Chapter 11 #2
His mouth. My throat. The hollow between my collarbones where my pulse was hammering so hard he could probably taste it.
Lower — the curve of my breast, and I sucked in a breath, and his hand came up and held the other one, his thumb dragging across the nipple, slow and deliberate, and my hips moved against him without permission.
He made a sound against my skin. Low. Hungry. And I stopped thinking.
His mouth on my ribs. The dip of my waist. My hip, and his teeth grazed the bone and I gasped and grabbed his hair.
The inside of my thigh, and his hands spreading me open, and I could feel his breath on me, hot, and my whole body was shaking, and then his mouth was on me and my back arched off the mattress.
He was thorough. He was devastating. He found the rhythm that made my thighs shake around his head and he stayed on it, relentless, his hands holding my hips down when I tried to move, and I said his name — "Raq" — said it against the dark, and he groaned against me and the vibration of it almost ended me.
"Say it again." His voice against the most sensitive part of me.
I looked down and his eyes were fully blue — all the dark burned out of them, just blue, just light — and he held my gaze and put his mouth back on me and I said it again, I said it loud, I said it with my hands fisted in the sheets and my heels digging into his back, and I came so hard the room went white.
He kissed his way back up my body while I was still shaking.
My stomach. My ribs. The underside of my breast. I pulled at his shoulders — "now, come here, now" — and he settled between my thighs, and I could feel him against me, hard, and I reached between us and took him in my hand and the sound he made — wrecked, desperate — was the best thing I had ever heard.
"Now," I said against his mouth. Plain. No jokes left.
He pushed into me slow. Watching my face. Those blue eyes steady on mine, and I watched them back, and he filled me inch by inch and the sound I made was not a sound I'd ever made before. He held there, fully inside me, both of us breathing hard, and his forehead dropped against mine.
"Cate," he said. My name. Like it cost him everything he had.
I moved my hips. He moved with me. Slow at first, finding the rhythm, his hand coming under my knee and opening me wider, deeper, and the angle changed and I gasped and grabbed his arm and said "there, right there" and he stayed there, he stayed exactly there, and the slow became something else.
The air around us was doing something. Warm, charged, pressing against my skin from every direction like the room itself had a pulse. I couldn't tell if it was him or me or the space between us. I didn't care.
His hand between my shoulder blades, lifting me against him.
His rhythm changed — harder, deeper, his grip on my hip tight enough to bruise and I wanted it, I wanted the marks.
His mouth on my neck, his teeth on my shoulder, and I was loud enough that Donnie banged the radiator pipe twice, and neither of us cared.
His breathing ragged in my ear, his whole body shaking with the effort of holding back.
"Don't hold back," I said, and he didn't.
And underneath everything — I could feel him.
Not just where he touched me. INSIDE. When he pushed deeper, I felt the ache of it in my body and in his, two versions of the same nerve firing, and when I tightened around him his breath caught and I felt that too, felt his pleasure hit the back of my spine like a second pulse.
Every place we touched ran in both directions.
I didn't understand it. I didn't try. I just held on.
He came with my name on his mouth, his whole body shuddering, and the feeling of him letting go — the man who never lets go — took me over the edge with him, and the dark behind my closed eyes went briefly, impossibly, bright.
The lamp on the nightstand had died at some point. I hadn't noticed when.
We lay in the wreck of Nonna's quilt, and his hand moved in my hair, slow and careful, and I couldn't square it — those hands, what they'd just done to me, and now this gentleness, like I was something he was afraid to smudge.
I put my ear on his chest. His heart was slow. Slower than it should have been, for what we'd just done. I didn't think about that.
Then I did. I pushed at his shoulder. "Turn over."
He turned. I ran my hand down his back — lazy, half-asleep, tracing the shape of him — and found the scars again. Two ridges under my fingers. I traced the full length of one, then the other.
He went still under my hand.
I leaned down and kissed them. One, then the other. My mouth on the raised line of each scar, and I felt his breath catch under my lips. His hand found mine on the mattress and held it. Tight.
I didn't ask again. He didn't explain. I kissed them the way I'd want someone to kiss the worst thing that ever happened to me. Then I tugged his shoulder again, and he turned back, and I put my head on his chest and listened to his heart, and the room was dark, and the room was enough.
The last thought I had before sleep was about his name.
Raq. Short for something. He'd said say it again like he was hearing music after years of silence. Whatever the full name was, I'd earned it. I'd ask in the morning.
Asking was a thing I did now.
RAQ
She sleeps the way she works: entirely, with her whole force, one fist closed in the quilt as if the quilt had tried something.
I lay still with her head on my chest.
For one hour the oldest inventory system in creation held a sleeping woman and counted nothing.
Something in me that had been empty a long time was filling. I knew what it was. I did not name it. Names are weight, and the night had held enough.
She had kissed the scars. Both of them, the full length, her mouth gentle on the place where the wings were — and some part of me that has been braced against that touch for ten thousand years did not know what to do with gentleness, and is not going to learn tonight, and does not need to.
She is asleep on my chest. Her breathing is the only clock in the room.
The lamp was dead. I had done that — felt it go, the way you feel a glass slip from a wet grip.
The hum. The light at the end, coming up behind her closed eyes.
Her body against mine still held the warmth of the current that had run through both of us.
I let it stand in the middle of me, enormous, unnamed.
She murmured something. Half a word — the curtain, possibly; a small domestic litigation continuing in her sleep — and settled deeper, and the trust of it went through me worse than the wanting had.
I rose when her breathing reached the bottom of its tide. Dressed. Stood a moment in the dark: the quilt without me in it. The paint on her knuckles, ochre and a white. The eleven saints keeping their counsel.
Then I went to the window and stood between her and the street.
The dead streetlight. The alley gate I had closed and wired shut. The roofline where the thing had stood in my spot, timing my route, learning my nights.
The trace lay on the block like a whisper — thin, patient, one part per ten million of the dark. Wet stone and doused embers, and something new under it: attention. It was not casing the house anymore. It was watching the way I watch. It had learned that from me.
Behind me she took one long breath and released it, asleep, unafraid.
I put my hand flat on the cold glass, over the reflection of the room, the bed, all of it — everything a thing like me is built to cost — and I said it to the empty street, quietly, in this language, so there would be no possibility of being misunderstood.
"I know you're there."