"Good," he says, and the almost-smile does what it does, brief and real, and I feel it in my chest the way I have been feeling it since a kitchen at nine in the morning.
Santos lifts his head and looks at me with warm eyes and the most genuine expression I have seen from him since the roulette table, no performance, no deployment of charm, just him. "Principessa," he says.
Tomas picks up his glasses from the nightstand and puts them on and looks at me over the rim of them with those grayeyes and the particular steady warmth he uses when something has settled the way he calculated it would and he is sitting in the satisfaction of the correct result.
We stay like that for a long time, the room warm and gold and full of our scents, and outside the island is doing its September evening thing, the water going from gold to amber to that color, and somewhere in the herb garden Gerald is standing in the last of the light being exactly what he is, having been here longer than everything else, having watched considerably stranger evenings than this one from the same quiet spot.
The heat moves through me again, softer now, the asking rather than demanding kind, and Santos makes a low sound beside me and Matteo's hand tightens fractionally at my waist and Tomas looks at me over his glasses.
"Again?" Tomas says.
"Yes," I say.
Matteo takes his time.
He rolls toward me and his pale blue eyes are dark in the evening light and close, closer than Matteo usually allows himself to be, and he reaches out and touches my face first, two fingers at my jaw, the same deliberate touch he used to tilt my face toward him in the early days, but different now, softer, the touch of someone who has stopped having to convince themselves they are allowed.
Matteo kisses differently from Santos.
Where Santos is warmth and immediacy, all saffron and Latin and the particular generous urgency of a man who has wanted something for a long time and is glad to be done pretending otherwise, Matteo is slow and deliberate and thorough, his mouth tracing mine with the precise attention he brings to everything that matters, his tongue warm and certain, his hands finding my waist and learning the shape of me with thefocused patience of someone who is not in any hurry and knows it.
I press my hand flat against his chest and feel his heart going considerably faster than his exterior would suggest.
"Your heart," I say, against his mouth.
"I know," he says.
"It's beating so fast," I say.
He presses one finger down the center of my chest again, that same slow deliberate line, and the sensation ripples outward from it in every direction, layering over everything else in the room, and I close my eyes and feel it spreading.
He follows the line his finger made with his mouth, warm and unhurried, his lips pressing at my collarbone, at the curve of my breast, at my ribs, taking his time with each place, and the ripples build on each other the way the morning ripples build when the wind crosses the water at a particular angle, each one catching the last.
I put my hand in his hair.
He makes a low sound and his mouth becomes less deliberate and more present, and I feel Santos's hand at my shoulder from behind, warm and steady, and Tomas's silver musk quiet and certain at the edge of the room.
"Still good?" Santos says, from behind my shoulder.
"Very," I say.
Matteo lifts his head and looks at me with those pale blue eyes and they are as dark as I have ever seen them and entirely unhidden.
He moves with the same deliberate patience and I close my eyes and the colors come back, different this time, cooler, the particular blue and silver of the water in the early morning before the sun has fully arrived, all that cool clear light, and the wave that builds is long and slow and certain the way Tomas is certain, and when it arrives it arrives completely.
Matteo holds me through it with both arms, and he says something against my hair that I hear and file away in the place where I keep the things I am not ready to examine yet but intend to return to.
After a while the room is quiet and gold and warm.
The window is going from amber to the color I do not have a name for, that color, and outside the island is going into its September evening, the water settling, the stars beginning their excessive thing overhead, and inside the room the four of us, the five of us, are breathing together in the warm close air.
Santos is on my left, his saffron settled and warm, his arm across me, his mouth at my temple pressing a kiss that is slow and deliberate and real.
Matteo is on my right, his hand resting near mine on the sheet the way it always rests near hers without touching, close, present, requiring nothing.
Tomas is sitting at the edge of the bed with his glasses on and his hand over mine, and the silver musk of him is the particular steady quality it goes when he has reached a conclusion and is sitting in the certainty of it.
Santos makes a sound that is almost a laugh, warm and low against my temple.