“God. I’m so sorry. Nico, I’m not trying to pressure you at all, I swear. I know it’s only been maybe a month since I got back, and we’ve been taking it kind of slow, and oh my God, I’m screwing this up, aren’t I––”
I’m cut off with a kiss as Nico yanks me close and covers my babbling mouth with his. It’s the same kiss from the tattoo shop, the one that burned deeper than any needle. The one that spurred me through the pain that’s still burning slightly on my side.
“Stop,” he says, breathless, his broad chest heaving, though he refuses to let me move away. “Just stop. Honest to God, baby. I thought you’d never fuckin’ ask.”
On this lonely corner, a golden halo of warmth surrounds us.
“Yeah?” I whisper, suddenly unsure. Did he really say what I think he said?
“What’s the word?” Nico asks after he kisses me again. “Home?” He tightens the arm around my waist, careful to avoid the tattoo, and lifts me so that only my toes graze the ground. “That’s what we are together, Layla. Home.” He kisses me again. “Now come on. Let’s christen our new place. Together.”
~
A few minutes later, we’re practically tearing down my door. Nico uses his new key to open it, and as soon as it’s shut, he’s dropped his bag to the floor and pulled me in for another kiss, the kind of kiss that might get us arrested if we ever did it in public. His hands are everywhere––up and down my arms, cupping my breasts, squeezing my ass, and without a thought, mine are flung around his shoulders, pulling him tight against me.
We just want to be close. As close as we can possibly get. For the first time, there are no ghosts threatening us from far away. It’s just him. It’s just me. Just…us.
Keeping his lips fused to mine, Nico guides us toward the bedroom, shedding clothing as we shuffle. His shirt. My shoes. His belt. My jacket. By the time we cross the threshold, there’s a trail of clothing from the front door through the living room, up to my bed, and we’re standing before each other in nothing but our underwear––Nico in those black boxer briefs that fit him like a second skin; me in plain black underwear and a bra, our matching white bandages skimming our sides.
Nico cups my face to kiss me again. In the blueish light that streams through my window––no, our window––his smooth skin glistens, and his black eyes shine with love.
I run my hands over his body, taking my time, just enjoying the feel of it when my fingers graze the frayed edge of athletic tape over a piece of gauze on his chest. I break away and look down.
“What is that?”
Nico looks down to where I’m staring––at a small white bandage at the top of the hand-sized compass over his heart. He looks back at me.
“I, um, had Milo do one other thing while you were up front paying. You…you want to see it?”
I nod. Nico swallows heavily, then slowly peels the bandage off. He turns to toss the bandaging into the trash bin under my desk, but when he turns back, I can see the black script clearly: Layla.
My name. Nothing more. In small, almost unintelligible script, right where the missing North symbol should have been on his compass, written plainly for anyone to see.
“Why?” The word slips out, even as tears start to cloud my vision.
“Because that’s what you are,” he says softly, pressing my hand firmly over the small, reddened words. It can’t feel good––it’s a fresh wound, just barely scabbed over. But he holds my hand firmly, and his gaze doesn’t waver as he speaks. “Layla, I knew it before I came back to New York. A part of me even knew it before I met you.”
I shake my head, unable to speak. This is…he is so utterly overwhelming.
“Do you remember your trip to New York with your dad? When you were, I don’t know, maybe in junior high?”
It was a long time ago––nine years, maybe. I was thirteen, and my dad took me to New York for a birthday present when he had to attend a conference. I spent most of the time in his hotel doing homework, but we went out at night to restaurants and shows. Even a Broadway musical.
“You went to see Phantom of the Opera, right?” Nico asks softly.
I frown. “How did you know that?”
“Because I was there, baby. I was on my way to the subway with K.C. and Flaco. Flaco told me right then that I had gotten the job at FedEx––my first real job that wasn’t hustling at some nightclub or helping my mom clean houses.” He cocks his head and traces his thumb across my cheekbones. “We were going to celebrate, and I bumped into this girl. She was kind of awkward and she had a mouthful of braces. But her eyes were like the bluest sky I’d ever seen. And even though she didn’t say a word, I knew she saw right through me.”
The memory rushes back with the force of a tidal wave. The trio of boys, maybe nineteen or twenty, laughing and joking loudly in the street with a mix of Spanish and English. “Ruffians,” my father had called them, mostly referring to their backward hats and low-slung jeans. One bumped into me, then grabbed my arm to steady my fall. He was thinner back then, without quite the same level of swagger, but still strong and solid. His deep-black eyes and bright white smile cut through me, and I was stuck there on the sidewalk, staring at him until my father pulled me into the theater.
I blink, suddenly unable to stop the tears that have been threatening since Nico started talking. How could I have forgotten that moment? Something had always called me back to New York since those first visits…but I had never been able to say exactly what it was. What if it was him? What if it was Nico from the start?
“Every good thing that’s ever happened to me has had you in it,” Nico says as he brushes hair from my face. His thumbs wipe away the tears that spill, one by one. “I knew that one day I would find my true north. I just never imagined she would be this beautiful, inside and out. I never imagined she would be you.”
“Nico,” I whisper as he pulls me close again. His skin is so warm––he practically glows.
“It’s you, Layla,” he whispers back before he fits his mouth over mine. “It’s always been you.”
My mouth opens naturally to his as he literally sweeps me off my feet and lays me down in the bed. Our tongues tangle, lips grapple, but his touch is soft, floating over my skin like a feather. His kisses drift down my body as he removes my bra and underwear, and I watch, lovesick, when he stands up to remove his boxers. I forget sometimes what a work of art he really is––the way years of training have sculpted his body into perfectly cut lines, marred slightly with a few scars here and there, accented by the tattoos on his chest and arm. And now, of course, his side and my name over his heart.
“Come here,” he rumbles as he leans back over me, peppering my neck and chest with kisses. He sucks one nipple, then another into his mouth with vigor and just a little bite, but I don’t shy. I don’t need to. There is no one here but us.
“Fuck, you’re ready,” he groans as his hard, eager cock brushes against my entrance. “Always so goddamn ready for me.”
I hiss lightly as his hand tickles over my bandage. He pulls away, looking down with concern. In response, I push up onto my hands and push him to his back, rolling over so I’m straddling him.
When he looks up at me, his eyes are big and open. “I don’t want to be rough tonight,” he says softly as his hands grasp my thighs.
His thumbs come together over that most sensitive spot at the juncture of my legs, and he presses lightly, eliciting a moan from deep in my chest. I rock into his touch, my eyes closed.
“Layla.” His deep voice beckons. “Please tell me it doesn’t have to be rough.”
My chest tightens to the point where it almost hurts, but it’s not a pain I hate. It’s a pain I love. This is what it feels like to love someone so much you want to burst. The heart can only take so much, but what I feel for this man overflows any vessel.
I know that this time I won’t need him to grab my skin so hard it bruises or bite my neck, shoulder, breasts like a beast. I won’t need to claw at him or wrestle wi
th him across the floor. We won’t need to be rough, because we already did it to ourselves. Today. Yesterday. Most of our lives. I float a finger over his chest, hovering down over the bandage still on his side, the one that matches mine. These are wounds we’ve given ourselves on purpose. Wounds that, like all the others, will make us stronger. Together.
“It doesn’t have to be rough,” I say as I lower, slowly, surely, taking him inside.
His other hand finds mine, entwining our fingers as he sucks in a breath. The words on my side––his words––burn slightly, but I don’t feel them. As I start to move, all I feel is him.
Nico tips his head back and shudders as I sink lower, taking him further inside me. I rock back and forth, luxuriating in the friction between us, even as his thumbs continue to circle my clit in time with the movement. We watch each other as I move, letting the sounds of our bodies joining, our hitched breaths, skin meeting skin, fill the room. Black eyes meet blue. Dark hands meet light.
I wonder now why I’ve been so scared to do this, to open myself to him this way. But at the same time, it’s totally clear. Here, naked with him, body and soul, I am my most vulnerable. No one can hurt me like he can; maybe no one has. But I also know without a shadow of a doubt that he’ll protect me with everything he has. He shelters my heart. He’s more than just a lover. He’s a partner. And there’s nothing for me to fear in that.
“Come,” I murmur as the knowledge flows through me, a river of pleasure channeling straight to where we join. It’s fast. It’s furious. And it’s approaching faster than I anticipated. “I want you to come with me.”
“Already?” Nico wonders, though I’m already starting to shake.
“Y-yes,” I manage as I tip my head back, rocking my hips downward to take him even deeper. Oh God, he feels good.
Suddenly, Nico sits up like it’s nothing, the rows of hard abdominal muscles flexing until his chest meets mine.
“Ah!” I flinch as his arms encircle my waist, landing on the fresh tattoo.
He tries to pull away, but I keep his hands where they are,
“No.” I clasp his face between my hands. “I like it.”
And I do. I start to move again, rotating my hips slightly to take him deeper with every movement. Nico groans, pressing his face into my breasts as his hands drop to my hips to guide my movements.
“Layla,” he murmurs as I start to move faster. He tips his head up again, seeking my mouth like a drowning man.
“Nico,” I whisper in between long, torrid kisses.
Balanced on one hand while the other maintains its iron grip around my waist, he meets each movement, pounding into me from below while I take him deeper, from above. He penetrates me. My heart. My body. All of me, in ways no one else ever will.
“Layla,” he chokes out. “Fuck, baby. I’m…oh, God, I’m here!”
His teeth find my shoulder, and he bites down as he starts to shake. The slight sting is my undoing, and together we come apart in our own beautiful corona of warmth, banishing the cold glare of the city. It’s the knowledge of that warmth that keeps me going, and builds my strength. If I am his true north, then he is mine. Together, we’ll never lose our way again.
~
PART II: Valió la Pena
CHAPTER NINETEEN
January 2005
Layla
All week. All freaking week I’ve been waiting for this. It’s been five days since we saw each other at the airport, when I came home from a very long month in Pasadena for Christmas. It was…nice. Safe. Boring. Sure, it was nice to take a break from the city once my semester was over and spend some quality time at my grandparents’ pool. My mom and I have continued to grow closer, and Dr. Parker agreed that I didn’t need another prescription for Valium. Apparently Nico is all I need to sleep well at night, even though no one in California is currently aware that he’s been acting as that cure for close to three months now.
But even after that month, it’s still been another five days since Nico had to take an extra forty-eight hour shift at the firehouse in order to get this weekend off. Five days since our first fumbled coupling at 7 a.m. after he picked me up from my red-eye flight. Five days since he left me in bed that morning, desperate for more of him, but drowsy in the knowledge that there would be more, so much more, for as long as I wanted it. Five days of tapping my pencil irritably on my desk and squeezing my legs together in anticipation. Five days of texting and talking here and there before another bell went off and he had to dash out to be a hero.
In other words, it’s been five days of pure torture.
Somehow, since October, this neighborhood, this tiny slice of New York that’s not quite Chinatown and not quite Little Italy, became more than just my new place. Nico moved in the weekend after Giancarlo’s trial, and it was the perfect way to close that chapter of my life and start a new one based on us. We’ve celebrated multiple milestones there already: his twenty-eighth birthday with all of his friends and family crammed into our little two bedroom, and just before that, his graduation from the fire academy, which was much, much bigger.
It was a sight I’ll never, ever forget. Nico stood on the bleachers with the other two hundred or so cadets in his graduating class. They were all kitted out in their dress blues-–formal, navy-blue suits with the military-style hats that should have looked stiff, but instead just made me want to do very dirty things. Nico stood taller, much taller than his not-quite-six feet. I sat with Carmen in the front row, and she held my hand on one side and Gabe’s on the other, while Maggie and Selena whistled loudly with Allie straddled across their laps. And after they called everyone’s names and shook their hands, Nico ran down the stairs and swept me up in a giant kiss before the rest of his family crowded around him with hugs, kisses. This man vibrated happiness and pride––more, I think, than he’d ever felt in his life. And therefore, so did I.
But that was months ago, and since then, he’s lived the life of a rookie FDNY firefighter. He’s stationed in Queens, which means long commutes from our place in lower Manhattan. He works forty-eight and seventy-two hour shifts for low pay, which he’ll continue to supplement with shifts at AJ’s until next year, when his probationary period is up, and he’ll start making a real salary. It means that sometimes we barely see each other, particularly if his off days fall on an exam week for me. I’m one semester away from finishing school, and I spent the majority of November and December taking the GRE and applying for graduate school. In three months or so, I’ll find out whether or not I’ll be going to the school of social work at Columbia, Fordham, or NYU, or if I’ll be waiting tables for a year while I try again.
Because the other relief of living with someone who supports me and cultivates this feeling of safety is that I felt confident enough to pursue a future that isn’t the one planned for me. My father, who still has barely spoken to me for most of the past year, still thinks I’m planning to go to law school next year. But watching Nico’s family’s frustrations over Carmen’s status inspired me more, especially when I compare it to my father’s relatively easy naturalization. The more I see them struggle, the more I understand just how much of my family’s fortune is just that: fortunate. Not just a product of hard work, but one of luck. I want to give back, but that’s going to take work. And time. And probably a lot of debt.
So our lives aren’t exactly easy. They’re busy and our budget is tight, especially when we consider just how we are going to afford this apartment after I’m finished with school and my mom won’t be paying my half anymore. But those are concerns for a few months from now, and these days, we both get to come home to each other. That’s what counts.
So I practically skip out of the 6 station on Spring Street, knowing he’s at the apartment waiting for me. Normally I slow down, enjoying the eclectic window displays. On this block alone, there’s a bodega, a rice pudding shop, an antique furniture store, and a kimono designer whose royal textiles loom over the sidewalk like emperors. But today, I’m practic
ally running.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out as I dodge around a couple perusing a restaurant menu. They give me a dirty look. I ignore them.
“Hey, baby. You almost here? I forgot my key.”
The anticipation in his deep voice vibrates against my cheek. It’s that same feeling that spiraled between us, between coasts, for the last month. It thrums between us like a guitar string that’s just been plucked, pulling me closer and closer to him. To Nico.
“T-two blocks,” I stutter just as I turn down Elizabeth. God, I can barely speak.
I turn onto Delancey, the massive boulevard that cuts across Lower Manhattan, pouring across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. I can see the corner of my six-story walk-up with the Chinese laundromat on the bottom, facing the still-green trees of Delancey Park. But I can’t see Nico yet.
“Hurry,” he says, his voice suddenly breathy and a little hoarse. “I’m…cold.”
He’s not cold. It’s unseasonably warm for late January, and the man is a furnace. Whenever he’s not out on a call, he spends most of his time in the firehouse gym. His metabolism could power all of lower Manhattan.
“I’m here,” I tell him as I reach the corner. “I see you.”
Across the street, he turns around. He’s still in FDNY-issued navy pants and a t-shirt that pulls across the taut lines of his chest under his thick black jacket. His favorite Yankees cap, curled tightly over his brow, casts a shadow over his eyes.
When he spots me, though, that hat doesn’t hide his smile as he claps his phone shut and shoves it in his pocket. It’s a bright, shining beacon; its light emanates, calling me home. Calling me to him.
“Baby! What the fuck are you waiting for?” he shouts, laughing. “Get your ass over here!”
He looks up and down Delancey––the big street, for once, is somewhat empty, as the next round of cars are at least four blocks away. Unable to stifle my grin, I jog across the six lanes, right into his arms just as another rush of cars arrives.
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