CHAPTER THIRTY
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MARY
On Friday night the Halloween costumes came up Ocean Drive fifty-one floors down, a wet smear of color moving north, and I stood at the street-facing glass watching them and kept my back to the bedroom door when it opened.
“Mary. Come away from the glass.”
Nicolas had crossed the room without a sound and taken the black wire chair by the terrace door, the one with the hall at his back. Lightning went off over the water. Rain hit the east glass in handfuls, like gravel thrown at a window.
My palms had gone cold against the glass before I understood that I was angry.
“You always take that chair. Every room, every time, since the kitchen on Calle Ocho.”
“I know.”
Two words, and he gave them to my reflection instead of to me.
“That’s the answer? Two words?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve never sat with your back to a door in your life, except in a room I’m standing in. You could tell me why. It’s one sentence.”
“I could tell you,” Nicolas said.
“But you’re not going to.”
“No.”
He sat with his burned right hand open on his knee where the storm could get at it.
The terrace door did not seal. The wind pushed the ocean through the gap, salt and wet concrete, and under it there was soap. Luca was in the doorway before he said a word.
“We’re not here to be forgiven. We’re here because you’ve been quiet two days and I can’t stand in a house that quiet.”
“You could learn,” I said.
“I could not. I’ve got two brothers who think silence is a strategy, and I’ve been losing to it since I was a kid.” Luca came and sat on the end of the bed with his sleeves shoved up his forearms. “Give me a bad word. Any bad word. I’ll take it home and be grateful for it.”
“That’s not a bad word, that’s a closing argument.”
“It’s a short one, by my standards.”
I did not sit down. “So all three of you are coming to see me. Was that a meeting? Who’s taking minutes?”
“There was no meeting. There was Nicolas going down the hall, and me deciding I wasn’t going to be the one man in this family pretending he couldn’t hear it.”
“You’re a lawyer, Luca. You could’ve sent me something in writing.”
“I’d rather be in the room for it.” Luca turned his hands over on his knees. “You’ve said eleven words to me, Mary, since the morning I asked you what was wrong. I counted them. Four of them were about the rain.”
Rian came in last. He got as far as the door frame, put his shoulder on it, and said nothing. My stomach dropped before I worked out why.
“Rian. Say something. You usually tell me when you’re angry.”
“I’m thinking about it,” Rian said.
“That’s new for you.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t suit me.” He looked at the floor between his boots. “I’m out at first light. There’s a man I have to find.”
“And when you find him?”
“That’s tomorrow night’s question.”
The rain came at the glass and nobody said anything into it.
“That’s not an answer, that’s a delay.”
“It’s the best I’ve got tonight. I’d rather be in the door than in the room.”
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I crossed the bedroom to Nicolas in his chair by the terrace door and had my hands on his shirt before I decided anything. My knuckles shook against his chest. I opened him one button at a time from the collar down.
“Mary.”
“Don’t,” I said.
Nicolas let me finish. Then he stood and undressed me himself at the foot of the bed, slowly, and named my belly and my thighs and my nipples and my pussy out loud the way another man would read orders off a card.
“You’re the best-made thing in this house and you’ll hear it standing up.”
“Mine,” Nicolas said.
“Ours.” Luca had a hand around the back of my calf. “And she’s known it longer than we have.”
“Mine too.” Rian had come off the door frame. “I just say it least.”
Luca got his mouth on my left nipple and then the right nipple and did not stop talking through either of them.
“Your hips. Beautiful—and don’t turn your head away from me while I’m telling you.”
“Luca—”
“Gorgeous. Now put that word in your own mouth, and I’ll keep talking until you believe the woman saying it.” Luca’s thumb dragged over the wet he had left on my nipple. “Your nipples go hard before the rest of you decides anything.”
Nicolas’s hand came between my thighs. He put two fingers in my pussy and worked my clit with his thumb and watched my face the whole time.
“You’re so wet you’re on my wrist,” Nicolas said.
Nicolas took his fingers out of my pussy and put them in his own mouth, then put them back, and his thumb never left my clit.
Rian’s cock was hard against my ass through his jeans. One of Rian’s hands came over my throat with no pressure in it, only weight and size, and everything in me went loose against him, pussy first, before I had an opinion about it.
“Perfect. That’s the word. Don’t argue with me tonight.”
Nicolas lifted his hand off my hip as Rian’s forearm came across it, and neither man touched the other.
“You’ll stay exactly where you are, Mary, and you’ll let me have this, because it’s the only thing tonight I know how to do for you,” Nicolas said, and then he put me down on the bed with his hand still on my pussy.
Nicolas got in behind me and pushed his cock into my cunt in one long shove and held it there.
Luca knelt up by my head. I took Luca’s cock in my mouth because I wanted it and because it stopped me thinking, and Rian got two fingers on my clit from underneath and kept them there. The three of them never touched each other.
“Slow,” Luca said. “There’s no hurry in this room and I want to remember all of it.”
And then I was not anywhere. My thighs shook around Nicolas, my nipples dragged on the sheet every time Nicolas’s cock moved in my pussy, my mouth was full of Luca’s cock, Rian’s fingers stayed on my clit, and somebody’s hand was in my hair and I did not know whose.
Then the rain changed pitch on the glass and I came back into my own head and could not get out of it again.
Nothing about it stopped being good, and that was the ugly part.
Nicolas’s cock was still in my cunt and my body had no complaint to make about it.
Luca’s cock was still hard against my tongue.
Rian’s cock was against my hip through the denim and his fingers had not come off my clit.
And every hand on me had turned into a hand on me.
I let Luca’s cock out of my mouth. Luca said my name twice and put a question mark on the second one, and I had no answer.
“Look at me,” Nicolas said.
I looked at him. It had worked four times in this house. It had gone through me like a hot wire and put me back inside my own skin, and it did not work now. Nicolas’s face was six inches from mine. I watched it register, and the failure was mine, not his.
Rian took his fingers off my clit and came off the bed first, before I said a word, because Rian had seen my face before anybody else got to it.
“Stop. Everybody stop.”
Everything stopped inside the one sentence. Luca got as far as “Right. All right. All right, we’ve—all right,” and then ran out of language. Nicolas did not move at all, and that was his version of the same thing.
Nobody touched anybody but me. That was the rule, and it had never needed saying.
We stayed like that a long time. Nicolas slid out of my pussy and sat back on his heels with his hands on his own knees.
Luca pulled the sheet up over me without being asked and took his hand back.
Rian stood at the east glass with his back to all of us.
Luca’s mouth had been on my nipple two minutes before and I was still wet from Nicolas, and now there was a foot of cold sheet between us.
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I sat up against the headboard in Nicolas’s bedroom with the sheet held under my arms, because from there I could see all three of them at once.
“You bought me, and then you made me want it. I don’t know anymore which of those I’m supposed to be angrier about.”
Nobody answered it. Rian did not turn around from the glass. Nicolas took it without moving his face.
“Mary—”
“Not that sentence, Luca.”
“I wasn’t going to finish it,” Luca said. “I was going to start something else and hope you didn’t see the seam.”
The clock on Nicolas’s side of the bed said 11:47. I dressed in front of the three of them, jeans and a T-shirt with the collar cut out over nipples still up and a clit nobody had told, and my hands were steady.
“Where will you go?” Nicolas said.
“I’m not telling you. That’s the first thing in this house that’s only mine.”
“It’s midnight and it’s raining,” Nicolas said.
“I know what I’ve got in my pockets. I counted it in the hall.”
Rian turned around from the glass. “Mary—”
“Don’t send anybody after me, Nicolas. Not one of you, not tonight, not tomorrow. If I see a car on my street I’ll know whose it is.”
“Nobody’s going after you, Mary,” Nicolas said, and he did not offer me money, which was the most useful thing he did all night.
The great room was dark and the limestone cold through my sneakers.
Corinne’s recipe book sat on the kitchen shelf where I had put it after bringing it back from Warren’s, stained and swollen and shut with a rubber band.
I put it under my arm. No bag, no closet, no charger, and none of the presents they had put in my room.
Rian was in the elevator lobby at the key panel with his card in it and the car held. The chime went off every time the doors tried to close and he would not let them, one flat note in an empty lobby.
“You’ve been holding the car.”
“Yeah.”
I moved the recipe book higher under my arm, because my hands wanted a job.
“Why’d you do that?”
“So you wouldn’t stand out here waiting on it with your arms full.”
“You’re going out at first light and you’re standing here at midnight holding a door open for me.”
“Both of those are the job tonight.” Rian’s hand stayed flat on the panel. “One of them’s the part I’m good at.”
“That’s the kindest thing anybody’s said to me in a week and I want to throw this book at your head.”
“I’d let you.”
He laughed at the wrong moment and hated that he laughed, and I heard him put it away.
“There’s a thing I did that nobody sent me to do,” Rian said.
“What thing?”
“Grant Halloway.”
My hand did not go near my left forearm. I noticed that after.
“Monday. A trailer lot off Bird Road, in front of his counter man, because he doesn’t get to hear it in private.” He said it to the doors. “He had his back to me. I turned him around by the shoulder. That’s the only thing I put my hands on him for.”
“And said what?”
“The reason first. You said a word about her body to a mirror and never turned around to say it to her face. Then I gave him two. Say it to me now, out loud, to my face. Or be out of this county inside two weeks.”
“Which did he take?”
“Neither yet. He’s still selling trailers.” The chime went off and he held the door through it. “I’d picked the other one before I walked onto that lot. I don’t get it back.”
Something came off my key ring and stayed off.
“You didn’t tell me you were going.”
“You’d have told me not to.”
“You could come down with me.”
“No.” Rian said it fast, and saying it fast cost him, and I watched the price cross his face and get shut in a drawer. There was an umbrella hooked over his wrist, black, off the stand by the vestibule. He held it out at the end of his arm and came no closer.
“Rian—”
“Take the umbrella. That’s the whole of what I’m allowed to do for you tonight.”