6. Stay #3
Nine years of standing at the back of other people’s grief with her face arranged so that nobody had to manage her, and she is apologizing to me for hers, in my bed, with me still inside her.
“No.” I put my mouth against her temple and I keep it there. “Do both. There is no rule about it, and there is nobody here to file a complaint. I am not going anywhere, and I am not going to ask you which one it is.”
Her hips. Her back. Her hair. Her wet face. She rides me by fractions with her forehead on mine and Ottavia’s band cold at the back of my neck, and I am close for a long time before I say so.
“Dio. God. I am close, Valeria.”
“I know. I can feel you trying to be polite about it.” Her hands frame my jaw. Her face is a ruin, and her voice has come all the way back, the one that closes rooms. “Stop being polite. Cum inside me, and look at me while you do it.”
And what comes out of me is not English. It is Nonna’s, and I have not had it in my mouth since I was a boy.
“Guardami. Non smettere di guardarmi.” Look at me, and do not stop looking at me.
It goes up my spine and takes the back of my head.
I hold her down onto me by the hips, and I cum in her with my eyes held open on hers the whole way through it, which is harder than anything I did on Cross Street.
She works me through it in small deliberate rolls, wringing every last shudder out of me while my hands go stupid on her hips, and when I finally still, she is watching me with an expression I have never seen her wear in any room, and I understand that I am the first thing all week she has watched without pricing.
We stay like that. Joined, cooling, her cheek on my shoulder.
“Say something,” she says, after a while.
“You have glass in your knees.”
“I know. I have had glass in my knees since 3:30 p.m.” She lifts her head. “Ask me something instead.”
“Why do you let me?”
“You go for the corner of my mouth first. Every time. In the elevator, in the crypt, twenty minutes ago.” She pulls back to see my face. “Nobody does that twice by accident. Why?”
Because I dreamed it before I did it, and because in the dream I took it off her, and because I have not been able to look at the corner of her mouth since Thursday without seeing what was on it.
“Because that is where he was on you,” I tell her. “You scrubbed it until it bled, and it was still there Friday morning. I wanted something else to be there.”
She does not answer that. She puts her face into my neck and stays there, and I hold the back of her head with a dead man’s gold against her scalp, and we breathe.
After a while she starts laughing.
“What?”
“Your man is outside my door tonight.”
“He takes his orders from you now.”
“Then, as of tonight, nobody enters this room until Tuesday. Including staff. Including you leaving and wanting back in.”
“You would have Tazio put me out of my own bedroom.”
“He would knock first. He is polite.” Her shoulders are going against my chest. “He would apologize the entire time he did it.”
We laugh at that longer than it deserves, the two of us picturing the boy with the strapped arm evicting a Don in his own house, on the day I buried nothing and married everything.
The laugh runs out into the dark, and after it there is a quiet with nothing wrong in it, the first one of those I have had since Thursday.
Her notebook is on the nightstand, shut, with the pen laid across the cover like a tool somebody intends to be holding at six.
I have not slept in a room with another person’s paperwork in it since I was a boy. I find I do not mind it. Then I find that I mind very much that she keeps it, and that both of those are true at once, and I put them where I put things.
At the nightstand, later, I start to take my brother’s ring off for the night, and her hand comes off the pillow and closes around mine.
“Leave it,” she murmurs, mostly asleep. “We married all of it.”
She sleeps thoroughly, the way she does everything, with her fingers laced through my right hand, over the ring.
She is holding the hand I lied to her with.
I do not sleep. I lie in the gray coming up off the water and do the arithmetic I have been declining all day.
For eleven years I have run this family on one advantage that nobody could take from me, which was that there was nothing to take. No wife. No children. Nothing whose address could be traded, nothing that could be held over me in a warehouse with a phone placed against my ear.
At 4:40 p.m. yesterday afternoon, in a room full of my dead, I gave that up on purpose, in front of witnesses, in writing.
At 8:20 p.m., Fabrizio knocks once with the New Rochelle plate. I take it in the corridor in my shirt and send him away, and she does not wake. At 9 a.m., in a room in Wilmington with nobody standing in it, the block moves.
Somewhere out there is a man who has spent four days proving he is patient, and thorough, and paid up. He watched the convoy. He watched the wedding happen anyway.
Whoever he is, as of yesterday he knows the exact address of everything I love.