by Ruthie Knox
She wanted him to do that more than she wanted to plan or deflect or know.
More than she wanted to be careful.
Flowers on his sheets. Hair all over him, on his corded arms and thick over his chest, arrowing down his stomach, a dark bush between his legs that his hard cock protruded from, and somehow all of it was of a piece, as though he was always exactly the same amount of naked. The reality of Noah was that he was forever being Noah, right out in the open, day in and day out. When he took off his clothes, he wasn’t revealed or diminished. He was himself.
He didn’t have armor, because he didn’t need it.
Carmen spread herself open to his invasion.
He entered her, leaving nothing between them but condom and lubricant, nothing to stop her from feeling his heat or his chest hair brushing her nipples, the heaving rising-falling motion of his chest, nothing preventing her from noticing that his arms trembled and his eyes were hooded, dark, his mouth open with the ecstasy of feeling this good.
He kissed her and stroked her hair back from her face with both hands, a hard firm pressure over the crown of her head and his gaze on her face, right on her, forcing her to look at him as he moved inside her body, as her nerves fired with the dragging heated pleasure of every stroke, and he was so big, so heavy, it was too much.
Too much. But she kept herself open.
Pushing her heels into the bed, flinging her arms wide, and clutching at the bumpy egg-crate surface of the pad beneath the sheet as he bore her down into softness and touched her, kissed her, grunting and gentle, weighted and furry, powerful and male and sweet, so sweet with her, she didn’t know how to respond.
She didn’t know. But she stayed open, made herself be open, kissed him eagerly, and bucked up her hips to draw out every grunting happy pleasurable exhalation because she couldn’t bear not to, couldn’t bear it, not anymore.
Even though it hurt to hold herself here this way, even though it tightened her lungs and closed down her throat and called up the tears, she did it, because she could with him.
She could.
She could be open and afraid, crying in his bed, and he would just move inside her with gorgeous slick slow strokes.
He would push her hair back and press his hands right over her crown, kissing her forehead and the space between her eyebrows, kissing her nose and her cheeks and her mouth, biting at her throat and licking her neck and saying her name, Carmen, Carmen, as though he’d asked for this.
As though he’d hoped for God to send him some fucked-up Latina with attachment issues who he could soothe and fuck and fall in love with.
If that was even what was happening.
She didn’t know if it was or if she only wanted it to be. But she knew that she could do this—be with him, scared, not understanding everything but choosing it anyway.
Her revelation must have crumbled a bit off the edge of another dam, made her cry harder and shake with it in a way that Noah couldn’t ignore. He stilled, and she was glad for that, even as it embarrassed her. Last time, the time before, she’d cried quietly at orgasm, and he’d held her and said nothing—which had been, for some reason, both too much and not enough.
Now he said softly, “Carmen.” He touched her wet cheek. “What is this?”
“Don’t stop.”
“I have to. I can’t …”
She wrapped her arms and legs around him. “I’m sorry.”
“Baby, don’t be sorry, just talk to me. Tell me what this is about.”
And because she was so open, because she could, she tried. “It’s just this.” She laid her hands over his hips where their bodies were joined. “This can be such a horrible betrayal. It can be the thing that breaks your trust and teaches you you’ll never be safe in the world. That there won’t ever be anywhere you can rest.”
“It’s been that way for you before?”
“Yes.” The word broke her open a little more, and she had to squeeze him tighter. “Yeah, it has. And when that happens, the thing is, you survive it. But you survive it by figuring out ways around trust. You have a life, and it’s your life, because you’ve hacked it and it works. Until there’s this other thing.”
She put her fingers in his hair, threading through, slipping over the mashed-up spot where he’d laid his head on the pillow earlier this night.
“This other thing feels like a miracle,” she said, and the words dragged out of her throat, the harshness an indication of how difficult it was to talk through grief. “Only you weren’t looking for a miracle. It’s so completely different, it’s like a passport to another world, like the first time you go somewhere and you don’t expect it to be beautiful because you’ve already been some other place, but this place is beautiful. You have to cry because it’s beautiful and because you never knew. You didn’t know it existed. People told you, but you didn’t know, you couldn’t trust them, and you can’t help but cry because there were so many years you didn’t know.”
The tears kept slipping out, and he looked down at her with understanding and sympathy, but she didn’t want his sympathy. She only wanted him.
He said, “Can I ask …?”
“Can we just not? Not right now? Because right now we’re here, and that’s where I want to be. Someday, I hope, we’ll be here long enough that I won’t have to cry anymore, because here will feel like all I’ve ever known.”
Her heart beat too hard, too fast. None of that was what she’d meant to say.
None of it had been in her plan, and she was afraid she’d said too much. That she’d lost him, left him behind, mired in pity instead of here with her.
Noah was still frowning. He took a deep breath, his belly pressing into hers, and said, “Okay. Okay, Carmen.”
She kissed him again, licking his lips, stroking his arms and back, rocking her hips to his. He was still inside her, their bodies joined even as she’d stolen most of the pleasure from their coupling.
Carmen wanted to put the pleasure back. She wanted the pleasure to be an affirmation.
She wanted to affirm that she could do, the way Roman had told her to. That she could keep doing and trusting until she could wear her trust like her own skin.
Impossible with Roman, because they’d both used their relationship to hide from themselves, to avoid intimacy rather than seek it out. But Noah was different. He drew her in. Looked at her and saw right through her defenses to the secret heart of her.
He wanted to know her in all the ways Roman never had, and she wanted the same thing—to know him. Completely.
So she rocked a little harder, and she appreciated the advantages of a hairy man, one of which was that all those hairs brushed against some very sensitive places. She added a grind at the top of her next lift, which felt so good that she had to clench around it, and Noah made a noise like he’d been punched in the solar plexus.
Then he was kissing her back.
He rolled them over, settling his hands at her hips. “I want to make you come. I want to make you come a hundred times after what you just said to me, but we’ll settle for one really good one. Tell me how.”
“Touch me.”
He touched her everywhere. Everywhere, as she rose and fell, the tender bottoms of her feet tucked beneath his thighs, his pubic hair teasing her lips, her clit, his fingers pressing there, circling, and she let her eyes fall closed so she could feel it.
His mouth at her breast. Heat and sucking, biting teeth.
All the tension drifting down, settling like sediment in her hips and making her so deliciously heavy, giving every grind and roll a gravity of its own.
He tugged on her nipples with pinching fingers. Tugged when she gasped. Tugged again when she tumbled down to lay across his chest. Carmen pressed her lips into the hollow of his throat and chased the orgasm and he tugged, the pleasure painful, the pain another form of pleasure. If he noticed the tears on his skin—if he minded—she was too full of everything, too open and wracked with feeling, to care.
Noah rolled them over again, knelt up, spread her legs wide. Balancing one hand on her rib cage, he thrust deep and fast, his gaze flicking from the bounce of her breasts to the sight of their bodies joining and parting, his free hand on her swollen clit, circling, flicking.
She toyed with her nipples to make his eyes glaze over. A dozen strokes, and he started to lose focus. Carmen watched the flush climb up his neck and disappear beneath his beard.
A dozen more, and she was coming apart.
Tightening down, she heard nothing but his harsh breathing, blocked everything out but the catch in his movement when he tripped into orgasm, felt nothing but the flurried rush of triumph as he stilled and came with one final thrust that sent her spiraling out and dropped her so deep behind the lines in this new country they would make together, she knew she would never get back to where she’d been.
That was fine with her. That was beginning to feel like the whole point.
Noah dropped to his elbows, panting against her neck.
She cried again, but the tears felt clean and right, and he held her through them, his body relaxed.
They drifted off. He woke her a few hours later and made love to her again.
In the morning, he took her out on his boat.
CHAPTER FOUR
The way Heberto was looking at the plate made Roman want to curve his arm around it. Protect his food from the curl of the other man’s lip.
“Ceviche,” Heberto said. “That’s what Carmen gets.”
“Today, it’s what I get.”
Heberto narrowed his eyes at the sampler of six oversized spoons. The spoons came arranged in two rows on the plate with a spill of roasted corn down the center. Each one was bright and colorful, overloaded with raw fish, citrus juice, vegetables, and spices—ingredients Roman couldn’t name and wouldn’t have been able to taste two weeks ago.
He tried to remember how Carmen had eaten this when she ordered it. You didn’t scoop food off a spoon with another spoon, did you?
“Looks like you’re having second thoughts,” Heberto said.
“No.”
Roman grabbed the handle of one egg-drop spoon at random and tipped the contents into his mouth, tasting ginger, salty soy sauce, a spike of chile. Then cool, creamy—cucumber, avocado. A symphony in his mouth.
He’d wasted too many years not tasting things.
Heberto took a big bite out of the steak sandwich Roman had ordered him. “I’ve only got twenty minutes.” Get on with it, he meant. He’d come to lunch late and would leave before the check came.
“We need to talk about Coral Cay,” Roman said.
Heberto wiped his mouth with his napkin. “We needed to talk about it last week. You wouldn’t pick up the phone.”
“I took a vacation.”
“Is that what you’re calling it?” Heberto tore another bite off his sandwich. Ground it to pieces between his molars. “You broke your word.”
“I didn’t give you my word. We shook hands.”
“That’s a contract.”
“Sure, it’s a kind of contract, but we agreed to do the development together, not to any details. Since when do you micromanage?”
Heberto shook his head, decisive. “You cut me out of the loop. You screwed around on my daughter, messed with the plan, took off for two weeks without explanation, and I’m supposed to pretend you were on vacation? No. Fuck no.”
“I think we can still make this thing work,” Roman replied. “I’ve been talking to Ashley, and I have some new ideas I want to run by you, a different angle on the segment of the tourist market we’re targeting, and—”
“I don’t work with people I can’t trust.”
“I’ve known you fifteen years. One thing happens and you can’t trust me?”
“One thing is all it takes to show me what you’re made of.”
Roman picked up his fork and tunneled it under the roasted corn in the middle of his plate. Put it down. His hand shook.
Two weeks ago, he’d been ready to build a future with Heberto at its center, because the older man possessed power and money and influence, and Roman had believed he needed all those things to keep his fear at bay. He’d lurked at the margins of his mentor’s life, blending into his family by degrees, never inhaling all the way or venturing his own opinions because he’d convinced himself, in his grief, that the scrap of life Heberto offered him was preferable to the wreckage of what he’d had in Heraly.
But two weeks could change everything. They’d changed him.
They’d made him into a man who could allow himself to feel so angry, his hands shook. So angry, his stomach heaved, bile rising in his throat because the anger felt violent, and violence made him ill.
“Bullshit,” he said, through clenched teach.
Heberto paused with his sandwich halfway to his mouth. “What did you say to me?”
“That’s bullshit. It’s not trust. If you trusted me, you’d give me a chance to explain. You’d show me some fucking loyalty after all this time.”
Heberto dropped the sandwich and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He stood. “We’re done.”
Roman shot to his feet. “I’m not.”
Heberto snagged his suit jacket and began walking toward the door of the crowded restaurant. Without thinking, Roman pulled a fifty from his wallet, threw it on the table, and jogged after him.
Outside, he paused on the brick sidewalk, looking left and right for Heberto’s familiar form, furious with him. Furious.
He found him crossing the street on a diagonal, holding his phone to his ear. Probably calling his driver to bring the car around. Roman waited for a break in the traffic and darted across three narrow lanes in pursuit.
Heberto whipped around, eyes narrowed, and began walking faster, finishing his call with a burst of rapid Spanish. When he put the phone away, Roman said, “Stop and talk to me.”
“We’ve got nothing to talk about.”
Roman grabbed his elbow, gripping tight and yanking him to a halt. “What’s your problem with me? What is it really?”
Heberto’s mouth was tight. Roman had never seen him so grave. “I never promised you anything. I told you a hundred times that you have to count on yourself. Just you. Nobody else.”
“I heard you, all right? But you took care of me. You did. You paid for my college, invited me to your house. Maybe you told yourself you were teaching me how to make it on my own, but that’s not how it was. You made me part of your family. You’ve been like a father.”
Heberto looked past Roman’s shoulder and lifted his arm, hailing his driver. “You never heard me,” he bit out. “That’s why I kept fucking telling you.”
The car pulled up. Heberto opened the back door.
Roman shook all over now, his mouth flooding with sour saliva. “This isn’t over. You talk to me or I’ll follow you around until you do. You watch.”
“I’ve got worse ghosts to worry about than you, kid.”
When the door slammed shut and the car pulled away from the curb, a wave of grief rose up and hit Roman so hard, he stumbled and retched, his stomach heaving, though he managed to keep the food down. He had to lean against a nearby tree, grateful for its shade and the solid trunk beneath his hand.
He had to take a deep breath, and then another one and another, just to get a grip.
When he got it, his hands clenched with the need to lock himself down. His body remembered how to do it. Three turns of the screw, and he’d be closed off from all this feeling. He would be able to breathe without pain, to banish all this fear and anger, this chaos, so he could carry on.
He could wipe it away.
But he’d wipe himself away with it.
Not again.
He wouldn’t lose Heberto, and he wouldn’t lose himself.
Roman extracted his phone from his pocket and pulled up Ashley’s number. Breathing against the blackness, he fixed his gaze on the letters of her name and thought about the way he’d left her in the c
ondo when he went into the office this morning.
Barefoot on his couch, wearing his green T-shirt and nothing else. Bed-rumpled, gum-cracking, twisting a lock of hair around her finger as she poked through employment ads on his iPad with one desultory finger.
Trying so hard to put her best foot forward. She’d smiled at him and wished him luck as he let himself out the door.
Roman looked at her name and breathed until his hands stilled.
Then he found Carmen’s number and put the call through.
Roman found Heberto in the prayer chapel at La Ermita de la Caridad—the National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity, the Virgin of Cobre, patroness of Cuban Catholics.
Carmen had told him where he’d be able to find her father.
Bathed in blue light filtered through stained glass, Heberto sat alone. Canted forward, head bent, his clasped hands draped over the pew in front of him.
The shrine faced outward from the lip of Biscayne Bay—the heart of Miami Cuban Catholicism, yearning toward its homeland. Roman had approached the building with uncertainty, feeling like the tourist.
He’d always felt that way—like this wasn’t his city. The Virgin of Cobre wasn’t his saint.
But in the hushed space of the sanctuary’s interior, watching Heberto’s lips move in a silent prayer, Roman heard his own heart beating.
He shifted his weight from back foot to front.
He approached the pew.
Heberto sat frozen at the far end, which meant a long slide for Roman—eight or ten feet of undignified scooting, polishing the wood with his ass. When he fetched up next to his mentor, he leaned back and studied the stained glass that filled the wall in front of them.
The pale-skinned Virgin of Charity floated in the clouds above a green sea, holding the infant Christ in one arm, emitting beams of glorious light into a sky the color of Ashley’s eyes.
Roman had seen the Virgin on murals around Miami, painted with brown skin and blue eyes, floating above an ocean full of refugees in boats. He knew she’d first appeared four hundred years ago, a statue of Mary on a floating scrap of wood discovered by three Cuban farmers caught in a maelstrom. Forty-odd years ago, she’d come to the United States, a replica idol secreted away in an emigrant’s carry-on and flown over the water. They’d built her a shrine on donated land, paid for with schoolchildren’s pennies and workmen’s weekly tithes.
