CHAPTER 15 #3
"Your hips," Emil says against my breast, his free hand gripping the wide flare of me, hauling me into Mateo's next stroke.
"Made for this. The give of you. I have a word for it and the word is insufficient.
" His glasses are off, his control is going, I can hear it going, the clean consonants starting to slur.
"Mateo. She is close. I can feel it building. "
"I know," Mateo says, even, watching me. "Look at me, Amara. Stay with me."
I stay with him. I stay in his gray eyes while Emil counts me through the second one, that is two, his voice fracturing now, that is two, kotyonok, and the slip goes through me like the second needle of the night, the word he tried to strike from the record falling out of him helpless in the dark, and I catch it the way I catch a dropped pin, keep it, I'm keeping that one, and I feel Mateo's rhythm finally falter, all that careful restraint finally giving, his strokes going deeper and less measured as my clench drags at him.
"Now," Emil says, ragged, all the clinical gone out of him, just a man with his mouth at my breast and his fingers slick to the knuckle. "Mateo, now, she's—"
"Come for me," Mateo says, the verdict, the command and the gift in three words, "look at me and come, moya," and the storm peaks white against the glass and so do I.
It tears through me from both points at once, the deep full ache of Mateo and the bright precise center of Emil's fingers, and it doesn't stop, it keeps going, the third one folding into the second with no seam between them, Emil's voice gone to broken pieces against my skin, there, there it is, that is — I lost count, I lost the count, the strategist who counts everything losing his place inside me, and Mateo's careful patience finally breaking, his hips snapping forward hard and his forehead dropping to mine and a sound coming out of him I have never heard, low and torn, as he spills into me, his scarred arm shaking where it holds his weight.
And the orchid. I swear to you. In the last white strike I know it is down there in the glasshouse, the one living thing among the dead ones, trembling on its stem in the lightning while all the dead hold still, and I feel like that, I feel like the one that refused to die, shaking and alive in a room built for things that bloom.
Then the storm lets go, the same way it came, by degrees. The sleet eases to rain, the rain to a soft patter, the wind unhooking its fingers from the seams of the house one by one.
We lie tangled in the wreck of the counterpane, breath slowing.
Mateo has rolled to my side, his scarred arm still under my neck, his hand resting on my belly like it belongs there.
Emil lies along my other side, and after a moment, in a gesture that undoes me worse than anything that came before it, he reaches across and finds the folded silk robe he carried up and lays it over the three of us, because the room has gone cold and he is, under all of it, a man who takes care of things.
"You lost the count," I say into the dark, wrecked and unable not to.
A long pause. "I am aware," Emil says, with enormous dignity. "It will not happen again."
"It will," Mateo says.
"It will," Emil admits, and I feel him almost smile against my shoulder, which is a thing I have witnessed perhaps twice.
I lie between them and listen to the rain thinning out over the clearing Sound, the sea gone quiet and far, and the warmth we built against it presses close on either side, and I understand, finally, the shape of the thing I am in.
A triangle would resolve; one angle wins and two lines break.
What I have is a constellation, points held in a fixed and impossible relation, each one whole, none of them dimming the others, and me the dark space between that makes it a shape at all.
I'd spent my whole life believing that to be wanted was to be used, that love was a transaction that always left me holding the coat in some cold corridor.
And here are two dangerous men breathing slow against my soft skin, having turned the whole force of themselves toward my pleasure and asked nothing back, having refused, in a dead woman's glasshouse in the worst of the storm, to make me choose.
So I won't either.
"You want me to pick," I say, into the dark between them, into the warm space their bodies make.
My voice is wrecked and it is certain, which is a combination I had never once managed before in my life.
"You and your brothers. You think this is a thing I'm supposed to resolve. One of you. The right one."
Neither of them moves. Outside, the last of the sleet ticks off the glasshouse roof and goes quiet.
"I'm not going to pick," I say. "I'm going to keep you. All of you. That's my counter-offer."
The silence stretches. Mateo's hand presses flatter against my belly, warm, claiming, answering. Emil's breath goes out slow and even at my shoulder, the breath of a man whose model has just been overrun by the one variable he stopped resenting.
Neither man says no.
And the storm, finally, lets go of the glass.