6. Stay #2
It takes her hard. She goes rigid all the way down, both hands clamped on my forearm, and she cums around me in long pulls that I can feel gripping the length of me.
Her mouth is open against my jaw, and no sound comes out of it at all for a while.
Then it does, low and broken, and she rides the whole thing out against me with her hips still going, slower, and slower, until she is just holding on and her thighs are shaking and her forehead is on my collarbone.
“Stay,” she whispers. “Do not come out.”
“I am not going anywhere.”
She lies there and breathes, and I keep still inside her, and she laughs at nothing against my throat.
“Attested,” she manages.
“Witnessed,” I answer, and her laugh goes wrecked and real, the two of us laughing into each other’s mouths at a contract while her body is still going, and it costs us nothing, which is the first thing all week that has not.
Then she pushes me over onto my back.
“Now let me.”
I go up against the headboard, and she climbs into my lap without letting me leave her body, a rearrangement of weight as sure as anything she does with numbers. From there, she sets a pace with her hips that is barely a pace at all, a slow grind that gives me all of her on every pass.
The lamp is behind her, and she is lit down one whole side.
I tell her, because somebody should have told her years ago and every one of them wasted their turn: “You should see what you look like right now. Riding me slow in my grandmother’s gold.
I could watch you do this until the sun comes up, and I intend to. ”
“Flatterer.”
“Accountant.” I press the word into her throat. “I am itemizing.”
“Then itemize.”
She means it as a dare. She has been daring men across tables since she was twenty-two, and nobody has ever once taken her up on one.
I open my mouth to do it. The place under her jaw that goes hot first. The left collarbone that sits a half inch higher than the right.
The callus on the inside of her middle finger from twenty years of gripping a pen too hard.
The whole inventory I have been keeping without permission since a service elevator on Friday.
And I find I am not going to, because she has been itemized her whole life. It is the one service every man she has ever known was glad to provide.
“No,” I say, into her throat. “Itemizing is for things I intend to sell.”
She laughs.
It comes up out of her without any permission at all, and it goes straight down through where we are joined. My hands close on her before I have decided anything, and the laugh breaks in the middle when she feels what she has just done to me.
“That is not fair,” she manages.
“It is entered and initialed.”
And under the laughing, with her hands flat on my chest and her whole weight on me, the true thing comes up.
I held the injector. I put the needle in my brother’s thigh with my own hand and counted to ten. She asked me on Thursday night, sitting on a floor with a pen in her hand. I said I do not know, and she wrote it down.
It gets as far as my teeth. Then she laughs again, and I put it back down. I keep my hands where she gave them to me, and I go on looking at her like a man with nothing in his mouth.
“Hands,” she reminds me.
“Where I want them.”
“Where you want them.”
So I put them where I want them, and where I want them is on her hips, and I stop her.
I hold her still, all the way down on me, and I do nothing else. No mouth. No hand anywhere else on her. A woman held still in the middle of the one thing tonight she came in here to run.
She lasts about four seconds.
“Lorenzo.”
“You gave it to me.”
“I did.” Her fingers close hard on my shoulders. “Give it back.”
“In a minute.”
She held a line under five rifles at three in the afternoon.
She held a man’s artery shut with a fountain pen and the ribbon out of her own hair.
She cannot hold still on me for twenty seconds.
I feel all of it go through her, the wanting to move and the deciding not to and the fine shaking that comes off the two of them arguing, and she puts her forehead down on my shoulder and breathes like somebody doing sums.
“Tell me what you want,” I say. “Out loud, and it is yours. That is the entire price.”
Nothing.
I wait. I have sat across tables from men paid a great deal to say nothing to me, and I have never in my life waited on anybody like this.
“You are going to make me say it.”
“I am going to let you.”
More nothing, and longer, and I hold her exactly where she is through the whole of it.
My right hand is flat on the small of her back. My brother’s ring is on that hand, and it has been against her skin since I put it there. It is the only cold thing in this bed, and I feel the second she remembers it is there.
And then, quietly, into my collarbone, in a voice I have not heard her use anywhere in this house:
“I do not know how.”
I put my hand up the back of her neck into her hair and leave it there.
“Then do not. You do not have to know how to ask.” My mouth is at her ear. “Tell me one true thing instead. Any true thing. It does not have to be about this.”
She is quiet for so long that I start to think about what I will say if she gets off me.
“I am not sad right now.” Her voice goes on the second word, and she keeps talking through it, the way she keeps talking through everything.
“That is the true thing. Four days, and I have been sad every minute of every one of them, and I am not sad right now, and I do not know what to do with that, and I think I am going to be punished for it.”
“Punished by who?”
She lifts her head. Her eyes are wet and completely open, and she does not do one thing to hide either.
“I do not know. It has always come.”
“Then somebody has been sending it, and we will find out who.” I take her hand off my shoulder and put it flat on my chest, over the place where she put her whole weight on Thursday morning. “That is the job. It is not tonight’s job.”
And then she moves.
It is not the pace she set before. It is smaller and slower and much worse. I let go of her hips because she has earned them back, and somewhere in the next minute her face comes apart and I cannot tell which of the two things is doing it, and neither can she.
She says sorry. She says it twice, into my neck, and her hips do not stop while she says it. Somewhere in the middle of it, her hand comes round behind her and closes over my right one and holds the ring against her back, harder, on purpose.