CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
?
NICOLAS
On Friday evening Bogdan had the car door open in the garage, two levels below the street. His cuff slid back: gold and steel, stones in the bezel, loose on a wrist too small for it. “Cool tonight. First decent evening all week,” he said. “Same time tomorrow, or should I—”
“Same time.” I priced the watch against his wages and disliked the answer. Upstairs, Yelena stood in the fifty-first-floor hall with folded laundry on her hip. “Nicolas. There’s coffee, and there’s a woman who won’t eat sitting down.”
“Then don’t tell her to sit down.”
I passed Yelena and went down the three steps toward the terrace. My head was in a drawer I had opened two weeks earlier.
The east doors stood open for the first time that week. Sixty-eight degrees came off the water and lay cold on the back of my right hand. Salt, hot cotton, and under both the burnt sugar that lives in this kitchen now and did not before her.
Rian was at the rail. The lighter went twice before it took.
“The doors are open,” Rian said.
“Yelena opened them. First cool night since the storm.”
Rian looked at the plate and spoon on the stone table. “She stood out here twenty minutes and didn’t touch that. Then she carried it in and ate it standing at the island with her coat on.”
“She ate. She did it standing up. That’s the same meal in a worse chair.”
“That’s not eating, that’s—”
“It’s eating.” Rian’s knuckles have gone pink and closed over. At the September party he had split them to the bone.
He let the smoke go out over the water. “She asked me where you were. I told her I didn’t know, which was true, and she said that was the most useful thing anybody had told her all day.”
“She’s rude to you.”
“Yeah, and I’ve stopped minding it, which is its own problem, and I’d rather not talk about that either.”
The causeway made the only sound in Miami. I waited, and I did not help him.
“You’ve been standing there since you got out of that elevator like somebody waiting for permission to talk in his own house,” Rian said. “You going to say it, or are we standing out here all night?”
“You told me no. Thirty-four years, and you told me no.”
“Yeah.”
“Do it again if you have to.”
Rian did not answer. We stood there while the cigarette went down to nothing.
A pakhan is a man in whose house nothing gets decided without him. My brother had made a decision I would not have permitted a month ago. He had made it to my face. Tonight I told him to keep doing it when I was wrong.
I have gone through the names of the men who would have to be dead before staying was easier for Mary. I have also decided that if she walked to the elevator tonight I would not put my hand out. Both live in the same man and I have stopped making them argue.
?
Mary was at the island, back to the glass and the door in her sight, the black stone warm from the sun. My hand came out of my pocket before I decided anything.
“Yelena made that coffee an hour ago,” Mary said. “It’s cold, I drank most of it, and I’m going to drink the rest.”
I took the cup out of Mary’s hand and finished it. It was terrible.
“You came in through the garage and went past me to your brother,” she said. “I counted the seconds. I’m not complaining, I’m telling you I noticed. And that was my coffee, and you didn’t ask.”
“What happened downstairs?”
“Nothing that changes your day.”
“That’s a smaller answer than the question I asked.” She set the fork down, which she does not do. “You take what I said and hand me back something the size of a coin, and then you’re standing there looking like a man who answered it.”
“It’s a smaller answer. I don’t have a bigger one I’m willing to say tonight.”
“You could lie to me. People manage it every day. There’s a whole shelf of books about how to do it well.”
“I’ve read one.”
A laugh came out of me I had not authorized, and she grinned at her plate. I had already worked out how the night ended, which was with my cock in her.
“Upstairs. Now.”
“I’m eating.”
“Bring it.”
She carried the plate down the east hall to the dresser, one hand steadying the plate the whole way, which I have never wanted to correct.
I put the lamp on and left the ceiling dark. The city came up underlit through the glass.
“Stand still. I’m going to look at you until you stop holding your breath.”
“You’ll be waiting a while.”
“Then I’ll wait, and you’ll stand there while I do.”
I took her clothes off one at a time and said facts to her while I did. The sweater. The jeans, over the hips, slowly. Cool air came down the hall and her nipples went hard and her pussy went wet before I had put a hand on her.
“You’re beautiful,” I said. “That isn’t a compliment and you don’t get to argue with it. Look at you. You take up more room than the room expects and I want the whole of it.”
“Nicolas—”
“Every inch of you. I’ve thought about all of it and I’m not going to be delicate about which. Arms down.”
Her breath went out somewhere in there and did not come back the same. I turned her left arm over and put my mouth on the scar first, without looking, the way I do every time.
Then her throat. Then her breasts, heavy and warm and past the edges of both my hands.
I worked one nipple and then the other nipple until she could not hold still.
Her nipples stayed hard against my tongue.
She is soft under my palm everywhere I put it, and I have wanted every ounce of her since her kitchen in September.
On her back on the bed, then. My mouth between her thighs, my tongue on her clit, two fingers in her cunt, my other hand across her hip so she stayed.
Her nipples were hard past the rise of her belly.
Her thighs came up around my head. Her pussy tightened on my fingers, and her face caught up a half-second later.
“You’re so wet you’re shaking. Say whose you are.”
“Yours.”
“Again. Louder than that.” My hand closed on her hip and I went back to her clit.
“Yours. God—yours—”
She came against my mouth, my chin wet from her pussy, and after that she could not find the sentence again, and I preferred her that way. Her clit was going under my tongue long after she stopped.
I turned her over. My palm between her shoulder blades, my other hand spread over her ass, and I put my cock into her pussy an inch at a time, slow enough to watch her take it. That hand went under her onto her clit. Her nipples dragged on the sheet when she pushed back.
“Take it. All of my cock. You’ve got room for me and you know you do.”
Her cunt closed on my cock, her clit still under my fingers, and she said Nicolas into the bedding and swore. I gave her every inch of my cock and then took it away, because I wanted her face for the rest of it.
“Look at me.”
“Your eyes stay open until I’m done with this part. You can close them after.”
I turned her onto her back and put my cock into her cunt again, my thumb working her clit. She kept her eyes open. It cost her, and I watched what it cost. She came the second time with her gray eyes on mine, her cunt shaking around my cock, her clit swollen, her pussy so wet it was on my thighs.
My cock stayed in her pussy, and I put my hand on her jaw and held it.
“Whatever this was on the fourth of September, it isn’t that now. You’re mine, and I’m not giving you back at the end of it.”
Her pulse jumped under my thumb and her pussy tightened once. Something crossed her face that was not pleasure, and I watched it, and I did not cut it down to a size she could carry.
“That’s supposed to be the nice part,” she said.
“It isn’t a nice part. It’s a true one, and I’d rather you had the true one.”
“You’re not going to let me get quiet about this, are you.”
“No. You can be quiet tomorrow, all day, and I won’t say a word about it.”
Afterward she slept on my chest, both of us bare, her weight coming down through me, my cock still wet from her pussy and her nipples soft against my ribs. My thumb went back and forth over the scar on her forearm. She surfaced near midnight.
“Do you ever sleep?”
“No.”
“You slept in the chair Sunday,” she said. “I watched you.”
“That wasn’t sleep. I was waiting for the phone.”
“With your mouth open.”
She was asleep before I could answer, and I lay there answering it anyway.
?
The study takes one lamp, and Yelena had left it burning for me. The second drawer sticks at three inches and I have never had it fixed. There was a cup on the blotter from before dinner and I drank it cold, which made twice.
On the thirtieth day Bogdan brought the original alliance folder from Luca’s office with the company audit papers.
I opened it before sending it back. Luca had trusted the wrong silence twice: mine at the signing, and mine after I finally read it.
Burning it would have taken four seconds.
I had a lighter then and I have one now. The fire was never the difficult part.
Here is why I didn’t.
Burn it, and everything she will ever have comes out of my hand and back into it the day I stop breathing or the day she stops wanting me, and I did not get to prevent either one. I wanted one thing in her life that did not run through me.
I am not a good man for wanting that. I found a way to hand it to her without saying out loud what I was doing. That is not honesty, and I did it anyway.
On the thirtieth day I read a thing I should have burned, and instead I started handing her the house one room at a time.
Then I picked up the pen.
The work order book lives in that drawer: white over yellow over pink, a carbon between each sheet, a ruled line for the name. Hector Ruiz runs the cage at the Coliseum. He answered at midnight and said nothing about the hour.
“Second floor. The office nobody uses,” I said. “New glass in the door, and a name on the glass.”
“Whose name’s going on it?”
“Warren, not Varela. Spell it the way she spells it.”
The pause held a question he decided not to ask.
“Cut vinyl, then. I’ll put a man on it in the morning and have it done in an afternoon.”
“Do it in an afternoon. Two carbons, and I want the pink one back in my hand.”
“Understood.” Paper moved on his end. “You want the painters in tonight, or should I hold them until—”
“Tonight.”
Sokolov’s motion calls my alliance a purchase. Her name on that glass is one more line in his argument, and I handed it to him. I know within a few thousand what that door costs this family. I signed it at an hour when nobody could stand in front of me with a reason.
The second envelope took longer. Sealed, nothing on it but a name and a street, it goes to the notary on Calle Ocho in the morning. I did not write down why, there or anywhere a man could hold it up to me later.
Two rooms away she was asleep, her plate still on the dresser, her left arm turned over and palm up where I left it.
The work order went into the out-tray at midnight with her name on the glass and not mine, and I did not tell her, because a man who explains what he is doing can be asked to stop.