CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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MARY
I had both hands in a bowl of dough nobody had asked me for. Tuesday. Ten at night. The black stone island was warm under my wrists. Across the great room, Rian leaned out of the bedroom doorway. His knuckles were pink and ridged against the frame.
“Mary.”
My hands stopped before I told them to. The dough sagged over my knuckles. My pulse went off ahead of me.
Nicolas was already in the black wire chair with its back to the terrace door. He had moved the lamp twice and explained it neither time. Luca came in last with a plate and did not put it down for eleven minutes.
“You can stop working, Mary,” Luca said, and held the plate against his chest like a man at a bad party. “The dough keeps. There’s something the three of us have to say to you, and it should’ve been said Sunday.”
“Then tell me to my face, Luca,” I said.
“We settled it Sunday, in the study, before any of us had slept, and we settled it without you in the room, Mary. I’d rather you had that from me than worked it out on your own later,” Luca said.
Nicolas did not correct him and neither did Rian. Nicolas turned the lamp a quarter turn off my face and put his right hand back in his pocket, where it goes in company.
Luca went on. “There’s no line to stand in. Nobody in this house is waiting his turn. You’re not a thing that gets divided.”
I put the bowl down and sat on the pale ash stool.
I was not angry. I checked twice, the back of my hand to it like a pan, and there was nothing in there but heat.
He had made me say plenty at a black window in September, and I had said it to the floor.
Nobody in this kitchen needed me to say it now.
“Is this in the contract?”
“There’s nothing in that contract about tonight, and I wrote most of it, and Nicolas signed it without reading one word of what I wrote,” Luca said.
“I didn’t touch him,” Rian said. “You want to know why, ask me tomorrow. Tonight I’d rather you didn’t.”
“You had a fork in your hand at that table, Rian. I watched you set it down.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole report?” I said.
“That’s tonight’s answer.” Rian came two steps out of the doorway and no farther. “Tomorrow you get the long one. Luca’ll do it with charts.”
Three phones lay face down on the black stone. Yelena had gone to her own rooms at nine and taken every other voice in this house with her. I had not seen it once since they brought me up here.
“They’re off. All three.” Rian looked at the ceiling. “I took two men off the Coliseum floor and put Osiel on the elevator until six to buy one night of that, and I’ll be paying it back all week.”
“Twenty-seven days,” I said.
It was not a complaint and none of them took it as one.
“And you’re making bread at ten at night like somebody’s coming to grade it,” Luca said.
“Somebody usually is, and it’s usually me.”
“Leave the bowl and come here,” Nicolas said. “You already know how tonight goes.”
“Do I.”
“You’ve known since Saturday.”
It had been in me since Saturday like a stone in a shoe.
“I’m not asking any of you to be sorry, I’m asking you to—”
“You’re ours,” Nicolas said. “That was decided Sunday and it isn’t going back on the table.”
I wiped my hands down my hip. There was nothing left in them to hold.
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The bedroom Nicolas walked me into smelled like the tin of guava paste I opened in the afternoon and never used and carried down the hall on my own hands.
Nicolas undressed me standing at the foot of the bed. When the shirt came off Nicolas put his mouth on the burn on my left forearm before anywhere else. Rian watched that from the wall. Luca sat in the chair by the window with his tie gone and did not offer to help.
Then Nicolas’s mouth went to my throat. Then to my nipples, the left one and then the right one and then back to the left nipple. Nicolas stayed on that nipple. My knees did a thing I had no vote in, and my pussy was wet before anything had touched it.
“You have a beautiful body and you’re going to let three men say so out loud,” Nicolas said.
My right hand had gone to the scar. It goes there without consulting me.
“Take that hand off it. You don’t cover anything in this room.”
“Your thighs,” Luca said from the chair, not moving, still dressed. “Your belly. This, exactly here—and I’m going to keep saying it until you hear it in my voice when I’m not in the room.”
“Your ass, which I’ve had opinions about since the first morning you stood in that kitchen, and your nipples, and your clit, and your cunt, and I’ll be saying all of it again tomorrow at a decent hour over coffee.”
He said cunt a second time because the first one made me flinch. He kept at it until my right hand came off the scar and stayed off.
“Both hands flat on the bed. Leave them where I can see them.”
Rian came off the wall and put me on the edge of the bed with one hand.
“You’re perfect and I’m not going to be nice about it,” Rian said. Then Rian was on his knees with his mouth on my cunt before I had finished sitting down.
I lost the thread with Rian’s mouth on my pussy and never got it back. I know I said things. I could not tell you one of them.
Two of Rian’s fingers went into my pussy and Rian’s tongue stayed on my clit. My thighs came in hard on his head. Rian laid a forearm across one of them and opened me out again and did not stop.
Nicolas took my jaw in his right hand and turned my face up off the ceiling.
“Look at me.”
“Look at your cunt. Look what my brother’s tongue is doing to your clit, and look at your hands, both of them, flat where I told you.”
“That’s it,” Luca said from the chair. “That’s your whole face gone—”
I came on Rian’s mouth with my clit still going under his tongue. Nicolas’s hand kept my jaw turned up, and Luca said what he saw.
“There’s nothing behind your eyes. Nothing at all. I’d pay money for that face.”
Then Luca was standing over me and I had Luca’s cock in my mouth. Luca’s hand closed in my hair and set the pace of his cock. Nicolas put his palm flat between my shoulder blades and left it there like a lid on a pot.
Rian went past Nicolas twice to get to me and turned his shoulder both times. The three of them never touched each other, and nobody said a word about it.
“Move your elbow, Luca.”
“Move your entire body, you enormous animal.”
Rian put me on my hands and got his cock into my pussy from behind. Both hands on my hips, fast and hard, with no apology anywhere in it. Rian’s mouth was at the back of my neck. Rian’s cock went all the way in on the first stroke, and Rian’s fingers came around to my nipple and stayed.
“Good girl,” Rian said into my hair. “Your nipples are going to be sore and I’m not sorry about it.”
“Say sorry anyway.”
“No,” Rian said, and did not slow down.
Luca went onto his back and pulled me down over him. I put Luca’s cock in my pussy and sat all the way down on it with my thighs shaking. Luca’s hands went to my belly and my thighs and stayed. Luca’s thumb came down on my clit and stayed there too.
“There she is.”
“Your cunt on my cock, your mouth, your thighs. I’m going to be unbearable about every part of this tomorrow, in company, at a reasonable volume.”
Luca talked the whole way through it, about my belly and about my pussy and about my clit under his thumb. I stopped following the sentences and took the sound of them instead.
Nicolas was last and Nicolas was slow. He put me on my back, his forearm across my belly and his other hand under my head. He watched my face the whole way in.
“Look at you. All the way. You’re not holding anything back tonight.”
The head of Nicolas’s cock was in my pussy and then the whole of Nicolas’s cock was.
Nicolas’s fingers found my clit. Rian’s hand was around my ankle.
Luca’s mouth was at my nipple, and Luca said my whole legal name into my skin like he had found it under something.
I came apart with three men’s hands on me.
Afterward Rian brought a towel and a glass of water, put both where I could reach, and called it nothing when I said thank you.
Luca stayed on the bed and kept talking, about my thighs, about a shrimp place in Hialeah, about my nipples, about my pussy, in no order at all until my breathing came down to a rate I recognized.
Nicolas put his mouth on the burn again on his way out of the bed and said nothing about it.
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The front came through around two. Rian heard the terrace door that has never sealed right play its one low note against the frame. None of us got up.
At four we were outside on the tile with bare feet and one plate between us.
“Sixty-eight degrees,” Luca said, “in September, and that’s worth somebody writing down.”
“Sixty-eight,” Rian said, and said it again into the plate. “It’ll be back over ninety by the weekend and then you’ll all stop talking about it, Luca.”
Nicolas said the number once, to the water. I said it too, because all four of us were going to and I wanted my turn.
The pastelitos were the cold ones from the afternoon, the pastry gone soft and the guava gone tacky. They are better that way and I will fight anybody about it. Eight hands went at that one plate. Nobody got up for a second one.
Nicolas took the seat with its back to the terrace door and left me the one that faces it.
“You always take that chair.”
“It’s the one I like.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I like,” Nicolas said, and ate.
“There’s four of us and one plate,” Rian said.
“There’s four of us and one plate because somebody ate off the other one and put it back in the cupboard,” Luca said.
“It was clean.”
“You licked it,” I said.
“I ran a finger around it. There’s a difference.”
“Rian. You licked a plate and put it back in my cupboard.”
“It was my plate.”
“It’s my cupboard,” I said, and did not take it back. Luca laughed at his brother.
“How long’s it been your cupboard?” Nicolas said.
“Since you started feeding us. You’ve all been eating in my kitchen like tourists and tipping like it too.”
“I own the building.”
“You own the building. I own the oven, and the man who argues with me about it eats standing up.”
Nicolas laughed. It got out of him before he had a say in it, and he looked at the water like the water had done it.
“I’m going to remember this one. That’s the whole announcement. Somebody note the time,” Luca said.
“Then eat something, Nicolas, before you say anything else that’s true,” Rian said, and pushed the plate an inch toward Luca with one knuckle.
Under the sugar and the wind there was a thin cold thought about what a night like this costs and who holds the bill. I put a pastelito on top of it and did not go looking.
Sheet lightning went on over the water with no sound, lighting the sea grape and the wet tile. Luca had guava on his thumb and was arguing about the cupboard. Rian had his boots off and his feet on the planter. Nicolas sat with his back to the door.
The wind came off the water cold enough to matter, and there was one plate and four of us on that terrace, and I licked guava off my thumb and let myself think the word home, and nobody took it off me.