Page 76 of Ruthless Sin
The day moves.
I take a call from New York. Draft a letter. Eat the sandwich Nonna puts in front of me in the kitchen without tasting it.
The library door stays open.
She sets the Tsvetaeva down and looks out the window at the garden for a long time with her chin in her hand. The light moves across the floor in the afternoon, the slant off the magnolia that Mama used to say was the house breathing.
I go back to the desk. The Pushkin is still closed where I left it this morning. The library door is open across the antechamber and I should cross it and I sit here instead.
I sit at the desk until the light through the windows has gone weak-tea pale and I have run out of reasons not to go, and then I stand and walk through the antechamber and stop in the library doorway.
She looks up when I come in.
She has closed the book with her finger marking the page. The dress from last night is folded on the chair by the window. She hasn’t put it away.
She looks at me and then she stands, and the breath goes right out of me and doesn’t come back, my hands at my sides and my chest gone tight and silent.
She crosses the room.
Library floor between the chair by the window and the doorway where I’m standing. She covers it in steady steps. She stops one step short of me.
She looks up at me.
Her eyes are gray-green in the evening light. The chain moves at her throat.
She lifts her right hand and puts it flat against my chest.
The hand stays there.
My heart is slamming against my ribs hard enough she has to feel it through the fabric. I hold. I hold everything I have. My hands at my sides. My breath even. Every muscle locked.
She rises onto her toes and her mouth finds mine.
For a breath I don’t move.
A full breath with her mouth soft against mine and my hands at my sides and my jaw locked against it, because if I move I’m going to pull her against me and feel every line of her through that dress and I cannot do that here, not like this, not when I am standing in a library with a woman who came out of a Benedetti basement and chose me to trust with the slow work of becoming herself again.
Then my right hand comes up to the back of her head and I kiss her back.
She exhales against my mouth when my hand hits her hair. Slow, thorough, hers. The kind of kiss that says everything I have not been allowed to say. All of it. Every week of it, going in because there is nowhere else for it to go.
She makes a sound against my mouth.
Small. Surprised. Her hips shift into me without her meaning them to, just a fraction, involuntary. She is warm and pressed against my chest and her pulse is jumping at her throat.
Cristo.
My left hand stays at my side. My cock is hard against the seam of my pants and my pulse is in my ears and she is pressed against me with her hand warm through my shirt and I give her everything I have, every restrained hungry careful inch of what I have been carrying, and I do not take a single thing she hasn’t offered.
She pulls back first.
I let her.
I keep my right hand at the back of her head for one beat after she pulls away.
Then I move it to her shoulder.
Then I drop it.
