CHAPTER 20 #3
He drove deeper. He gave her his weight.
He let the rhythm shorten by a quarter; her body was opening into the after of the first, and the second was already in the line of her sternum where the linen bunched, and he found the second in her by leaning forward and putting his chest against the line of her shoulder blades and pressing her wrists more deeply against the small of her back and gathering her against him from above; and his cock at the angle was now full and direct against the front wall of her, and the pad of his finger had held its place at her clit, and the firelight had held its place against the wall, and the cedar was the air.
The brand against the back of her wrist. The copper at the back of his throat from his own bitten lip where he had set his teeth a beat ago to keep from drawing on her, because he had told himself before he came into this room that there would be no bite tonight, and he had told himself that he would keep that promise.
She came a second time at the twelfth minute.
The second was a sharper thing. Her hips bucked once against his hand.
Her shoulder blades pulled tight in a long arch.
Her wrists tensed against his palm and her cunt around him pulsed faster and harder and more, and her face turned half-into the linen, and at the apex of it she shouted — one syllable, into the white wool — fuck. Once.
The word she had held back since Friday, the word she gave him only when a thing was past the line of what she could keep behind her teeth.
He drove through the shout. The rhythm took him with it.
His own crest rose. He held himself for two beats at the top of it because he wanted to see the line of her shoulder blade in the firelight while he came; he wanted to remember that the line of her shoulder blade in the firelight on the night Ines was dead was the line of her shoulder blade in the firelight; and he came inside her at the thirteenth minute on a single long stroke that he held to the hilt.
He came forward over her. He bent. He put his mouth at the slope of her left shoulder where the muscle ran into the collarbone.
He set his upper canines against her skin and pressed.
The pressure was firm. It was the shape of the bite he had not made.
He held the canine pressure for three seconds. He did not break the skin.
He felt the give of her flesh under the points of his canines; he felt the catch in her breath against his cheek; he tasted the salt on her skin and the faint trace of the camisole's silk-laundering on her shoulder; he held back the draw.
He released the pressure. He kissed the place where his teeth had been.
He kissed the place again. He took his teeth away.
He released her wrists.
He stayed where he was. He stayed inside her, slack, his hands set against her hipbones to hold her gently while he softened, and he bent his forehead to the place between her shoulder blades and breathed against the heat of her skin in a way he had not breathed against another human body since 1530.
She held still. She breathed. She let him stay.
He pulled out. He drew her up onto the linens with him.
He rolled her toward him and she came willingly against his side, and he reached down to the foot of the bed and unfolded the ivory wool blanket and drew it up over both of them.
He set her under his right arm. He set her head against the hollow under his collarbone.
He set his right palm at the small of her back.
He set his left hand on the linen beside them with the brand turned upward to the ceiling. He kept his mouth shut.
She kept hers shut too.
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The wood fire popped once at half past eleven.
He counted the pop the way a man counts a clock.
The cedar in the air had thinned by half; the iron grate had gone a degree cooler; the smoke at the flue was a faint pale line he could see if he turned his head.
He kept his head where it was. He watched the ceiling.
He felt her breath against his collarbone go from the rhythm of a woman recovering from her body to the rhythm of a woman lying still beside a man. She stayed awake. She watched his face. He let her.
The brass radiator in the library below them ticked, twice, at quarter to midnight, against the cold. He counted that too.
He had spent four hundred and ninety-eight years lying beside no one with the brand turned upward to a ceiling.
He had spent ninety-nine of them with Ines Calder in the field somewhere on his timetable.
He had spent forty of those with her ten miles north of him, on the rotation he had given her so she would be near the city she had loved; he had given her the Boston Conservatory cover because she had asked for it, because she had wanted to play her cello in front of children for the years she had left before her face stopped aging in a way the Conservatory would notice.
He had given her the cello in storage on floor 39 when she came in from the Conservatory in 1962 because the storage was secure and the climate was correct and the question of her returning to claim it was a question he had left unasked.
She had left it on the shelf. She had said, once, in 1979, I will play it again when I am tired of standing at the line, sir, and the tiredness had stayed elsewhere.
The cello in storage on floor 39 was a Gagliano. Naples, 1764. He had been the one to procure it for her in 1925. He had paid in cash.
He had kept all of that from Eliza. He would tell her some of it. He would keep the rest. The not-telling was the discipline of having lived this long.
He counted to forty minutes by the radiator's ticks and by the wood fire's pops and by the rhythm of Eliza's breath against his collarbone, and at the fortieth minute he spoke.