6. Cassandra #2
“Christ,” he hisses. “Your hand - Cass - fuck, tighter…”
“On the bed. Flat on your back. Hands on the headboard.”
His eyebrows lift. “Bossy tonight.”
“You left me alone in this house for months. You can take orders without complaining.”
Something wounded flickers across his face, then heat.
He obeys, stretching his arms up, knuckles white on the carved wood. I straddle his hips, bracing my palms on the hard plane of his chest, and sink down onto him inch by aching inch.
The stretch makes my breath hitch. He swears in Italian under his breath, hips twitching up despite the order to stay still, both of us shaking with the effort of not rushing.
“Feel that?” I whisper, fully seated, pulsing around him. “That’s what you walked away from every morning before dawn. This heat. This fucking home.”
“I know. Fuck, I know. Move, Cass - please, just move…”
“Ask nicer.”
“Please.” His eyes are wet. “Please ride me. Please use me. Please let me be your husband for five goddamn minutes.”
I roll my hips slow. Deliberate. The kind of pace that turns desperation into prayer. His head tips back against the pillow, throat exposed, and I lean down to bite the hinge of his jaw while I ride him. Silk sheets whisper under my knees.
Outside, Rome is a distant wash of scooters and late traffic. In here there is only the wet slide of him inside me and the broken sounds we keep feeding each other like confession.
“Harder,” he begs. “Use me. Take whatever you need.”
“What I need is my husband.” My voice cracks on the word. “Present. In this fucking bed. Not half a ghost who sends flowers and then disappears at five in the morning.”
“I’m here. I’m here - ah, God - right here. Feel how deep I am. Feel how hard you make me.”
I brace on his shoulders and fuck him properly then, rising and dropping until the headboard knocks the wall in a steady, shameless rhythm.
His hands leave the wood to roam - palms cupping my breasts, thumbs scraping my nipples into aching peaks, then one hand sliding down to rub my clit while I ride.
The dual pressure builds too fast. I fight it. I want this to last. I want the ache to mean something bigger than orgasm.
“You’re clenching so tight,” he pants. “You’re going to make me finish if you keep squeezing like that.”
“Don’t you dare come yet. I’m not done taking what I want.”
He laughs, wrecked. “Then take it faster before I lose my mind.”
He flips us without warning, pinning me under his weight, and drives into me deep enough that I cry out against his shoulder.
One of my legs hooks over his hip. The other he hooks over his own shoulder, opening me wider, and the new angle makes white light burst behind my eyelids.
Every thrust drags against that deep, swollen place that makes me see stars.
“Too much?” he asks, stilling, forehead damp against mine.
“Don’t you dare stop now. Fuck me like you mean the apology.”
He doesn’t stop. He fucks me like a man trying to write an apology into bone - long strokes that bottom out, then shorter, grinding ones that keep my clit pressed flush against him. Sweat gathers between our stomachs.
My nails rake his back hard enough to leave crescents. He curses into my neck, filthy Italian mixing with English, telling me how tight I am, how many nights he woke hard and alone in hotel rooms thinking about this exact heat, how he’s going to fill me until I can’t forget who I belong to.
“Say it,” I demand, breathless. “Say who I am when you’re buried inside me.”
“My wife. Cassandra. Mine.” His forehead knocks mine. “Always mine. Even when I was too much of a coward to act like it.”
“Then act like it right now. Claim me.”
He does. He drives harder, the slap of skin loud in the quiet room, and when his hand slips between us again I shatter a second time, clenching around him so hard he groans like he’s been hit.
He follows a few thrusts later, burying himself to the hilt, pulsing hot inside me with my name torn ragged from his throat.
We stay locked like that, shaking, breathing each other’s air.
Eventually he softens and slips free, and the empty ache makes me make a small, involuntary sound as his come starts to leak down my thigh. He gathers me against his chest, pulling the sheet over both of us, and presses kisses into my hair like punctuation marks he doesn’t know how to speak aloud.
“That was more than sex,” he whispers eventually.
“Don’t analyze it to death.” I tuck my face against his sternum, inhaling the salt-and-skin smell of him. “Just hold me and shut up for five minutes.”
He holds me. His heartbeat drums under my ear, familiar and terrifying. I slide one thigh over his and feel him half-hard again already, ridiculous and hopeful, and despite everything I smile against his chest.
“Again?” I murmur.
“Only if you want. No pressure. No performance. Just us.”
“I want.” I push up onto an elbow and look at him - messy hair, kiss-bruised mouth, eyes too bright. “Slow this time. Make it last. Make me forget every cold night I spent reaching for an empty pillow.”
He rolls me gently onto my side and spoons behind me, lifting my top thigh, sliding back into me from behind with a groan that vibrates through my spine.
This angle is deeper, lazier, almost cruel in how thoroughly it fills me.
One of his arms bands under my breasts. The other hand finds my clit again and strokes in lazy circles timed to his shallow thrusts.
I can feel every ridge of him, every pulse, every inch of the apology he still can’t say cleanly.
“Like this?” he asks against the nape of my neck.
“Exactly like this. Don’t rush. Stay inside me.”
“I won’t rush. I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
The lie sits between us for half a second - I feel it, the old instinct that tomorrow’s call sheet will win - but I shove it away and rock back onto him.
We fuck like that for a long time, unhurried and filthy, his mouth at my ear whispering every filthy endearment he can invent, my hand covering his on my clit, guiding the pressure until I’m shaking again.
“You’re fluttering around my cock,” he pants. “Fuck, Cass, you’re going to finish me if you keep…”
“Then finish. Flood me. I want to feel it dripping out of me when I walk downstairs tomorrow.”
The crude demand undoes him. He bites my shoulder and empties himself with a sound that is almost a sob, grinding deep while I chase my own third climax against his fingers.
When it hits, quieter this time, almost a sob of my own, we collapse into sticky, tangled honesty that feels dangerously like marriage.
I turn in his arms afterward and map his face with my fingertips - the freckle near his temple, the scar under his lip from a stunt years ago, the soft mouth that just ruined me twice. He catches my wrist and kisses my pulse point, then the center of my palm, then each knuckle like a ritual.
“I meant what I said downstairs,” he murmurs. “I love you. I never stopped. I just forgot how to prove it without a camera watching.”
“Then keep proving it when no one is watching.” I tuck myself under his chin. “Every day. Not just when the guilt gets loud enough to drown out the call sheet.”
“I will. I swear on every stupid rose downstairs.”
Outside the window a scooter whines past. I let myself believe the thread is back - knotted, frayed, but holding - while his fingers draw idle circles on my spine and the last of the wine-dark night presses warm against the glass.
Somewhere between the third climax and sleep I hear him whisper something in Italian against my hair. Too soft to parse, too sincere to interrupt and I answer by tightening my arm around his waist, anchoring him to the mattress as if flesh alone could keep a promise.
Later, we lie tangled together in the dark, my head on his chest, his hand tracing patterns on my back. The house is quiet. The world outside feels very far away.
“Stay,” I murmur, half-asleep already.
“What?”
“Tomorrow. Stay with me. Don’t leave before I wake up.”
His hand stills for a moment. Then he presses a kiss to the top of my head.
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try. Just do it.”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. I’ll stay.”
I believe him.
I let myself believe him, let myself sink into the warmth of his body and the steady rhythm of his breathing, let myself feel married again for the first time in what feels like forever. This is what we used to have. This is what I’ve been missing.
Maybe we can find our way back. Maybe tonight is the beginning of something.
I fall asleep wrapped around him, safer than I’ve felt in months.
***
I wake to cold sheets.
For a moment I don’t understand.
The pillow beside me still has the indent of his head. The blankets are pushed back on his side, tangled from where he slipped out of them. The light coming through the curtains is gray and thin - early, very early, the sun not even properly up yet.
He’s gone.
I sit up slowly, pressing a hand to my chest where something is cracking. The room is empty. His clothes and shoes are gone from the floor.
On the nightstand, my phone shows a text sent at 5:47 a.m.: Early call. Didn’t want to wake you. Last night meant everything. I love you.
Last night meant everything.
But not enough to keep his promise.
I stare at the message until the screen goes dark, then lie back down in the empty bed and pull the covers over my head.
The sheets still smell like him. The pillow still carries the warmth of his body.
I reach for the place where he should be, and find nothing but cold fabric and silence.
The thread snaps in my hand.