She doesn't hit me again. She grabs the front of my jacket with both hands and pulls. Not to hit. To hold. Her fists are balled in the fabric and she's pulling me toward her, crying now, hard, and the crying is angry. The anger is grief and the grief is everything she's been carrying that’s now burst open.
"Why?" she says into my chest. "Why did you come here? Why me? Why do you care about a woman you've never met? Why did you kill two people and sit at my table and fall in love with me and not tell me? That must be it because who does that?"
Fall in love with me. She said it. I didn't, but it’s true. I did fall in love with her.
"Because I heard your father say he lost you," I say. "And I couldn't stop."
Her fists tighten in my jacket. Her face is against my chest. She's crying and shaking and her body is pressed against mine. I put my arms around her because there's nothing else to do with my arms when she's this close and this broken open.
"My father," she says.
"His name is Renzo. He's been looking for you for sixteen years."
She makes a sound against my chest that isn't a word. It's a sound from the same place her body keeps the tapping, deep and involuntary, the place where the truth lives. She pulls back and looks up at me. Blood smeared on her forehead from my lip, tears on her face. Her hands still fisted in my jacket. She's the most beautiful and unfortunate thing I've ever seen.
She kisses me.
The kiss tastes like blood and salt. My blood. Her tears. She pulls me off the stool and I stand and she's small against me and her hands go from my jacket to my belt, and she unbuckles it with the fast, angry efficiency of a woman who needs to feel something that isn't this.
"Grace. Don’t"
"Shut the fuck up. Don't say my name in that tone. Don't tell me what to do. Don't be gentle."
"Grace."
"I said don't. We didn’t finish last night and now that you’ve destroyed my whole fucking life the least you can do is FINISH what YOU started." She pulls my belt free and drops it on the floor and the knife clatters on the tile. "I just found out my entire life is a lie and the man I've been, I don’t know what to even call this, killed my foster parents. I had a name I don't remember and a father I've never met and I've been drugged for eleven years and I don't know what's real anymore except you. You're real. This is real." She grabs my hand and puts it on her hip. "Make it real."
Grabbing her hips, I lift her onto the bar. She sits on the edge with her legs open. I step between them and her hands go to my face, both of them, holding my jaw, thumbs pressing into my cheeks. She kisses me again and the kiss is hard and angry, and her teeth catch my split lip, and it bleeds again and she doesn't stop. Neither do I. My hands are on her thighs, pushing her pants down, and she lifts her hips to help and kicks them off one leg and leaves them hanging on the other ankle because neither of us cares about the other ankle.
I push her underwear to the side. She's wet. Despite the rage, despite the tears, despite everything. Her body wants mine and the contrast between what she's feeling emotionally and what she's feeling physically is written across her face, fury and desire occupying the same space.
Pulling down my pants, I pull my cock out and push into her and she grabs the edge of the bar with both hands. Her head drops back and she says "Fuck" and it's not pleasure. It's not a moan. It's a declaration. Fuck this situation. Fuck these revelations. Fuck the pills and the Marinos and the trafficking and the lie.Fuck everything except this, right now, a man inside her who she's furious at and can't let go of.
I grip her hips and pull her to the edge, and thrust hard. She wraps her legs around me and locks her ankles behind my back and pulls me deeper. The bar glasses rattle. A cocktail napkin holder falls off the far end and crashes to the floor. Her nails dig into my shoulders through my shirt, and she leans forward and bites my neck, hard, and I feel her teeth break the skin and I fucking love it. Every mark she puts on me is earned.
She comes first. Fast, hard, her body clenching around me and her forehead against my shoulder and her teeth still in my neck. The sound she makes is muffled by my skin and I feel it in my throat and my spine and my chest.
I follow her. Deep inside her, my hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave bruises that match the ones from two nights ago. She holds me inside her with her legs locked behind my back and neither of us moves for thirty seconds.
Her finger starts tapping. My shoulder. Slow.One. Two. Three.
She pulls back and her eyes find mine. Red, wet, exhausted… but also certain.
"Tell me everything," she says. "From the beginning. All of it. Don't leave anything out."
I lean my forehead against hers. My lip is bleeding. My neck is bleeding. Her tears are on my shirt. We're in the restaurantwhere we met, her sitting on the bar with her pants around one ankle, me standing between her legs with cock softening inside her.
"Your name," I say, "is Graziella Ferrara."
A sharp inhale and then she’s asking for more.
So I do. I tell her everything. From the beginning. In the empty restaurant with the cracked window and the neon clock. The chairs stacked on the tables and the CLOSED sign on the door. I tell her about the records and the placement files and the Social Security number and the pharmacy that doesn't exist. I tell her about the Marinos and the check-in logs and the photographs, surveillance photos taken every year from a distance, her at fourteen, seventeen, twenty, documented but never known. I tell her about the Silent and the placement network. I tell her about Renzo, who asked Emilio to keep an ear out, and about me, who heard it and couldn't stop.
I tell her almost everything. I don't tell her about the trafficking. Not the details, anyway. Not what happened between eight and thirteen. That isn't mine to tell. That's hers to remember, on her own terms, in her own time, when her body gives it back.
She listens. She doesn't interrupt. Her finger taps my shoulder the entire time, and the rhythm gets faster when the information hits harder and slower when it settles, and by the time I'm done, an hour has passed and the restaurant is still empty. The CLOSED sign is still on the door and she's still sitting on thebar and I'm still standing between her legs and neither of us has moved.
"Graziella," she murmurs.
