CHAPTER SIX
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MARY
When Nicolas walked in after Rian left that morning, he looked at the empty stool, then at the pastry box.
He closed the lid without taking one. “Go to bed, Mary.” I had waited for a question.
It never came. By ten that Sunday night I had spent most of the day waiting for it, and gone back to flour.
Corinne’s recipe book was propped open on the counter beside me with Mary Corinne Warren written inside the cover in her pencil.
At the black stone island on the fifty-first floor I was cutting butter into flour because my hands wanted work, and it had come out of the freezer hard enough to hurt my knuckles.
Heat lightning went off over the Atlantic. No thunder came behind it.
I did not hear the elevator or his shoes on the tile. The back of my neck pulled tight a half second before anything touched me, and then Nicolas had his mouth against the side of my throat. “Mary.”
My hands stayed in the bowl. Behind me a pan of sugar and water was coming up for no reason anybody could defend.
“What are you making?” he said, into my hair.
“Nothing. Dough for nobody. It’s ten o’clock at night and I’m laminating for an audience of none, so go ahead and say the obvious thing about that.”
“It’s ten o’clock.”
“That’s the one, thank you.”
His phone lit up face up on the stone beside the flour. He read it without moving off my skin, turned it over, and set his hand next to mine.
“Is that the debt?”
Nicolas straightened up. “No. And this isn’t the debt either. The debt gets paid in a different building.”
“You read it and you turned it face down, and now we’re both pretending that’s a normal thing that happened.”
“It’s the answer you get tonight.” He put two fingers on the back of my neck and left them there.
“Is it about my brother? Is it about Danny?”
“It’s about a man who works for me.”
I could feel my own pulse going against his fingers, and so could he.
“There were two men on the door tonight,” I said. “When Yelena went down at nine the intercom held the lobby open and I heard both of them say good night to her. There’s only ever been one.”
“There are two. Where were you at four this afternoon?”
I took my hands out of the bowl.
“In the east hall. It’s where my room is.”
“That’s what Yelena told me. Ask me the next one.”
He hands over a true thing with the back half sawn off, and I am supposed to be grateful.
“The sugar’s at hard crack in about ninety seconds, so if this is where you say something terrifying, could you—”
“Then say it in ninety seconds,” Nicolas said.
“Give or take. The back oven at Warren’s has been dead six years and I keep meaning to tell somebody and there is nobody to tell, so I’m telling you, in a kitchen that isn’t mine. That’s my news. Everybody should know.”
He laughed. One sound, out before he could get a hand on it, and I felt his jaw set against my hair.
“You laughed at me.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did. It came out of you and I heard it, and nobody on this floor’s ever going to believe me.”
“That’s the second no you’ve given me tonight,” I said, “and it isn’t even late.”
“You’ve had three of them.”
I moved the pan half off the burner. Then I was humming, and I had not decided to. Four bars, low, the second phrase and nothing either side. Nicolas went so still the wine fridge compressor was the loudest thing on that floor.
“What’s that?”
“Cielito Lindo. My grandmother’s four bars. It’s what I do instead of screaming.”
His hand had not come off my neck. “Sing the rest of it.”
“There isn’t a rest of it. She’d sing those four and then start talking over herself and forget the words, and I never learned the words either.”
“Then hum it again.”
“No. You get the four bars and that’s it.” Corinne had it, then she died, and then it was mine, and I put it on the counter between us because a man went quiet at the right moment.
He turned me around by the shoulders. I had butter and flour to the wrist and held my hands out so I would not get it on his shirt, and he did not tell me to wash.
“I’m going to take you into that room and I’m going to take my time. I’m asking once and I won’t ask again. Do you want that?”
Then he waited. The pan ticked as it came off the heat, and out past the glass the lightning went off again, white over the water. On the terrace he had stopped himself, and I had been carrying it since.
My hands were shaking out at my sides. My heart went before the rest of me did.
“Yes.”
I said it with my voice, and while it was coming out I knew I was not getting back to Thursday. He turned the burner off without a word about the sugar.
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Nicolas took me into the master bedroom, which has glass on three sides, and did not turn on the overhead. There was moon on the water and it was plenty. He stood me at the foot of the bed and took my clothes off one at a time.
“Hands down. You don’t cover anything tonight.”
“I’m not covering, I’m holding. There’s a difference and I’d like it noted.”
“All the way down.” He waited until they were. “Look at you.”
My right hand had come up across my left forearm. I put it back at my side and made it stay, and that cost me more than the shirt.
Then he stood there and looked and touched nothing. My skin went hot in patches, across the tops of my shoulders and down over my nipples, and I had to count a breath down.
“You could blink at some point—”
“You’re the best-looking thing that’s ever been in this room, and I’ve had this room a long time.”
He switched on the bedside lamp, lifted it off the nightstand and set it on the floor beyond the bed. The light came up from underneath and put me the wrong way up, the underside of my arms, my chin, my thighs.
“Why the lamp?”
“So I can see it.”
He came back, took my left forearm in both hands, turned it into the light and put his mouth on the burn. His whole mouth, open, held there. Then he did it again.
“It’s caramel. Hard crack, my own hand, my own pan. I was nineteen,” I said.
People look once and then work hard at not looking, and he had carried a lamp across a room to get more of it.
“You’ve spent your whole life apologizing for taking up room. In this house you’ll take up all of it, and I’ll thank you for it.”
He went up the inside of my arm with his mouth, the soft part above the elbow, the crook of it. He got one nipple in his mouth and rolled the other nipple between finger and thumb and would not stop, and I made a sound I have never made in front of anybody. Then his teeth on the same nipple.
He got both hands under my breasts and lifted their weight, his thumbs going back and forth over my nipples. “That’s what you weigh in my hands. Don’t move.”
“You can’t say things like—”
“I can. Don’t move.”
His mouth went down after that. He took one nipple on the way, then the soft of my belly, the crease under it, the inside of my thigh where the skin gives. He said belly and thighs and pussy out loud and softened none of it, and the lamp threw my whole shape onto the ceiling.
“That’s the part I’d take off if I could—”
“This part is perfect and you’ve been hiding it from everybody. Say the rest of that sentence.”
I did not have a rest of it.
He put me on my back at the edge of the bed, dragged me down by the thighs, went onto his knees and opened me with his forearms until the lamp had my pussy in it.
“Look at me. I want my mouth on your cunt and I’m going to be down here a while.”
Flat tongue first, the whole width of it over my pussy, twice. Then the tip of it on my clit and nothing else in the world. Two fingers into my pussy with his mouth still on my clit, my heels came off his back, and I came so hard the room went white at the edges.
He held my thighs open and would not let me shut them. “Your clit’s going under my tongue right now. Feel that.”
“God, I’m sorry, that’s—”
“You’re so wet it’s on my wrist. Don’t you dare say sorry for it.”
I was going to. It was already in my mouth. He put his tongue back on my clit and it never got said.
He stood up and opened his belt and I had my hand around his cock before it was out. I got the weight of his cock on my tongue, and then his hand was in my hair pulling me off.
“You’ll have my cock again later. The first time is going inside you.”
He got me up the bed, got over me, put himself against my pussy, and took my jaw in his burned right hand.
“Look at me. You don’t get to close your eyes for this part.”
He pushed his cock into my cunt slowly, the whole way, and then he stopped. Dead still, holding my jaw, watching my face do whatever it was doing. He did not move until I moved first.
Then he put his free hand flat on my belly and left it there. “This is mine now. All of it. That’s not a request and it’s not a compliment.”
“I can’t—”
“You can, and you’re going to.”
“You could go faster.”
“No.” His cock stayed slow and his mouth came down by my ear. “Your cunt has hold of me and I’ve still got my thumb on your clit. You feel like nothing I’ve had my hands on in my life.”
After that I lost it. His thumb came back onto my clit and the other hand went flat across my throat with no weight in it, and I could not tell you which came first.
I could not tell you how long it went on or whether the lightning was going out there. There was the lamp on the floor and his cock in my pussy and the noise I was making, and the order of it is gone.
I came the second time with his cock moving slow in my pussy and stopped keeping track of the room.
He pulled his cock out at the end and finished on my belly and my breasts and over my nipples, and watched himself do it. Then he took my left arm again and put his mouth on the burn, last, the same as first.
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I ended up on my side in Nicolas’s bed, facing the glass.
The lamp stayed on the floor beyond it and neither of us went for it.
The lightning had quit. The room was warm, the glass was warm under my palm, my nipples were sore from his mouth, and my pussy was swollen and open where his cock had been.
Then I started crying. There was no build to it.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
I could not have told anybody which part I was crying about. Maybe the lamp. Maybe Danny, somewhere in this city tonight, not thinking about me, whose debt is why a man’s mouth had been on my arm at all.
It was not that he had made me do anything. I had wanted it, in a kitchen, with my brother’s debt sitting in the room.
“I’m not sad. I’d like that on the record.”
Nicolas did not ask. He put his hand flat between my shoulder blades and left it there. He did not rub my back. He did not tell me it was all right. He let me get on with it, and that took me apart worse than the rest had.
“Say something to me.”
I got my wrist up toward my face. He caught it, turned my chin back with the back of his right hand and held it until I stopped trying to take it anywhere.
“Don’t wipe your face. Leave it. I’m not finished looking at you.”