CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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LUCA
On Wednesday, the thirty-fifth day, I rode up fourteen floors in the Aurelio Building with Mary beside me. People say things in that slow elevator they would never say in a corridor. She said my name before the doors had finished closing.
“Luca. This elevator smells like a dentist’s office.”
“It’s a law firm. That’s the same smell with a worse markup.”
She read the floor buttons top to bottom, her wet umbrella dripping off two fingers onto my shoe, her takeaway coffee balanced in the other hand. My hand went to the small of her back before I decided to put it there. I had cleared my evening at four and told myself it was for the courier.
“There’s no thirteen here,” she said, tapping the panel.
“There’s no thirteen in this building. Ours has been lying about it since it opened, and I’ve explained it to so many clients that I quit explaining it.”
“You didn’t quit,” she said.
“I did. It’s a relapse, and you brought it on.”
Fourteen opened on a dark reception desk with nobody behind it. The storm hit three walls of my office at once, and the floor smelled of warm toner and wet asphalt off the shaft.
The courier envelope carried a Marchetti clerk’s stamp in the corner. Gio Panetta’s stamp. He kept the Accord book and still did Marchetti’s clerical work. The envelope had come through him; that was not the same as knowing what it said.
“Sokolov’s filed his motion,” I said. “He’s moving that our alliance is a purchase and not an alliance, and that our seat’s forfeit for it. Panetta’s set the vote.”
“When?” She had her hand out for the pages before I could turn them.
“Day ninety. The clerk sets the date and he’s set that one, which happens to be the last day of your—”
“Say the number.”
“Fifty-five days left.”
I put the motion under the glass paperweight on my father’s desk, in the lamp, where I would keep seeing it. Paper you can’t see is paper you start lying to yourself about.
“Show me my brother’s file.” She said it flat, with no run-up.
I could have had the Coliseum marker file on that desk inside the hour. Hector Ruiz would have carried it up.
“I’ll ask Nicolas.”
“That’s the second time somebody in this family’s said that to me. Neither of you said no, either.”
I didn’t correct her. She was right, and correcting her would have cost me a sentence I could not afford. I watched her decide not to ask again, and I let her.
She toed her shoes off where she stood. She put both palms on the desk and read the motion upside down, faster than most lawyers read it the right way up.
“It says you bought me.”
“It says four families are going to be asked to agree we did.”
“And the contract doesn’t say that.” She turned her head to read the clerk’s stamp.
“The contract says what I put in it.”
“You wrote it standing up.” She didn’t look up. “It’s got the rhythm of a man who can’t sit down.”
“I was pacing. Expensively.”
“That’s what I said.”
Her mouth twitched. I lost that one and enjoyed it.
Her hands on my father’s desk. Nails cut to nothing, a ridge of callus across the right palm, the fingertips shiny where old sugar burned them. I stopped pretending to read anything.
“Do you actually like me, or is that in the paperwork too?”
“It’s the only thing I’ve done all year that isn’t.”
?
“Yelena packed me a bag on Saturday,” Mary said, still barefoot at my father’s desk. “Nobody’s mentioned it since.”
“It’s going to stay packed. Nicolas wanted you at Casa Ofelia behind a wall with four men standing on it. He wasn’t wrong to want it. It isn’t happening.”
“Why not?” She set the cup down on my blotter without looking at it.
“Rian told him no.”
She went very still. She had been drinking out of my cup since the lobby, my cortado, cinnamon gone gray on dead foam, and she had finished it cold.
“Rian said no to Nicolas.”
“Rian had never told his brother no. He did it Saturday, in a bedroom made up for a woman who’s never going to sleep in it. Neither of them will say the word for that. So I’m saying it in front of you instead, because somebody in that family ought to.”
I crossed the room and put her back against the north window, a black mirror after dark. The squall hit the glass behind her shoulders and did not get in.
I put my hands over her breasts through the dress. I found her nipples with my thumbs and worked them until she made a sound she had to stand there and hear herself make, and her hips came forward off the glass to put her pussy against my thigh.
“There it is. I’ve been budgeting my whole week around that noise and it was worth every hour of it.”
“You’re a lunatic.” Her nipples had gone hard enough under my thumbs to feel through two layers.
“I’ve been called worse in open court.”
“By who?” she said, with her eyes shut.
“By me. I was losing.”
“Then hire yourself. You’d win and you’d bill the client twice.”
I laughed. I want it noted that I did not choose to.
“Get the dress down.”
She got it off her shoulders and down to her waist. I stepped back and looked, which men have not done to her enough and never on purpose.
“Look at all of you. I’ve had this in my head every day since that office door and it wasn’t half this good.”
She flinched. I put the next one into the flinch.
“Your thighs. Your belly. All that soft weight across your hips, and your nipples going hard in my air conditioning while I stand here talking about your nipples. Gorgeous. There’s more of you than a man can hold, and I’m spending the whole evening being beaten by it.”
The second flinch was smaller. There wasn’t a third.
“You’re the most beautiful thing that’s ever been in this room, and I’ve got a Rothko on that wall.”
My cock was already hard and my hand was at my collar working the tie loose before I decided to use it.
“I’ll tie your hands, and then you get to find out what you sound like when you can’t cover anything up.”
“Luca—”
“I want your hands out of the way. I’m not doing that unless you say the words. Say them.”
I waited. Waiting is not a thing I have ever been good at.
“Say yes or say no. Either one, and I’ll live with it.”
Her thighs were shaking, her pussy wet through the dress, and she had not moved an inch.
“Tie them.” Her voice had no air left in it.
I got the dress off her and put her down on the cold leather, and it went warm under her back inside a minute. My tie went twice around her wrists over her head, silk on silk, and I checked her fingers.
Her right hand—the one that lands on her left forearm the second anybody looks at her, which she has never caught herself doing—went nowhere. The burn lay in the lamplight with nothing over it, because I had made sure she couldn’t reach it.
I took my mouth down her throat and over her breasts. I stayed on both nipples longer than she expected. One nipple and then the other nipple, the underside of each, the warm crease beneath them where she is softest, and then down to her pussy.
“God—you’re so wet I can hear it. Say thank you like you mean it.”
“Thank you—”
“Again. Slower. I want the whole sentence out of you.”
I put my tongue flat on her clit and two fingers curled up into her cunt. I kept my mouth on her pussy while she came apart above my hands. Her heels came off the leather. She said something with no word in it.
Somewhere in there she lost the thread, and I felt it go. I stayed on her clit through it, her pussy gripping my fingers, both arms useless over her head.
“One day I’m going to make you listen to what your cunt sounds like around my hand while my tongue’s on your clit. Tonight you only get to make the noise.”
“Is this what you do to opposing counsel?”
“Opposing counsel gets a letter,” I said.
“That’s not a no.”
She went for my belt with hands that were not available to her, wanting her mouth on my cock before she had her breath back.
“You can’t. That’s the entire point of the exercise.” I got my cock out and took her jaw in one hand.
“Please—”
“You want my cock in your mouth and you can’t do a thing about how you get it.”
I fed her my cock slowly, an inch and then more, and told her what she looked like.
“That’s it. You have no idea what your mouth looks like around my cock, and it’d ruin you if you did. Take a little more. There.”
Then I got her flat again, wrists tied over her head, and put my cock into her cunt in one long push, my thumb on her clit. I kept my eyes on her face and did not stop talking.
“There she is.”
“Luca—”
“Your cunt’s holding onto my cock like it’s got an opinion about it, and your clit’s had one since the elevator. Say my name again. You feel perfect, and I’m going to be unbearable about this for a week.”
I turned her over. Knees on the couch, one hand wound into the tie, my other palm spread across her ass. I pushed my cock back into her pussy, got my free hand around to her clit, and put my mouth against her shoulder.
“Mine. Say it back, or I’ll keep going till you do.”
“Luca—” she said, and it came out wrecked.
“Yours.” The word went into the leather.
She said it before she had decided to. I heard her decide afterward. Then I heard her not take it back.
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On the couch in my office I had the knot off Mary’s wrists before she asked. Two soft pink lines where the silk had been. I put my mouth on both of them, then on one nipple, and left her clit alone, which was more restraint than I have shown all year. The tie went on the floor and stayed there.
Her hands were loose and had nowhere to go, and she looked at them like they belonged to somebody else. I put her right hand flat over the burn on her left forearm, then lifted it off again and put it on my chest.
She was asleep before midnight with my jacket over her shoulders, one nipple still hard against my ribs, and her ear on my sternum. The air handling shut down floor by floor beneath us, one long sigh. The Rothko went to a black rectangle with its color gone.
The safe is behind the Rothko, eleven feet from the arm of that couch. I’ve opened it in the dark.
“Luca,” she said, asleep, into my shirt.
There was no version of tonight where I told her.
She wouldn’t have run. She never has. She walks at it. I want it on the record that I kept my mouth shut for a worse reason than fear. She would have started looking at me the way she looks at Nicolas when he answers a smaller question than the one she asked.
I wrote that paper the night before she walked into a room I was in. I had no reason then that I could say out loud at my family’s table, and I don’t have one now.
I told a room in this building once that I keep nothing from my brothers. Tonight I said nothing about that paper to the four people I would burn this building down for. On purpose. Awake. With her asleep on my chest and the rain shadow crawling across the motion under the paperweight.
She turned her face up under my chin, more asleep than not, and said it into my collarbone.
“You went quiet. You never go quiet.”
I lied to her in one breath, warmly, the way I do to judges. It cost me nothing, which is the part I’ll think about at four in the morning.
“There’s nothing in this building I haven’t already shown you. Go back to sleep.”