12. Her Name #2
“Please.” The word comes out of her like a splinter coming out, painful and then relieving. “Please, Lorenzo. Teach me. Please.”
The first beg of her life goes through me like current, and I tell her that too, that I know what it cost, that I will spend it well, and then I put my mouth back on her and give her no more choices.
She cums with both hands in my hair and her head thrown back, loud, unmanaged, wave after wave, and I stay exactly where I am through all of it, steady, until she pushes my head away herself because there is nothing left to take.
“There is nothing left of me,” she says, draped forward over my shoulders, wet, wrecked, laughing at nothing.
“There is one thing left.” I stand and strip off what the bath has left me wearing, shirt and trousers wet to the skin, dropped on the tile where they land.
She watches me do it the way she reads a final page.
Then I lift her out of the water and set her on the mat in front of the vanity.
The mirror is a solid field of steam. “Hands on the marble.”
She puts them there. I reach past her and wipe the glass clear with my forearm, one stroke.
She looks at herself for half a second, flushed, dripping, mouth swollen, eyes black, and looks away.
“No.” I take her chin and bring it back. “Eyes.”
“Lorenzo…”
“Four newspapers put that woman under a headline they invented. Every man at that council table looks at her sideways. She has been photographed, printed, priced, and never once seen.” I press against her from behind, hard where she can feel it, my mouth at her ear. “Tonight she gets seen. Look at her.”
Her eyes come up and land on mine in the glass, which is not the same thing, and I know it.
“Not me. Her. And when you can hold her eyes,” I take myself in hand and line up against all that heat, “tell her her name.”
I push in slow, all the way, and she rises up on her toes with the whole length of me in her, and her eyes go to her own in the mirror and hold, and hold, and hold.
“Say it.”
“Valeria.” Her voice shakes and does not stop. “Valeria D’Amato.”
“Again. Watch her mouth while she says it.”
“Valeria D’Amato.” Louder. Her knuckles white on the marble, Ottavia’s gold flashing under the light. “That is her. That is me.”
“That is my wife,” I say, and start to move, deep and slow, and I give the mirror everything I have.
“Look at her take it. Look at her color. Look at what she does to me, you can see it, turn your eyes two inches and you can watch what holding her does to a man. Nobody who ever printed her name has any idea. She is the best thing either family ever produced and she is going to cum on my cock watching herself do it.”
“Touch me. Please. There, and do not…”
“I know where.” My hand comes around and finds her clit, and her breath goes ragged against the glass. “Eyes open. Stay with her.”
“Item one.” It comes out of her in pieces, filthy and unstructured and nothing like her boardroom voice. “You are splitting me in half, and it is the best audit of my career. Item two…”
Neither of us gets to item two. The laugh takes us both at once, mid-stroke, tangled up with the heat instead of breaking it, her shoulders going under my hands while she grips me from inside, and I have to put my forehead against her hair until it passes, and when it passes everything is hotter than it was.
“I am going to cum,” she says. “Watch me. Watch us.”
“I have never looked at anything else.”
She goes over with her eyes open on her own, gripping me in long rolling pulls, crying out her own name once at the peak like she is calling somebody home, and it takes the legs out from under my control.
“Valeria. I am going to cum in you.”
“Do it.” Her eyes find my face in the glass and hold it, one last command issued from inside total surrender. “Let me see your face.”
I let her watch me come apart over her shoulder in the mirror, her name breaking in half in my mouth, her hips moving in small slow circles wringing the last of it out of me, and the steam starts closing back in from the edges of the glass like a tide coming in around the two of us.
After, wrapped in the same towel because she refuses to release me to get a second one, she looks at the pencil on the windowsill.
“Can I have it back?”
“In the morning. That was the term.”
“I want to write one thing.”
“Dictate it. I will remember.”
She pulls my head down and puts her mouth against my ear.
“Paid in full,” she whispers, “with interest. The auditor found no exceptions.”
“I will have it notarized. But Priya is not coming into this bathroom.”
She laughs against my chest until she has to hold onto the vanity, and I carry her to bed with her hair soaking my shoulder and her hand already curled over my brother’s ring before she is fully asleep.
I lie in the dark a long time.
An old woman on Doyle Avenue told me today that a name is not information, it is a grave, and she is right about hers.
But a thing you keep long enough stops being a thing you are protecting somebody from and becomes a thing you are protecting yourself with, and I have been keeping one sentence in a grave since 11:06 a.m. on the morning my brother died.
My wife came into this marriage with two secrets and she has spent both on me, and she is asleep on my chest with empty pockets and my dead brother’s gold under her hand, and I am the last locked box in her world.
In the morning, before the coffee, before the shoeboxes, before anything else this house wants from us, I am going to tell her.