Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen: Emilio
I find her behind the bar.
Not the kitchen, not the corridor, not the gym. The bar. The room I forgot existed until I walked past the open door and heard her laugh. Alexandra's laugh was loud, the two of them drinking at two in the afternoon in a room that used to host dignitaries but has declined alongside Aurelio.
"There you are," I say from the doorway. "I've been looking everywhere."
Alexandra turns on her stool, sees me, and immediately starts packing up her laptop. "And that's my cue." She stands, tucks the laptop under her arm, gives Savannah a look I'm not supposed to see but do anyway. "Have fun, lovebirds."
"We're not lovebirds," Savannah says.
"Sure you're not." Alexandra pats my shoulder on her way past. "Be nice to her."
"I'm always nice."
"You're never nice. That's why she likes you." Alexandra disappears into the corridor, and her footsteps fade and then it's just us. Me in the doorway and Savannah behind a bar she apparently cleaned and restored in the hours I was sleeping.
The room is different from the last time I saw it.
Clean, warm, bottles organized on the shelves, the counter polished to a deep amber shine.
She's standing behind it with a rag over her shoulder, a glass in her hand, looking more settled than I've ever seen her.
This is her space. She found it, claimed it, and she's standing in it with the easy authority of a woman who knows exactly where she belongs.
She's Goddamn beautiful. I've thought it before but right now, in this light, with the afternoon sun coming through the window and catching the gold in her skin and the curl of her hair where it's come loose from the band, the thought goes past thinking and into something physical.
A pull in my chest. A heat low in my stomach.
"You going to stand in the doorway all day?" she asks.
"I'm admiring the view."
"The view is a dirty bar and a tired bartender."
"The view is fucking perfect and the bartender knows it.
" I walk in, sit on the stool directly across from her.
The counter is between us, and somehow the space makes this more erotic than it should.
She leans her forearms on it and looks at me.
I can see the freckle below her left ear that I didn't notice until the first time I kissed her neck. I can smell the lemon cleaner on her hands. She’s looking like a whole ass meal and it takes everything in me not to hop this bar and devour her where she stands.
"What can I get you?" The question is professional and the tone is not.
"Whiskey, vodka, gin… whatever you're pouring."
She reaches for the Macallan without looking, pulls it off the shelf, and pours two fingers into a glass. The pour is clean, no drip, no hesitation. She slides the glass across the counter, and I catch it and drink without breaking eye contact.
"Good whiskey," I say.
"The previous owner had taste. Everything else about this room was neglected, but the liquor is excellent."
"Kind of like you."
"Excuse me?"
"Excellent but neglected… until someone showed up and gave a shit."
Her eyes narrow but her mouth twitches. "That's either the worst compliment or the best insult I've ever received."
"Can't it be both?"
She leans closer across the counter. Her arms are folded on the wood, and her chin is tilted up and her mouth is right there.
They’re pursued and she looks so fucking adorable as she studies me, my cock twitches and I bite back a groan.
The bar between us is the only reason I'm still on this stool instead of on top of her.
"You know what I was thinking while I cleaned this place?" she says.
"Tell me."
"I was thinking about how many times I've fucked guys in bars after closing. On the floor, in the stockroom, against the jukebox once, which broke and cost me a week's tips." She picks up her own glass and takes a sip. "But I've never fucked anyone on my own bar."
The whiskey in my stomach turns to gasoline. "Is that an invitation?"
"It's an observation. The invitation is: get behind this counter before I change my mind."
I don't need to be told twice. I'm off the stool and around the end of the bar in three steps. She's waiting for me in the narrow space between the counter and the shelves, rag still over her shoulder, glass still in her hand, a look on her face that could start a fucking wildfire.
I take the glass out of her hand and set it on the shelf, the rag off her shoulder and drop it on the floor. She watches me do both with the particular patience of a woman who is letting me have this moment of control because she's already decided how the next twenty minutes are going to go.
Grabbing her face in my hands, I pull her closer and kiss her. My thumbs on her cheekbones, my mouth moving against hers with a forcefulness that makes her breath change. She grabs the front of my shirt but doesn't pull. She holds.
"Sit on the counter," I say against her mouth.
"Do it for me, asshole."
I grip her hips and lift her onto the bar. She weighs nothing, or I'm running on enough need to bench-press a car. Her ass hits the polished wood, her legs open, I step between them. Her thighs lock around my waist.
"You know," she says between kisses, "this counter took me forty minutes to polish."
"I'll polish it again after."
"You don't even know where I keep the Windex."
"Under the sink. I watched you put it there when I walked in."
She bites my bottom lip. "Observant little shit."
I kiss down her neck while my hands work her shirt up and over her head. No bra, because Savannah makes her own rules, and the sight of her bare on the bar I used to drink at with soldiers who would never in their lives believe what's happening on it right now makes my cock so hard it hurts.
She pushes me back. One hand flat on my chest, holding me at arm's length. "Sit on the stool."
"What?"
"My stool." She points. There's a stool tucked in the corner behind the counter where the bartender sits during slow shifts. "Sit."
I sit. She slides off the counter and drops to her knees between my legs, and the sight of her on her knees looking up at me with those brown eyes and that perfect fucking mouth does things to my circulatory system that should require medical attention.
She undoes my belt in stages, belt, button, zipper, and she pulls me out of my boxers before wrapping her fingers around me. The contact makes my head tip back against the shelf behind me.
"Eyes on me," she says. "You wanted the view. Here it is."
I look down at her. She holds my gaze and takes me into her mouth.
The sound that comes out of me isn't dignified.
It's not smooth or charming or any of the things I'm supposed to be.
It's a groan that starts in my gut, comes out broken rasp.
Her mouth is hot, wet, her tongue doing something on the underside that makes my fingers grip the edges of the stool hard enough to whiten my knuckles.
She takes her time. Long, slow strokes with her mouth, her hand working the base, her eyes on mine the entire time.
She's not rushing, she's enjoying this, and the enjoyment is visible on her face, in the way her eyes go half-lidded and her cheeks hollow and the small sounds she makes around me that vibrate through my entire body.
"Fuck, Savannah." My hand finds her hair, just holding it, allowing her to set the rhythm, "Your mouth is..."
She pulls off long enough to say, " Perfect? I know," and then takes me deeper, and my vision narrows to nothing but her.
She works me until I'm shaking, until my thighs are tense, my breathing ragged, my hand fisted in her hair. I'm about thirty seconds from finishing in her mouth when she pulls back, wipes her bottom lip with her thumb, and stands.
"Nuh uh uh," she says. "I want you to come somewhere else."
She turns around, unbuttons her jeans, and pushes them down her hips along with her underwear. She bends forward over the bar counter with her forearms flat on the wood and looks back at me over her shoulder.
"Well?" She wiggles her ass and I jump.
I'm behind her before the word finishes leaving her mouth. One hand on her hip, the other between her thighs, and she's wet enough that my fingers slide through her without resistance. She moans into her forearms and her back arches.
"You're soaked," I say against her ear.
"I've been thinking about this since I started cleaning. Three hours of polishing this bar imagining you bending me over it. So yes, I'm fucking soaked, are you going to do something about it or just commentate?"
I push inside her.
The angle is different from the bed. Deeper. The bar height puts her at exactly the right position and when I bottom out she makes a sound that's half scream, half profanity, her fingers gripping her forearms so hard she’s going to bruise them.
I pull back and thrust in again, harder. The bottles on the shelves underneath the bar rattle. She laughs, a breathless, beautiful sound, and pushes back against me.
"The whiskey glasses are going to fall," she says.
"I’ll buy you more."
I set a pace that's hard and rough, each thrust rocking her forward against the counter.
The wood creaks beneath her. Her knuckles are white, my hands grip her hips, pulling her back onto me with every forward push.
The sounds filling the room are loud. Skin, breath, the rhythmic protest of a bar that was not built for this purpose but is serving it admirably.
She reaches back and grabs my wrist, pulling my hand from her hip to her front, pressing my fingers against her clit.
The instruction is crystal clear. I rub in tight circles while I fuck her, matching the rhythm.
Her head drops forward onto her arms. The sounds she's making get louder, higher, wilder.
"Right there, right there, fuck, don't stop, Emilio, right fucking there."
I give her exactly what she's asking for.
My hips driving into her, my fingers working her clit, the counter holding both of us up because my knees are starting to feel a little shaky.
She comes with a shout that echoes. Her pussy clenches around me so hard my rhythm breaks and I have to brace one hand on the counter to keep standing.
I follow her thirty seconds later. Deep, buried in her pussy, spurting my come over and over. My forehead drops between her shoulder blades, her name is in my mouth on a groan that I feel in every bone. I pulse inside her and she pushes back against me, taking everything, wanting every last drop.
We stay there for a minute, both of us breathing hard, bent over the bar together. A bottle of vodka has fallen on its side on the shelf. One of the whiskey glasses slid to the edge but didn't fall. The Macallan is untouched because even sex can't topple good whiskey.
I pull out slowly. She makes a small sound at the loss, turns around, leans back against the counter.
Her hair is everywhere, her cheeks flushed, naked from the waist down with my cum slowly seeping out of her and trailing down her legs.
The look on her face is the best thing I’ve ever fucking scene and I have half the mind to take a picture.
Instead, I’ll just work my ass off everyday to make sure she always looks at me this way.
"On the house," she says.
I laugh so hard I have to grab the counter to keep from sliding to the floor. She laughs too, and it hits me. This is us. This is who we are. Two people who fuck on bar counters, laugh about it after, and don't apologize for any of it.
She bends down and pulls her jeans up, and I zip mine. She picks up the rag from the floor and starts wiping down the counter where we just had sex, because Savannah cleans her own bar even when the mess is mutual.
I pour two more whiskeys and hand her one. We stand behind the bar together, shoulder to shoulder, drinking in silence. Good silence. Full silence. The kind that doesn't need filling because everything that needed saying was said with our bodies.
My phone buzzes.
I pull it out and see Leone’s name flash across the screen, so I answer.
"Dahlia's here."
Dahlia left this world a long time ago and went to Westpoint Academy and fell in love with a man named Bam who is built for destruction the way Carmelo is built for it, and if she's finally here, it means the thing everyone in this compound has been avoiding saying out loud is about to become real.
Aurelio is dying, and his daughter has come to say goodbye.
Savannah reads my face. She always reads my face. "What is it?"
"Aurelio's daughter just arrived at the compound."
She doesn't ask why. She already knows. She presses the bottle cap in her pocket and sets down her glass, then reaches over and takes my hand and squeezes once.
"Go," she says. "I'll be here when you need me."
“Just going to greet Dahlia. I’ll be back.” I squeeze back and then I let go. I walk out of the bar and into the corridor and toward the east entrance where Dahlia Bonaccorso is walking back into a world she left behind to say goodbye to the man who built it.
The whiskey still warm in my chest and the taste of Savannah still on my mouth and all of that has to take a backseat as I say goodbye to the only Don I’ve ever known.