He took my hand, and I let him because I felt no will outside my desire. He led me past Zia scrubbing a pot and greeting the lunch staff, to the office where I’d looked at the restaurant’s books a million years before. The same squares of yellow sticky paper covered the wall, and the same beige computer hissed and hummed. He snapped the door closed and pushed me against the shelf that served as a desk.
“Let me have you,” he growled. “Today. Now. Adesso. I don’t care about anything but your body. I can’t think without it. I’ll get a divorce. An annulment. I’ll murder anyone who comes between us. I’ll promise not to. Anything. But I want you. Please. Call it a fuck of agreement. Call it a fuck for good-bye. Call it a che sera, serà. I don’t care. But don’t tell me I’m married to someone else. There is no one else.”
I didn’t want to believe him, because everything about what he was saying was wrong. But I did believe him. From the soaking arousal between my legs to the tips of my toes, from basest parts of my lizard brain to the intellect in my frontal cortex, I believed him.
I didn’t believe the world would cooperate, but I didn’t want the world inside me. I wanted him. His… what had Valentina called it?
“What does cetriolo mean?” I asked quietly.
His mouth twitched on one side as if he was trying not to smile. “You call it…” He cleared his throat and rubbed his eye as if he were so embarrassed he couldn’t even see straight. “A cucumber.”
“No, that’s not what I call it at all.” I spoke only in breath, my eyes on his luscious mouth. Those lips. On me. On my neck. On my body. My resistance slid away, lubricated by Valentina’s dismissal and the shape of Antonio’s mouth.
With a tilt of his head and a tsk of his tongue hitting the roof of his mouth, he had me.
“She doesn’t seem to care if you fuck me,” I said.
“She said that?”
“More or less. She seems to want every part of you but your eggplant.”
His eyes lit up, and his mouth tightened in a smile. I’d given him as good as a “yes.”
“It comes with the set,” he said into my neck.
“Give it to me. The whole package.”
I kissed him, pushing my body up against his. We wrapped our arms around each other, and pressed together, the outline of his erection was tight against me. He pulled back, and I drank in the lines of his face, the texture of stubble on his cheeks, the espresso of his eyes. Our lips came together again in an explosion of shared desire.
He pulled my shirt and bra over my breasts in one move, releasing them. “I missed these,” he said, squeezing a nipple. “You are magnifico.”
I groaned his name when he took my breast in his mouth. “I won’t let you go,” I said in a gasp. “I know I said I would, but I can’t. I’m so confused.” He sucked the nipple hard, and my last word came out as a squeak.
“I’m not.” He opened my pants. “Fucking is very simple.”
I was going to do this. I was going to break my promise to myself into a thousand pieces.
“Your body is mine.” He kneeled in front of me, kissing my belly and the triangle where my legs met, slipping my pants down as he went. “I’m going to do what I want with it. Trust that I want what’s right for it.”
“I trust you, I just…” My words fell into breaths when his hands caressed my ass.
“Trust me. Trust that I won’t leave you. Not from being careless or reckless. Not if I can help it. Not for a woman in my past.” His eyes became brown disks warm with a pure decency I’d never seen before. “I will never leave you. I need you. Tell me you understand.”
I didn’t. Not at all. But I believed his intentions. “I trust you.”
He lifted my feet from my jeans and kissed inside my legs, my knees, his tongue waking my skin as if from a long sleep. He spread them apart, pushing me back onto the desk. “You’re going to let me fuck you so hard, you remember me forever. There is no such word as ‘no.’”
My head rested on the wall, and he kissed where I was most vulnerable. The hair on his face scratched my sensitive thighs, but when his tongue reached my center, the discomfort was forgotten.