Page 114 of The Beast Who Bought Me
He stares at me hard for a second, then grabs the lube. “Come on, then.”
As it turns out, we have to be careful of his bandaged wound, so Dami’s the one who does most of the washing. He soaps me up all over, gentle and soft between my butt cheeks. And then he pushes me up against the wall, the cool tiles a shock against my hot skin, and drops to his knees behind me to nuzzle into my crack. My hole is still so tender, but when I feel his flat tongue lapping over it, soothing and slow, I’m glad I trusted him. He licks around for a while until I reach back and thread my fingers through his wet hair, pressing him closer in a wordless plea. His tongue wriggles in, a slick, dirty invasion that has me panting.
He knows when I need more without me having to even ask. He stands just before I start begging, spreads my legs wide with one of his, and slicks himself up with the lube. I brace for discomfort when he lines up the head of his cock with my asshole, but he slides right in to the hilt like it’s the easiest thing in the world.
And I take it with a deep groan of satisfaction. The water from the showerhead is running between us, down my ass, trickling over my stretched hole where we’re joined. Dami starts a slow, easy rhythm, and his orgasm, when it comes, is just as slow, a lazy pulse that makes me feel warm all over.
He stays inside me while he washes my hair, which is nice for a minute, but soon becomes a strange kind of foreplay. By the time we’re done, he’s hard again, and he starts to fuck me in earnest this time, jacking me off while he does, until I splatter the tiles.
“Messy,” he tells me with a grin.
I can only laugh.
By the time we get out, I’m starving. I dress in some of the clothes the Benedettis sent over. “I’ll get Rosa to send something up,” he says. “We should talk about this Tiberius guy.”
I catch his hand. “We need to do that. But let’s eat down there in the kitchen. With them.”
He looks at me in surprise. “Uh. Sammy’ll…be there.”
“It’s time Sammy and I got used to each other. Besides…” Should I bring this up? “You should warn them. About the Bratva.”
His face darkens—but not at me. “Yeah,” he says gruffly. “You’re right. I don’t want any of them blindsided. They need to know the situation.”
He lets me keep his hand as we go downstairs, but I release him as we enter the kitchen. I don’t want to push too much. Rosa is there as usual and the place smells deliciously of sizzling pancetta and garlic. She glances up as we enter. “I’ll send something up,” she says.
“We’ll eat down here tonight,” Dami says.
Rosa’s eyes meet mine briefly, but she just nods and sets out a few more places at the round table in the small dining area.
“Sammy and Vito gonna make it to dinner?” Dami asks. “I gotta talk to you all.”
“They’re always here,” Rosa says with a shrug.
Sammy comes in not long afterward, though he stops dead seeing me at the table. “I’m not going to break bread with a Clemenza,” he says at once.
“That’s fine,” Dami says to him. “You can watch the rest of us eat. But you come and sit down, because I need to talk to you all.”
Sammy comes to the table. Slowly and angrily, but he comes. He takes the other seat next to Dami and slumps back in his chair so that he doesn’t have to see me. Vito comes in soon after, and then Rosa serves up dinner to us all: a creamy carbonara on her handmade pasta to start, followed by chicken saltimbocca with a side of roast vegetables, baked ziti, and two different kinds of bread. At first it’s enough food to seem excessive, even for an Italian household, but as I watch Vito and especially Dami startto wolf it down, I can see she knows exactly how much food she needs to make to keep the men of the house happy.
Even Sammy picks up his fork about half a second after Rosa sets the noodles down in front of him. Halfway through the meal, when the atmosphere is more convivial, Damiano starts laying it out to them: that there might be trouble, that they need to be extra careful, that they should stay in the house as much as possible. He points a fork at Sammy. “That means you stay away from the markets, too,” he says sternly. “I ain’t chancing someone coming at you while you’re there. You hear me?”
Sammy looks pleased that Dami singled him out. “I hear you. But what about groceries?”
“We’ll get them delivered.”
“Won’t be as good,” Rosa sniffs. “These places get rid of the worst of their stock on delivery orders.”
“You’ll make it taste as good as it always does,” Dami tells her. “And you, Vito, I want you with Rosa when you’re not with me. Just in case.”
Vito gives a reassuring smile to Rosa. She flushes a little and busies herself serving out more baked ziti onto his plate.
“I mean it,” Dami says. “This is serious shit. And you see anything, hear anything, you come to me right away.”
After Dami’s pronouncement, an atmosphere of camaraderie seems to settle over us. This little group of strays will pull together, I think.
And me with them.
I have to look down at the second helping of chicken—that Rosa served me without even asking—to hide a sudden prickling in my eyes. I’m not a crier. Learned early that it wouldn’t be rewarded in the Clemenzas. But this sense of belonging, offamily, is exactly what I’ve been missing since my father died. He and Nonna Mellie and me, we were our own little group. We’d have fun together when I was small, and we’d meet at Bergdorf’s for lunch once a week. The three of us were simpatico, my Dad used to say.
