Chapter Nine

I can cook. I don't tell her that. I let her find out.

Chicken, lemon, the thing with the potatoes my mother did on Sundays. The knuckles make the knife slow and I do it anyway, and she sits at her end of the table with her laptop closed, which is the first time I've seen it closed, and watches me work with the bad hand.

"You're favoring your side," she says.

"My side hurts."

"Marco hits hard for an old man."

"Marco hit hard when he was a young man. He just doesn't do it often now."

I sent Tommy home. I sent the two on the step to the corner, where they can see the door and not the windows. That's as close to alone as this house gets, and she asked for alone, and I wanted to see what she'd do with it.

She eats. She eats like someone who grew up in a house where food was serious, and she tells me the potatoes are good, and she tells me the chicken is better than the potatoes, and she doesn't tell me she's nervous, but she's turned her glass a quarter turn four times.

"Say it," I tell her.

"Say what."

"Whatever you've been not saying since the first bite."

She puts the glass down. "I want to know what this is. Before. Not after."

"It's dinner."

"Dario."

I wipe my hands and sit. The chair's closer to hers than it needs to be. "You want me to say I'll be different tomorrow. I won't. Tommy's still driving you. The men are still on the corner. If somebody puts a hand on you I'll still break it. None of that changes because of tonight."

"I know."

"Then what are you asking?"

"I'm asking if you're going to lie to me about any of it."

That's the question. Of all the ones she could ask, that's the one, and the memorandum is sitting in my desk twenty feet away with her father's name on it.

"I'll tell you what I've done," I say. "I won't always tell you why."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

She looks at me a long time. I don't know what she's deciding. I've wanted her since a ballroom fourteen months ago, I've wanted her since the kitchen, I've wanted her since she lifted Marco's hand off her shoulder like something she'd found in the sink, and I sit still and let her decide, because this is the one thing in this marriage I told her I wouldn't take.

She stands. She comes around the table. She puts her hand flat on my chest, left side, the side that doesn't hurt, same as in the front room.

"Upstairs," she says. "Yours. I want to see what you look like somewhere you can't make the rules."

"I make the rules in my own bedroom."

"We'll see."

The second floor is dark. She doesn't let me turn the light on. She gets the buttons of my shirt open one-handed while I'm still finding her waist, and when I hiss at the ribs she doesn't stop, she just moves her hand higher. My shirt hangs open. She looks at the ink on my chest in what light there is and then she looks at my face, and there's no fear in it, and no forgiveness either, just want, plain as a bill.

She backs onto the bed.

Her hands come up to my shirt. She pulls me down by it and her mouth finds mine, and this time I let it go where it wants to. My hand goes to her jaw. The other finds her hair and takes the tie out of it, and it comes down over my wrist, heavy and cool.

I take the sweater off her. The T-shirt under it. Her skin is warm, and there are freckles on her shoulders and across the tops of her breasts, and I put my mouth on them, one and then the next, and then on her nipple, slow, until it's hard against my tongue and her nails go into the back of my neck. She pushes my shirt off my shoulders. Her palms slide down my chest, and she has my belt half undone before I take her hand off the buckle.

"Not yet."

She gives me a look that would empty a bar in Southie, and lets me lay her back.

I take my time with the jeans. I have thought about this since she sat across from me at Sal's, and her body under my hands does things to her breathing that I want to watch. Her thighs are strong and they come apart for me.

I put my mouth between her legs. She's wet already, and she tastes of salt and heat, and the first slow pass of my tongue lifts her hips off the bed. She wants it fast. Her hand pulls at my hair, and her hips rock to hurry me.

So I stop.

I keep my mouth an inch from her and my hand flat on her stomach. She swears at me, low and filthy. Her hips push up against my palm, and I hold them down and wait until she goes still.

Then I start again, slower.

I slide two fingers into her and curl them, and she comes on my mouth with her thighs shaking against my head and my name going up to the ceiling.

When I come back up to her she takes my face in both hands.

"Say it," I tell her.

"I want you." Her voice is low and rough and it shakes. "Here. Now. Yes."

I take both her wrists in one hand and lay them on the pillow above her head. When I open my hand, they stay there. She watches me get out of the rest of my clothes, and her hands stay where I put them.

I go into her slowly. Her eyes stay open and so do mine. She's tight and hot and soaked, and she takes me in with a long breath and lets it out with my name in it, and I hold still inside her until she says please. She says it twice.

Then her hands come off the pillow. She gets one in my hair and rolls her hips up against me and says harder, and whatever I was holding goes. I take her how my body has wanted to take her since Sal's back room, deep and hard, her knees up at my ribs. My headboard hits the wall. She bites my shoulder. Her legs lock around me and her eyes shut, and I get my hand in her hair and say look at me, and she does, and that is what takes her over, her eyes open on mine and her whole body pulling tight around me and then loose, and I follow her a second later with my face in her hair.

After, I stay on her. Her heart goes against my chest, fast, then slower.

When I roll beside her, she looks at the ceiling. There's a crack in the plaster that's been there since I bought the house. She finds it right away.

"That's Cape Cod."

"It's a crack."

"It's the whole Cape. There's Provincetown." She points. Her arm is shaking a little, still. "You've been lying under Massachusetts every night and never noticed."

"I noticed."

"You never fixed it."

"I like it."

She turns her head on the pillow and looks at me. I don't know what she sees. I know what I see. I see a woman who did exactly what she said she'd do, who chose this in my kitchen with her eyes open and is already, right now, deciding what it does and doesn't mean.

"I'm going upstairs," she says.

"Stay."

"No."

I don't ask twice. I watch her find her sweater on the floor and pull it on, and at the door she stops with her hand on the frame.

"Thursday was mine," she says. "Tomorrow's still yours. I know that. I'm not confused about it."

"Good."

"Don't mistake it for anything else."

She goes up. I hear her door, and I hear her key, and I lie under the Cape with my ribs hurting and her smell on my sheets, and for the first time since the ballroom I don't know what I'm going to do about her.

That's new. I don't like new.