I can still feel him.
Not just the way I usually carry him around in my head, which is bad enough. This is worse.
Vito takes a corner and I bump against the door, but it barely registers. I’m lost in the specific memory of his delicate spine under my forehead, the warmth of his skin, that one second where I brushed my lips down his vertebrae.
I shouldn’t have done that.
The rest of it, I don’t regret. I don’t regret scaring him. Heearnedthat, acting like he has a hope in hell of protecting himself when the predators come for him. I still wanted to see if his survival instinct had resurfaced. But the forehead thing…
And then my lips on his skin.
I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know why I did.
Caligula sits beside me, stinking of cum and olive oil. He’s silent. And that silence is all wrong. It’s the quiet that he gets when he’sthinking, and I don’t want him thinking. Not about what just happened, anyway.
His head is turned toward the window, but I don’t think he’s seeing any of it. Streetlights slide over his face. His mouth looks swollen. His hair is a mess. His shirt’s hanging open because I ripped it apart and most of the buttons flew off.
I drag in a breath. “You cold?”
He doesn’t answer at first. Then, after a beat: “No.”
His voice is flat. Not angry. Not shaky. Flat.
We sit in silence for another block. Vito takes a right, and the headlights of oncoming traffic wash across the back seat, turning everything white for half a second. Caligula doesn’t blink.
Then he says, still looking out the window, “Do you think people can be born wrong?”
“What?”
“Wrong,” he repeats. “Corrupt. Defective. Whatever word you like.”
I stare out at the city because I can’t look at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I liked it.”
For a second, I think I’ve heard him wrong. Or I hope I have.
He keeps staring out the window. “What you did back there.” He swallows. “Whatwedid back there. I liked it.” Another pause. “And even…what happened in the basement. It wasn’t…”
He trails off, and something twists in my gut.
“So I think there has to be something wrong with me,” he goes on at last. “You humiliate me. You use me. You treat me like I’m nothing, and I…” He lets out an exhalation, soft and bewildered. “I want it.”
I can’t breathe right.
“I know what you are,” he says. “I know what you plan to do to me one day. I know you hate me. And still—” His hand curls once, hard, in his lap. “Still, if you touched me right now, I’d let you. Worse than that. I’dwantit.” He gives a short laugh that isn’t laughter at all. “What kind of Don lets himself get fucked and used and spoken to that way?”
“Plenty of powerful people like it rough in bed,” I mutter. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just…just wired that way.”
He doesn’t seem to have heard me. He keeps looking out the window.
And why would he look at me? I’m the asshole who uses that very wiring against him. Every single time. It’s the only fragile spot I’ve found in him, and I’ve been relentless at stomping down on it until it cracked.
“I think my grandfather saw it in me,” he says, more to himself than to me. “That weakness. I think that’s why he hated me so much.”
Something hot and ugly surges up through my ribs. “Your grandfather was a motherfucker who hated the whole world. He was a vicious old bastard, and how you like to fuck has nothing to do with whether you can lead.”
The words are out before I can stop them, and they’re too warm, too close to something that could be mistaken for?—
