Chapter 9 #3
Not fast. That was the thing about sunsets in Chicago—they took their time.
The water went from blue to gray-blue to a color that was almost green and then to the ink of a good fountain pen, and while the water was doing that the city was doing something else: the grid was coming on.
One block at a time. The sodium-orange squares of the streetlights clicking into their sequences, methodical, decided, the architecture she had called built that morning on the river now wearing its evening clothes and wearing them the way she wore the charcoal suit. Cleanly. With intent.
She did not touch her wine.
I did not say anything about it. I watched her watch the city.
She spoke without looking at me.
“I could live here, Marco.”
My hand stopped halfway to my glass.
“I could,” she said. “I have been catching myself imagining it. Today. On the boat. On the street with the saints. At the lake. I have been catching myself.”
I set my hand down. Did not pick up the wine. The sentence was in the room now and I was not going to do anything with my hands that would distract from it.
“Sera.”
“It is very inconvenient.” She turned her face toward me finally.
Her eyes were wet but not spilling. The wetness was just there—like the sheen I had seen in my office that morning, held, not released.
“I have a brother who will ask me for my report on Monday. I have a father who does not know he has been reading my words in his son’s handwriting for eight years.
I have a life, Marco. It is all waiting. ”
“I know.”
“And I have been imagining a kitchen. Your kitchen. With a moka pot that is not dead. And a window. And — “ She stopped. Breathed. Picked up the wine. Did not drink. Set it down again. “I have been imagining it.”
I did not say stay. Not because I did not want to say it. Because saying it right then would have been a negotiation I had not earned the right to open, and I had spent my whole life knowing when to keep my mouth closed.
“I want to ask you something,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Last night.”
Her eyes stayed on mine. The wetness stayed held.
“What about it.”
“Why did it work? What did it do for you?”
The question sat between us. I watched her think about it. The thinking was visible—her mouth did the small quiet work of arranging words before she released them, the way it did when she was writing. She was writing now, in her head.
“Because I did not have to decide anything,” she said. “That is the short version.”
“Tell me the long one.”
“The long one.” She turned her glass by the stem.
A quarter rotation. “I have been deciding since I was eight years old. I decided which version of myself to take to my father’s breakfast table.
I decided which strategy my brother would present.
I decided when to speak and when to stay quiet and when to let him take credit and when to let him fail—those are different decisions, by the way, and I have made both of them many thousands of times.
I decide what I eat. I decide when I sleep.
I decide whether the pain I am carrying is acceptable to carry in the room I am currently in.
I have been—“ She paused. “I have been exhausted, Marco. Not tired. Exhausted. It is a different word.”
“I know.”
“Last night you decided. Not big things.
And in the space where I would have been deciding, there was nothing.
And I could—“ Her voice caught, fractional, and she corrected it.
“—breathe. I could feel my body. I could feel your hand. I could feel what I was feeling because I was not also running the calculation in the background.”
“And the — “
“The pain.”
“Yes.”
“The pain is not the point.” She looked at me very directly. “The pain is the proof. The proof that you are paying attention. That you will not look away. That you will be the one who holds the line when I cannot, because I cannot anymore, Marco, I have been holding it too long.”
I could not breathe.
She picked up the wine finally. Drank. Set it down. Her hand was not steady.
I was hard under the table. She was flushed at her throat where the gold chain sat.
The ma?tre d’ was too far away to see any of it, and the city was lit now in its methodical grid, and the glass wall held the reflection of two people who had stopped pretending, in any meaningful way, that they were here for the alliance.
“Marco,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Take me home.”
I signaled for the check without looking away from her.
The ride up in the private elevator was six floors and took longer than six floors should have.
She stood beside me. Not against me. Not yet.
Her shoulder was an inch from my shoulder and the inch was doing more work than any inch had ever done.
I could smell the cedar from the bathroom this morning, still in her hair.
I could feel the heat coming off her throat where the gold chain sat.
The mirror in the elevator gave me the two of us at a three-quarter angle and I watched her watching me watch her in the mirror and neither of us said anything because there was nothing that needed saying that had not already been said at a glass-walled table thirteen floors above Millennium Park.
The door opened. I let her out first.
The suite was dark. I had not left a light on. The only light was the spill from the hallway and the low glow from Nero twelve floors below, coming up through the windows in a faint crimson wash.
The door had barely closed.
She turned. She did not throw herself at me.
She did not rush. She came to me in the kitchen—where she had counted to ten on a leather chair the night before, where she had stood in my T-shirt at three in the morning and made coffee beside me and our fingers had almost touched on the stove dial—and she put her hands on my chest and she began to unbutton my shirt.
From the top. One button at a time.
Her fingers were steady now.
“Sera.”
“Don‘t.”
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t want this.”
“I want this.”
“I know.” Another button. The shirt parted over my sternum. Her fingers brushed skin. “I wanted you to say it.”
Third button. Fourth. The shirt fell open to my waist. She ran her palm flat across my chest—over the skin, over the scar, over the faint line of Latin she had looked at and not asked about at dawn in the gym—and her hand was warm and the touch was not tentative.
She looked up at me.
“You gave me last night, Daddy.”
The word put a hand around my throat.
“Let me give you this.”
And she knelt.
On the hardwood. The same hardwood I had stood on this morning pulling two espressos while she slept in my bed.
Her dress pooled around her knees. Her hair fell forward.
She looked up from the floor with her hands flat on my thighs and her eyes wide and serious and not performing anything, and there was not a version of me that could have refused her.
My hand found her hair.
I made a fist in it at the base of her skull. Not hard. Just enough to be a weight, a claim, a hand that had arrived where it intended to arrive. Her eyes closed for one breath at the contact. She leaned her cheek into my thigh. I felt her breath through my trousers.
She unbuckled my belt.
Slowly. The leather hissed out of the loops one at a time and she dropped it on the floor beside her.
Button. Zip. She pulled the front of my trousers open and slid her hand inside with the same patient, studious precision she brought to turning pages, and when her fingers closed around me I heard the sound I made before I felt it leave me.
A low, broken thing.
“Shh,” she said. Quiet. Almost teasing. “I am paying attention.”
She was.
She took me out of my pants with both hands and she looked at me—looked, with the same cataloging attention she had brought to Cicero spreadsheets, to river skylines, to every thing she had ever needed to understand—and when she leaned in and kissed the head of me, slow, open-mouthed, her tongue warm and flat and unhurried, my hand tightened in her hair without my permission.
She smiled against me.
Then she took me into her mouth.
Not fast. Not all at once. She took an inch, stayed there, let her tongue find the ridge at the crown of me and circle it—once, twice—and I felt her cataloging the response, watching my abdomen tighten, watching my hand.
Her hand at the base of me gripped and released in a slow rhythm that matched the slow rhythm of her mouth, and she took another inch, and another, the warmth of her working down me by degrees until her nose was against the coarse hair of my stomach and her throat was soft around me and I made a sound that was not a word.
She held me there.
One beat. Two. Her eyes lifted. Looked up at me from under the dark fall of her hair with the gold chain catching what little light there was, and the look in her eyes was not submission — not the word people used for this — it was attention.
It was I see you and I have decided to do this and I am doing it with my whole self, and it was the most naked thing I had ever seen on a human face.
She pulled back. Slowly. Her tongue worked the underside of me on the way up and I felt every millimeter.
Then she began.
And she worshipped me.
That is the word. She was patient. She was studious.
She was cataloging every sound I made and feeding it back to me—when I groaned low at a particular flick of her tongue, she returned to it, once, twice, a third time, until my thighs were shaking.
When my fingers tightened in her hair she hummed around me and I felt it down the length of my spine.
Her hand worked the base of me in counterpoint to her mouth, the rhythm she had found without being taught it, the rhythm of a woman who had decided that my pleasure was a thing she intended to understand the way she understood everything: thoroughly.
I tried to hold on.
I tried because I wanted to give her time, because I wanted this to last, because there was a part of me that knew I would be replaying this in my head for the rest of my life and I wanted the reel to be long.
I lasted a few minutes. Maybe five. Every pass of her mouth built the pressure and every look up at me — and she kept looking up, kept watching my face, kept making eye contact at the bottom of each descent — undid what control I had left.
“Sera.”
It came out rough. A warning. A plea.
Her hand tightened at the base. Her mouth did something specific and slow and devastating with the ridge under the head of me and her eyes held mine and I understood that she was not going to stop.
I came.
Quiet, the way she had asked me to give her last night.
Her name in my mouth, Sera, broken and low, my fist in her hair and my other hand braced against the counter because my knees were not going to hold me.
She took all of it. She did not pull away.
She swallowed and stayed, her mouth soft around me through the aftershocks, her hand gentling at the base, her eyes closing now because she was allowed to close them now, the job done, the offering received.
When she finally drew back she pressed her forehead against my thigh.
My hand left her hair. Came to her cheek. Lifted her face.
Her eyes were wet. Her mouth was swollen. She looked like she had just received something — not given it, received it—and I understood that she had.
I picked her up.
Off the kitchen floor. Into my arms. She made a small sound against my throat and I carried her down the hall to the bedroom, and I laid her on the bed, and I went into the bathroom and came back with a warm cloth and I cleaned her mouth and her hands and the small smudge at the corner of her lip, and she lay still and let me do it and her eyes were on my face the whole time.
I got in beside her. Pulled the blanket up. Drew her against my chest.
Her heart was fast against my ribs. It slowed, slowly, in the dark.
“Sera,” I said. Quiet. Against the crown of her head. “Tomorrow.”
“Mmm.”
“Tomorrow the four rules become twelve. We sit down. We do it properly.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Her fingers moved against my chest — a small, drowsy motion, tracing something I could not see.
Then she nodded. Once. Against my throat.
“Okay, Daddy.”
The word made my heart pound in my chest.