Agony spikes through me, making me go still and rigid. Moving will only make it worse. I know that from experience. So I let it pour through me, let Nicky’s appreciative hum at my response be my reward. My dick stays iron-hard. If anything, I get harder.
It occurs to me, right at the back of my mind, that this asshole knows my body way too well—and maybe my mind as well. All the time we’ve spent in bed has given him too much insight into me.
It’s the last coherent thought I have for a while. Everything after that is pure experience, distilled sensation: Nicky’s hot, wet mouth moving over me, little darts of pleasure-pain the only measure of time passing, before finally he moves back to my cock and gives me what feels like the slowest, wettest, most vacuum-pressured blow job of my life. My orgasm comes out of me in slo-mo, the muscles tightening in my thighs and ass and belly, the burn churning in my balls, creeping up my dick, the first few splashes coming out of me without any sense of relief. The crest, when it comes, makes my head stretch back on my neck, my mouth opening in silent astonishment as much as bliss, while I empty everything I have into Nick’s mouth.
He swallows most of it but spits the remainder into his hand, then kneels over me and uses that spit-cum mixture to beat off, his breath quick and quivering. I watch his cock through half-lidded eyes, tight and straining until it spurts in long, thick stripes, covering my still-twitchy dick with a warm, comforting mess.
We take a while lying there together in our own glutinous wreckage, our combined release congealing in a way that, with any other man, would make me want a shower ASAP. But not now. Not with Nicky. My poor exhausted dick gives a valiant twinge as I think about keeping his spray all over me, stinking of him, marked out unmistakably as his.
“Fuck,” I murmur at last, rolling into the circle of his arms. “I’m too tired to shower.”
“So don’t.”
The idea of sleeping with his coat of cum all over me appeals. “You still owe me a nut in my mouth.”
“How you figure that?”
“You said downstairs I wasn’t done eating,” I say sleepily, shuffling into his arms, into the perfect position, his sticky dick plastered against my ass, his big arms all the way around me. “And you were right. I wasn’t.”
“Mm,” he sighs contentedly. “Think I prefer keeping you hungry. More fun that way.”
“I could suck you now,” I suggest. “Like a pacifier.” The thought makes me smile.
“Tomorrow. You’re tired. So’m I.”
“Promise?”
“Sure. I promise you can suck my dick tomorrow, Harvard.”
“Keep your arms like this. Don’t let go of me,” I mumble just before I drift off. Maybe I dream his response. Maybe I only hear what I want to hear. But it’s still comforting.
Never.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nick
Igive up trying to sleep somewhere around three. I’ve been lying there with Carlo in my arms, my mind ticking over, but mostly thinking about how peaceful he sounds when he’s asleep. Even the occasional snore is soft, content, subsides quickly.
The lack of any solution to my problem is why I’m lying awake. Carlo sleeps like he has nothing to worry about. I guess when you spend your days doing a job as stressful as his, you need to sleep well at night. Something in me wants to make sure he sleeps this peacefully for the rest of his life.
That means solving the problem.
I take a quiet shower and then wander downstairs in my towel, over to the windows. I look out over the river, to Jersey where my family is sleeping. I haven’t seen them in a while and I need to get back home, make sure everything’s running smooth. Mom and Dad, my brothers and sisters—I don’t see them often enough. Things got strained when I was put away, and after I came out they acted like there was no question I was staying on the straight and narrow.
The truth is, they don’twantto believe anything bad of me, so they don’t. One of my sisters is a little more savvy, and she’s also the one I see the least—by her own choice. She’s always busy when I visit, or exits fast. At Thanksgiving or Christmas I tend to avoid her, or make it easy for her to avoid me.
But the older I get, the less I find myself worrying about perceptions. About what other people might think. Except for Luca. He’s one person whose thoughts I do worry over, and even now I don’t know if I made the right choice to stay quiet about Gatti.
I turn away from the view but do a double-take at the black mouth of hell opening up on my living room wall. It’s the Reinhardt, that’s all. As I stare at it, it seems to get darker, growing bigger, engulfing me in its own weighty darkness. I bought it a year after I got out, on the anniversary of walking free. By that time I was a well-oiled cog in the Morelli machine, but I was haunted every night by dreams of being shut up in a cell again, thrown in solitary, left alone in a dark place with nothing but my own company. There are slight variations in the black shades—some more red, some more blue. But you need to stare at it a long time to see those differences.
I’d never heard of Ad Reinhardt, but when I saw that painting it hit me like a brick to the head. It was a picture of everything I felt inside. So I bought it and I put it on my wall to remind myself I would never go back. Never give up that control over my life again. I’d kill myself first. But over the years it’s become an anchor instead of a reminder, pulling me back to a place of suspicion and resentment, of paranoia, of the hit-first-think-later instinct I developed real fast in the joint.
I take a seat on the sofa and stare at it until the night becomes gray, until the dawn finally creeps in and my white apartment starts to glow again in the early morning light. At six, I pick up the phone and dial a number. I expect to have to leave a message, but a cautious voice answers instead.
“Hello?”
“This is Nick Fontana.”
