Chapter 15
SALVATORE
The key's in the door. It's always in the door. I turn it, and it's a small sound, and it's the loudest thing that's happened in this room in two years.
She doesn't look at the door. She looks at me.
"Say it again," I tell her.
"I've decided."
"What."
"You. This." She lifts her chin. "I'm not going to be told what I decided.
I'm telling you. I want this, and I've wanted it since you sat in a plastic chair and said yes ma'am to Dot, and I've been standing behind a bar in my own head for three weeks pretending I didn't, and I'm done.
There's no paper. There's no debt. There's me, in your study, at one in the morning, saying I want you to lock the door. So it's locked. So."
"So."
"So don't be careful with me."
I cross the room.
She's already there. She doesn't step back and she doesn't step forward, she stands where she stood and lets me come, and Rosa's cardigan is on the floor before I reach her, she's shrugged it off, and under it a T-shirt, and jeans, and bare feet on my father's carpet, and I put my bad hand on the back of her neck and my good one on her jaw and I don't kiss her.
I look at her. I take the time.
Her mouth's open. Her eyes are the colour they are in lamplight, more brown than green, and she's not afraid, she's not anything I've seen on her before, and she gets two fistfuls of my shirt, and she says, "Salvatore," like it's an instruction.
Then I kiss her.
There's nothing slow in it. Sunday was slow.
Sunday I had time and I used it and she stopped me, and I'm not going to have that again, so I take her mouth like I mean to keep it, and she gives it, she opens for me, and the sound she makes goes straight down my spine.
Her hands are pulling the shirt out of my trousers.
I let her. I get the T-shirt up over her head in one pull and her hair comes down over her shoulders with it and I've got her in a black bra that's been washed too many times and the chain at her throat with the small key on it lying in the hollow between her collarbones, and I put my mouth there. On the key. On the skin under it.
"Take it off," I say.
"No."
"Marina."
"It stays on. Everything else."
Everything else. I get the bra. I get it off her with the bad hand, and the cuts open under Rosa's wrapping, and I let them, and then I've got her bare to the waist against me in the lamplight and I put my hand on her breast and she arches into it with her eyes shut and her lips apart and I watch her do it.
I want to see all of it. I've been watching her for six months and I want to watch this.
"Look at me."
She opens her eyes.
"Don't close them. Whatever I do."
"That's not"
"Whatever I do, Marina."
I take her nipple in my mouth. She doesn't close her eyes.
I see her fight it and win, and her hand goes into my hair and holds on, and her breath's going in short pulls, and I take my time with her there, one and then the other, until she's rocking against me with a sound in her throat she's not letting out, and then I put her on the desk.
Gate logs. Thirty days of trucks. They go on the floor.
The photograph of Gia goes with them, face down, and I don't think about it.
I put my hands on her hips and I lift her onto the edge of the desk and I get her jeans open and off her, and the underwear with them, everything, and then she's sitting on my father's desk in the lamplight in nothing but a chain, and I stand between her knees and look.
"Don't," she says.
"Don't what."
"Look at me like that."
"Like what."
"Like you've already got it."
I put my hand between her legs.
She's wet. She's so wet, and hot, and she jolts when I touch her and grabs the edge of the desk with both hands, and I don't rush.
I've wanted this for half a year and I'm going to find out what she does.
I find it. The thing that makes her hips come up off the wood.
Her head goes back and I say, "Eyes," and she brings it forward and looks at me with her mouth open while I work her with two fingers and my thumb, slow and then not, until she's shaking, until she says my name in a voice I haven't heard, and then I stop.
"No."
"Yes."
"Salvatore, don't you"
I get on my knees.
She says something. I don't hear it. I put her legs over my shoulders and I put my mouth on her and the sound she makes then is the one, that's the one I'll keep, and I hold her hips down on the desk with my forearm because she's trying to come up off it, and I don't let her.
I take her apart. That's what it is. I take her apart with my mouth in my father's study with the door locked and the tank humming, and she's got one hand in my hair and one on the edge of the desk and she's saying don't stop and please and my name, and when she comes she comes hard, with her heels in my back, and she doesn't close her eyes.
I know she doesn't. I'm looking up at her the whole time.
I stand up.
She's lying back on the desk with her hair everywhere and her chest going and the key slid round to the side of her neck, and she looks at me, at my face, wet with her, and she sits up. She gets hold of my belt.
"Now," she says.
"No."
"Now. Don't be careful, I said don't be careful, I'm not going to break, I've never once in my"
I pick her up.
Not far. Off the desk, up against me, her legs round my waist, and I carry her three steps to the chair, my father's chair, and I sit in it with her on me, and I get my trousers open with her hands in the way, helping, not helping, and then there's nothing between us.
She's above me. She's got her knees either side of me on the leather and her hands on my shoulders and she's looking down, and I've got my hands on her hips, and I hold her there.
Just there. Not in her. Just above.
"Say it," I tell her.
"What."
"What you decided."
She looks at me. She's flushed to the chest and her mouth's swollen and there's a thing in her face that's not surrender. It's the opposite. It's a woman who's spent twenty-five years deciding everything alone and has just found out what it is to decide something with a man's hands on her.
"You," she says. "I decided you."
I bring her down.
She's tight and she's hot and she takes me slow, all of me, with her nails in my shoulders and a long low sound going out of her, and when she's all the way down she stops.
Just stops. Sits on me with her forehead against mine and her eyes open an inch from my face, and neither of us moves, and it's the only time I've ever been inside a woman and not wanted the next thing yet.
I put my mouth on hers. Nothing else moves.
Her thighs are shaking against the leather and I can feel her heart where her chest is on mine, fast, and I kiss her slow to make it slower, and it doesn't work, and I do it anyway.
"Marina." Against her mouth. "Look at what you did.
" She looks. Down between us, where we are.
Then back up at me, and something goes across her face that I'd pay to see again, and she says, "I did that," not a question, and I say yes, and she says it again, quieter, to herself.
She stops. Just stops. Sits on me with her forehead against mine and her eyes open an inch from my face, and neither of us moves, and it's the only time I've ever been inside a woman and not wanted the next thing yet.
Then she moves.
She sets it. I let her. She rolls her hips against me slow, and then less slow, and she's got her hands on the back of the chair either side of my head now, and she's looking at me, she's still looking, she's doing what I told her, and I've got my bad hand on her hip and it's bleeding through Rosa's wrapping and my good one on her breast and I'm saying things to her.
I don't know what. Her name. What she feels like.
What I'm going to do. She's nodding. She's saying yes every time.
It gets faster. It gets to where I take it off her, my hands on her hips, and I bring her down on me hard, and again, and she lets me, she lets me set it now, and she says, "Yes, like that, don't," and doesn't finish, and I don't stop.
The chair's going against the wall. The tank's humming.
I've got my mouth on her throat, on the pulse, on the chain, and she's got her hands in my hair pulling, and I can feel her getting there again, the way she tightens, and I say into her neck the thing I don't say.
"Mine."
She hears it. She goes still for half a second, everything, and then she comes, all round me, with her mouth open against my temple, and I go with her.
I can't not. I hold her down on me and I come inside her with my teeth on her shoulder and her name in my mouth, and it goes on, and on, and then it's just the two of us in a chair with the lamp on, breathing.
Nobody moves for a long time.
Her face is in my neck. My hand's on her back, on the sweat on her spine, and the other one's on her hip, and I look at it, and there's blood on her skin from the wrapping, a smear of it on her hip bone, mine, and I don't wipe it off.
"You said it," she says. Into my neck.
"Yes."
"You don't own me."
"No."
She lifts her head. She looks at me, and her face is soft and it's fierce, both, and there's hair stuck to her mouth and I move it.
"Then why say it."
"Because I've never said it. About anything. Not the house, not the chair. I don't own things. I run them." I put my hand on her face. "And I said it to you, so now it's said, and I'm not going to take it back."
"That's not how"
"No. It's not. But everyone will think I do." I hold her eyes. "Every man in this family. Dominic. The men at the terminal. Whoever's in that Camry. They'll think I own you, and they'll act like it, and that's what keeps you alive, Marina. Not the lock on the door. That."
She's quiet. She puts her hand flat on my chest, over where it's going, and she looks at it there.
"I'm not going to be a thing you keep in a room," she says.
"I know."
"I mean it. I've been that. I know what the door sounds like from the inside."
"I know."
"So say you won't."
I don't say it. I look at her, and she looks at me, and she sees me not say it, and her mouth goes flat, and she doesn't get off me.
She stays. She stays exactly where she is with my blood on her hip and the key against my chest, and that's the answer she gives to the answer I didn't give, and neither of us says anything else about it.
My phone goes.
It's on the floor. In the trousers, under the gate logs, and it goes, and goes, and I let it, and she says, "Answer it," and I say, "No," and it stops. And starts again.
Luca.
Luca doesn't call twice.
I reach down. I get it out of the pocket with her still on me and I put it to my ear, and he doesn't say hello.
"Nico Silvestri," he says. "Just got dropped outside Lutheran Medical from a moving car. He's alive. He's cut." A pause. "Not ours."