23. Ariah #2
He laughs - quiet, delighted - and kisses his way down my body.
Slow. Thorough. The inside of my elbow. The ticklish spot under my ribs that makes me squirm.
The soft crease where hip meets thigh. When he settles between my legs he looks up at me first - checking, asking without words - and I nod.
He peels my underwear down with both hands, sets them aside like they matter, and then his mouth is on me.
It’s nothing like the desperate kitchen or the bittersweet night before the anniversary. This is worship. This is a man who has been given a second chance and intends to spend it learning every sound I make.
He licks into me with devastating patience.
Flat strokes of his tongue, then the pointed tip circling my clit, then two fingers sliding inside to curl against that place that makes my back arch off the mattress.
I thread my fingers into his hair and hold on.
He hums against me like he’s savoring something expensive, and the vibration of it makes me gasp.
“Pietro - god…”
“I know, amore. I’ve got you.” His voice is muffled, filthy-soft. “Come on my tongue. Let me taste you properly. I’ve been starving for this. For you. For the way you sound when you’re close.”
“You’re - talking too much…”
“You love my mouth.” He sucks gently on my clit and I nearly come apart. “Say it.”
“I love your mouth,” I gasp, laughing and moaning at once. “I love your filthy fucking mouth. Don’t stop…”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He doesn’t stop. He works me with tongue and fingers in a rhythm that builds and builds - slow, then faster, then slow again when I’m right on the edge, the bastard, drawing it out until I’m tugging his hair and whispering please like a woman who has forgotten she spent months practicing how not to need him.
“Please what?” he asks against me, cruel and tender.
“Please let me come. Please - Pietro…”
“Since you asked so nicely.”
He doubles down - fingers curling, tongue relentless - and I shatter, thighs trembling around his head, one hand fisted in the sheets and the other still tangled in his hair.
The orgasm rolls through me in long waves, sweeter than the kitchen’s sharp spike, deeper than the bittersweet night.
He stays with me through it, gentling as I come down, pressing soft kisses to the inside of my thigh like apologies and thank-yous mixed together.
When he crawls back up my body I pull him into a kiss that tastes like me and wine and forgiveness. I reach between us and stroke him through his pants until he’s panting against my mouth, then I undo his belt myself - slowly, watching his face - and free his cock.
He’s hard, flushed, the head already gleaming. I stroke him once, root to tip, and watch his eyes flutter shut.
“Come here,” I tell him. “Inside me. I want to feel you while I can still look at you.”
He settles over me, bracing on his forearms so our faces stay close.
When he pushes in it’s slow - so slow I feel every inch, the stretch and the heat and the way my body opens for him like it’s been waiting - and we both exhale like we’ve been holding our breath for months.
He bottoms out and stays there, forehead to mine, eyes open.
“Hi,” he whispers, absurd and tender.
“Hi.” My laugh catches on a soft sob. “Move. Please.”
He moves. Deep, rolling thrusts that keep us pressed together, skin to skin, no space for ghosts or cold years between us.
I wrap my legs around his waist. He finds my hand and laces our fingers against the pillow.
Every time he sinks into me he watches my face like he’s cataloging the pleasure, learning what I need now instead of assuming he remembers.
We find a rhythm that belongs only to this room - unhurried, deep, the kind of fucking that has nowhere to be and nothing to prove.
I can feel every shift of him inside me.
Every breath. The way his stomach flexes against mine on the downstroke.
The way his bracelet - my bracelet - brushes my wrist where our hands are joined.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmurs.
“This. Just this.” I roll my hips to meet him. “Harder - yes - like that - god, right there…”
He gives me a few harder thrusts and then eases back, watching my face for the truth of it. “Too much?”
“No. Perfect. Don’t you dare go careful on me now.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. I just…” He swallows. “I want to get this right. I want to get *you* right.”
“You are.” I squeeze his hand. “You are.”
“Here?” He adjusts the angle, grinding deep on the downstroke, and a broken sound escapes me.
“Yes. Don’t you dare stop looking at me.”
“Wouldn’t. Couldn’t. You’re the only thing in this room worth looking at.”
He gives me harder without losing the tenderness.
His free hand slips between us to rub my clit in tight circles, and I feel the second orgasm building low and sweet and inevitable.
The bed creaks softly. Somewhere outside a scooter passes.
The ordinary world keeps turning while we remake ourselves in this small rented bedroom.
“I love you,” he says against my mouth. “I love fucking you. I love the way you take me. I love that you chose this. Chose me. With your eyes open.”
“I love you too.” The words come easy, eyes open, no hedge. “God, Pietro - I’m going to…”
“Come for me. Let me feel it. Let me feel my wife come on my cock.”
The word wife does something to me - cracks something open and remakes it in the same breath. Not the old version of wife, the invisible one. This one. The one who gets to choose.
I come with his name on my lips and my eyes locked on his, and he follows me over with a groan that sounds like relief, spilling deep inside me while he holds my face in both hands and kisses me through it.
We stay joined afterward, breathing together in the dark of my small bedroom.
His bracelet glints on his wrist in the lamplight.
Mine - the terrible lopsided one - is still on mine.
He presses his forehead to mine again. Sweat cools on our skin. His thumb strokes my cheekbone, slow and absent.
“Stay,” I whisper, though he hasn’t moved to leave.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He kisses the corner of my mouth. “Not tonight. Not unless you ask me to.”
“I’m not asking.”
“Good.”
He softens inside me eventually and slips free with a shared, rueful sound.
I make a face at the mess; he laughs and reaches for the tissues on the nightstand like a man who has learned, finally, that aftermath is part of the act.
He cleans us both up with a gentleness that would have wrecked me six months ago and only half-wrecks me now. Progress.
Then he pulls the sheet over us and gathers me against his chest, and I go willingly, fitting my head under his chin the way I used to before the cold years taught me to sleep on my own side of every bed.
“Okay?” he asks the dark.
“Okay.” I mean it. “More than okay.”
“If you wake up and regret this…”
“I won’t.”
“-tell me anyway. I’d rather hear it than guess.”
I tip my face up and kiss the underside of his jaw. “I’m not going to regret this. I chose it. Eyes open. Remember?”
“I remember.” His arms tighten. “I’m going to remember every second of it.”
I tuck my face into his neck and breathe him in - cologne and metal shavings from the workshop and the particular scent of a man who has finally learned how to stay.
For the first time in a long time, the quiet between us doesn’t feel like distance.
It feels like a room we built together and decided to keep.
And in the morning, when I wake up with his arm around my waist and his breath warm against my hair, I don’t regret it. I don’t second-guess. I just lie there in the early light, feeling something I haven’t felt in years.
Hope.
* * *
The birthday is two days away. The twins are turning five. We’ve planned a party at a rented garden venue - modest by Grimaldi standards, but with trusted staff and carefully vetted food because Luca’s allergy means I can never be casual about what’s served.
“Rosaria is still insisting on coming,” Pietro tells me over breakfast, while the twins argue about whose birthday it really is (both of them, obviously, but try explaining that to four-year-olds). “I’ve told her she’s not welcome. She’s ignoring me.”
“And Marco confirmed he’s coming?”
“He texted yesterday. Wouldn’t miss it, he said.”
Marco Grimaldi - Pietro’s cousin, one of the few family members who’s been genuinely kind to me over the years. The twins adore him. At least there will be one friendly face from the Grimaldi side.
“What about security at the venue?”
“I’ve given them her photo. And Serena’s. They won’t be let in.”
But even as he says it, I see the doubt in his eyes. Rosaria has been maneuvering around obstacles for decades. She knows how to get what she wants.
And what she wants is to prove she still has power over this family.
I touch the bracelet Pietro made me - the terrible, lopsided one I still wear because it matters more than any perfect piece - and I try to convince myself that everything will be fine.