6. Stay
STAY
LORENZO
She has drawn Cross Street on the back of a spare signature page.
“Engines, tires, glass corners, concrete.” She taps each word as she says it. “Tell me where I am wrong, and be right, because I have checked it four times and I need it to be wrong and it will not cooperate.”
I have laid ambushes.
“You are not wrong. Five men who never once fired at a person are five men who were paid not to.” I sit down on the edge of the bed, on the far side of her map, and make myself look at it instead of at her.
“And there is one more. The truck at the far mouth was reversed in with its nose to the abutment, and a truck parked that way is a truck somebody intends to drive out again. An ambush that spends four thousand rounds and buys zero bodies is not an ambush. It is an invoice.”
“An invoice for what?”
“For twelve minutes of both families looking at Cross Street.” My hand flattens the page. “While a courier with correct paperwork emptied a refrigerator on Fountain Street.”
“So we agree.” She caps the pen. “And there is nothing to do about it until the state lab opens at 8, and the block moves at 9 regardless. Kelleher is safe in Pelham, and your men have the plate, and every single road out of this night is closed until morning.”
“Every one.”
“Good,” she breathes, and it is not analysis anymore. “Because I have been awake since Thursday, and I got married today, and there is one clause left.”
“One thing before it.” I hate how careful I sound, and I say it anyway. “Are we being careful, or are we not?”
“I have been on something since I was twenty-four.” It arrives in her schedule voice, flat, no weight anywhere in it. “Nine years. I have never once let it lapse, and I have never once sat down and asked myself why. I am not going to start tonight.”
“All right.”
“That is all.” She looks at me properly. “You are the last D’Amato with a pulse.”
“I have spent eleven years making sure this family had nothing anybody could take off it.” The map is still under my hand, and I take my hand off it.
“This afternoon, I gave that up on purpose, in a room with eleven people in it, in writing. I am not doing it twice in one night to somebody who has not asked me for it.”
She takes that in and files it with the schedules, and I watch her decide not to say the thing she has just thought of.
Neither of us laughs at that, quite. I reach across the map and take her hands off the pen, and that is the last decision I make well.
They are wrecked. There is a split across the base of her thumb where the windlass tore it, and dried blood in the creases of her knuckles that soap could not reach, and a burn stripe from the tie band.
These are the hands that held my brother’s heart for eleven minutes and Ciro Tebaldi’s artery for twelve, and I have watched them shake for four days and never once seen them stop working.
I bring them up and put my mouth on them.
The split thumb first, easy, no pressure.
The inside of each wrist. The knuckles, one at a time, while the paper with the worst afternoon of our lives on it slides off the bed and is not missed.
She goes very still, and when I press my mouth into her right palm, her fingers curl in against my jaw and stay.
“Lorenzo.”
“These first. The rest of you after.”
“That could take a while.”
“I have until 8.”
Her laugh comes out shaky and does not get in the way.
Then she takes her hands back, and takes my face in them, and looks at me from close, so that the whole of the last four days is in the twelve inches between us.
“I need to say a thing before I cannot.” Her thumbs are on my cheekbones.
“I have been the smartest person in every room since I was twenty-two, and it has cost me every room I was ever in. I ran the elevator. I ran that road today. I have been running my own funerals since the first one. I have been doing this since I was nineteen, and I ran every minute of that too, every time, with all of them, because running it was cheaper than finding out what a man does when I stop. I do not want to run this bed. Take it, and I am not asking because of the clause. I am asking because it is the one thing I have never once let anybody do, and I am asking you.”
She starts to say something else, and I watch her catch it, the old command halfway up her throat. Keep your hands where I put them. She closes her mouth around it and rewrites it, and when it comes out, it has changed sides.
“Put them where you want them. That is the gift. All of it.”
“Tell me to stop, and I stop,” I answer, and her breath breaks, because that is her line, from the elevator, coming home.
“Do not stop.”
I undress her the way you handle something that has already been dropped once.
The zip is jammed with grit at the bottom, and I go slow with it rather than force it.
The dress is the last of the day left on her, the road and the crypt still in its seams, because she stood at the sink before we spread the map and scrubbed until her wrists went pink, and I had already stood under water long enough to learn that water does not do anything about a day like this one.
She stands in the lamplight and lets me, hands at her sides, chin level.
When the dress goes, she steps out of it and does not look down, and there is not one thing about her that asks to be forgiven.
“You are staring.”
“Yes.” My voice comes out lower than I planned it. “Four days I have been making myself look at doors and windows instead of at you, and I am done doing that. God, look at you. You are the best thing this house has ever held.”
“Do not stop.”
We come down onto the bed facing each other, and for a while it is only hands and mouths and learning, her fingers opening my shirt one button at a time, her palm flat over the bruise the door frame left on my ribs, her hands going on without being asked when the shirt is gone, belt and zip and the rest of it, as unhurried on the buckle as they were on the buttons, my mouth at her throat, her ear, the corner of her mouth first, always first. She notices and says nothing, and sets it aside for later, I can feel her set it aside.
I go down her by inches, her throat, the line of her collarbone, the underside of her breast, and I take my time at each stop and tell her what I find.
“Soft here.” Her breath catches. “Sweeter here.” I put my mouth below her navel, and she arches.
I go lower and taste her, one long slow pass that pulls a sound out of her she has never let a room hear, and she is sweet and salt and hers, nothing like I imagined and better than all of it, and I say so against her.
“You taste better than anything I let myself want. And I wanted.” Her hand lands in my hair and grips.
I stay until her thighs start to shake, and then I come back up her body slow.
She pulls my mouth down onto hers to taste what I found.
Careful is costing me. My hands are not steady, and I let her see it.
There is a point, with her mouth open under mine and her leg coming up over my hip, where the whole of me wants to stop being careful.
Holding the line costs me something I can feel go, and she gets a fistful of my hair and pulls my head back to look at what holding it is doing to me.
“You are shaking.”
“I am.”
“Do not be gentle because you think I will break. Be gentle because you want to.”
“I want to.”
“Then keep going and let me see what it costs you.”
I put my hand between her legs, and she is soaked.
I tell her so with my mouth against her ear.
“So wet. You feel fucking incredible.” The curse comes out of me like a confession, because I do not curse, and she hears exactly what it costs and pulls me closer by the hair.
She says my name into my shoulder in a register I have never heard from her in a boardroom or a stairwell or a crypt.
I work her with two fingers and my thumb light on her clit, unhurried, no cleverness, the same pressure over and over until over and over is the whole world, and she stops being the person who briefs anyone.
She pulls my hair. She tells me there, and stay small, and do not be brave, which is the best instruction anyone has ever given me in a bed.
“Look at me,” she says, and then, softer, “please.”
I look at her while I work her, and her mouth comes open. She keeps her eyes on mine the whole way to the edge of it, and then she takes my wrist and stops me there, pulsing, unfinished, breathing in pieces.
“Not like this. I want you inside me.”
“Say it with your eyes open.”
“They are open. I want you inside me, Lorenzo, and I am not doing this because it is in a contract.”
“Neither am I.”
She reaches down and takes my dick in her hand and guides me. I go into her by slow inches with her breath catching on each one, and I hold still at the deepest point because moving would end me.
“Valeria.” Her name is all I have for a moment, and then the truth, against her mouth, because she asked for slow and nobody said quiet. “You feel like the first good thing in four days. You feel fucking perfect. I am going to take my time telling you.”
My right hand is under her thigh. My brother’s ring is on it.
I have been keeping that hand off her all night without deciding to, and she reaches down now and finds it and laces her fingers through it, gold against gold, Ottavia’s band and Giulio’s ring in one grip, and puts our joined hands flat against her sternum, over the heartbeat, where on Thursday she put her weight.
“He is allowed to be here,” she whispers. “All of it married all of it. Now move.”
I move. Slow, long, face to face, her heel drawing me deeper on every stroke, our hands pinned between us over her heart, and I put my thumb where we are joined and work her clit in small circles that match what the rest of me is doing.
“There. Do not change it.”
“I will not.”
“Do not change it, do not change it, oh…”