9. Ask Better
ASK BETTER
VALERIA
Ferrante reads me the order over the phone while I stand at the kitchen counter with my heels in my hand.
The heels go down. The notebook has been open on this counter since six, and I get the pen off the top of it before she reaches the operative paragraph.
Ex parte. Emergency. Material adverse event, supported by four newspapers and the phrase inconclusive pending panel, cited eleven times, which is ten citations of a rumor and one of a rumor’s echo.
Vasari does not want to win on the twenty-ninth.
Vasari wants three weeks of a frozen block and a bleeding name, and then a discount.
“Council at 10,” I tell her. “Bring the intercreditor original. Bring page nine. And get me a number where Milo Sarto answers on the first ring.”
“Sarto answers on the first ring at his own mother’s wake.”
“I am counting on it.”
At 10 a.m., it is eight men and me. The freeze goes on the table next to the coffee, and before we reach it, Fabrizio delivers Thursday, because he promised Thursday.
“The New Rochelle plate belongs to Boetticher Landscape and Sod.” He has three pages and does not read from them.
“Registered owner is Alvin Boetticher, seventy-eight. He died in hospice in March. His sister in Yonkers still pays the phone bill because nobody told her to stop. She cried when I explained why I was asking, and I sat with her for an hour. The yard has been sublet since April for cash, and the rent arrives as postal money orders bought at three different post offices. A man who pays rent like he is laundering regret. Nobody can describe him. It is another stump, and I am sorry, and I am not finished pulling.”
Lorenzo thanks him and looks at the window for a moment, and the fury on him is the quiet kind, the kind I have learned to read the way sailors read water.
Then the freeze. He tells the table we hold, answer in the ordinary course, nothing loud in the week this family buried a son.
“No,” I say.
Silvio Corva’s cup stops. My analyst, Priya Raghunathan, who has been at this table since 9 with her shoes under her chair and her feet flat on my mother-in-law’s rug, turns her laptop around.
“If we sit until the twenty-ninth, the block trades at a discount for three weeks, and Vasari picks it up in pieces through nominees, and the discount is the whole point of the filing.” I put the intercreditor agreement on the table and open it flat.
“Page nine. In 2021, Vasari took a waiver from this consortium on a cross-default. They were technically in default on a Rhode Island facility and they needed us not to call it. We did not call it, and the waiver was papered quietly and never filed anywhere.”
“So?”
“So the waiver is a document in our possession that describes a default their current lender has never been told about, and their current facility carries a representation that no such event has occurred. If they want a hearing on the twenty-ninth, they get a hearing. Page nine goes in as Exhibit C. It becomes a public record, and by 10 the next morning a bank in Providence is reading about a default its borrower swore did not happen.”
“That is a threat,” Corva says.
“It is disclosure with a calendar attached. I would never threaten anybody before lunch.” Priya makes a sound into her coffee. “Nadia. Put Milo Sarto on the speaker.”
Nobody at that table authorizes it, and I do not wait for anybody to. Ferrante dials, and Milo Sarto answers on the first ring in the middle of my mother-in-law’s dining room. I say good morning, and I read him two sentences of page nine, and I invite him to imagine it stamped as Exhibit C.
The silence on that speaker has a lawyer inside it doing arithmetic.
“That sounds like a threat, Signora D’Amato,” Sarto says.
“It is disclosure with a calendar attached, counselor. Talk to your client before your client talks to his bank.”
At 4:40 p.m., Vasari withdraws, consents to vacate before close, and waives their arrangement fee, and Corva shakes my hand at the door with the expression of a man swallowing a fishbone, and shakes it anyway.
The office still smells like the eight men who just left it.
Lorenzo shuts the door behind the last of them, and the latch is quieter than the men were. Quiet out of him has always been the loudest thing in this house.
“At 10:40 a.m. this morning, I told that room we hold,” he says.
“You did. I was in the room. I heard you.” I put the photocopy of page nine on his desk, face up, the clause ringed in my handwriting. “Then I made a decision with the information available, on a speaker, in front of your council. If you want an apology, the line forms behind Sarto.”
“Say the number.”
“Four hundred and ten million, unfrozen, before the close. Plus the waiver fee we no longer pay.”
“In front of my men.”
“In front of your men.”
He turns around. His jacket is over the chair, sleeves folded back twice, ink along the edge of his right hand from the pen he was gripping while I did it.
He crosses the room, and he does not hurry, and that is the part that undoes me.
Four days of him not hurrying are stacked up in my body like unbilled hours.
He stops with his hip against mine. He is hard, and I can feel it through two layers of very good wool.
“Your dick is not leverage,” I tell him.
“It is not an argument either.” His hand comes up and does not land. “It is information.”
“Then we negotiate.” I take a fist in his shirt and hold him exactly four inches away, which is worse for him than farther and we both know it.
“Because since Sunday night you have handled me like something with a hairline crack in it, and on our wedding night you loved me like an apology, and it was the most beautiful apology I have ever received, and I am done being apologized to. Tonight I want the man who does not hurry to show me what he was not hurrying toward.”
“State your terms.”
“Every clause out loud. Both parties narrate. No silent performance, no polite translations. You tell me what you want in the words you actually think it in, and I will tell you what I am doing to you while I do it, and neither of us stops enjoying ourselves to be impressive.” I let go of his shirt and smooth it flat with my palm. “Lock the door.”
He locks the door. He comes back. He stands where I put him.
“Terms accepted,” he says, low. “Consideration?”
“Consideration follows. Hands on the desk, both of them, beside my hips.”
I watch him decide. It takes a moment, and the moment is the best thing that has happened to me all month. Then his palms come down flat on either side of me, caging me against his own desk, holding still, in charge of nothing.
“Tell me you want this.”
“I want this.”
“Specifics.”
“I want your mouth on me, and I want to hear you the whole time, and I want you to stop the second you do not.”
“Ask better if you want my mouth.”
He gets quieter. It is the thing he does instead of begging, and it is better than begging.
“Valeria. Please put your mouth on my cock. I have thought about it every day since the sacristy. I thought about it yesterday, standing over his grave with dirt on my shoes, and I will be paying for that one for the rest of my life.”
“Better. Witnessed.” I slide off the desk and turn us, walking him back until the chair he runs four hundred men from catches him behind the knees. “Sit in your chair, Don D’Amato. I want you to be at work for this.”
He sits like a man taking a knee.
I get his belt open and his zipper down and take him out. He is heavy and hot across my palm, thick enough that my fingers do not close, already wet at the tip, and I hold him there and look up and give him the report.
“You are enormous, you are shaking, and you have been walking around like this since the speaker call.” My thumb drags through the wet, and his hips jump.
“Tell me what that feels like,” I order.
“Like the first four inches of falling.” His hands close on the arms of the chair. “Do it again and keep looking at me while you do.”
“I am looking.” I drag my thumb through him again, slower. “Item one. You are enormous, and you have been very polite about it. Item two, you have not moved your hands. Item three, you are going to ask for everything else properly, one thing at a time, and I am going to enjoy deciding.”
“Flatterer.”
“Accountant. I am itemizing.”
I put my mouth on him.
One long pass, base to tip, and I hum at the top, and his whole body goes off true. I take him in slow, deep, to where I have to stop, and hold, and his hands stay flat on the chair arms with the knuckles standing up like a mountain range.
“Talk,” I pull off to order. “That was a term.”
“You feel like being forgiven.” It comes out of him rough and even. “Your mouth is hot, and your tongue is patient the way nothing else about you is patient. You look up through your lashes like you are winning.”
“I am winning.” I take him back in, deep, come up slow. “You are heavy on my tongue. I can feel your pulse with my lips. Right there. It jumps when I hum.”
“Then hum.”
I hum. He swears, one syllable, hard, and it goes through me like a struck bell, because he does not curse. I have now heard it three times and caused all three.
“You jump every time,” I tell him, working him with my hand and mouth together, twisting on the way up. “I intend to abuse that discovery for years.”
“God. Slower there. That. Exactly that.” His breath is coming apart in pieces, and he keeps talking through it, low, ruined, obedient to the term. “Look at you. The most feared woman in this state is on her knees on my rug, and she is thrilled with herself.”
I pull off, wet to the chin. “I am thrilled with myself. I have wanted to do exactly this since you took your tie off in that elevator. And I am soaked, and you have not touched me. That is a receivable, and I expect interest.”
“Noted.” His voice drops further. “I am going to think about this every time Corva sits in that chair across the desk. God help me in meetings for the rest of my life.”
I laugh around him. He groans at the laugh, and the groan and the laugh get tangled together going up.
“Deeper,” he asks, when I tell him to ask. “Your hand at the base, tighter than that. Slower coming up, and do not stop when I get loud.” His jaw works. “May I put my hand in your hair?”
“Yes. Do not push.”
“I will not.”
His hand comes into my hair and lies there weightless, a permission he holds like something breakable. I give him deep and slow and tight exactly as ordered, and he gets loud. Loud for him.
“Valeria.” His fingers flex in my hair and do not close. “I am going to cum.”
“I know. I can feel it. Give it to me and say my name while you do, and do not be quiet. That is a term.”
He cums with my name breaking in half in his mouth, loud, his hand shaking against my scalp with the effort of not pushing.
I take all of it with my hand tight at the base and my hum going the whole way through him.
The sound he makes at the end belongs to nobody who runs four hundred men, and it is mine alone.
I stay with my cheek on his thigh while his chest comes down. His thumb strokes my hairline over and over, clumsy, like a man learning it.
“Grade,” he manages.
“Nine. You lost one for the desk.”
“I will have it reupholstered.”
“I keep waiting for you to need me to be careful,” he says, when his voice comes back.
“Stop waiting.”
He looks down at me, and the look is not softer. It is corrected.
“Today I watched you put a lawyer on a speaker in my dining room and take a knife off our throat between coffee and lunch,” he says. “I have been the most dangerous person in every room since I was twenty-six. I am not anymore, and I have never enjoyed anything more in my life.”
“Sworn testimony?”
“Sworn.” He tucks a ruined strand of hair behind my ear. “Get up here. There is an outstanding balance on this desk, and I pay my debts.”
“Do you?” I rise, and I sit on the edge of his desk in front of him. I take his right wrist the way he took mine in the cathedral, thumb over the artery, his pulse going hard under it, and I put his hand under my skirt.
His breath leaves him in one line.
“Your pussy is soaked.”
“I have been on my knees enjoying myself for a quarter of an hour. Accrued interest.” I move his hand where I want it.
“Two fingers. Not inside. Higher. There.” The noise I make is new to this office.
“Now hold still. I will do it. You watch, and you narrate, and you do not move one millimeter unless I move you.”
“You are using my hand,” he says, and his voice is gravel and wonder in equal parts.
“You have got my wrist in both of yours like an instrument, and you are setting your own pace. Your eyes have gone dark, and your mouth is open. There are four hundred men in this state who are afraid of me, and not one of them knows the Don sits very, very still when he is told.”
“Keep going.”
“You are close. I can feel it against my fingers. You are getting tighter. Your breath has gone up an octave, and you have stopped being in charge of your face. And tomorrow every man who sat at that table today is going to shake your hand, and not one of them will know.”
“Two fingers inside. Now. Heel of your hand stays.”
He obeys to the millimeter, and I ride his hand on the edge of his own desk with my heels hooked on the arms of his chair. He leans in close to my ear and puts the last of it in the vault.
“Do not be brave,” he says, my own gift handed back at the exact right moment. “Stay small. Let it take you. I have you, and I am watching.”
I cum with my eyes open on his, loud, my hands clamped on his wrist keeping him precisely where I put him.
It goes through me in long pulls that bow me off the desk, and he holds the pressure steady all the way through it because he was told to, and tells me I am gorgeous, wrecked, his, in a low itemized murmur until my breathing finds its floor.
He kisses the corner of my mouth first. He always kisses the corner of my mouth first.
“Are you enjoying yourself, Signora D’Amato?” he asks, against my cheek.
“I am having the time of my life. That is on the record too.” My thighs will not stop. I do not want them to. “Do not take your hand out.”
“I was not going to.”
“Again,” I tell him, wrecked and level at once. “Slower this time.”
He settles back in his chair like a man opening a long file, and his free hand undoes his cuff, and the smile he gives me has never once been seen at a council table.
“Dio, all night, Signora D’Amato. The market is closed.”
“Good.” I hook my heels tighter on the arms of his chair and pull him in by the collar. “Then start slower, husband. We have all night, and I intend to audit every minute of it.”