15. Found Money #2
“Good.” I get his belt open. “Tell me to stop and I stop.”
“Do not stop.”
He gets my skirt up and my back is against the hull and his hands are on the cold skin of my thighs and I hiss into his mouth.
“You are freezing.”
“Then fix it. You are the only warm thing in this building, and I am confiscating you.”
“Confiscate me, then.” He gets his mouth on my throat. “Nadia takes Kelleher from Monday.”
“Nadia takes the paperwork. I take the doctor.” I get my hand around him, and he swears into my collarbone. “You are hard enough to be reasonable. Say yes.”
“No.”
“Say it properly, then.”
“Nadia takes the filings, and you take Kelleher, and you take Tazio and one more, and you tell me the address before you go and not after.” He gets two fingers into me and I lose the whole sentence I was building. “God, you are wet. You are freezing everywhere except here.”
“Do not think that closes the Providence question.”
“Nothing is closed.” He is working me and talking into my ear. “You are the most infuriating woman I have ever met and I have not been able to put a cup down at your elbow since Monday and it has been the worst part of my week. Tell me what you want.”
“Inside. Now. Against this hull, and do not be careful with me, and I am still not conceding Providence.”
“Concede the driver.”
“Half a driver.”
He laughs and pushes into me and I go up onto my toes with my fingers in his hair, and the laugh goes to pieces in his throat and turns into something else.
He gets his hands under me and takes my weight against the boat, and the whole hull moves on the trestles, and neither of us cares.
“Tell me,” he says. “Say what it feels like.”
“Like being fed.” I bite his ear. “You are furious with me.”
“I am furious at you, and you are the best thing I have ever held, and both of those are going in at the same time. Take a breath, I am not finished.”
“You never are.” My head goes back against the hull. “You are better at negotiating like this.”
“Everyone is.” He is laughing into my throat and driving into me and the two rhythms tangle. “We should have done the port deal this way.”
“Nadia would have objected.”
“Nadia bills by the hour. She would have understood.”
From the chair by the lamp, Soldo makes a sound of pure editorial disapproval.
“Your cat is watching,” Lorenzo says.
“Your cat. It voted with the jacket.” I am laughing and shaking and holding onto him. “Move me. The daybed. I want to look at you and I want you to have to look at me.”
He carries me and we go down onto the dust sheet in a cloud of it, and neither of us coughs because neither of us is breathing right anyway, and I get my knees either side of his hips and his back against the wall paneling, and I take him back inside me by inches with both my hands flat on his chest.
“Better,” I say.
“Say the rest of it.”
“You do not get a full driver and you do not get Kelleher and you do not get my hours.” I start to move.
“You get this. You get me coming down to this building on my own two legs and getting on top of you because I want to. That is what I am prepared to spend on your fear tonight, and it is a great deal more than you have any right to.”
“I will take that.” His hands are on my hips and he is letting me set every inch of it. “Cristo. Christ. You are gorgeous like this. You are angry and you are riding me and your mouth is open, and I want you to tell me what you are going to do, amore. Love.”
“Grade me first.” Wicked. His own game, handed back.
“Ten.” His head goes back against the paneling and his voice is gravel. “Ten, and I withdraw every previous score I have ever given anything.”
“Flatterer.”
“Witness. Under oath.”
“Then here is what I am going to do.” I get one hand between us. “I am going to cum on you, and then I am going to do it again, and in the morning I am going to be exactly as unforgiving as I was at 6 o’clock.”
“Understood.”
“Say you want it anyway.”
“I want it anyway. Every day. Unforgiven, until you say otherwise, and if you never say otherwise…”
“Do not stop talking.”
“You feel like silk over a furnace and you are still angry, I can feel it, it is in your spine.” His hands close on my thighs and let me keep the pace. “You fight me even here. Do not ever stop.”
“Mio,” I tell him, moving, watching his face give itself up. “Mine. Unforgiven. Confiscated. Held. Harder, and do not close your eyes.”
Somewhere in there the fight and the filth become the same sentence, and neither of us can tell which one we are winning.
“I am going to cum,” I tell him, eyes open on his. “Watch me stay angry while I do it.”
He watches. I do both.
It takes me in long rolling waves with both hands braced on his shoulders and my whole body clamping down, and I ride it all the way out on him in slow drags, and I do not close my eyes and I do not stop being furious and it does not matter, it is the best one yet, anger and want in the same channel wide open, and he holds my hips through all of it saying gorgeous, saying mine, saying still angry, look at you, magnificent.
“Your turn,” I breathe. “Say it first.”
“I am going to cum inside my unforgiving wife, and in the morning nothing will be fixed, and I would not trade this for fixed.”
“Then have it.”
He goes with his head back against the wall and my name coming apart in his mouth, and I keep moving on him, slow, wringing it out, and I watch his face the whole time, and when it lets him go he pulls me down onto his chest with both arms and stays inside me and holds on.
We lie there under a dust sheet in a cold building with the tide going under the floor.
“Three days,” he says after a while. “I want to tell you what the protocol cost.”
“Tell me.”
“I rehearsed every sentence I said to you. Every one, in my head, before it came out, so that none of it would land like a request.” His hand is moving up and down my spine.
“And I stopped putting the cup at your elbow. That was not a rule. Nobody made it a rule. I took it away myself in case you did not want it from me, and I have carried that cup in my head all week.”
“Put it back.”
“Valeria…”
“Tomorrow. At 4. Put the cup down and say nothing, and I will drink it and say nothing, and that will be the entry for tomorrow.” I lift my head off his chest. “One line a day, husband. That is how an account like this rebuilds. No balloon payments. No grand gestures. A cup at 4.”
He nods once, slow, like a man being read terms he intends to honor.
The kitten has relocated from the chair to the pile of his jacket beside us and is asleep with its wrong ear against my knee.
I put my hand on my husband’s jaw and turn his face toward me, and I kiss him at the corner of his mouth, first, on the exact spot, the ritual handed back across the border, and his breath stops, and I feel the whole of him go quiet under my hands like a house when the weather finally passes.
Neither of us says anything about it.
He takes the notebook down off the shelf and hands it to me without being asked, and we walk up the lawn at 9:40 p.m. with his coat around my shoulders and the notebook dry under it and Soldo riding inside it like a stolen wallet, and the water-side guard rotates at 10, and nobody comes past the path.
Entry, Wednesday, written sitting up in bed at half past eleven with wet hair: one kitten, no provenance, no papers, not on any list. One husband, no absolution, no better footing than he had at 6 o’clock.
Both of them coming into this house with me anyway.