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“An idiot how?”
He polishes off his pie then looks at me. “Wading into the water in winter.”
“Santos—”
“If he’d found me even a few minutes later, I would have died.”
I reach to take his hand, hot tears filling my eyes. I lose my appetite at the sight of him like this.
“What’s happened?” I ask quietly when he drops his napkin on top of his dish and pushes it away.
He shakes his head looking too sad and I get up, pulling him up with me. Without a word, I lead him up the stairs and into the bedroom, where I peel away his clothes and mine and we get into the bed. I don’t put on any lights. The curtains aren’t drawn, and moonlights shines in on us. We lie together listening to the wind and the waves while I hold him, and he holds me.
He’s distant, his mind on something I don’t know. So I take his face in my hands, feel the scruff of his overgrowing five o’clock shadow and kiss him. The kisses are soft at first but as they grow heated, as I feel him harden, I push the blanket away and climb on top of him. His grip on me changes and our kiss grows hungrier. He draws me back to look at my face for a moment, then slides his hands down over my naked body to my hips, to guide me onto himself. He looks at me as he sheathes himself in me and I sit up, straddling him, my hands on his chest as I grind myself into him.
“Fuck, Madelena. You’re so perfect, you know that?” he asks, moving me along his length before winding one hand into my hair, wrapping it around his first and pulling me down onto himself. “Fucking perfect,” he says, shifting our position so he’s on top of me, fucking me deep and slow. We’re so close, closer than any two people can be, I think, with him inside me, his weight on me, our eyes open as we watch each other, see each other in this, our most vulnerable moments. “So perfect,” he mutters as his lovemaking morphs into something harder, darker.
He spreads my arms across the bed and weaves his fingers with mine and I glance at the oversized rosary hanging over the bed. His gaze follows mine and he looks up at it, too, and there’s another shift in his expression, a different sort of darkening.
He mutters a curse at the thing, tears it from the wall and throws it so hard against the corner that beads come loose and bounce along the floor. He flips me onto my stomach and draws my hips up as he thrusts into me from behind, fucking me hard, pinching my clit painfully to make me cry out. I grab hold of the iron rungs of the headboard to take him as he drives into me, punishing me.
I turn back to watch him. He needs this, I think, this beastly fucking. He may have needed soft lovemaking moments ago but now, he needs to fuck. I climb up on my elbows and meet his thrusts, the old bedframe creaking so loudly beneath us I’m afraid it may break.
“Santos,” I pant because I’m close.
His fingers bruise my hips and I look back to watch his face, watch him watch himself fucking me, grunting, sweat dripping down his temple onto my hip.
He’s so beautiful like this, so raw. When he slides his fingers once more to my clit and squeezes, I cry out, coming hard, my body vibrating with orgasm as I watch his face, watch the effort it’s taking him to hold back his release as I moan beneath him, my walls throbbing around him.
When I’m spent, Santos draws out, taking me by the hair and turning me to face him. He sits back on his heels, drawing me to him. He kisses my mouth, then pushes my face down. I know what he wants, and I open for him, taking him into my mouth, tasting myself on him as he fucks my face hard, as hard as he fucked my pussy. I pant for breath as he groans, the beast now in the place of the man. When I dig my nails into his thighs, it pushes him over the edge and I feel the first spurts of his release down my throat, his cock throbbing, too thick to breathe around. But I want it. I want him. I want this beast-man, my husband.
I swallow, greedy, until I can’t, and he draws me off and brings my face to his and kisses me deeply. He draws back, catching his breath as I catch mine.
“Did I hurt you?” he asks, voice raw, eyes dark on mine.
I shake my head because I know he needed this. Needed us like this. But from the corner of my eye, I see the rosary he smashed against the far wall.
He lays me down and draws the blankets over us, sliding in behind me to hold me tight.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“Because this place is good. It heals. It forgives.” He hugs me tight to him. There’s more so I wait. He sighs. “And because no one can find us here.”
20
SANTOS
Beads scatter across a wooden floor. Wind whips my face, icy rain pelting it. All those gathered move at a frantic pace below, coming and going, as if it’s all happening in double time. Jerky, unnatural movements leave me confused as I see everything at once and too fast.
Words on a page. The same words appear, disappear, reappear over and over again as if being typed out by a ghost typist. Words I’ve memorized. The record of Alexia’s murder. The brutal stabbing as if the killer would murder not only the mother but also the unborn child inside her womb.
Beads bounce, hundreds of them. Thousands. The sound they make is otherworldly, somehow louder than the crashing of waves. They disappear into the abyss below. Black water pounds against rocks beaten down over ages.
A man screams. A body falls.
A woman’s blood-red fingernails slide along the beads of a rosary. Lips move, murmuring prayers. A man’s bloody hands count out prayers on those same beads. Or perhaps he’s counting the number of those he has felled.
My mother stands perfectly still. She is young, her belly swollen. She is silent, her lips sewn crudely shut, sanguine eyes staring straight ahead into nothing.
