CHAPTER NINE
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MARY
The gym on the fiftieth floor had one bank of lights on out of four, and Rian Varela stood under it wrapping his own left hand. He got to the thumb loop before he looked up.
“Mary.”
I was in a T-shirt out of a drawer that was not mine, cotton shorts, and no shoes. Behind him the heavy bag turned on its chain. Thirty knots off the water made the glass tick like a sheet pan cooling.
“You said I didn’t believe him. Say the rest of it.”
Rian pulled the tape out of his teeth and let the hand hang half done. He did not ask me what I meant. I had braced myself for that on every step of the fire stair down from fifty-one.
“You watched your own brother’s mouth move and you counted it. That’s the first thing about you that scared me.”
“Counted what?” I came off the doorframe.
“The lies. You had a number before he got to the shoes.” Rian dropped the roll on the bench beside his radio and the water. “Most people argue with a brother. You did arithmetic.”
My hands went cold and went up under my arms before I decided to move them.
“That’s an ugly thing to say about a person.”
Rian did not look up from the tape. “It’s true, though, and you know the number.”
“Both of those can be true.” I came down the step onto the mats. The room smelled of rubber and the ammonia they hose it out with. “You’ve been carrying that since the causeway and you didn’t say a word in the car.”
“You were sitting in the car.”
“And that stopped you.”
Rian turned the tape twice more over the flat old knuckles and tore it with his thumb. “Yeah. That stopped me. I’ve been down here since midnight not saying it.”
The radio went off on the bench, two words of Russian and a hiss. Rian looked at it, then back at me, and the looking back took longer.
“What was that?”
“The lobby.” He left it where it was. “They’re asking where you are every hour now.”
“Do you work out at one in the morning every night, or is this for my benefit?”
Rian turned his head away from me. “Christ. Don’t be funny at me.”
“You laughed.” I had never watched a man be so betrayed by his own face. “That’s twice this week.”
“I’m aware of what I did, and I’d like the two of us to stop discussing it.”
A man that size furious about a noise he made was the best thing all week.
“Then here’s my arithmetic,” I said. “Two point four million dollars and a brother who can’t tell the truth about a pair of shoes. I’m a debt with a body. Which page of the contract is this on?”
“None of them.”
“Page one’s got a number on it and a name under the number. Somebody wrote that down and somebody countersigned it.”
“Somebody wrote down what your brother owes.” Rian’s jaw set. “That’s a different sentence, and you’re smart enough to know it.”
“You bought me.”
Rian came off the bench fast enough to put the bottle over.
“Nicolas bought your brother’s paper. Nobody in this building bought this, and if you say it again I’ll stop, and I don’t want to stop.”
I had come down for that sentence and it cost me the last soft version of my brother I had. I want Danny out of that building, and if I do not get him out, I am the payment. The elevator was eleven feet behind me and wanted a card I did not have.
I made my mouth move. “Stop what. Nothing’s happening here.”
“Something’s been happening since you came up in that elevator and you’re too tired tonight to lie about it well.”
“I’m not tired.”
“You haven’t slept since the causeway.”
Rian looked at the mirrors instead of me, which I had never seen him do.
“I’m not gentle and I’m not going to get gentle. But I’ve never once been careless with something I mean to keep.”
Then he shut up. There was no second sentence coming and nothing to be rude about. My pulse went off in my throat. I crossed four feet of mat before I had agreed with myself about it.
?
I got two fists in the front of Rian’s shirt out on the mats. That was the whole plan and it lasted a second.
Rian had me off my heels and against the padded post, one flat hand on my sternum, telling me what was going to happen while I argued.
“You’re going to be quiet, because that elevator is right there. You’re going to hold what I tell you to hold and nothing else.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“You were.” His hand stayed flat where it was.
He got my shorts off my hips with one hand and put two fingers in my pussy with no preamble, thumb on my clit, and my knees went before a single thing in my head had voted.
He worked deeper into my cunt, thumb still going hard, and watched my face do it.
I got loud. Rian put his other hand over my mouth and left it.
His mouth came down at my ear and the hand did not move. “Eleven feet. Your pussy’s so wet it’s running down my wrist and you’re still arguing with me. Stop arguing.”
His thumb went back to my clit and I said something into his palm that was not a word.
He took the hand off my mouth and his fingers out of my pussy to turn me around.
“Hold on to the mirror. Both hands. Don’t take them off it.”
The glass was cold. There is a hairline crack in it from the floor to my hip. “Wider than that.” I moved my palms out and Rian went down on his knees behind me.
One hand spread wide on my ass, holding me open, the other up my shirt on a nipple. His mouth on my cunt from behind, tongue flat on my clit and then not flat and not slow. The only thing left to look at was my own face.
“Look at you. Christ.” His mouth came off me for that and no longer. “You’ve got the prettiest pussy I have ever had my mouth on, and you’re not going to argue about that either. Hold still. I’m not done with your clit and you’re not done watching.”
A week ago I would have shut my eyes. I watched instead—my mouth open, my hair coming down, one nipple dragging cold glass, his tongue working my clit and the glass fogging under my mouth—and that is the only decision in the whole night I can prove I made. I liked the woman in that mirror.
My hands came off the mirror. Rian put them back without a word. When he stood, I got one hand down anyway, into his shorts and around his cock, and he made a sound like something taken off him.
Then he took my wrist off his cock.
“No.”
“Why not—”
“Because I’m not finishing in your hand. I’ve had my mouth on your pussy half the night and my cock is going somewhere else.”
The radio went again. Rian crossed the mat, pulled the battery out and set both halves on the bench. His shorts came off before he got back, card in the pocket, his cock out and hard.
Then he picked me up.
I am a size twenty and I have spent my life careful about laps and doorways and the arms of chairs. Rian took my weight like it was the point of the exercise.
His mouth went down against my throat and his hands were full of me. “You’re heavy. You’re heavy and I’ve been thinking about it all week and I’m putting you on the floor now, and you’re going to let me.”
It went through me like the heat off an oven door.
The mats were cool where we had not been.
Rian put his cock in my pussy and went fast from the first second, one hand under my ass tilting me up, my thighs locked around his back, his mouth open on my throat, his cock working in my cunt hard enough that I heard myself every time.
He dragged the T-shirt up and got his mouth on one nipple and then the other nipple, and I lost the thread and did not find it again.
Rian took both my wrists in one hand and put them over my head without slowing down.
“All of it. Every inch of you, and I’m not saying it twice.
” His free hand came down between us and found my clit.
“Your tits. This belly. These thighs—I’ve had a problem about your thighs since the car.
Your nipples go hard the second I look at them and I have had to stand in a kitchen and watch you do it. ”
“You can’t just—”
“I can say what I like about what’s mine.”
He got his mouth back on my nipples and said the rest into my skin, where I had to lie there and take it.
Then everything stopped. All of him at once, mid-stroke, his cock still all the way in my pussy, his mouth against my shoulder.
“Mine. Say it back.”
I could hear my own breathing off the mirror. He was not going to move again until I said it.
“Yours.”
“Good girl.”
He went again and it was worse, and I came with my wrists still in his hand and my heels off the mat.
His thumb was still on my clit when it happened.
Rian pulled his cock out and finished on my belly and my thigh.
Then he stayed there, forehead down on my sternum, breathing, longer than a man built like that has any business staying.
My brother did not cross my mind once on that mat. I noticed, and I let it.
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Rian did not carry me anywhere off those mats and did not say one soft thing.
He got up, pulled his shorts back on, felt the card through the pocket, and came back with the coffee can of wraps and the roll.
“Sit up. Give me the right one.”
“Are we doing this now?”
I had put my shorts back on and tugged the T-shirt down before he brought over the wraps. The cool air found the damp at my hairline.
“You’re awake.” Rian shook a wrap out of the can.
He took my hand and started at the wrist. His voice changed into one I had not heard.
“Three around the wrist first. The wrist’s what goes, not the knuckles, whatever anybody tells you.”
“Nobody’s ever told me anything about it.” My hand looked small in his.
“Then listen. Thumb loop, back to the wrist. Three across the knuckles, one more around the thumb to lock it, or it’ll unwind the first time you land something.”
“You’ve thought about my hands more than I have.”
“I’ve thought about your hands since that first morning. Don’t make me say the rest of it.”
He finished the right wrap and started on the left. His hands went from the base of my thumb to my wrist and back, twice, and never once further up my left arm over the old burn. He did not look at it and did not go out of his way not to.
“Thumb outside. You do it the other way you break your own hand, and then I’ve got to explain to my brother how you broke it.”
“Is there a written test?”
“There’s a bag.”
He studied the tape roll.
“You’ve been saving that one all night.”
“Since midnight.”
He moved my feet with his foot and turned my hip with his hand.
“Hip first. The hand’s just the last thing that arrives.”
I hit the bag three times like a woman swatting at a curtain. The chain rang, the duct-taped seam gave nothing back, my wrist stung inside the wrap, and my pussy had not come down and neither had my nipples.
“Again. Hip.”
The fourth went through the bag instead of into it, and I felt it arrive in my heel.
“Good girl.”
Two words. After everything on the mats, those were the ones that got in.
Rian put the roll back in the drawer. My knuckles had started to go sore inside the wraps—the first mark anybody in that building had left on me, and I had done it myself.
“Somebody should’ve taught you that years ago. You’ve got the hands for it. You always did.”
“Always? You’ve never even—”
“Go to bed, Mary. You don’t want that answer at two in the morning.”
He unwound the wraps himself, kept one over his shoulder, and used his card to take me back to fifty-one. He waited until I was through the doorway before the elevator descended.