CHAPTER 15 #2
Behind me, Emil's hands find the tie of my robe and hold it, patient, waiting on me even now, his mouth coming to the back of my neck, his voice low against my nape, and I feel the words more than hear them.
"I am going to take this off you," he says.
"I am going to put my mouth on the back of your shoulder, here, and then lower.
I will tell you what I am doing before I do it.
If at any point the word changes, the action stops. Confirm you understand."
"I understand. " My voice cracks on the middle of it.
"Good. " The robe slides off my shoulders and down my arms and pools at my feet, and I stand in the brown stutter of the failing lamps and the white slap of the lightning in nothing but my skin, curvy and soft and full, my heavy breasts, the round give of my belly, the wide flare of my hips, the thick of my thighs, and I stand open to them. That is the new thing.
That is what these men have built in me without setting out to. I hold myself loose and unhidden, free at last of the old reflex to wait for the flinch, the for a big girl, the small cruel mercy of being wanted with an asterisk. I let them look.
"God," Mateo says, very quietly, which from him counts as a shout.
Emil's hands settle on my hips from behind, both of them, spanning the width of me, and his fingers press into the soft of me like a man taking the measure of something he means to keep.
"I have tried," he says, his mouth at my shoulder now, exactly where he told me it would go, "to account for this.
For the specific fact of you. The way you are made.
" His lips move down the slope of my back, a slow descent, narrated by the pressure of his hands.
"I cannot. You exceed the model. Every time. " A kiss to the dimple at the base of my spine. "I have stopped resenting it."
Mateo's mouth takes my throat. His hand comes up and cups one breast, lifting its full warm weight into his palm, his thumb dragging slow across my nipple until it draws tight and I gasp, and he catches the gasp in his mouth and holds me up with the burn-scarred arm banded across my back when my legs try to quit again.
"Patience," he murmurs against my jaw, when I push up into his hand, greedy.
"We have all night. There is no horn at the end of this one.
No clock. " He draws back to take me in, both of them touching me, neither of them touching each other, all of it me, the whole gravity of the room mine.
"Bench," he says. "Or the chaise in your suite.
Your choice. Everything tonight is your choice. "
"Suite," I manage. "I'm not... Katya's flowers. " I can't finish it. Even wrecked, I can't do that here, in the dead woman's room, with her one living orchid shaking on its stem.
Something moves through Mateo's face, grave and grateful at once. "Suite," he agrees.
We go up through the dark house with the storm walking the roof.
Mateo's hand at the small of my back. Emil a half-step behind, my robe folded over his arm because of course he picked it up, of course he did, the man who indexes everything.
The lightning lights the staircase and the dead Sokolovs in their portraits watch us climb, Yuri's the newest, and I think, your sons, and then I stop thinking in sentences for a while.
My suite. The four-poster, the velvet chaise, the dress forms standing sentinel in the open door of the workroom with the half-built bodice on the nearest one, ivory silk-velvet catching the storm-light along its nap like skin.
My territory. They've let me bring them here, onto my ground, and that is its own quiet language too.
Mateo undresses without ceremony, the way he does everything, no performance in it.
The burn scar runs pale up the inside of his right forearm.
The bullet-graze at his hip. The heavy shoulders, the body of a man who has carried things.
Emil takes longer, folding, always folding, his glasses set on the nightstand last of all, and without them his pale eyes read younger and less defended and more dangerous to me, because that's the one I want, the undefended one, the version of him he never shows.
"Lie back," Mateo says, and I lie back on my own bed, on the cool counterpane, and the two of them look down at me in the lightning and I feel, for the first time in my life, like something held sacred, an altar two men have come to tend.
"Open for me, malysh—" Mateo catches himself; that's Gael's word, not his, and the small slip, the brothers' shared map bleeding through, makes something ache in me.
He lets the borrowed word go and stays silent, and he just sets his scarred hand on the inside of my thigh and presses, gentle, asking, and I open my thighs for him and watch his jaw go tight at the sight of me, slick already, throbbing already, and he says, low, the rarest thing he owns, "Moya. "
He gave me that word once, in his monastic room, like laying down a weapon. He gives it to me again now and it means the same and more.
"That is not fair," Emil says, conversational, settling on the bed at my other side, his hand coming to rest flat on my belly, splayed wide, reverent.
"He gets one word and it does the work of a paragraph.
" His fingers spread on the soft of me. "I will have to use more.
" He bends and puts his mouth to the swell of my belly, a kiss, then another, lower, and I feel his breath stutter against my skin, the crack already starting, the cold one already not cold.
"I am going to tell you exactly what is going to happen," he says, lips moving against me.
"Mateo is going to be inside you. I am going to be here.
" His fingers slide down through the slick of me and find my clit with a precision that arches me off the bed.
"And I am going to count. I have a number in mind. "
"Emil—" His name breaks in half.
"Tell me yes again," he says, ruthless, gentle, his fingers going still and maddening. "We are escalating, and I will not move until you say it."
"Yes. God. Yes, yes—"
"Say yes, Amara," Mateo says at the same moment, kneeling up between my thighs, the broad blunt head of his cock pressing where I am open and wet and aching, and the two consents braid together in the dark, the soldier and the strategist, both waiting on the same word.
"Yes," I say to both of them. "Both of you. Yes."
Mateo pushes into me slow. He always goes slow.
He sinks in by inches with that devastating patience, watching my face the whole time, reading it the way I read cloth, stopping when my breath catches, going on when I push up to take more, until he is seated all the way and I am full of him and the stretch of it makes my eyes sting.
And the whole time Emil's fingers work my clit in those precise unhurried circles, narrating under his breath, "There.
That. I can feel you clench when I do that.
Note it. " Two men, all their attention on the single point of me, never once a hand straying toward each other, the whole architecture of it built around me, only me, the center of gravity of the entire shaking house.
"Move," I beg Mateo. "Please move."
"Look at me when you ask," he says, and I drag my eyes up to his, and he begins to move, slow deep strokes, the burn-scarred arm planted by my head, his gray eyes locked on mine, and Emil's fingers pick up the rhythm with him, and the lightning comes white through the storm-streaked glass and lights all three of us in one bright frozen frame.
"That is one," Emil says, when the first one takes me by surprise and rolls up through me and I cry out and shake between them, Mateo never breaking his slow rhythm through it.
"I felt that. That is one. " His voice has gone rough at the edges, the syntax just starting to come apart.
"I calculated three. We are not finished. "
"I can't—"
"You can. " His mouth finds my nipple, draws it in, his tongue working it while his fingers work lower, and Mateo's pace deepens, and I am pinned between the slow inexorable fullness of one and the precise relentless attention of the other, worshipped from two directions at once, named and revered, soft and full and wanted with no asterisk anywhere in the room.