He finds my clit with his tongue and stays there. He studies me the way he has been studying me since the warehouse, with the patience of a man who has nowhere else to be in the next ten minutes and the discipline of a man who has been told no by women like me his whole career. He is not going to be told no tonight.
"Lì," I say. "There. Lì, Sean."
I do not say it in English.
I am not able to speak English right now.
My hand grips his hair. My hips move, and I cannot stop them, and he does not want me to stop them. His hand goes under my hip and lifts me into his mouth, the quarter inch that does it.
"Cazzo. Sean. Madonna mia."
He works two fingers into me without breaking the contact of his mouth.
I am wet enough that there is no resistance.
He goes deep on the first stroke, and I am clenching around them before I have decided to. The fingers find the place inside me that the rest of my career has not been paying attention to.
I am close. At the edge of the kind of orgasm I do not let myself have in front of other people.
He shifts to lift me.
I see it then.
The dressing on his side.
Dark through the gauze. The whole back of the bandage is soaked dark. The blood is running down his ribs in a thin line. I can see from where my hand is fisted in his hair. He has been on his knees on a kitchen floor with a hole in him that he has been pretending he does not have, and the pretending has run out.
"Sean."
He understands before I finish the word.
He does not pull away.
He puts his forehead against my hip and breathes.
His breath is hot against the inside of my thigh, and I have to close my eyes because the want is still in my body and is going to be in my body for the next several hours, regardless of what we do or do not do.
"Yeah."
It is not a yeah of agreement.
It is the yeah of a man who is going to remember this for the rest of his life and is, also, not done with me.
He gets up slowly.
He kisses me before he reaches for his shirt. He kisses me with the taste of me on his mouth. I take it.
"You’re bleeding, Sean."
He looks down.
"That feels dramatic."
"You’re leaving a trail."
His eyes follow the drops of blood on my kitchen floor.
"That feels slightly more concerning."
