18. Kept #2
I have wanted to take my time since the boathouse, and now she has both hands in my hair and her heel against my back and she is saying my name in the middle of sentences that do not finish.
“Tell me,” she says. “Tell me what it is like. Out loud. You made me say every clause of a contract out loud in an office. You can say this.”
“You want it itemized?”
“I want it itemized.”
“You are wet enough that it is on my chin.” I say it flatly, the way I would read a figure.
“You taste better than anything that has ever been in my mouth. You are swollen right here, and every time I do this, you try to close your legs and then you open them wider, and you have done that four times in the last minute.”
“Five.”
“Five. I stand corrected.”
“Do it again.”
“Say what you want.”
“I want your mouth on my clit, and I want you to keep it there until I cum on your face,” she says, “and I want you to tell me when I am close, because you know before I do.”
“Christ.”
“That is one,” she says. “Do it.”
So I do it, and she cums with my hands holding her wrists down flat on the wood, out loud, in her own voice, nothing about it forged and nothing about it quiet.
Then I stand her up and turn her around and walk her to the window.
The study window is eight feet of black glass at this hour with the lamps behind us, which makes it a mirror.
“Lorenzo.”
“You said nobody has ever looked at you.” I put her hands flat on the cold glass, and I keep mine over them. “Look.”
“I do not want to…”
“Look at her.”
There is a woman in that window with her hair down and her mouth open and my hands on her, and she is not a shape somebody found in a file, and I put my mouth against her ear and I tell her so while I take her from behind.
“That is the one he cannot have,” I say. “Look at her. Look what she does when I go in. Do you see that? She just closed her eyes. Open them.”
“Oh my God…”
“Open them, Valeria.”
She opens them.
“Now say what you see.”
“I see you.” Her voice breaks in the middle of it. “I see your hand on my throat, and I see… I see me letting you.”
“Say the rest. All the clauses.”
“I see my husband fucking me against a window in his father’s study.” She is pushing back onto me now and her breath is fogging the glass in front of her mouth. “And I see that I am enjoying it. And I see that I am going to let you do it again tomorrow. Put it in the minutes.”
“Noted.”
“Harder.”
“Ask.”
“Fuck me harder, Lorenzo, and tell me how it feels or I swear to God…”
“It feels,” I say, “like the best fucking thing that has ever happened to me in my life. You are so tight I cannot see straight. You are so wet I can hear it, listen to it, that is you, and every time I say something filthy to you it gets worse.” I get an arm across her hips and hold her still.
“And you are watching yourself take it, and you love it, and there is not one line of that on any piece of paper anywhere in the world.”
She cums against the glass with both palms flat and her forehead on the window and my name coming out of her in pieces.
She is not finished with me.
She turns around inside my arms and puts two hands on my chest and walks me backward until the rug stops me, and then she puts me down on it.
“On your back.”
“Valeria.”
“You have been running this for twenty minutes.” She is already kneeling over me, and her hair is a disaster, and she has never looked like this in her life. “It is my turn to do the narrating.”
And then my wife puts her mouth on me for the first time, and describes it.
“I am going to take my time,” she says, against me, so I feel every word of it. “And I am going to tell you every single thing I am doing while I do it, because you like that, and because I want to hear what your voice does.”
“Valeria…”
“Clause one.” Her hand closes. “I have wanted to do this since the elevator.”
“God…”
“Clause two. You are shaking. Lorenzo D’Amato is shaking, and I did that.” Her mouth again, and by the third clause I have a fistful of the rug, and I am no longer a person with a surname. “Clause three. You taste like…”
“Do not.” I can hardly get it out. “If you finish that sentence, I am done, and you will be furious with me.”
She laughs with her mouth on me, which nearly ends it anyway, and then she lifts her head and looks up the length of me with her chin wet and her eyes absolutely full of murder and love.
“Then get up,” she says, “and put me in that chair.”
I do better than that.
I get up and I pick her up, and she gets her legs around me. I sit down in the reading chair by the window with all of her in my lap, and she stops.
Face to face.
“Eyes open,” she says.
“Valeria.”
“That is the rest of what I want.” She is already lowering herself onto me, and it takes everything I have not to close them. “He can watch me. Fine. Let him. Nobody has ever looked at me. Look at me.”
So I look at her.
She takes me in slowly, all the way, and neither of us says anything for a second, and then she starts to move.
“Say it,” she says.
“Cazzo. Fuck. You feel so fucking good I cannot think.”
“Then do not think.” Her forehead comes down against mine. “Tell me the rest of the list.”
“You are shaking.”
“That is not on the list.”
“It is now. You shake here. And here. And when you do that thing you are doing right now with your hips, which you have done four times in your life and every one of them was with me, he will die not knowing.”
She makes a sound like something breaking that is not sad.
“Say my name.”
“Valeria.”
“Again.”
“Valeria.” I have both hands on her hips and I am holding her down and I am watching her break open eight inches from my face with her eyes open.
“Valeria. Valeria Rinaldi. You are not a shape somebody found. You are not the fourth of anything. You are the only one there has ever been of you, and I have looked at you every single day since the hospital, and I could pick your hands out of a hundred, and I would know you in the dark, I would know you dead…”
And that is when she cums the third time, on that word.
I go right after her. I say things I do not remember. She holds my head against her chest with both arms and does not let go for a long time, and I can hear her heart doing something I would like to hear every day I have left.
The page closes at about eleven o’clock at night, with both of us still in that chair and neither of us dressed, and it does not close the way I have been imagining it for five days.
She says, “I am not going to keep it open anymore.”
I do not move.
“The lie,” she says. “The injector. Fifteen days of it. I am putting it down.”
“You do not have to do that tonight.”
“I know I do not have to.” Her fingers are in my hair. “I have been carrying two things that were not mine. I put the first one down on the kitchen floor yesterday, and I have decided that was enough weight for one week.”
“Valeria.”
“Do not thank me.” She says it fast. “If you thank me, I will pick it back up out of spite.”
So I do not thank her.
I do not say the other thing either, the one that has been sitting behind my teeth since the boathouse, because a man who has already used this woman once does not get to be the first one to say a word like that.
I can wait. I have waited eleven years for things I wanted less than this.
Tazio comes to the door at half past midnight.
I open it four inches. Soldo, who has been asleep against it for three hours, falls over the threshold into the room in a small startled heap, recovers his dignity in the time it takes him to stand up, and walks past both of us without a word to go and sit on Valeria’s discarded blouse, which he then kneads for a while with his eyes shut, as though something in this house has finally been arranged correctly.
“You said tonight,” he says.
“All of it.”
“Concetta Vanni has been receiving eight hundred and forty dollars on the first of every month for nine years and eleven months.” He is holding the paper like it is warm. “It comes out of a custodial account in Providence. It has never been late. Not once. Not in a hundred and nineteen months.”
Providence.
The same account that cut three condolence checks to my wife.
I stand in the doorway of a room where the woman I love is asleep in a chair with a blanket over her and a kitten curled into the bend of her knees.
He did not kill Tullio Vanni and walk away.
He killed him, and then he went and found the wife, and he has paid her on the first of the month for nine years and eleven months without missing once.
My mother built a fund to take care of widows.
Somebody has been making his own.