11. Chapter Eleven Carmelo #2
I kiss her. Slow this time. Her mouth opens under mine, and her hands go to my belt, and she unfastens it with fingers that are shaking but committed and she pushes my jeans down my hips.
Her hand finds me through my boxers and her grip tightens and she makes a sound against my mouth that I feel in my balls.
I work my way down her body. Mouth on her ribs.
Her stomach. The inside of her hip bone.
She's breathing in short, shallow bursts and her hands are in the sheets, and her tapping has moved to the headboard, finger against the wood, fast, and when my mouth reaches between her legs she stops tapping entirely.
She stops everything.
Her whole body goes quiet the way it went quiet when I put my hand on her jaw at the door.
Total stillness. I run my tongue along her, slow, and the sound she makes is something I've never heard from another person.
Not a moan. Not a gasp. It's a sound from somewhere deep and involuntary, the sound of a body receiving pleasure it didn't know it was allowed to have.
I stay there. Patient. Thorough. She comes apart under me in pieces.
Her hands find my head. Her hips move against my mouth.
She says my name, once, twice, and the third time it breaks in the middle and her body bows off the mattress.
Her thighs clamp around my ears and she comes with a cry that fills the apartment.
All I can think is how I want to do that again, but next time with her sitting on my face, watching her writhe and gasp above me.
I move back up her body. She's boneless, breathing hard, her eyes half-closed.
I push inside her slowly. She's tight and wet and hot and the feeling of her body around mine makes my vision narrow to a point.
Her hands grip my biceps. Her nails dig in.
She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me deeper and my groan is raw and hoarse and comes from somewhere I didn't know I had.
I move. Slow. She meets me. Her body rolls against mine, finding the rhythm, matching it.
The bed creaks under us. The apartment is dark and the streetlight puts stripes across the sheets.
Her face is below mine and her eyes are open and she's watching me while I fuck her and nobody has ever watched me during sex.
Nobody has ever wanted to see what's on my face when the walls come down.
For the first time in my life, I let someone see what's behind the dead gray eyes while my body is inside theirs, and what's behind is everything I've never said and never shown and never let out. I hold her gaze. I don't hide.
Her hand comes up and touches my face. Her palm on my jaw. Her thumb below my eye. And she says, "There you are."
I nearly lose it. My hips stutter. My arms shake.
She pulls me down and kisses me and I bury my face in her neck.
Her pussy spasms and I move faster, harder, and she matches me, her hips rising to meet every thrust, and the pressure builds and builds, and I can feel her tightening around me, getting close again.
Then she screams.
But it’s a different scream…
Terror.
Her eyes go wide and blank and she's not in the room anymore.
Her body locks rigid under mine, every muscle contracting at once, her hands going from my arms to my chest pushing, shoving, her palms flat against me trying to get me off her.
The sound coming out of her mouth isn't my name.
It isn't English. It's a string of syllables in a language she doesn't speak, high and fractured, the sound of a child, and her eyes are open but she's not seeing me. She's seeing something else.
Someone else. Somewhere else.
Italian. She's screaming in Italian.
I pull out, immediately. I roll off her and put two feet of space between our bodies.
She curls into a ball on the far side of the bed, her knees to her chest, her arms over her head.
She's shaking so violently the mattress vibrates.
The tapping is back. Her finger against her own forearm, so fast the sound is a continuous buzz against her skin.
Grabbing a blanket, I pull it over her, tucking her in before grabbing my boxers and sliding them on.
I know what this is. Danila told me. The emotional content hits before the narrative context.
She's feeling what was done to her before she remembers what was done to her.
Something about the sex triggered a suppressed response.
The vulnerability, the position, a man's body above hers, a physical sensation that her brain filed under a category it can't access yet.
I did this. I killed the Marinos. I cut the pills. I put myself in her bed.
And now she's curled in a ball screaming in a language she doesn't speak while her body remembers being hurt by people she can't see.
I don't touch her. I don't speak. I sit on the edge of the bed, two feet away, and I wait. The screaming stops after about thirty seconds. The shaking continues. The tapping continues. Her breathing is ragged, wet, the breathing of someone who's been crying without knowing they started.
"Grace.”
No response. The shaking continues.
"Grace. You're in your apartment. You're in your bed. It's Tuesday. The restaurant is closed. Javi went home early. You're safe."
Her breathing hitches. One of her hands releases its grip on her forearm. Her tapping slows. One beat. Pause. Two beats. Pause. There’s a ring of red where she gripped.
"I'm here," I say. "You're safe. Nobody is going to hurt you."
She uncurls. One limb at a time. Her face comes out from behind her arms, and her eyes find me in the dark. They're wet and red and terrified and confused. She looks at me and I don't know what she sees but she reaches for me.
Her hand finds my arm. Her fingers grip my bicep.
She pulls, not hard, just pressure. Come here.
Come closer. I move to her and lie down behind her and wrap my arms around her and her body is small and shaking against my chest and her finger taps my forearm in the slow rhythm that means the worst has passed.
"What happened?" she whispers.
"You had a flashback."
"A flashback to what? I don't have anything to flash back to. I don't remember anything."
I hold her tighter. My face is in her hair. She smells like shampoo and sex and salt from the tears she doesn't know she cried.
"Your body remembers things your mind doesn't," I say. And it's the truest thing I've told her, and the most incomplete, and the guilt of what I'm not saying sits in my chest next to her heartbeat.
"I was speaking another language," she says. "I heard myself. What language was that?"
I don't answer. If I answer, I blow everything open tonight, in this bed, with her naked and shaking and not ready. If I don't answer, I'm lying by omission to a woman I just realized I’m in love with.
"I don't know," I say.
The lie sits between us in the dark. Her tapping slows. Her breathing evens. Her body stops shaking. She presses back against me, her spine against my chest, and my arms tighten around her, and I just hold her.
She falls asleep against me. Her finger rubs my forearm in small circles in her sleep. Slow. Spaced. The rhythm of a body finding its way back to something it can trust.
I lie in her bed and hold her and stare at the ceiling, thinking about the lie I just told and the truth I'm going to have to give her and the fact that when I do, she's going to look at me with those gray-blue eyes and see the man who knew everything and said nothing and fucked her anyway.
The pill bottle on the nightstand is empty. She took the last one this morning.
Tomorrow, the withdrawal starts for real.