moment, imagined them casting their light over Katerina, then I blew them out and stood in the dark of our bedroom feeling like an idiot, a grown man, a soldier, a Scordato, breathing hard over a row of guttered tealights.
Later, closer to when she was due, I’d lit them again. They made the room warm. Inviting. Perfect.
My burn made me slow.
The scar ran tight up my arm to the elbow now, shiny and pulled, and sometimes the fingers didn’t quite do what I sent them to, so I struck three matches before one took and I swore at all three in Sicilian.
Olimpo, sprawled across the doorway, lifted his great grizzled head and gave me the grumble. The judgmental one.
“You don’t get a say in this, old man,” I told him. “Out. Go. This isn’t for you.”
Of course, he did not go. He resettled his bald scarred flank against the doorframe. I stepped over him, and I went to the drawer.
Time to choose.
She’d only ever worn them once. That first day, just to test me.
Black, lace, the front cut clean away, the kind of thing a woman buys for a self she isn’t yet brave enough to be.
I’d found them folded under the plain ones, and I’d put them back exactly as I found them and said nothing.
I’d waited. Chose a different pair for her to wear each day.
Now I lifted them out and held them flat across my good palm in the candlelight, the lace catching the gold, the bareness of them, and I imagined her in them and nothing else, the burn-scarred wrists, the strong shoulders, the soft she only lets me see, and I was half-hard before I’d finished the thought, breathing it out slow, ridiculous, twenty-nine years old and gone like a boy over a scrap of lace.
Why was I so nervous?
The nerves weren’t about the feather or the candle or the wax. The nerves were her. I wanted to get it right for her the way she gets so much right for me. So much right for everyone.
I heard the street door downstairs.
The boots on the bakery stair, slow, the loaf-tin set down on the counter, and then her tread coming up, tired, the long day in it. I left the lace folded on the bed where she’d see it and I went to the top of the stairs and Olimpo beat me there because of course he did.
She came up tired around the eyes.
I didn’t pounce.
I wanted to. The lace was on the bed and my blood was up.
She came through the door soft and undone and beautiful and I wanted to take her against the wall before her coat was off.
I didn’t. I took the coat instead. I peeled it off her shoulders the way you peel something fragile and I hung it and I steered her by the small of her back, the easy authority, into the kitchen and the chair turned out the way I turn it.
“Sit,” I said. “Down. Now.”
She sat. She didn’t fight it, which told me how far the day had taken her.
I had food waiting. Of course I did. I always do—it’s the language we both speak perfectly. I’d kept a plate warm, pasta with the garlic and the chili she loves. I set it down in front of her I crouched with my good hand on her knee and waited until she looked at me out of the grief.
“Eat,” I said. Soft. “All of it. The day’s over.” I picked up the fork and held it to her. “Now you put it down. The grief, the responsiblity, all of it. Don’t make me invoke the contract.”
She smiled, slowly.
“Good girl,” I said, low, and watched it go through her—the color up her throat, the breath catching, the whole proud meticulous woman gone loose for the held second of it.
When the plate was clean I took it and set it aside and I tipped her chin up with two fingers, and I let the steel come into it, soft, the soft-steel she’s stopped being able to fight.
“Tonight’s mine,” I said. “You just feel what I do to you and you let me.” I held her eyes until I was sure she had it. “Understand?”
“I understand,” she breathed.
I reached behind me to the doorway, to where I’d carried the lace through, and I held it up in the candlelight where she could see it. The black. The bareness of it. Her own secret self, folded in my palm, six months in the drawer.
I watched her recognize it. Watched the pink flood up her throat and the breath go short and the want she’d cut out of herself the year her father died come up bright in her eyes anyway, because she’s been learning, all this time, to let it.
“Go put these on,” I said. “Just these. Nothing else. And come back to me.”
She took them. Her fingers brushed mine over the lace.
“Yes, Daddy,” she said.
She came back through the door and I forgot how to breathe.
That’s the truth of it, and I’m a man who breathes for a living, who fills rooms with sound the way other men fill them with silence, and she came out of that bathroom in the black lace with the front cut away and nothing else, the candlelight running gold up the strong line of her thigh and the soft of her belly and the bareness the lace framed instead of hid, and every word I own in three languages went out of my head at once.
I just looked. Top to bottom. The shoulders that haul flour sacks, the burn-scarred forearms, the dark hair down and loose for once instead of scraped up and escaping.
She stood in the candlelight and wore those panties just for me.
My cock thickened, heavy, against the seam of my trousers. I let her see what looking at her did.
“There she is,” I said, low. “Christ, sweetheart. Look at you.”
She bit her lip. She didn’t know where to put her hands—she never does when she’s not allowed to work—and she let them hang.
How I was going to make it through the slow part without burying myself in her in the first minute, I genuinely did not know. But the slow part was the gift. The slow part was the whole point.
“Come here. Sit.”
I sat her on the edge of the bed and I knelt in front of her so our faces were level, my hands on her bare knees, and I made myself talk instead of touch.
“There’s new things tonight,” I said. “I’m going to tell you all of them before we start. No surprises you didn’t agree to. You with me?”
“Yes.” Barely a breath.
“First—I’m going to tie something over your eyes.
” I watched her face for the flinch and it didn’t come, just the breath going shorter.
“Soft. Dark. So you can’t see what I’m doing or where I’m doing it.
That’s the point—you can’t get ahead of me, can’t run the choreography, can’t be the boss of it.
You just feel it. My voice is the only thing you’ll have. You hold onto my voice.”
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Second—I’m going to use things on you. Not my hands tonight.
Things.” I reached to the nightstand without taking my eyes off her and I lifted them one at a time so she could see.
“A feather. Just to start. Light, all over you, so you never know where it’s coming.
” I set it down. I lifted the next. “And this. A candle.” Her breath caught hard.
“I light it, I let it burn till there’s a little pool, and I drip the warm wax on you.
From up high, so it’s cooled to just-warm by the time it lands.
It stings bright for a second and then it’s gone, and I chase every drop with my mouth.
Hot, then cool. Then later I peel the cooled wax off your skin, slow, and that’s a whole feeling of its own. ”
She was breathing like she’d run up the stairs. Her thighs had gone restless under my hands. Already excited, already halfway down, my good girl, and I hadn’t laid a finger on her yet.
And then I did the thing I’d been turning over all week.
“Look at me,” I said. “I need you clear for this part. You remember the rule you wrote? Early on. Your own hand.”
Her face changed. She knew the one. That I’d only use my hand on her. I’d honored it like scripture, for months, never once an implement, never once a thing between my skin and hers, because she’d set the line and the line was sacred.
“I remember,” she said.
“That rule still stands until you change it. Tonight I’m asking you to change it.
There will be no striking—I think that’s what you were worried about.
But if you don’t want this tonight, you just have to say.
I can still be very inventive, just with my hand.
” I held her eyes. “So. Tell me. Is it still only ever the hand?”
She held my gaze a long moment, the grief of the church basement gone clean out of her face and something braver come up in its place, the thing she’s spent six months learning, the letting.
“No,” she said. “I trust you with more than the hand now.”
The whole of me went tight at that. But I didn’t move.
“Not good enough,” I said, gentle, exacting, the way she scores a loaf in long clean pulls. “I need you to say exactly what you mean. Tell me what I’m allowed.”
She swallowed. Her chin came up — the boss in her surfacing one last time to do the brave thing properly.
“The feather,” she said. “And the candle. The wax. You can use them on me. I want you to. I’m changing the rule. It’s not only the hand anymore—it’s whatever you choose, because it’s you.” Her voice cracked on the last of it. “I trust you with all of it.”
I said it back to her so it was real and agreed between us, the way you repeat an order on the floor so there’s no mistaking it.
“The feather, the candle, the wax,” I said. “Tonight, on your body. And if any of it’s too much, you say kataifi and the whole world stops. Say it back.”
“Kataifi stops everything,” she said. “Yes, Daddy.”
And God help me, the editing of her own rule, that got me harder than the lace had. Harder than the bareness. The trust of it. The brave careless gift of it.
I reached for the soft dark cloth.