CHAPTER FIFTEEN
?
MARY
On Sunday, my eighteenth day, I got into Nicolas Varela’s bed at ten at night with the lamp off, and nobody carried me there. The sheets were cold the whole length of me. Out in the hall his phone went, Rian’s voice small out of the speaker and Nicolas’s going back low and level.
Forty seconds of that, then three words that ended it, then the strip of light under the door went out. The dresser took the phone, face down. “Mary,” he said, before I could work out where in the room he was.
“You sound like a man who got told no.”
“Rian’s been at it two days and the whole building works for us. Nobody down there is talking.”
“About who sold my brother’s paper.”
“About the weather.” Cloth moved somewhere on my right, a jacket going over the back of the chair. “Somebody in that cage is being paid to have a bad memory. It’s findable. It’s slow.”
“Does Rian have somebody down there, or is he standing in that cage himself?”
“He’s standing in it. That’s the problem, and it’s also why I’m not moving him.”
I got an elbow under me. A boat worked north below us.
“How slow?”
“Slower than you want and faster than they think.”
“That’s the kind of thing people say when they’ve got nothing.”
The terrace door has never sealed. The breeze off the rain came in under it, cold and mineral, and under that his soap.
“It’s the kind of thing I say when I’ve got one man and no name for him yet. When I have the name you’ll hear it from me and not from anybody else.”
“That’s a promise with a lot of doors in it, and you know where every one of them is.”
“It’s the only kind I make.”
The air handler cut out. It had run since the day I got here and I had stopped hearing it.
“The paper. On Danny. You said you’d get it.”
“I went down to the cage myself and put my hands on it. You’re not getting it tonight.”
I sat up. The city came across the bed in one stripe and lit nothing.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. It’s the truth, though.”
“Those two things aren’t the same, and you’re the one man in this building who knows the difference.”
I heard his watch come off and go down on the wood, one small dead click.
“You asked me for the paper. I’ve told you who touched it last and where it sits tonight. Next question.”
“What was in it?”
“Next question.”
My hands had gone to the hem of the sheet and were folding it into a tight seam, which is what they do when the rest of me has nowhere to go.
“You know what you do? You answer a smaller question than the one I asked, and you hand it over like it’s my change.”
“I don’t lie to you.”
“That’s not the compliment you think it is at eleven at night.”
He did not defend it. That is harder to fight than an excuse.
“It’s the only thing I’ve got that’s worth anything to you.”
“Fine. Then tell me my brother’s alive tonight.”
“Danny ate at six and he’s asleep in a room with a man outside the door.”
Somebody had stood in a doorway and watched my brother eat, because he was told to.
“You had a person count his forkfuls.”
“I had a person count his forkfuls.”
I opened my mouth to hand him a line with a hook in it and did not. He kept telling the truth and it kept being the wrong one.
“That’s the closest thing to a kindness anybody’s done me this week, and you made it sound like a delivery.”
“It was a delivery.”
I pulled the sheet up over my chest, and then put it back down, on purpose.
“Then say the sentence you’re not saying and let me hear how bad it is.”
“No.”
That was the third time of asking and the third wall, sanded smooth. I could have gotten out of that bed. Twelve pages with my name on them said what I owed and how long for, and no line of that contract put me in his sheets. A woman who has been bought does not get to pretend the door is locked.
?
“Stand up,” Nicolas said from the foot of the bed.
I stood up. He came around the end of the bed with no hurry and stood close enough that the cold off the glass stopped reaching me.
“Arms.”
The shirt went up over my head. He did not drop it on the floor. He laid it on the bed, and I have never been able to file that anywhere.
“You’re beautiful. That isn’t a compliment. It’s a fact and you’ll stop arguing with me about it.”
“I wasn’t arguing.”
“You were winding up to.”
He took the waistband of my shorts and drew them down over my hips, went down on one knee to get them off my feet, and stayed at eye level with my pussy longer than the job took.
“You’re going to hold still and let me look at you, and then I’m going to tell you what happens.”
“That’s not a conversation, that’s a weather report.”
“Hold still.”
So I held still. He looked, and kept looking, past the length anybody had ever looked at me. My knees started an unauthorized shake.
“Wider. Hands at your sides, where they were.”
My nipples had gone up hard in the cold off the glass, and he took his time over one nipple and then the other nipple, and longer over my pussy.
“You’re enjoying this a truly unreasonable amount.”
“I’ve been enjoying it since the elevator. Hands.”
“You watched the panel that whole ride.”
The corner of his mouth went and came back.
“I was counting floors.”
It came out deadpan and I laughed with my hands still at my sides.
“You could try being a little sideways about it. That’s a lot of eye contact.”
“Every man who ever looked at you did it sideways. I’m not going to.”
He put his mouth on the burn on my forearm first, on the shine of it, and said nothing about doing it. Then my throat. Then my shoulders, and both my nipples, one nipple and then the other.
He put me on my back, gathered both my wrists into one hand and set them above my head on the cold half of the pillow.
“Hands where I put them. You can take them back whenever you want, and you won’t.”
One of his hands is not a lock. I could have had my wrists back inside a second and we both knew it. I left them where he put them, and knew I was leaving them, and that is the whole exchange.
His mouth came down on my tits and took its time. My nipple went between his teeth. My back came off the bed before I had voted on it, and he waited out the sound I made, then did the other nipple.
“Look at me.”
I looked. His hand went between my thighs and two fingers went into my pussy, slow, and his thumb settled on my clit and stayed.
“Look how wet you are. Say whose that is.”
“Yours.”
“Again.”
His fingers went deeper into my pussy. His thumb came off my clit and came back to it, and my voice went out of me in pieces.
“Yours. It’s yours, it’s—”
He watched my face the whole way through it and I came on his hand with his shirt still buttoned, his thumb never once off my clit. Then he took his clothes off at the end of the bed and I got all of him in a stripe of city light, his cock in it.
He got both hands spread under my ass and lifted me clear off the bed to his mouth.
That is where I lost the thread. There was a sentence and my grandmother’s oven was in it.
Then there was his mouth on my cunt and his tongue flat on my clit and my heels sliding on his shoulders, and the sentence never came back to me that night, or since.
He said something into my pussy that I did not catch.
“Breathe.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Work harder.”
He came up the bed, hooked my thighs over his forearms and put his cock into my cunt slowly enough that I heard the terrace dripping in the gap between one inch and the next.
“Perfect. Every inch of this is perfect and I’m going to keep telling you until it bores you.”
“That’s a long program.”
He laughed at that, one breath of it, and did not stop moving his cock in me.
“That’s the third time you’ve stopped breathing. I’m counting.”
“You’re keeping count of my breathing with your cock inside me—Nicolas—”
His hand came up and closed around my jaw, not hard, and turned my face back.
“Legs wider. Don’t hold your breath, let me hear it.”
I did what he said, and I would like to report it as a one-off. He got his hand down between us, found my clit, and held me at the edge with two fingers working my clit.
He turned me over, pulled my hips up, put one hand flat between my shoulder blades and wound the other into my hair. My face went into the sheets. His cock went back into my pussy from behind and did not hurry there either.
“Mine. I want it in your voice, Mary.”
“Yours.”
“Again. The whole sentence.”
His fist tightened in my hair and drew my head up off the sheet. His other hand came around and found my clit and stayed there, and he waited, and my pussy closed around his cock and answered for me.
“I’m yours.”
I spent twenty-nine years being told I was too much.
It had taken my first four days in that house to find out too much was the entire point.
He finished with his cock in my pussy and did not move off.
He held me down under his weight with my hair still in his fist, and I lay with my mouth open against the cotton until my heart came back into range.
He was soft in my pussy a long time before he pulled his cock out, and even then his hand stayed in the small of my back with my breath moving under it.
Later his right hand was an inch from my mouth on the pillow. I put my thumb on the ridge across the back of it, the shiny hairless run of it, and traced the edge.
“Where’d you get this?”
“You were closer to me when I got it than you are right now.”
I lay very still. The salt off his throat was on my tongue.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means what it means. Ask me again when I can answer it.”
I kept my thumb where it was. He let me, which was an answer of some kind and no use at all.
“That’s twice tonight that you’ve done that.”
“I know what it is. I’m doing it anyway.”
The rain had stopped off the terrace. I could hear the glass ticking as it cooled.
“Nicolas—”
“Go to sleep.”
?
I surfaced in Nicolas’s bed in the small hours the way you do when a room has been changed around you. My back was against a wall. There had been no wall behind my head at eleven. There had been open floor, and a door in it.
The hall light was on and the door stood open. Nicolas was in it with the black wire chair held up in both hands, off the carpet so the legs would not drag. Four dents sat in the nap, gray and soft as thumbprints in dough.
He had moved the bed with me asleep in it, and now he was taking the chair out without a word. He has never once told me why he takes the chair with its back to the open door in every room we share.
I did not say thank you. He would not have known what to do with it. Something had gone quiet and enormous in my chest and was not ready to be spoken to.
“Nicolas. What are you doing?”
“Nothing that needs you awake. Close your eyes.”
Before the hall light went out, he set a white access card beside my phone. I reached for it, and he left his hand there until I had it. “The elevator. Yours.” Then he took the chair away. I lay with the card pressed into my palm long after he had stopped moving.