15. Solenne #2
“Needing me and showing up for me are different things.” I take a step toward him.
“You needed me when it was convenient. When you wanted someone to come home to. But when I needed you to see what was happening in your own house, when I needed you to choose me over your mother’s comfort, you couldn’t do it. ”
“I was afraid.” The words come out rough. “After my father died, my mother was all I had left of that life. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing her too. So I convinced myself she was helping, that her advice was good, that if I just kept everyone happy, everything would be fine.”
“Everyone except me.”
“Yes. Everyone except you.” He doesn’t look away.
“I sacrificed your happiness to avoid conflict with her. I told myself I was keeping the peace, but what I was really doing was choosing the easier relationship. She didn’t ask me to change.
She didn’t challenge me. She just told me what I wanted to hear. ”
“And I challenged you.”
“You asked me to see things I didn’t want to see. You asked me to believe that my mother was capable of cruelty, that the woman who raised me was systematically undermining my marriage.” He swallows. “I wasn’t strong enough to face that. So I made you the problem instead.”
“You made me the problem.” I’m close to him now, close enough to see the lines around his eyes, the way he’s holding himself like he’s waiting for something to break.
“Do you know what that does to a person? To be told over and over that you’re overreacting, that you’re too sensitive, that you’re imagining things? ”
“You start to believe it.”
“I started to believe it.” My hands are shaking. “I started to wonder if I was crazy. If I was the problem. If everything your mother said about me was true.”
“It wasn’t. None of it was true.”
“I knew what she was doing. I kept wondering if I could explain it better, make you listen for five minutes. And you could have told me. You could have stood beside me and said, out loud, to everyone who would listen, that I was your wife and I belonged there. Instead you asked me to keep the peace until there wasn’t any peace left to keep. ”
Something in me snaps. I shove him, both hands against his chest, hard enough that he stumbles back a step. He catches my wrist as he regains his balance, then lets go. For a second neither of us moves.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I say, stepping back. “I’m sorry. That was wrong.”
He stays where he is. “We can stop talking for a minute.”
I shake my head, then make myself put my keys in my bag. I don’t trust how hard I’m gripping them. “I want to finish. I won’t do that again.”
We stare at each other. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. The anger is still there, but now it’s tangled up with something else. Something that feels like grief. Like loss. Like the ache of missing someone who’s standing right in front of me.
“I loved you,” I say, and my voice breaks on the words. “I loved you so much. And I know you loved me too. But you didn’t show up. You loved me and you didn’t show up, and I don’t know how to make those two things fit together.”
“They don’t fit together.” His voice is rough. “I loved you and I failed you. Both things are true. I don’t know how to make them fit either.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“I don’t know.” He takes a step toward me. “I know what I want. I want to be the man I should have been. I want to prove that I can show up, day after day, when it’s hard and unglamorous and no one’s watching. I want you to trust me again.”
“And if I can’t?”
His eyes close briefly. “Then you can’t. I’m not going to turn the last few weeks into a bill you owe me.”
I look at him. The man I married. The man who broke my heart. The man who’s been showing up every day for weeks, asking nothing, expecting nothing, making time for the ordinary afternoons I once had to ask him for.
I close the distance between us and kiss him.
It’s not gentle. It’s not the careful, tentative thing we’ve been building toward with dinners and conversations and the ghost of his lips on my knuckles.
It’s months of silence and anger and want, and I pour all of it into the kiss, my hands fisting in his jacket, pulling him toward me like I can drag the last half year out of his mouth.
He answers with a sound low in his chest. His hands find my face, my hair, then my waist, hauling me flush until I feel every hard line of him through our clothes.
We’re stumbling without aiming, shoes scraping concrete, and I break the kiss only long enough to breathe against his jaw.
“Car,” I say. It comes out wrecked. “Now.”
He looks past me once, toward the elevator bank, and lifts a hand toward the guard. A short nod. Stay. The man turns away like he never saw us.
Valentin’s car is in the darker bay, away from the fluorescents. He unlocks it. I shove him toward the back door before either of us can invent a better idea. He half falls onto the seat and I climb after him, yanking the door shut.
The click seals us into leather and leftover heat and the smell of him.
I straddle his lap. My skirt rides up my thighs. His hands grip hard enough to bruise, dragging me down onto the thick press of his cock through his trousers. I rock once, mean with it, and he swears against my mouth.
“Fuck, Solenne…”
“Don’t talk pretty,” I mutter, biting his lower lip. “You don’t get pretty tonight.”
“Then take what you want.” His voice drops, rough, commanding under the apology still stuck in it. “Use me. God, look at you. So fucking beautiful when you’re furious.”
I kiss him filthy, open, tongue and teeth, while my hands wrench his jacket open and yank his shirt free of his belt. Buttons give.
My palms scrape warm skin, the sparse hair on his chest, the jump of muscle when I dig my nails in. He groans into me like it hurts in the best way and surges up to meet my mouth again, one hand fisting in my hair to tip my head where he wants it.
His other hand slides under my skirt, finds the damp heat of my underwear, and presses two fingers hard against my clit through the fabric. I jerk, a broken sound escaping before I can swallow it.
“There she is,” he murmurs, almost vicious with praise. “Already soaked for me. Riding my hand in a parking garage like you hate me for it.”
“I do hate you for it,” I gasp, rolling my hips into his fingers. “I hate that I still…”
“Still need this.” He pulls the underwear aside and sinks two fingers into me without warning, thick and sure, curling until my forehead drops to his. “Fuck, you’re tight. Clenching like you’ve been empty too long. Say it.”
“Valentin…”
“Say you need my cock.” His thumb works my clit while he fucks me shallow with his fingers, wet sounds loud in the closed car. “Be filthy for me, baby. I know you can.”
“I need your cock,” I whisper, and then louder when he rewards me with a harder thrust of his hand. “God, please… fuck me. Stop teasing.”
He laughs once, dark, and works his belt open between us. I help, impatient, shoving fabric down just far enough. His cock springs free, heavy against my stomach, and I wrap my hand around him and stroke once, tight. He hisses through his teeth.
“Condom,” he manages.
“I’m still on the pill.” My voice shakes. “Unless you’ve been…”
“Only you. Even when you left. Only fucking you.” He grips my hip, lines himself up, the blunt head of him sliding through my wetness. “Sink down. Slow. I want to feel every inch of you taking me.”
I drop onto him in one long, punishing slide. The stretch burns sweet. My mouth opens on a silent cry against his. He fills me so deep I have to breathe through it, thighs trembling around his hips.
“Good girl,” he rasps, forehead to mine. “Fuck. Perfect. So hot around me. Move when you can.”
I do. I ride him hard, angry, using the roof handle for leverage, slamming down until the car rocks.
He meets every stroke with an upward thrust, hands bruising my ass, praising me in a filthy stream between kisses.
“That’s it. Take it. My brilliant wife fucking herself stupid on my cock in the back seat.
Christ, Solenne, you feel like coming home. ”
“Don’t…” My voice cracks into a whine when he hits deeper. “Don’t call me that if you don’t…”
“You are.” He bites the side of my throat. “La mia. Say you’re mine while you use me.”
“I’m yours,” I choke, and hate how true it sounds. “Fuck… Valentin, I’m close…”
“Not yet.” He stills my hips with an iron grip, buried to the hilt, and I make a helpless, needy sound that would embarrass me anywhere else. “Turn. On your back. I want to see your face when you come.”
We scramble in the tight space, laughing once without humor when my elbow hits the door. He lays me back along the seat, one of my legs hooked over his shoulder, the other braced against the console. He pushes back into me in a single deep stroke that punches the air from my lungs.
“Oh, fuck…”