CHAPTER 17 #3
He moves. Slow. Long strokes. He keeps his eyes on my face.
His left hand is at the side of my jaw, his thumb at my freckle; his right hand has come down to the place where our bodies meet and his thumb is at my clit.
He works me in slow, even circles. The orgasm rebuilds — different from the first one; this is the slow climb I know from Ch 13, the climb I can map, the climb that is not the bell-ring of the bite but the steady wave of him moving inside me with his thumb at my clit. He says, low, "Tell me when."
"Soon."
He keeps the rhythm. The cedar smoke; the copper of his breath; the marble cold of his thigh against my inner thigh; the warmth of the bite-site at my throat where the saliva enzyme is still working; the brand under his sleeve at the underside of my jaw where his forearm holds my face.
I come at twenty-two thirty. I come with a long shudder that runs from my throat to the soles of my feet.
I come with his name in my mouth, the second name I have given him, the only name I have for him on a night like this.
"Vance."
He keeps moving. He keeps watching. He says, low, "I am close.
" I nod. He moves three more strokes, four, five, and on the seventh his hips slow and his breath catches and he is coming inside me at twenty-two thirty-eight, his pupils blown black, his temples warm to my fingertips when I lift my left hand to his face.
He says, low, into the corner of my jaw —
"Quinn."
Once.
We are still. The fire is still. The harbor is still. The 1925 brass alarm clock on the bedside table is not wound yet; it does not tick. The only sound is our breath, slowing.
---
He does not pull out for a long time. He has lowered himself onto his elbows above me; he is breathing into the hollow of my collarbone on the unmarked side; the side where his fangs were is closed and bruising a faint rose-purple that I will see in the bathroom mirror in twenty minutes.
He does not move off me; he does not move out of me; he just stays.
After what I count as four minutes — I am still counting; the auditor does not stop counting even when she has come twice and been fed from for the first time in her life — he kisses my hairline.
He kisses my forehead. He kisses my mouth.
He pulls out of me, slow, and lies beside me on his left side, his right arm across my hipbones.
"Helene," he says.
"In twenty minutes."
"Good. " He breathes once, deep, and then, low: "Quinn."
"I am all right."
"I am asking."
"I am all right. " I turn my face to him. The bruise at my throat already feels like a heat-print, not a wound. "I used the word once."
"You did."
"You stopped."
"I did."
"In two beats."
"In two beats. " A small lift at the corner of his mouth — the closest he comes, ever, to a smile. "You doubted I would?"
"No."
"Quinn. " He puts his right palm flat over my sternum. "The first time the word is used between us I want you to know I count my obedience to it as the most important thing I will ever do."
"I know."
"Tell me you know."
"I know."
He nods. He sits up. He gets off the bed, naked, and walks the eight steps to the velvet-lined door of the master bath. He turns the bath taps. He turns the shower as well; the two heads come on. He comes back.
He lifts me off the bed — not carrying, exactly, more like setting me on my feet with his hands at my ribs, an inch above the monitor patch, careful — and walks me through the door into the marble.
---
The master bath is the cold-white of Carrara, the dark veining like ink in milk.
The cast-iron tub is filling. The shower at the far end is running; both heads on; the rain head and the wall head.
He has set them both to hot. The marble ceiling above the shower has begun to bead with steam — small drops of water gathering on the cold stone, rolling along the underside of the curve. I have not seen this before.
The bath is private enough to bathe in; the shower is large enough to live in. He has run the shower for me to look at while we are in the bath.
He helps me into the tub. The water is warm — body-warm, not hot; Helene's protocol is a safe heat after a feed.
He gets in across from me. He sits with his knees drawn up; his shoulders against the curved back of the tub; his pale gray eyes on me.
The bath is large enough that our feet do not touch unless we want them to.
I want them to. I extend my right foot; I rest it against the inside of his left ankle.
"Steam," I say, looking up.
He follows my line of sight. The marble ceiling above the shower is fogged now; the beads have begun to roll, slow, along the curve toward the wall. I watch a single drop run the length of one of the dark veins in the marble, the veined line acting as a track, the drop hitting the wall and falling.
"You like the steam."
"I like the rolling."
"It will go for ten minutes. The shower."
"I know."
He has run the shower because he wants me to look at it.
He has run it because there is no scene yet in our short shared life where I have been wrapped in heat without him being the source of the heat, and tonight he wanted to give me a heat the building made, the heat of two showerheads on at once and the marble fogged and the small living shape of water doing what water does.
I lean my head back against the tub's lip. I close my eyes. He says, low, "Quinn."
"Mm."
"I have wanted to feed from you for nine weeks."
"I know."
"I have wanted not to feed from you for nine weeks at the same time."
"I know."
"I have wanted to be inside you while I did it for nine weeks."
"I know."
"I have wanted to say the third thing for nine weeks."
I open my eyes. The marble ceiling has gone full white with the steam now. The drops are running.
"Three things, Vance," I say. "Tell me again."
His mouth — at the corner — lifts. "I will not take more than a cup."
"And the second."
"I will leave you able to walk."
"And the third."
He breathes out, slow. He says, low: "I love you."
"I heard you the first time."
"I am going to keep telling you," he says, "until you are tired of hearing it. And then I will tell you again."
I do not say it back. I look at him in the bath with the marble steaming over us and the small line of his throat where my mouth was earlier and the silver-streak at his right temple, and I do not say it back.
I want to say it back. I do not. The word is mine; I will give it to him when it is ready to leave my mouth, and not before.
He has given it to me at twenty-one hundred under his own roof in the cadence of his old-world Latinate diction, and that is the gift, and I am holding the gift in my hands and looking at it and I will not give a gift back in the same hour.
He sees the not-saying. He nods, slow. He understands.
"When you are ready," he says.
"Yes."
"I will be here."
"I know."
He pulls me forward in the water. I float across to him; my legs settle around his hips; I am sitting on him in the bath now, my arms around his neck, the warm water at my ribs, my throat at the level of his mouth.
He does not bite. He puts his lips at the small closed place where the bite was. He kisses it. Not for healing; the wound is already closed; he kisses it for tenderness, for the thank-you he does not say in words.
He stands me up. He gets out. He wraps me in a white towel from the heated bar — the towel is large enough to be a small blanket — and he stands me on the heated marble floor.
He takes a second towel and begins to wrap my hair.
The shower is still running behind us; the steam has rolled the full length of the marble ceiling now and is beading along the bath-side wall in a slow lace.
I watch the steam roll while he twists the towel into the turban he has watched the women in his life do for five hundred years and that he has never, before this moment, with me, attempted himself. The turban is competent. He has been paying attention.