He angles and lets me have it.
Thepleasure hits too fast, too sharp, like the sea dragging me under and calling it mercy. I come hard, sound broken. Luca doesn’t slow down just because I break. Luca fucks me through it. He rides it out with me like he owns the storm.
And follows with my name, or rather Sera’s name, his body shaking against mine.
For one breath, it feels like we’re connected.
Then I remember I don’t know him. Not really. Luca is a name a man uses when he wants to be someone else on an island where nobody asks for paperwork. The thought should cool me.
It doesn’t.
Pulling out, he slips off the condom and unties me gently. Turning me, he rubs the faint marks, kisses both wrists.
Not tender the way love is tender.
Precise the way a man is when he knows he left evidence on my skin and he wants me to feel proud of it, not hurt by it.
The result is the same.
I cross my wrists over his shoulders and kiss him back while the sea listens like a priest at confession.
My body knows what it wants before my mind admits it. I want the way he holds my face like it matterswhat I feel. I want the way his mouth softens and roughens in the right places. I want the way he says Sera like he knows it’s a secret he’ll keep.
He asks for nothing but what I give.
And that’s the part that wrecks me.
Because men like him don’t ask. They take. They decide. They move on.
Luca doesn’t move on. He waits, watching me like I’m the one holding the leash, like the only thing he wants is to see what I’ll do with the power he handed me.
I give him my knees on the bed, and the line of my throat, and the small sounds I never make where anyone can hear as I open my mouth wide and let him have what I’m offering.
Luca gives me his mouth, his tongue, his kiss, on my breasts, below my belly and his pace, slower now. The kind of hunger that is like adoration as he breathes heavily against my clit and makes my knees fall open, makes me climax again like I’m floating in the sea.
We learn each other like a language and don’t speak any other for a very long time.
Later, the wind cools our skin. The sheets tangle around my legs. He lies on his back with his forearm over his eyes, and I trace the pale crescent of his scar with my fingertip. He lowers his arm and looks at me. Those eyesagain. Dark as if the world inside him is deeper than the sea.
“You will leave,” he says. “I won’t ask why.”
“I don’t want to,” I say. It slips out before I can stop it. Sera says things like that. Isabella doesn’t. The truth feels reckless and tender in the same breath.
“Then give me this,” he says. “If you go in the morning, answer when I call. Say, yes.”
Men in my world promise things the way they inhale, effortlessly and without cost. I’ve never trusted a promise that came easy. This one doesn’t. It comes from a man who said he didn’t want my name, and he still doesn’t ask for it. He asks for my yes. The word sits on my tongue and lights my mouth.
“Yes,” I say.
He kisses the corner of my mouth like a period at the end of a sentence. We sleep with the balcony doors open, and the sea comes in to blanket us.
I wake before dawn to the sound of a phone in another room. Not my room. Not my phone. His, on a table by the wall. A vibration against wood, short and sharp. He’s already up. He moves like a man who learned long ago how to leave without making noise. But I’m a woman who notices everything.
He dresses in the gray light, pants first, then the open shirt, then the watch that looks like it could buy theisland. He catches me awake and comes back to the bed.
“I have to go,” he says, meeting my eyes. “I’m needed. I’m always needed.”
“Work,” I say. I don’t want to ask what kind. I don’t want to know who he is when he’s not Luca. I think of the ring in my safe and the truce in a week and the fact that this island exists because men like my father pay in cash and silence.
