21. Blank #2
He takes me up four steps to the landing where the window is and puts me against the wall beside it and gets my clothes out of the way with an efficiency that has nothing gentle in it at all, and the first thing he says, with his mouth against my ear, is my name.
“Valeria.”
“Do not.”
“Valeria.” His hand is between my legs, and he is not asking for anything. “You are already soaking. Say something about that.”
“You are a bastard.”
“That is not about that. Try again.”
“I have been like this since the stairs,” I say. “Since you said two of those.”
“Yes you have.” Two fingers, and he does not build up to anything, he simply starts, and I go up onto my toes with my back flat against the wall.
“You want to know what I think. I think you have spent all day in a room proving my brother was a liar and the only thing in the world you want right now is to be so full of me that there is no room left for it, and you are going to get exactly that, Valeria, and you are going to hear your name the entire time.”
“Lorenzo, please…”
“Ask properly.”
“Fuck me on the stairs.”
He does.
He does it hard and he does it fast and he does not once ask me if I am all right, because I have told him not to, and the whole staircase is making a noise it has probably never made in a hundred and ten years.
And every four or five strokes, in that flat, low voice, like a man setting down a stone.
“Valeria.”
“Stop it.”
“Valeria.”
“Stop…”
“Valeria. Look at me.”
I do not look at him. I put my forehead against his shoulder and I hold on to the back of his shirt with both fists and I let it happen to me, and it is not tender and it is not kind and it is the single most cared-for I have been in nine years, and I cum on that landing with my mouth open against his collarbone and no sound coming out at all.
“There she is,” he says.
Then he takes me up the rest of the stairs, and we do not make it as far as the bed.
The bedroom door shuts behind us, and I turn around and put my hands on it, high, because I know what I am doing, and he stops.
“No,” he says.
“Lorenzo.”
“Not facing away.”
“I am not asking you for kindness. I am asking you to…”
“I know what you are asking me for.” His hands are on my hips, and he has not moved me an inch. “You want the wall in front of your face instead of me. You can have anything in this room and you cannot have that.”
I put my forehead against the door.
“Then what,” I say.
He turns me around, and he puts one hand under my thigh and lifts, and he puts me against that door with my back to it and my eyes eight inches from his, which is the exact opposite of what I asked for and precisely what I wanted, and I make a sound that I would not want played back to me.
“Now,” he says. “Both of them. Every clause. Out loud.”
“I am not doing that tonight.”
“Yes you are, because I am about to be too far gone to talk and one of us has to.”
“You are unbelievable…”
“Valeria.”
“Fine.” My arms go around his neck. “Clause one. I have wanted this since you said you would not be careful.”
“Keep going.”
“Clause two. You are already shaking, and we have not started.”
“Clause three.”
“Clause three.” I get my mouth right up against his ear, because if he is going to do this to me then I am going to do it back.
“Scopami contro questa porta finché non riesco più a stare in piedi.” Then again, in English, so that he cannot pretend he did not hear it.
“You are going to fuck me against this door until I cannot stand up, and then you are going to carry me to the bed, and then you are going to do it again slower, and I am going to let you, and at no point tonight am I going to say the thing you have been waiting since the boathouse to hear me say.”
He goes completely still.
“Say that last part again.”
“No,” I say. “Move.”
And he does, and it is not slow and it is not quiet, and he says my name so many times against my throat that it stops being a word and turns into something else entirely, some noise that only means here, here, here, and I cum with my back against a door in a house I did not grow up in, holding on to a man I have been married to for sixteen days, crying in a way that has nothing to do with being sad.
He does not stop.
I told him not to and he does not, and that is the whole of it, that is the entire thing I will think about at four in the morning for the rest of my life, that when I said do not be careful with me he heard it correctly, and when I cried he checked my face once and read it right and kept going.
He carries me to the bed and he does it again slower, exactly as instructed.
That one takes a long time and it is a different animal completely, and by the end of it I am past language and he is saying things into my hair that I will pretend tomorrow that I did not hear, and when he cums he says my name again, and it is the last thing either of us says for about twenty minutes.
Afterward I lie on his chest in the dark with my leg over his and my hand flat over his heart.
“You did not get what you asked for,” he says.
“No.”
“Are you angry?”
“Furiously,” I say, and he laughs, and I feel it come up through the whole length of him, and I have not felt anybody laugh underneath me in nine years.
I wake up at ten past three with the answer in my mouth.
That is how it happens with me. It always has. Never at the table, never with the lamp on, never when I am trying. It arrives in the dark like something posted through a door.
The blanks are not hurried.
I am sitting up before I know I have moved.
Eleven forms. Eleven signatures. Not one has the little half-millimeter break on the downstroke that his hand made when he was going fast, the one that is on the pink slip because he signed that one standing at a counter with somebody waiting behind him.
Eleven blanks, and every one of them patient.
The way you sign a name that is not yours.
My hand goes to the nightstand before it goes anywhere else, because habit is quicker than I am.
I take it off again.
I get out of bed and I stand in the middle of that room with my heart going and I have my hand on the door before I stop.
God, I want it. I want it so badly that my hands are already reaching for the light.
I have spent twenty years in rooms telling people that the evidence does not care what you want.
Fifteen days ago I sat in a storage unit in Queens and told this same man that the first thing they would hand me was the thing I most wanted to see, and that I would look at it last.
A man who wants a forgery badly enough will find one.
Lorenzo said that to me about his brother, on his knees in Mount Vernon, into an evidence bag, in his own handwriting. I am not qualified. My wanting has weight, and weight bends things.
I am not qualified either.
So I get back into bed and I lie on my back with my eyes open. I do not turn the light on, and I make myself say it in my head, in order, the way I would to a jury.
There is a tell on eleven pieces of paper.
I found it in the dark, alone, wanting it more than I have wanted anything since the hospital.
And I am the only person in this house tonight who cannot be trusted with it.
So it does not go in the book. That makes two things I have not written down since the nineteenth of July, and I lie in the dark until the sky goes gray holding both of them.