Page 56 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
"How did that feel?"
Her voice was soft against my mouth.
"Like a thing I gave up a long time ago and forgot I needed."
She breathed out a laugh against my lips. She brought her hand up to the side of my face and gave me one more small closed kiss at the corner of my mouth, the way a person puts a marker down on a page so she will not lose her place.
"Whatever you say, sir. I should get back to Rhea."
She stood. She made the small physical adjustment a woman makes when she has just been kissed and has somewhere else to be. The shirt at her shoulder pulled straight. The hand at the back of her hair. The pendant settled back inside the open neckline. She bent and picked the tablet up off the floor where it had ended up.
She crossed to the door. At the door she turned and she looked at me once. The look had more in it than her mouth had been allowed to put on the page yet. The look stayed in the room after she had gone through the door and closed it behind her.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute after she went.
The image of the bowl in her hands at the foot of this bed was still in my head. Dim. Fading at the edges already. The shape of her shoulders inside the swallowing t-shirt. The way the steam from the bowl had lifted up past her chin. The look on her face that had been the look of a woman deciding something. It was going. I let it go. I did not chase it the way she had told me not to chase it.
I put a hand flat on the place at my ribs where her hand had been. The cotton was warm there still. I breathed in. I breathed out. I waited for the last of the dull pulse at my temple to go, and it went.
I stood. I buttoned the rest of the shirt. I went out.
I found them in the small upstairs sitting room off the hall. The tablet was on the low table between them. The two of them were on the rug in front of the couch with their heads close together over the screen. Rhea had Beom-Beom in her lap. The bear's one good ear was up and the other ear was the small soft tragedy it had been since I had known him. Rhea was pointing at the screen with both her index fingers at the same time. A green dress with small white flowers on it.
Chloe was laughing at something Rhea had just said.
She looked up when I came in. The color was not in her cheeks anymore. The corner of her mouth had the small careful smile on it that I now knew was the smile she kept for me.
"Good. We need your card. Rhea's wardrobe is a tragedy."
I pulled the wallet out of the back pocket. I pulled a card. I crossed the rug and went down on one knee beside them and put the card in her open palm.
"PIN is the last four of my passport. The girls have it written down somewhere."
She looked at the card in her palm. She looked up at me.
"Aren't you afraid I'll steal this from you?"
"You can have it. Keep it."
"You're insane."
"Insane is a stronger word than I deserve. Take the card."
She closed her hand around the plastic and looked at the closed hand for a beat longer than she had to and then she put the card down on the table next to the tablet.
Rhea had been watching us with both eyes wide and Beom-Beom's good ear gripped tight in her small fist.
"He is being a boyfriend, Chloe."
Chloe choked on the small breath she had just taken in.
"Stop it, Rhea. Don't make it awkward."
Rhea swung her head around to me with the seriousness of a kid making her closing argument to a courtroom she had built in her own head.
"If you don't want her, brother, that's fine. The tall guard who walks the gate at night thinks she's pretty. I heard him tell the other guard. I will introduce them."
The voice came down out of me a half octave into a register I had not put it in for a while. It came down without me reaching for it. It came down the way a thing comes down out of a high shelf when the hand has not asked the shoulder for permission first.
