Page 77 of Knight
His mouth descends. Teeth on my pulse. Tongue soothing the sting. His other hand slides between our bodies, finding my clit, and I shatter.
The orgasm rips through me without warning, a white-hot detonation that starts at my core and radiates outward. My pussy clenches around his cock, spasming, and I scream—his name, a curse, a sound that does not belong in this penthouse with its silk sheets and city views. It belongs to the girl from the fourth-floor walk-up, the one who learned that wanting something does not mean you get to keep it.
He follows me over the edge. I feel him swell inside me, feel the hot pulse of his cum flooding my cunt, filling me. His groan vibrates against my throat, raw and wrecked, and his hips stutter, losing their rhythm, grinding deep as he empties himself.
We lie there, tangled together, breathing hard. His weight presses me into the mattress. His cock softens inside me, and I feel his cum leaking out, slick and warm against my thighs. The evidence of what we just did—angry, desperate, unfinished.
I push at his chest. He rolls off me, onto his back, one arm thrown over his eyes. The silence stretches, thick and suffocating.
I stare at the ceiling. My body is satisfied in the way a fire is satisfied after it has consumed everything in its path—hollowed out, still smoking, waiting for the next thing to burn.
He did not tell me the truth.
I did not make him.
The wall between us stands, built of a secret I cannot see and he will not name. We fucked around it, not through it. We used our bodies to say what our mouths could not, and it felt like victory and defeat at the same time.
I turn my head to look at him. His chest rises and falls, the muscles of his abdomen still twitching. The bite mark on his shoulder is already purpling. My mark. My claim. As if claiming his body could ever be the same as claiming the truth.
"You still owe me," I say.
He does not answer. But his hand finds mine in the dark, his fingers threading through mine, gripping tight.
Neither of us lets go.
Afterward.
Silence. The wrong kind.
The wall is intact. Reinforced. Whatever Romeo carries about his father is still locked behind that door and all the passion in this bed cannot pry it open because passion is not what he is withholding.
Trust is what he is withholding.
And I cannot keep colliding with a man who gives me his body like a sacrifice and keeps his truth locked in a vault.
My decision crystallizes in the dark. Clean. Final. The way my decisions always form — in silence, in stillness, in the hours when the people I love are sleeping and I am the only one left awake doing the math.
Guido. Tomorrow. The brother who told me Romeo deserves the chance to say it himself — which means Guidoknows whatitis. He knows and he has been waiting, the same way I have been waiting, for Romeo to crack open on his own.
Romeo has had his chances. I gave him the hallway. The kitchen. This bed. I gave him every opening a woman can give and he smiled through each one and walked to the window.
Tomorrow I go to Guido. I ask the right question. I carry the answer back and I set it on the counter between us and I give my husband one final chance to say the words with his own mouth.
Because I did not marry a performance.
I married the man behind it.
And I am done waiting to meet him.
15
romeo
The Knight's Gambit
The Surgical Kill
Fabio calls at five-forty and I know before he speaks.
