Chapter 5 Emilio
Chapter Five: Emilio
I call Claudio at eleven because the twin frequency has been screaming all day and if I don't talk to someone I'm going to put my fist through the drywall again and Leone already made me patch the last hole myself.
He picks up on the second ring. "What."
"I need advice."
"No, I’m with Char, go away."
"You don't even know what about."
"I don't need to. The last time you needed advice at eleven p.m., I spent three hours explaining why you couldn't challenge a Castillo underboss to a fistfight at a funeral."
"That was a reasonable idea and the circumstances were exceptional."
"The circumstances were that you were drunk and offended by his tie."
"It was a clip-on, Claudio, at a funeral for the police chief who had covered for both our families more times than I can count. The man had no respect."
A pause and then I hear Charlotte's voice in the background, muffled, asking who's on the phone.
Claudio says something to her I can't catch and then a door closes and the background noise changes.
He's moved to another room. Giving us privacy.
The fact that he moved instead of telling me to call back means he already knows what this is about.
"The bartender," he says.
"Savannah."
"You've corrected Leone on her name. You've corrected me. You'll probably correct Aurelio next if you can get past the nurses."
"She has a name. People should use it."
Claudio is quiet for three seconds. When he speaks again his voice has shifted from irritated brother to concern.
"What's happening, Emilio?"
I sit on my bed with the phone against my ear and stare at the ceiling and try to put words on the thing that's been building in my chest for five days.
The gym this morning. Her fists on the pads, sweat running down her neck, the way she looked at me when I asked what my smile meant and said haven't figured it out yet with the honesty of a woman who could have lied and didn't. The shoulder brush on her way out.
Her body against my arm for half a second and then gone, and the ghost of that contact burning in my skin six hours later.
And now I'm lying here at eleven p.m. with a hard-on that won't quit and a brain that won't shut up and a woman three doors down who probably sleeps like a Goddamn baby.
"She's in my head," I say. "Not the way women usually get in my head.
Not just the sex thing, though that's there and it's bad, Claudio, it's really fucking bad.
But the thing that's keeping me up isn't how she looks.
It's how she holds that bottle cap, and how observant she is.
Fuck me, and how she bit her nails down to nothing in that apartment and hasn't stopped even though she's safe now.
She doesn't believe she's safe. She doesn't believe any of this.
And I want her to. I want her to trust it.
Not for the intel, not for Leone. For her. "
The silence on the other end goes long enough that I check the screen.
"Claudio?"
"I'm here."
"Say something."
"Charlotte didn't trust me for weeks. She counted ceiling tiles and checked exits and slept with one eye open in rooms I'd personally secured.
Trust with people who've been through what they've been through isn't something you earn by being kind.
It's something they decide to give you when they're ready, and nothing you do speeds that up. "
"That's not advice, that's a lecture."
"It's the same thing, you just prefer one word over the other." Another pause. "And Emilio, don't fuck her until you're sure it's a choice she's making with clear eyes and not a response to the situation she's in."
"I'm not going to..."
"You are. Eventually. I can hear it and I could feel it through the wall this morning when you came back from the gym vibrating at a frequency I haven't felt from you since we were teenagers.
Charlotte noticed too. She looked at me over breakfast and said your brother is in trouble and I said I know. "
"Charlotte said that?"
"Yes, and Charlotte is right."
"She scares the shit out of me."
"She scares the shit out of everyone with her mind-reading voodoo shit that’s seemed to blossom to life now that she’s happily settled in and knows everyone.
" His voice changes again. The careful edges pull back further, and underneath is the brother.
. The kid who grew up beside me and knows me the way no one else does. "Brother just... listen."
"I'm listening."
"If she's the one, you'll know. Not because of how you feel, but because of how she changes the room when she walks in.
Charlotte rearranged my whole head. Alexandra did the same to Leone.
It's not about the woman being special in the abstract.
It's about how they remove barriers you’ve built and allow your brain to just chill. "
"When did you become a poet?"
"When Charlotte told me my emotional vocabulary was on par with a toddler and I should do better."
I laugh. The sound is too loud for eleven p.m. in a concrete building. A guard grunts and shuffles past my door, probably startled.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me. Go to sleep."
"I can't sleep. That's the whole problem."
"Then go hit the bag, or rub and tug, or run the corridors, do whatever you need to burn through it. But stop lying there thinking about her because the twin frequency is keeping me awake and Charlotte is going to blame me and Charlotte blaming me is worse than anything you're dealing with."
"Ugh, you’re the worst."
"Go to bed, idiot, and brush your teeth. I can feel that you haven't."
I hang up. He's right about the teeth. He's right about most things, and the injustice of having a twin brother who is smarter and more mature than me despite being the one everyone calls the cold one is a burden I've carried for twenty-eight years.
I brush my teeth, but I don't go to the gym. I lie in bed, pull my cock out and think about her anyway because Claudio's advice was good and I have never once in my life followed good advice.
The next morning I'm in the gym at six waiting for her.
She shows up at six-fifteen in black pants and a tight sports bra. The bra is dark gray, and covers exactly enough to be functional while leaving her shoulders, her stomach, and the curve of her waist completely exposed.
I stare and I don't pretend not to. She catches me staring and doesn't look away.
"Eyes up, DiAngelo."
"They are up. You're just tall and my eyes got tired."
"That doesn't even make sense."
"Doesn't need to. I'm not here for sense. I'm here to hold pads." I toss her the wraps. "Let's go."
She wraps her hands and we start the same way we did yesterday, jab cross combinations, her fists cracking against the pads while I brace and absorb.
She's better today, little more loose and less tense.
Her shoulders aren't up around her ears, and her feet move between strikes instead of staying planted.
The three days of tension haven't fully unwound, but the first session yesterday broke the seal, and today she's hitting with rhythm instead of desperation.
She's also hitting harder.
The cross connects and my arm jolts back and I have to reset my feet.
She grins. Full, wide, real, the first one I've seen that she didn't try to hide, and my brain goes sideways because Savannah Cole smiling with her fists up and sweat on her collarbones is a thing that should come with a skull and crossbones label.
"Harder?" I ask.
"Always harder."
"Noted."
I push back on the pads, give her resistance, make her work for the impact.
She likes it. I can tell because her breathing changes and her eyes narrow and she starts putting her whole body into the strikes instead of just her arms. Hip rotation, weight transfer, the mechanics Gigi drilled into her years ago coming back online in real time.
She throws a right hook that I catch on the pad and redirect, spinning her off balance. She stumbles sideways and I grab her waist to keep her upright and suddenly we're chest to chest and her hands are on my shoulders and her face is three inches from mine and neither of us is breathing.
Her skin is hot under my hands. The sports bra is damp with sweat, and I can feel her ribs expanding against my palms. Her eyes are wide and her lips are parted and somehow, her sweat smells fucking incredible.
"You caught me," she says. Her voice is lower than normal.
"You fell."
"I didn't fall. You spun me."
"No. You fell.
She doesn't step back. I don't let go. My hands are on her waist, and her hands are on my shoulders and the distance between our mouths is shrinking because one of us is leaning in and I'm not sure which one and I don't care.
"Emilio." It’s a little rasp with an inflection at the end of it.
I close the distance and press my mouth against hers.
Not gentle, not tentative, nothing about this is tentative.
She tastes like coffee and salt and the sound she makes against my lips, a short, bitten-off noise in the back of her throat, goes straight through me and lands somewhere south of my belt.
She kisses me back. Her fingers grip the back of my neck and pull me in, and her mouth opens and her tongue finds mine and the kiss turns into something with teeth and pressure and her hips press forward against mine and she feels me, hard against her stomach through two layers of fabric, and she doesn't pull away.
She rolls her hips. Once. A slow, intentional grind that drags her body against the length of me, and my hands tighten on her waist hard enough to leave marks, and a groan comes out of me that I couldn't stop if I had a gun to my head.
"Fuck," she breathes against my mouth.
"Yeah."
"We should stop, this is bad news bears.”
"I agree." I push my cock harder into the curve of her stomach.
"Fuck me, ughhhh."
She grinds against me again. Harder this time, and my hand slides from her waist to her hip and pulls her in and the friction through our clothes is enough to make my vision go white at the edges.
She's panting now, her forehead against mine, her fingers digging into the back of my neck, and I can feel the heat coming off her through the fabric of her jeans and she's wet, she has to be, because the way she's moving isn't casual anymore, it's urgent and rhythmic and she's chasing something and using my body to get there.
I slide my hand down from her hip and press my palm flat against the front of her jeans, cupping her through the denim, and the sound that comes out of her is loud and raw and the best thing I've ever heard.
"Fuck, yes, oh my God," she moans as she dry humps me.
I press harder, my cock leaking through my boxers and my shorts, using all my will power not to push her onto the mat and shove it in her pussy.
Instead, I take a breath and focus on her.
My fingers find the seam of her jeans and work against it, rubbing through the fabric, and she bites my bottom lip hard enough that I taste copper and her body shudders against me and I'm about thirty seconds from losing my mind entirely when my phone goes off.
Not a ring. The specific buzz pattern that means Leone. Three short, one long. Emergency protocol.
I freeze. She freezes. We stand there, breathing hard, foreheads together, my hand between her thighs, her fingers on my neck, and the phone buzzes again on the bench where I left it.
"That's probably your boss," she says, panting.
"I know."
"You should answer it."
"I know."
"If you don't answer it, I'm going to finish what we started and then I'm going to be pissed at myself for the rest of the day, and I don't need that on top of everything else."
I pull my hand away. It takes every ounce of willpower I possess, and I don't possess much. She steps back and her cheeks are flushed and her chest is heaving and her eyes are dark and furious, not at me, at the phone, at the timing, at the universe for what just happened between us.
I grab the phone. "What."
Leone's voice is clipped. "War room. Now. Both of you."
"Both of us?"
"You and Savannah. Kreiss moved. We've got forty-eight hours, maybe less. Get up here."
The line goes dead.
I look at her. She's already rewrapping her hand wraps, pulling the fabric tight, jaw set, eyes hard. The woman who was grinding against me ten seconds ago is gone.
"What now?" she asks.
"Kreiss. Leone wants us in the war room."
"Us?"
"You heard the man."
She undoes the wraps and drops them to the floor, grabs her water bottle, and walks past me toward the stairs. At the bottom step she stops and looks back at me.
"For the record," she says, "that was the worst timing in human history."
"Agreed."
"And we're not done. Consider this a pause because I am desperate to cum and you made me feel that way, so you’re going to fucking finish the job or so help me GOD."
"I know." I struggle to hide the grin trying to break out.
"Good." She huffs and then turns and takes the stairs two at a time.
I stand in the empty gym with a hard-on that could cut glass and the taste of her blood on my lip and the smell of her on my hands.
Kreiss moved. The war just accelerated. Leone needs me clear and focused and operational and I've got about ninety seconds to get my head out from between Savannah’s thighs and back into the fight.
I take the stairs after her. By the time I hit the corridor my face is blank, and my breathing is normal and nobody looking at me would know that three minutes ago I had a woman pressed against me making sounds that are going to live in my head for the rest of my fucking life.
Nobody except Claudio, who is standing outside the war room door, and who looks at me once, looks at Savannah walking ahead of me, looks back at me, and says absolutely nothing.
Which is, of course, the loudest thing he’s saying.