CHAPTER 21 #2
"Yours. " I get my fingers in his silvering hair, hold his head to me. "I'm yours, Mateo. God. Yours. Now take me upstairs before we both freeze on this rock and your soldiers find the Pakhan dead of the cold with his wife half out of her shirt."
A laugh shakes out of him, broken and astonished, into the soft give of me, and it's the warmest thing on the whole shore.
He carries me up. He doesn't ask; he just stoops and lifts me, and I feel the burn scar of his forearm under my thigh, the smooth pale ruin of it where he carried his mother out of fire, and the thought of what that arm has carried and lost and what it's choosing to carry now makes my eyes sting in the cold.
The sea-stair, the cliff path, the dark side door, the hall, the master wing — he carries the whole curvy weight of me the way a man carries something he has decided cannot be set down, and not once does his step falter under it, not once does he shift me like a load.
He carries me like the answer to a question he's been afraid to ask.
My suite. The four-poster. He sets me on it and stands over me a moment in the dark, breathing hard, and the watch — I see it — has fallen out of his coat onto the velvet chaise, open, face-up, the worn brass falcon catching the starlight from the window. Watching nothing. For once not on guard.
"The wall has a door now," he says, low.
He's stripping out of the coat, the shirt, his eyes never leaving me.
"You know that. You put it there. You came down to my water and you put a door in the only wall that's kept me standing for thirty-five years, and I should hate you for it.
" He comes down over me. "Don't make me wish you hadn't, Amara.
That's the only thing I'll ask. Whatever happens in this war, don't make me sorry I let you in. "
"I won't. " I pull him down by the back of the neck. "I'm not a thing that gets left in the corridor anymore. I decided. Now stop talking and let me feel that you believe me."
He believes me with his hands.
He gets the rest of my clothes off and then he's just looking, in the starlight, at all of me — the heavy fullness of my breasts, the round of my belly, the wide give of my hips, the thick of my thighs — and I lie open and easy under his eyes now, because I've learned in this house that his gaze stays warm the whole way down me. It always does.
He looks at me like a man who's been cold a long time looking at a fire he's allowed to stand close to.
His cold palm spreads over my belly, slides up to take the weight of one breast, his thumb across my nipple until it tightens and I arch into it, and he watches me do it like it's the only news worth having.
"Look at how much of you there is," he says, reverent, wrecked.
"All this warmth. I keep thinking the world's going to take it from me before I've learned it.
" His mouth finds the soft skin below my navel, kisses it, open, slow even now, the one place his patience still lives.
"I'm not finished learning you. Lev doesn't get to take you before I've learned you.
Do you understand me. He doesn't get to. "
"He doesn't," I breathe. "Mateo. Please."
He marks me. That's the shape of it, this raw possessive thing — his mouth on the inside of my thigh hard enough to leave the bloom of it, his teeth grazing the round flare of my hip, a hand splayed wide and pressing on my belly like he's keeping me on the earth, and I let him, I want him to, I want the proof of his mouth printed on my skin where I can find it in the morning and know this was real.
He works two fingers into me, slick and ready and clenching around him, and I'm already so wound from the cold and the fear and the want that I'm close embarrassingly fast, and he feels it, and the wall-man's patience comes back just enough to be cruel with.
"Hold off for me," he says against my thigh. "Stay with me. I want you with me when you go."
"Then get up here. " I drag at his shoulders. "Forget your fingers tonight — I want all of you, I want to feel that you're alive and you're mine and you're going to stay out of that sea while I'm sleeping. Mateo. Now."
He comes up the length of me. He settles into the cradle of my hips, the give of my thighs around him, and he braces on the burn-scarred forearm beside my head so I can see it, so it's the thing between us, and he holds my gaze in the dark with all of it open in his face — the fear and the want and the thirty-five years of holding the wall alone — and he says, "Tell me yes, moya.
Let me hear it once more. I'll hear it the rest of my life. "
"Yes," I tell him. "Yes. Yours. Come home."
He pushes into me slow and then he's seated deep, the stretch of it, the full clenching ache of being filled, and we both go still, and he presses his forehead to mine and just breathes, both of us breathing, the sea somewhere far out keeping its slow ruined time.
Then he moves. And this runs deeper than the careful, devastating patience of his own room, rougher, a man burying himself in the one warm thing the cold hasn't taken, and I take him, all of him, my hands on the scarred arm and the unscarred back, my soft belly to his, my thick thighs locked around him, meeting him stroke for stroke because I am not lying still under any man ever again, not even this one, especially not this one.
"Look at me," he says, low, the verdict-voice cracked wide open. "When you come. Look at me. I want to be the thing you see."
I look at him. The pleasure builds and breaks and floods, my whole body clenching around him, and I keep my eyes on his storm-gray eyes the whole way through it, on his face coming apart above me, and he says my name — Amara, my own name in place of moya, like the most important word he owns — and follows me over, shaking, spilling into me, his forehead dropping to my collarbone, the cold gone out of him at last and only the warmth left, the two of us, the salt drying on our skin.
After, the room is dark and the window is full of cold clean stars and the sea keeps its long patient measure over the black water, and Mateo Sokolov, Pakhan, the wall no one has ever stood beside, lies in the wreck of my bed with his head on the soft of my chest, breathing the slow deep breaths of a man who has finally, just barely, let go of something.
I trace the burn scar on the inside of his forearm in the dark. The smooth pale ruin of it. The arm that carried Katya out of fire and lost her anyway. The arm that carried me up off the wet stone tonight and didn't falter.
"This is the only thing it was ever made to hold," I tell him, quiet, and I lay my cheek to it. "It just didn't know it yet."
His breath catches. His arm tightens around me, careful even now of the give of me, careful the way you're careful with a thing you've decided is precious.
"Sleep," I tell him. "I've got the door."
He lifts his head. In the starlight I can see him not understanding, the Pakhan who has watched every door in this house for thirty-five years, who watched the door in his own room the night he first had me, who cannot put the watch down because no one has ever held it for him.
"You watch the door," I say. "Every night.
You watched it before I came and you'll want to watch it tonight, with the war coming, and you're so tired, Mateo, you're so tired you carried me up a cliff and I felt how tired you are.
So tonight I watch the door. You sleep. If anything comes through it, I've got a thimble and your watch and a very loud scream, and I'll wake you. I'm not afraid to wake you."
For a long moment he doesn't move. And then something goes out of him that I don't think has gone out of him in years — some held thing, some weight at the very bottom of the stack — and he lowers his head back to my chest, slow, like a man setting down a watch he's stood his whole life.
"Beside," he murmurs, half-gone already, the word slurring soft. "You said beside. I'm holding you to it too, moya."
"Both sides of the wall," I say. "That was the deal. Sleep."
And he does. The Pakhan sleeps — really sleeps, deep and heavy and trusting, his weight gone slack against me, the burn-scarred arm loose across my belly, his breath evening out into the rhythm of the surf until I can't tell the two apart, until Mateo Sokolov is finally asleep inside its pulse the way I never thought I'd live to see him be.
I sit up against the headboard in the dark with his head pillowed on my softness and I do not sleep. I watch the door.
The reach of starlight crosses the floor.
The watch lies open on the chaise, face-up, refusing to hide, ticking off the careful seconds it's kept for the dead.
Out beyond the cold glass the cleared sky burns hard and indifferent over the cove, salt on the air, the sea breaking on the stones where he stood an hour ago deciding to be a wall forever, and the foghorn calling its patient time across the black water to nobody, to everybody, to me.
The small steel weight at my collar rests cold against my skin, cold the way the world is cold, the way the stars are.
I used to think this house was a cage. I signed myself into it like a debt and I came up that gravel drive in a dead man's-blood-colored coat certain I'd spend whatever came next as somebody's ornament, somebody's exhibit, the careful thing set on a shelf and ransomed when convenient.
I was so sure. I had twenty-eight years of proof.
I was wrong about the shape of it.
He sleeps, and I keep his post for him, watching the door he's watched alone for thirty-five years, my father's thimble cold at my throat — and I understand at last that I'm not in a cage.
I'm on a wall.
And for the first time it has someone standing on both sides.