CHAPTER 11 #2
He walks me back to it. The barracks-tight bedding gives under me as he lowers me down, following me, careful of his weight, one forearm planted beside my head — and there it is, six inches from my face, the burn scar I've only glimpsed before: smooth and pale and old, running the inside of his right forearm from wrist to elbow, the skin of it different, too even, the way scar tissue is.
I put my fingers on it before I think. He goes rigid.
"Don't," he says.
"Tell me," I say.
He's quiet for so long the watch on the nightstand seems to get louder. I keep my fingers on the scar and don't move them and don't take my eyes off his, and slowly, slowly, I feel the rigidness leave him, won out by the one thing he didn't expect — that I held his gaze and let my hand stay.
"Twelve years ago," he says, low, into the dark between us.
"December. The house caught. I was twenty-three.
I went back in for my mother. " His jaw works.
"I got her out. She died anyway. Four days later, in a bed, of the burns.
So I carried her out of one fire into a slower one.
" His eyes don't leave mine. "I don't perform this.
I'm telling you because you put your hand on it and didn't flinch.
Nadia flinches. Pyotr flinches. You touched it like it was just skin. "
"It is just skin," I say softly. "It's skin that proves you'll go back into the fire.
That's not a thing to flinch from, Mateo.
That's a thing to want to be near. " And I lift my fingers from the scar and press my mouth to it, once, the smooth strange surface of it warm under my lips, and I feel the whole great weight of him shudder.
"Moya," he says.
It comes out of him gravely, against my hair, the way a man lays down a word he's been holding in his fist so long his hand has shaped to it.
Mine. I should be afraid of that word. I've been taught to be afraid of that word my whole life — mine is what they say right before they make you a possession and leave you holding the coat.
But the way he says it lands as a vow, the whole weight of it promise, and I find, lying under him in a cold cell of a room with the sea going on outside the dark glass, that the old fear has lost its grip on me entirely.
He undresses me by inches. That's the only way he does anything.
The slip up and over my head and dropped to the floor, and then he sits back on his heels and just looks at me, all of me bare in the gray fog-light — my breasts heavy and full in the cold, the full swell of my belly I made my peace with years ago, the wide spread of my hips, the thick of my thighs — and I make myself hold still under the looking and not reach for the sheet, because I am done bracing, I decided that weeks ago on Gael's atelier floor, and a woman who has decided does not unmake the decision because the man looking at her is a wall come down.
"Look at you," he says, very low, and there is nothing in it but reverence.
He puts both hands flat on my belly, warm and broad, and slides them up over the swell of it to cup my breasts in his palms, lifting their fullness, his thumbs moving over my nipples until they tighten and I arch up into his hands.
"I had decided you were a strategy," he says, almost to himself, watching his own hands move on me.
"A peace lever. A counter to Lev. I built the whole thing cold.
" His mouth comes down to the soft heavy curve of my belly and he kisses it, openmouthed, unhurried, working his way lower, and the part of me that has flinched my whole life at a man's mouth on the give of me goes liquid and undone instead.
"And then you walked into my study in a coat the color of dried blood and read the room like I read it, and I have not had a cold thought about you since. "
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," I manage, and it comes out wrecked.
"It's the truest. " He spreads my thighs with patient hands, kissing the inside of one, the give of it, naming me with his mouth and not one word of apology in it.
"These," he says against my thigh, "I have thought about more than a Pakhan should admit.
" And then his mouth is on my cunt, slow, devastating, the same patience he brings to everything turned on the wet center of me, his tongue working my clit in long unhurried strokes while his hands hold my hips down, and I come apart embarrassingly fast, my fingers fisted in the tight bedding, a sound tearing out of me into the cold quiet room.
"Mateo—"
"I know. " He doesn't stop. He works me through it and past it, building it again before the first has even finished, and the patience of it is its own kind of cruelty, the unbearable certainty that he will not be rushed, that he intends to take me apart by degrees and reassemble me as something that belongs in this room.
When I'm shaking, when I'm past words, when I've got both hands in his short silvered hair, he finally rises up over me, and I hear him work his trousers off, and then the blunt heat of his cock is against me, slick from how wet I am, and he goes still.
"Yes," I say, before he can ask, because I want him to know I'm still in this with my eyes open, still asking, still taking and not surrendering. "Yes. God, yes."
He pushes into me slow. So slow. The stretch and fill of it, inch by patient inch, his forearm braced beside my head and the burn scar pale in the dark, his eyes locked on my face the whole way as though he's reading me for the place I'll tear and means to stop the instant I do. I don't tear. I open.