CHAPTER 9 #2
The scar through his left eyebrow catches the light when his face changes.
I'd never seen it move before — he holds the eyebrow still the way he holds everything still — but it moves now, lifts, the old white line of a nine-year-old boy and a chair and a lesson from the same man who murdered my father by inches, and I think, fierce and sudden, I will ruin his control before this is done. I will be the thing he can't square.
He reaches up and takes my wrist — the left one, his thumb finding the silvered needle-scar across the pad of my index finger like he'd cataloged its exact coordinates days ago and had only been waiting for clearance to confirm them — and he draws me down.
He doesn't pull me into his lap; he turns me, deliberate, sets my back against the front of his chair so I sit on the floor between his knees with the fire on my face and him behind and above me, his mouth at my ear, my whole front exposed to the warm room and his hands free to do whatever the math tells him.
"I'm going to tell you what I'll do," he says, low, "before I do it.
I find I can't help it. You'll forgive the narration; it's how I think.
" His hand slides down the inside of my forearm, slow, mapping.
"First I'm going to open your cardigan, because I want to see you in firelight and I've wanted it since the conservatory and I'm done pretending the want is noise.
Then I'm going to make you wait. You won't like the waiting.
That's the point of it. I want you past the place where you can pretend this is data. Yes?"
"Yes. " My voice has gone unfamiliar.
He opens the cardigan. Pushes it off my shoulders, down my arms, and the slip's thin strap with it, until the firelight falls on me, on the full soft swell of my breasts, the round give of my belly that I've made my peace with and am not about to un-make for any man, and Emil — who is never without a word — makes a low broken exhale against my hair instead of one — and his hands come around me at last and take my breasts in both palms like a man weighing the only two things in the world that had ever come up unbalanced and being glad of it.
"You are not a thing I can model," he says into my neck.
His thumbs find my nipples and don't move, just hold, just learn the pebbling of them under his hands and the way my breath catches.
"I have tried. Do you understand the indignity of that, for me?
I ran four hundred outcomes of this marriage.
In none of them did I account for the heft of you in my hands undoing the model.
Look at the fire. Don't look back at me.
I want your eyes on the flame while I take you apart, because I cannot do this and be watched, not the first time, I'm not —" a fracture, small, the first thread popping "— I'm not built for it. "
"Emil. " I reach back and get a fistful of his shirt and hold on. "Stop narrating the architecture and touch me."
A breath of a laugh against my throat, surprised out of him. "Greedy. Good. " And then his hands move.
One stays at my breast, rolling, pinching, learning exactly how hard before my hips lift off the floor.
The other goes down — over my belly, slow, reverent, his palm spreading flat across the soft heavy weight of my belly and pressing there a moment like he's steadying something, like the give of me under his hand is a fact he needs to hold before he can go on — and then lower, under the hem of the slip, between my thighs, and he finds me slick and goes still again.
"That's data I'll allow," he murmurs, ruined and dry at once. "You're wet for the cold one. Noted. Cataloged. I'll be insufferable about it later. " His fingers part me, find my clit, circle once, lightly, and take the touch away when my hips chase it. "No. You wait. I told you you'd wait."
"You absolute —"
"Counting now," he says, against my ear, calm as a man reading a ledger, while his fingers come back and circle and retreat, circle and retreat, building me and abandoning me, building and abandoning, until I'm shaking between his knees and have bitten through any pride I walked in with.
"I'm going to give you three. I've calculated three; you can hold three; I've watched your breath and your pulse and you have three in you tonight.
But not yet. Wait until you've stopped thinking.
I'll know when you've stopped thinking because you'll stop trying to win.
" His teeth graze my shoulder. His fingers slide lower, two of them, pressing into me slow, the heel of his hand riding my clit, and I clench around him and hear my own sound fill the fire-lit room.
"There. That's the woman under the armor. Hello."
"Please. " I never beg. I beg. "Emil, please, you cruel —"
"There," he says, like a man who has finally heard the one syllable he held out for, and stops denying me.
He lets me have the first one. He drives it up out of me with two fingers curling and his palm grinding and his mouth at my throat narrating it as it breaks — there, there it is, that's one, I have you, come for me — and I come apart against the front of his chair with the fire on my face and his arm locked iron across my chest holding me up while I shake, and it's nothing like data, it's nothing like anything, it's a cold exact man taking me to pieces with his hands because I dared him with the truth.
He doesn't let me finish coming down before he starts again.
"Two," he says, and his voice has changed, the calm gone reedy at the edges, the syntax he kept squared all night beginning, finally, to fray as I'd promised myself it would.
His fingers move in me, slick, certain, finding the place that makes me arch, and he stops telling me what he'll do and starts just — doing it, narration breaking down into half-sentences, into breath.
"You're — God, the way you — I can't — I had a number and you've ruined the — kotyonok —"
The word falls out of him.