Chapter 37 #2
He pressed his mouth to the swell of it. Once. Still. His hand spread over my stomach, covering the whole of it, and something moved through him that was older than desire, the thing under it, and I put my hand over his hand, and we stayed like that. One breath. Two.
"Both of you," he said, against my skin. Not to me.
Then his mouth kept going, and the reverence turned filthy by degrees, exactly as I'd hoped it would.
He hooked my knee over his shoulder like he was setting a table. Kissed the inside of my thigh, high, deliberate, and looked up the length of me with those burning eyes while his thumb dragged through exactly how ready I was.
"Five days," he said, low, wrecked, reverent as a curse. "And you're this wet for me."
"Are you going to talk about it or—"
His mouth came down on me and the sentence died in office.
He licked into me slow, learning me all over again, and when I gasped he did it again, and when I swore he settled in — patient, precise, merciless, his tongue circling my clit at a pace he refused to negotiate no matter what I called him, and I called him plenty.
My hips came up. His forearm came down across them. Easily. Pinned.
"Raq — God —"
"Not quite," he said, into me, and the word hummed straight through the center of me, and I broke — hard, loud, his name and half the saints in one breath, his mouth working me through every wave of it and refusing to stop until I pushed at his head.
He pressed one last kiss to the inside of my thigh. A signature.
"Again," he said.
"I need — Raq. Now. I have waited—"
"I know exactly how long you have waited." He came up my body, took my hands, laced them through his on either side of my head. "To the hour."
He pushed inside me slow.
The stretch of him. The heat. The sound we both made — his forehead dropping to mine, a tremor going down the whole architecture of him, ten thousand years of discipline arriving at one bed in Bensonhurst — and he held there, all the way in, until I could breathe again.
Then he moved.
Deep. Unhurried. Nothing like the beach and everything the beach had promised — no goodbye in it, no secret under it, nothing held back anywhere in the length of him.
The headboard found the wall and kept time.
My nails found his back, the two old scars, the only receipts.
His voice found my ear, saying my name, the whole name, like a vow with one word in it.
"Harder," I said.
He stilled. Lifted his head. Looked at me — the question, the leash, the last inch of it.
"I'm cleared," I said. "All restrictions lifted. Harder."
The sound he made was not a human sound, and then there was no more slowly anywhere in the room — the bed frame arguing with the wall, his hand fisted in the quilt beside my head, tendons standing, all that held-back power finally spending itself and me rising to meet every stroke of it, loud, shameless, Donnie and the pipe and the whole borough be damned.
"Look at me," I said.
He did. Blue burning an inch away, nothing banked, nothing hidden, every century of him wide open.
"I love you," I said, straight into it. "I love you, Raq."
It broke him.
He came apart with a sound like a wall coming down, his whole strength shaking over me, and I went with him, looking into all that burning blue the entire way, his name in my mouth and mine breaking in half against my neck.
After, he stayed — forehead to my shoulder, heart going slow and enormous against mine, his hand already back on the curve of my belly like it had appointments there. The ten o'clock light had become the noon light, and neither of us had anywhere in creation to be.
"You said it," he said, into my shoulder.
"I said it."
"Say it again."
"Greedy." I turned my head and put my mouth to his ear and gave it to him slow, the way he gives me the true ones. "I love you. I loved you at the stoop and I loved you furious on that couch and I loved you standing on my roof with the whole sky coming. Now you know. Plan around it."
His arms closed, and the laugh moved through both of us — the real one, the rare one, wrecked and warm.
"So," I said, into his hair. "Normal activity."
His laugh moved through both of us — the real one, the rare one, wrecked and warm.
"I will write the doctor a card," he said.
We lay there while the noon light moved.
Under my palm his heart went on at its enormous unhurried pace, a clock built for a different span than mine — a body five days past a war and smooth as the day I met it, while my hospital bracelet was barely in the trash — and the thought arrived the way the true ones do, quietly, without asking.
"Raq."
"Mm."
"I'm going to get old."
The stillness came into him. Not the wall — the other one, the listening one.
"Yes," he said.
"And you're not."
"No."
I lifted my head and looked at him — at the face that will look exactly like this when my hair is white, when my hands can't hold a brush steady, when this house has buried me like it buried Nonna — and he looked back and did not soften it, and did not look away, because we don't lie in this bed.
"You told me once you stopped keeping homes," I said. "Because you furnish a life and you watch it empty. And you went and furnished this one anyway."
"Yes."
"Knowing."
"Knowing." His hand came up and tucked my hair back, and his voice stayed level the whole way down. "I have watched everything I ever kept empty out of my hands, Caterina. I know the price of this to the last hour, and I have never in the whole of my existence bought anything so gladly."
My eyes went hot. His thumb caught the first one before it fell.
"Okay," I said, when I could. "Then we don't waste any."
"No," he said. "We don't."
And we didn't waste that one — the noon light on the quilt, his heart under my hand, the small one keeping its quick time underneath — and whatever the sky decides about us someday, it is going to have to get through him first, and then it is going to have to get through me.