Chapter 17 #3
The same coin I’d spent in this room with my heart going like a dropped pot lid — stay, I’m asking — spent back to me by a thing that predates the language it asked in.
So, I did what he did when I asked. I didn’t make it gentle-careful, hedged, revocable.
I put both palms flat on his back, on the ruin, full weight.
The sound he made was not a human sound.
Whatever went through him went through him like a tide, a long shudder down the whole architecture of him, and the room hummed low enough to feel in my sternum, and under my hands the scars stayed exactly what they were, and I did not take my hands off them.
Then he turned around inside my arms.
His hands came up my back, and I reached for the lamp.
“Leave it.”
“Raq—”
“Every time before, you turned it off. I let you.” His thumb moved once across my knuckles. “I want to see you this time. All of it.”
“You’ve seen me.”
“I’ve felt you.” The blue came up. “It is not the same thing, and I have been living on the difference.”
“Oh,” I said. My voice was not entirely available. “Okay. The lamp stays.”
He took the rest of my clothes off slowly. Not carefully — slowly, with something like rage in it, at time, at everything he had never once been allowed to want.
And then his hands stopped being slow.
He picked me up like I weighed nothing and put me down on Nonna’s quilt, and came over me, and there was no more waiting in him anywhere.
His mouth went to my throat, my collarbone, the underside of my breast. His hand spread wide on my stomach and went lower and I heard myself say something that was not a word.
“That,” he said, against my skin. “Again.”
His mouth followed his hand.
Down my stomach. The crease of my hip. The inside of my thigh, where he stopped, and breathed, and I felt him take in the state of me and make that sound again, the not-human one, low enough to feel where I needed his mouth.
“Raq. Please.”
“I know,” he said, against me. “I can taste it.”
And then his mouth was on me, and the whole world went down to that.
He licked into me slow. Learning me all over again in the light — long, flat, unhurried strokes that had me fisting the quilt inside a minute, and then his tongue found my clit and settled in, patient and precise and merciless, circling, flicking, working me exactly where I needed it and refusing to hurry, and my hips came up off the bed.
His forearm came down across them. Easily. Without effort. Pinned.
“Oh God—”
“No,” he said into me, and the word hummed straight through my clit. “Just me.”
I laughed — broken, breathless — and the laugh turned into something else entirely when he slid two fingers into me, curled them, and found the spot that took my vision at the edges.
He worked me with his fingers and his mouth together, that ancient patience turned all the way onto one task, building it and building it, holding me down while I shook and swore and pulled his hair, keeping me exactly at the edge until I was begging in two languages, one of them Nonna’s.
“Now,” he said against me — permission, command, both. “Loud.”
I came apart with my thighs shaking around his shoulders and his name in my mouth like a curse — long, and hard, and he worked me through every wave of it and did not stop until I pushed at his head, and even then, he pressed one last slow kiss to the inside of my thigh like a signature.
He came up my body while I was still shaking.
“Again,” he said.
“Raq—”
“Again.” His eyes were burning blue an inch from mine, and nothing behind them was human, and he was not asking. “I know what you sound like in the dark. I want it in the light.”
He pushed inside me slow.
I could not breathe.
He held there, all the way in, forehead against mine, and something enormous shuddered through the whole length of him — and then he began to move, and it was deep and unhurried and absolutely deliberate, and every stroke took something out of me and put something back.
Under my palms his back was iron cabled with the effort of gentleness. A thing that could fold girders, holding itself to the pressure of a hand smoothing gold leaf.
And behind the heat of him — through every place we touched — there was cold.
Not his skin. His skin is a furnace. Behind it. All that dark, an open door at my back with all of history’s winters on the other side.
And every time I pulled him closer, every time I said his name — his real one, his short one, mine — the door swung a degree.
Warmth going through it the wrong way. Into the winter. Out of me, and losing me nothing.
There was more where it came from. There was more every time.
“Harder,” I said.
The look he gave me then was not a look a man gives a woman. It was the look of something enormous being told it no longer has to be careful.
And then he stopped being careful.
The bedframe hit the wall. I held on with my nails in his back and my mouth on his scarred shoulder and gave the winter everything it asked for, gladly, at volume — Donnie banged the pipe; the pipe can file a grievance — and the hum came up through the floorboards and my bones until I could feel how enormous the cold was, the sheer acreage of him, and instead of terror what came was the thing that always comes when I finally see the whole extent of the damage.
Everything in me rolled up its sleeves.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did.
I broke apart looking straight into all that burning blue, and he watched every second of it, and when he followed me he broke silently, which I was learning is how the oldest things break — his whole strength shaking over me, his face buried in my neck, my name said into my skin.
He came down onto his forearms, careful even wrecked, and stayed, his heartbeat going slow and enormous against mine, the lamp still burning.
"I still have questions," I said into his shoulder, when I could talk again.
I felt him smile against my neck. The real one, the one nobody else gets.
"I know," he said. "Ask me everything."