“He brushes my hair. He makes sure I eat. He runs the bath to the exact temperature where my shoulders drop and he knows what that temperature is because he pays attention. He pays attention to everything. He’s the most attentive person I’ve ever met and he’d rather die than admit it.”
I pressed my hand against the glass.
“You’d like him,” I said. “I think you’d have opinions about the tattoos. You’d tell him the Madonna on his shoulder looks like she‘s judging everyone and he’d say that’s the point and you’d roll your eyes so hard they’d leave your head. You’d give him a hard time. You’d make him earn it. And he would earn it, Maria. He’d earn it every day because that‘s what he does.”
The glass under my hand.
“I’m glad I found you,” I said. “I’m sorry we can’t be together. But you’ll always be with me.”
Maria Flores. Sixteen years old. My sister. Here on this wall, in this building, part of my life.
I lifted my hand from the glass. My palm left a print—the faint smudge of warmth on the cool surface, the ghost of contact. It would fade. That was okay. I’d be back tomorrow.
I turned. Walked toward the sound of voices.
*
The bedroom was ours now.
Not his. Not the guest room. Not a space I was borrowing or passing through. Ours. The word still felt new in my mouth—a language I was learning by immersion. His watch on the nightstand beside my sippy cup. His jacket over the chair where the moon pajamas were folded. The rabbit on the pillow beside the fox Gemma had given me that morning, the two of them arranged the way Gemma would have arranged them—facing each other, close but not touching, the stuffed-animal version of something too polite to make the first move.
The coloring books in a stack on the dresser beside his gun oil. My crayons in a jar beside his cufflinks. Two lives, collided and settled, the debris of the collision becoming furniture.
He closed the door.
The sound of it—the click of the latch, the compression of air in the frame—changed the room. Changed us. The shift wasphysical. I felt it in my skin, in the way my breathing adjusted, in the way my body oriented toward him the way it always oriented toward him, the way a compass pointed at whatever magnetic thing he was.
“I love you, Cora.” His voice was calm. Smooth. Low. “Seeing you stand in front of all those people and talk about your sister—her legacy—it was so moving. I couldn’t be more proud that you are mine.”
He crossed the room. Stopped in front of me.
His hands found the zipper on my dress. The side zipper—the same position as the black dress that had been ruined by glass and gunfire, but this dress was new. Simple. Something I’d chosen because he would take it off me and I wanted the taking off to be easy and slow and to feel like what it was: a man undressing a woman he loved with the kind of attention that made the undressing itself an act of worship.
“You made me a better man,” he said, voice breathy, sincere. “Reminded me what’s important in life.”
The zipper descended. Tooth by tooth. His knuckles grazing my ribs through the fabric, the contact light and deliberate, the particular restraint of a man who could have torn the dress off with one hand and was choosing not to because the choosing was the point. The fabric loosened around me. Fell open. His hands at my shoulders—sliding the straps down, the dress following, pooling at my waist, my hips, my feet. I stepped out of it.
“I belong to you. You belong to me.”
His eyes on me. Dark. Running hot, the way they always ran—you always knew what Santo was feeling because it was written on his face and right now what was written was hunger. Controlled. Banked. The kind of hunger that a man held in check not because he couldn’t act on it but because the holding made the acting better.
The bra. His fingers at the clasp—practiced now, the fumbling of the early days replaced by the efficiency of a man who had learned this particular mechanism and committed it to permanent memory. The clasp released. The bra joined the dress. Air against my skin. His breath against my shoulder.
“Come here,” he said.
He sat on the edge of the bed. Drew me to him. The transition was seamless—his hands guiding me, my body following, the choreography of something we’d built between us over months of learning each other’s language. I went over his knee.
The position. Stomach across his thighs. The hard muscle of his legs beneath me, the denim rough against my bare skin. My hands finding the bedsheet. My body suspended—half on the bed, half on him, the particular vulnerability of this arrangement. The exposure. The surrender of it—offering the most vulnerable plane of my body to a man whose hands were built for damage and choosing to believe they’d give me something else.
“This is because I know how much you love it.”
He didn’t make me wait.
The first strike landed with a crack that snapped through the quiet room. The sound arrived before the sensation—sharp, percussive, the particular report of an open palm meeting skin. Then the heat bloomed. A rose of warmth spreading across my left side, the nerve endings firing in sequence, the pain converting almost instantly into something else. Something that lived in the space between hurt and pleasure where the wires crossed and the body stopped distinguishing between the two.
Again. The right side. Harder. I gasped—the sound involuntary, pulled from somewhere below my lungs. The heat doubled. Layered. The first strike still radiating while the second landed on top of it, the sensation compounding.
Again. Again. His hand finding the rhythm that undid me—measured, deliberate, each strike placed with the precision of a man who knew exactly where to land and exactly how hard and exactly what it did to the woman across his lap. My hips moved. I couldn’t help it—the grinding was instinctive, my body pressing down against his thigh, seeking friction, seeking relief from the pressure building in my center. I could feel him beneath me. Hard. The length of him straining against the denim, pressed against my stomach with every shift of my hips.
