"Look at me," she says.
I look at her.
"You don't have to carry all of it tonight."
"I carry all of it every night."
"Not here. Not with me."
Her thumb traces my cheekbone. The gesture she's learned from me or I've learned from her. I don't remember who started it. It belongs to both of us now.
I pull her closer. My forehead against her stomach. Her hands in my hair. The blouse smells like the restaurant. Like her. The scent of soap underneath everything. The baseline of her body, the one smell that is hers and hers alone, clean and uncomplicated in a life where everything else carries residue.
Something cracks.
Not tears. I don't cry. I stopped crying when my father died because my father never cried and the transition of power requires a seamless performance. What cracks is the containment. The vault where I store the things I can't afford to feel while running an organization that depends on my capacity to feel nothing.
The vault opens. Not all the way. Enough.
"I need you," I say into her stomach. The words come out low, muffled by fabric, by her body, by the specific humiliation of a man who leads a Camorra clan admitting that he cannot get through this night without a waitress holding his head.
She doesn't say anything. Her fingers tighten in my hair. She pulls my head back. Looks down at me.
Then she kisses me.
Not gentle. Not the tender, careful kiss of a woman comforting a grieving man. She kisses me hard. Her mouth on mine, her hands gripping my jaw, her teeth catching my lower lip hard enough that I taste copper. The pain registers. Small, bright, specific. A signal that cuts through the fog of the day, through the marble cemetery and the paper-weight mother and the fifteen-year-old's handshake.
I feel it.
I stand. The stool scrapes behind me. My hands go to her waist, grip, lift. She wraps her legs around me. I carry her out of the kitchen. Down the hallway. Her mouth on my neck, biting. Not kissing. Biting. Her teeth on the tendon below my ear, hard enough to leave marks I'll see tomorrow. Idon't care. I want the marks. I want evidence that something happened tonight that wasn't grief.
In the bedroom I don't set her down, I throw her onto the bed.
She hits the mattress, bounces, her hair coming loose from the tie, spreading across the white sheets. Her glasses are crooked on her face. Her blouse has pulled free from her skirt. She looks up at me with an expression I haven't catalogued. Not desire. Not sympathy. Something feral. Something that matches the thing breaking open inside my chest.
I pull my shirt off. Over my head. Drop it. My belt. My pants. I don't fold them. I don't drape them. They hit the floor and I am on her before they settle.
Her blouse. I tear it. The buttons scatter across the sheets with the sound of small stones hitting fabric. She doesn't flinch. She reaches for my neck, pulls me down, kisses me with her mouth open, her tongue finding mine, her hands raking down my back hard enough that I feel her nails draw lines from my shoulders to my waist.
I hiss. The scratches burn. Good. The pain is a frequency that tunes everything else to static. I bite her shoulder. She gasps. Not pain. Something beyond pain, something on theother side of it, where the nerve endings stop distinguishing between damage and pleasure and the body stops caring about the difference.
I yank her skirt up. Don't remove it. There's no time for removal. No patience for the careful undressing of other nights, the glasses-first tenderness. I pull her panties to the side. She reaches between us, grabs my dick, positions me right between her pussy lip and I thrust into her in a single motion.
She cries out. Loud. Her back arches off the mattress. Her hands slam against my chest, not pushing away, bracing. Finding purchase.
I don't start slow.
I fuck her the way I've needed to all day. Hard. Deep. Each thrust driven by the accumulation of everything I couldn't say at the funeral. The grief. The rage. The helplessness of a man who controls a criminal empire and cannot bring his friend back from a marble wall. I channel all of it downward, into my hips, into the force of my body against hers.
She takes it. She more than takes it. She meets every thrust by lifting her hips, by locking her legs around me, by pulling me into her with a strength that contradicts her size.
I grab her hair. A fistful of the dark strands, winding them around my hand, pulling her head back. She moans. The sound is raw, stripped of performance. Her throat exposed, the pulse hammering at the base, her mouth open.
"Più forte,"she says through clenched teeth. (Harder.)
I give her harder. The bed frame hits the wall. A rhythmic percussion that marks the pace. Her hands claw at my shoulders. She pulls herself up, changes the angle, wraps her arms around my neck.
She slaps me.