CHAPTER 17 #2
He makes a sound. I don't have a word for it. It's the sound the deepest grin covers — I've learned that about him, that the wider he smiles the worse it is, and right now he isn't smiling at all, so it must be very bad indeed, the kind of bad that's just love with nowhere to hide.
"Tonight," I say, and I lower my voice, because we're past the speeches now, "I'm in charge.
You're done performing for one night. You don't get to flip it onto me to keep it off yourself.
You did that downtown, against the wall, tonight's about you, velvet, and it was beautiful and I'll never forget it, but tonight it's the other way around.
Tonight you let yourself be the one who's chosen.
" I tip my head, watching him. "Tell me to stop and I stop.
Right now, no questions, the door's right there. Is that what you want?"
It's his line. I've turned his own line on him, the out he always offers, and I watch him realize it — watch the enforcer who hands everyone an exit get handed one himself and not know what to do with the gift of it.
"No," he breathes. "God, no, don't — don't stop. Don't you dare."
"Then say it. Say green. I want the word, Gael. " His mouth quirks at that, at me stealing all their lines at once. "Color?"
"Green," he says, wrecked, soft, nothing cocky left in it. "Green, malyshka. So green."
I kiss him.
I've been kissed in this house like a verdict and like a calculation and like a man trying not to drown.
I kiss Gael like a decision, slow and deep and mine, my hand still fisted in his shirt, and for a second he just lets me, lets me lead, his hands finally landing light at my hips like he's afraid the wanting will press too hard and break the moment.
So I take his hands — both of them, by the wrists, his scarred right palm rough against my fingers — and I move them onto me. Press them down over the spread of my hips, the give of me, so he feels exactly how much there is to hold.
"All of it," I tell him against his mouth. "Careful's off the table. Hold all of it."
He groans into the kiss and stops being careful.
His hands go greedy then, full and sure, mapping me through the green silk — the round of my belly, the full heavy fall of my breasts, the wide flare of my hips he grips like handholds on a cliff, like I'm the thing keeping him from falling and also the fall.
"Fuck," he says, ragged, into my throat, "you came down here, you came down here in the fog to tell me — Christ, trouble, you have no idea, you have no —" and I shut him up by pushing the robe off my own shoulders, letting the green pool at my feet, standing in front of him in nothing but a thin slip and the small dented shield of my mother's hanging cold between my breasts, and I hold steady.
That's the thing. That's the whole arc of it, and I feel it happen in my own body like a seam finally lying flat.
There was a girl — months ago, years ago, all my life — who'd have watched a man's face in this moment for the flinch, for the recalculation, for the gallant little lie. That girl is gone.
I stand soft and full and sovereign in my own skin and I let him look, and his looking is reverent, hungry, undone, and I take it as my due because it is my due, and standing here open-handed is the most naked I've ever been.
"Look at you," he says, low, like a curse, like a prayer.
"Look at you. I've thought about — every part of you, I've — the way you stand, you stand like you own the floor, malyshka, and you do, you own the whole —" His hands skim the slip up over my thighs, my hips, drag it off over my head, and then I'm bare in his lamplight and he stops talking entirely, which from Gael is the loudest thing he could possibly do.
I walk him backward to the bed. I do it. I put my hand flat on his chest again and I push, gentle and inexorable, and the enforcer, the blade, the man who decides who walks out of a room, sits down on the edge of his own bed because I've told him to with my hand.
I get his shirt over his head — dark wings inked over his heart, the blackwork climbing his left arm — and I push him back against the pillows and I climb up over him, the give of my thighs settling on either side of his hips, and the look on his face when I'm above him, the weight of me over him, my chest full and unguarded in the lamplight, is the look of a man watching something he'd given up praying for walk in the door.
"Amara. " His hands are on my thighs now, my hips, kneading, worshipping. "I have to — let me, I'll — I'm good with my mouth, let me get you there first, let me —"
"No. " I get his belt, his fly, free him — he's hard and hot and twitching in my hand and he hisses, his head going back.
"I told you. I'm in charge. You did me a kindness against that wall, and now I'm taking what I want, and what I want is to watch your face while I do it.
" I lean down so my mouth is at his ear, my chestnut hair falling around us like a curtain, closing the world out to just this.
"Tonight your whole job is to receive, Gael. You get to be the one who's wanted, for once, and only that. Can you do that? Can you let me?"
His eyes shut. A muscle jumps in his jaw.
And I understand that for him this is harder than any blade, any beating, any of the violence he's so easy with — that letting himself be the chosen one and not the useful one is the deepest cut anyone's ever dealt him, and the most tender, and he's terrified.
"Yeah," he whispers. "Yeah. I can — I'll try. Fuck. Be gentle with me, trouble. " He dresses it up as a joke, and we both hear the bare truth under it instead.
"Always," I say, and I mean it, and I take him inside me.
Slow. I sink down on him slow, taking him by inches, watching his face the whole way the way Mateo once watched mine — look at me when you come — except I've made that command my own now, I'm the one watching, I'm the one in control of the descent, and Gael's mouth falls open and his hands clamp on my hips, letting me set the depth, just holding on, as I take all of him and seat myself fully and the breath leaves him in a long shaking rush.
"There," I breathe. "There you are."
And then I ride him.