CHAPTER 7 #3
That undoes me. The words do it, more than the fingers, though the fingers are undoing me too.
When you stop being the bargain. He's read me down to the raw seam, the one I keep basted shut, and he's put his mouth on the wound and called it good.
The pleasure goes up through me from where his tongue works, gathers behind my belly, behind the soft give of me that I have made such a careful peace with, and breaks — breaks hard, my back arching off the brick, a sound coming out of me I didn't authorize, my thighs clenching around his head and his hands gripping the give of them like he'll hold me up through anything, my fingers fisted in his hair.
"There she is," he says into me, riding it out with me, slow now, gentling, his mouth soft.
"There she is. Good girl. God, look at you.
Look at you come for me. " And he stays down there, easing me through the aftershocks with his tongue and his thumb, until I'm a shaking soft-boned wreck propped on the cold wall with my hand in his hair and the machine chattering on through the wall like nothing in the world has changed.
He presses one last kiss to the inside of my thigh, and then to the soft of my belly, and then he rises up the length of me and sets his forehead to mine, both of us breathing hard, his hands settling on my hips like they belong there.
"You didn't —" I get out. He's hard. I can feel it against me. He hasn't touched himself once. "Gael, you didn't take —"
"I told you. " His voice has gone rough and quiet, all the swagger spent, just a man in the amber light with his hands full of me.
"Tonight wasn't about me. " He searches my face, and whatever he finds there makes his own go strange — because I know what's on mine.
I know I'm looking at him stunned, undone, faintly devastated, like someone has handed me a thing I'd long ago crossed off the list of things that were real and asked nothing for it.
And the sight of that on my face wrecks him. I watch it happen. The dangerous one, the blade, the youngest, gazing down at me like he can't decide whether he gave the gift or got it. "Hey," he says softly. "Hey. Why do you look like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like nobody ever —" He stops. His jaw works.
The grin that comes is too wide and I'm already learning what too wide means on him, that the widest grin is the deepest hurt, and he covers the crack in himself with it the way I cover a raw edge with bias tape.
"Like nobody ever did that just to do it. "
I don't answer. The truth is too naked. No one had.
Every man who'd ever knelt in any sense in front of me had been keeping a ledger, even if he didn't call it that, even Mateo with his not until you ask, the whole world a counter and me always handing over the coin.
No one had ever simply knelt. No one had bowed his head at my hips and asked for nothing back.
"Get dressed, trouble, before Bea comes back here and proposes to me.
" He kisses my temple, gentle, and steps back to give me the room, and bends to gather my blouse and hand it to me like a courtier, the most ridiculous tenderness, and I almost say something then. I almost break open and say all of it.
I button my blouse instead. I fix my skirt with hands that aren't steady.
And over Gael's auburn head, past the row of patient faceless forms and their giant shadows going gray now as the light fails, I see it: the cardboard records box in the back corner where I'd left it, ten feet away, my father's manifests in his careful hand, the one card I hold that all three of them want, the paper that could prove what Lev did or could get me killed for proving it.
Gael's whole body has been on his knees for me.
He asked for nothing. He called it free.
And every soft cell of me wants to walk over to that box and put it in his scarred hands and say here, this is what you came for, take it, I trust you, because he's just made me feel like a woman who can afford to trust.
I don't.
I tuck my blouse in and I smile at him and I say, "Tell Pavel we'll go in ten," and I keep my eyes off the box, and I don't say a word about it, because I have built a life on the certainty that nothing is free, and one beautiful man on his knees on my floor stands as thin proof against a whole lifetime of the opposite. It's the only card I have.
A woman who learned the cost of trust in a court corridor keeps her last card close even when a man is tender with his mouth, and she keeps it close from him most of all, tenderness like his being exactly the kind that costs a woman everything.
Not yet, I tell myself. Earn it. All of you. Earn it first.
Pavel drives me home up the cliff road in the dark, the foghorn starting its slow note out on the Sound, the gate lamps of Sokol House rising up out of the fog.
Gael rides in the front beside Pavel and keeps twisting to look back at me, and every time he does it that too-wide grin is a little less wide, a little more like a man who's been handed something instead of a man holding a knife.
No one had ever knelt to me like the kneeling was the whole gift and not the down payment on something owed. I ride home with my thighs still trembling and my father's records ten feet from where I came apart, and I tell Gael nothing.
Not yet.