Page 50 of Blood Orange Christmas
“Tell me what happens now,” I say, because I want him to say it where the fire can hear.
“Now,” he answers, mouth at my cheek, voice in my ear, “we stop pretending quiet is safe. We set the table the way we want the room to break. We move the wine. We change the passes. We seat the men who think they’re lions under lights that show their teeth are borrowed. We keep the kitchen clean and the chapel locked. We let the Morettis think Christmas Eve is theirs while we make the room belong to you.”
“And when the door opens and someone thinks I am the weapon?”
“You are the meal,” he says, almost a smile, almost not. “And the prayer. And the kitchen fire. Anyone who reaches for you learns why a stove has more than one heat.”
I shouldn’t laugh. I do anyway, because something in my chest needs to be what it was before I learned what men can take when you don’t put your hand on the door. The sound gets tangled up in a small sound he makes when I slide my fingers up into his hair and tug there, not to move him, but to remind him that I know how to.
He kisses me like a man on a ledge who can finally lean back into a wall. It makes me reckless and sensible at once. I push him until his hips bump the tasting table, until the untouched limoncello glass wobbles and steadies. He catches it with his left hand without looking and doesn’t let it spill because he knows I don’t want the floor either sticky or cold. Then he sets it far enough away that we can forget we were trying to act like people with sense.
“Stop when you need to,” he says into my mouth, and I nod and then answer in the language he speaks better than men who mistake danger for permission. I touch his bruised hand again, press a kiss to the split skin because I am a cook and a motherand I know how to tend a thing without making it feel like a wound.
My blouse buttons are already loose. He takes his time anyway, not because he’s careful, but because he has learned what waiting does to the breath between us. Firelight skims the tops of my breasts when he pushes the fabric wide. The air is warm and then his mouth is warmer. He licks a line that makes my back want to curve and my mouth say his name like the saints are listening. He sucks my nipple gently first and then harder when I arch into his hand, the slow slide of his palm across my ribs making me feel held and unbound in the same inch of skin.
“Tell me,” he says, and I do, because I like him honest and he likes me loud, and the tasting room is the kind of private that means the house will pretend it can’t hear.
“More,” I tell him, because I am done asking permission from rooms that don’t feed me. “Your mouth, there, yes, like that. Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t. He keeps his mouth on me and his hand at the low place on my back where heat lives, and then he slides that hand lower and finds the edge of my skirt. He pushes it up with that steady pressure that says we could move a mountain if we had a reason. The fireplace tosses a spark and then another because it knows what happens when heat and oxygen stop pretending they’re not the same thing.
I reach for his belt and he catches my wrist, not to stop me; to make me look at him. His eyes are dark and the little lines at the edges look like something that learned to smile and forgot how when the work got loud. He kisses my palm—the bruised hand pressed to my skin like an apology he can’t make to anyone else—and then he lets me unbuckle him and pull him free.
He’s hard in my hand and the feel of him makes something easy and greedy uncoil in my belly. I stroke him until his breath breaks against my mouth. He groans and bites my lower lip, just enough to make me want to bite back. He drags my panties aside, his knuckles grazing my thigh, the blunt head of him sliding through the wet he put there with his mouth and his voice and his hands.
“Serena,” he says, and it sounds like confession and oath. “Look at me.”
“I am,” I say, because I always have. “Don’t make me wait.”
He pushes inside in one long, deep stroke that makes the table feel like it just remembered gravity. There is a second where the world resets around where our bodies join and then there is no room left for other sentences. He fills me and I take him and we meet in the middle where it hurts good and then better. My fingers dig into his shoulders as he sets a rhythm that is nothing like the kitchen and exactly like a kitchen—timed, focused, clean, with room for a perfect mistake or three.
“Tell me if it’s too much,” he says, and I laugh a little and then I forget how to laugh because his hand drops to my hip and sets me at the angle that turns the whole room into a solution. He braces my back with one arm and holds my thigh with the other, his bruised knuckles pressed to the soft inside that knows his name.
“Harder,” I breathe, and it isn’t a dare. It’s a recipe. He gives me what I ask for without politeness, without apology. He pounds into me until the tasting table complains, until the limoncello glass rings like a bell, until my breath breaks on a word that was never going to be the right one. The fire snaps, sweat slides,wood under my shoulders is cool and then hot and then nothing I can name.
I come fast because the day has been a long string of almosts and my body is ready to be sure. It hits like heat rolling low and then breaking across the edges of me. I lock my legs around his hips and ride it while he bites the place where my neck meets my shoulder, my name a sound that lives against my skin. He keeps moving through it because he likes me too much to stop at the first thing we get right. I shudder and he doesn’t let me go until the second wave gets mean and then sweet, until I’m saying things into his mouth that would make saints set down their palms.
He is close and I want to take him with me. I slide my hand between us and rub the place that’s still singing, use his thrusts and my fingers to pull myself apart again, and the look on his face when he feels me clamp down the second time is something I want to keep in a jar and put on the shelf next to the saffron. He groans, deep and helpless, and drives into me three times like a man who knows exactly how to end a night. He spills with a sound that isn’t pretty and doesn’t need to be. I hold him like a woman who knows what it costs him to be this unguarded and none of the cost is mine to pay.
For a long minute we stay where we are—his forehead pressed to mine, my fingers in his hair, our breath loud in a house that pretends it can’t hear. His heart thunders against my chest. Mine answers, not because it has to, but because it wants to. The fire settles, the flames dropping to coals that glow like the inside of an orange.
He eases out of me with care he uses for almost nothing else and pulls my skirt back down, his hands smoothing fabric with a focus that makes my throat tighten. He tucks me against himand pulls me off the table and carries me the two steps to the leather bench by the hearth like I’m not heavy with everything we just did. We sit. I fold into him. He wraps around me. The limoncello glass sits on the table catching light and the condensation slide makes its own path to the wood.
“Do you forgive me?” he asks into my hair. He doesn’t make it a performance. He doesn’t put a price on it. He asks like a man who will survive either answer and build a better house with the truth.
“Not with one night,” I say. “Not with one fight at a pantry door. But every minute you are the man I saw under that cedar tree with my son in his arms and your knees in the mud, you earn the rest.”
“I don’t want to earn it,” he says. “I want to deserve it.”
“Then don’t leave us alone again,” I answer. “Not because you think you can run faster than a mistake. Not because your ghosts feel louder than our voices.”
His chest moves under my cheek, a breath that sounds like a man letting something go he thought he couldn’t live without. “I won’t,” he says. “Not while there’s breath in me. I brought Teresa because you trust her more than my guards. I doubled the watch because my men trust their fear more than their pride. I moved your prep tomorrow closer to the cellar because I can’t keep that door honest if you’re too far from it. I know you saw that. I know you think it’s a trap. It is. But it’s not for you.”
“I know,” I say. I think of the missing blade in my roll. I think of Paolo and his cufflinks and his hands that have never lifted a pan. I think of the message in the Barolo bottle.La cena èl’arma. “They think the dinner is the weapon. Let them. I’ll hand them a spoon and make them eat their pride.”
He smiles against the top of my head. “That’s my girl.”
I stiffen and then relax because the word lands differently in his mouth than it does in rooms where men like to own things. He feels it and corrects himself without making a speech. “That’s my woman,” he says. “That’s the mother of my son. That’s the person who decides whether this house gets to call itself a home.”
