“I want this. Wanted it for a long time,” he says, lips on my lips, kissing. Biting. “I’ve wanted you for a long time.”
He lets go of my hair and I grit my teeth as he closes his hands around mine. I curl my fingers around his, and my nails are digging into his skin, breaking it, drawing blood like he’ll draw blood from me.
“It hurts,” I manage.
“Look at me. Keep looking at me. Hurt me back,” he says, forcing me to look at him, at his dark eyes, black ringed in gold and green. “Hurt me back.”
I can’t. I’m trying. But he’s too big and I squeeze my eyes shut. “Stefan!”
“Look at me.” He holds tight to me so I can’t move. “Open your eyes and look at me, Gabi.”
Gabi.
That name.
I open my eyes and lock them on his. I brace myself and when he thrusts, I cry out and my cry is simultaneous to a tearing of skin, to that pouring of blood, that bleeding, more than I thought. A warm gush of it.
“Fuck.” He draws back, does it again.
“Stefan!”
He’s fucking me. He’s fucking me hard and it hurts, and I don’t want him to stop. I don’t want him to let me go.
He kisses me again, sets his hands on either side of my head and lifts himself up a little to loom over me.
I grip his shoulders and he’s so deep inside that I swear I feel him in my belly.
I can’t drag my gaze from his and I don’t think he can drag his from mine.
“Come for me,” he says, sliding one hand down. When his fingers brush against my clit, I arch my back, wanting him, wanting his touch. Wanting to come.
Pain morphs and merges with pleasure and one intensifies the other, making it more. And when he moves inside me again and all I feel is him and the warmth of blood and his eyes on me, I come. I come again and I let out a long moan and it’s his name on my tongue, my breath is his name.
He fucks me hard then, thrusting deep, taking and claiming in a way he hasn’t yet. And when he stills, I feel his cock thickening, body tensing. He throbs inside me and I watch him come and I hear the sound he makes, and I feel him inside me. Feel him empty as he fills me up.
It’s a few minutes later that he moves, blinks. His eyes aren’t black anymore and the way he looks at me, it’s the other Stefan. The one who carried me out of that well and what has he done to me? What’s happened to me? What he said the other night, is he right? Am I falling in love with him? Have I already?
He watches me and I want to know what he sees because I don’t know who I am anymore.
“Gabriela.”
He slowly pulls out of me, and I feel every inch. I’m raw inside.
I follow his gaze down, feel semen slide out of me, see smeared blood on him. See it on my thighs, on the sheets.
He looks down too, shifts his weight to his knees. I pull back, can’t seem to drag my eyes from all the blood, much more than I realized. The sheets are stained a deep red.
Stefan meets my gaze.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice hoarse.
I move to sit up, bite through the pain.
“Gabriela?”
I look at his shoulders, at the blood there. Small crescent shapes. My fingernails. I meet his eyes again. “I’m cold.”
He gathers the blanket and puts it around my shoulders, then gets up, walks into the bathroom. A few minutes later, he’s back and he sits down beside me. The blood is gone from him and in his hand is a damp towel.
I go to take it from him, but he shakes his head and he’s cleaning me and he’s gentle and tender and I just watch his dark head as he softly wipes the blood and cum from between my legs.
“I should have been more careful with you. Your first time…” he trails off, setting the towel aside.
I study him, see the weighted look in his eyes. And what I say, I don’t say it to make him feel better. I say it because it’s true.
“I don’t know that it could have gone any other way. This is us, Stefan. This is you and this is me. It’s always going to be this way with us.”
19
Stefan
I can’t stop thinking about last night. About what she said. She’s right. This is us. I will always take. And she will always be made to give.
“Exit’s coming up,” Rafa says beside me.
I nod, slowing the Bugatti down as I exit the highway and turn onto the smaller streets into Syracuse. I used to come here a lot growing up and know the streets pretty well. Avoiding the busiest part of the city, I make my way to the Greco house. It’s in one of the poorer neighborhoods, which doesn’t surprise me.
“Remind me again why do you want to do this?” Rafa asks me casually as we park outside the small, shabby house.
“Just want to hear for myself,” I answer.
I found the man Gabriela recognized. I found his family. I expected them to be from Taormina, but it bodes well for my uncle that they’re not.
“I already talked to them. There’s nothing to hear, Stefan. His grandmother’s an old woman who’s now stuck raising two kids both under six. They don’t know anything about Danny Greco. All they know is he’s been gone for a while, which apparently isn’t unusual for him.”
Danny Greco is the name of the man who sideswiped Rafa’s car. Who was one of the men at the house in Pentedattilo.
“Sounds like a class act.” I get out of the car and look at the house. The plot is mostly sand, no grass, and the two trees are half-dead with thirst. Laundry blows in the hot wind on a line in the backyard which butts up to a crumbling concrete wall that divides it from the train running behind it.
All of the windows are open—I would be surprised if they had air-conditioning—and patterned curtains keep the sun and insects out.
This is poor Sicily. Where I live, how I grew up, I’m in the minority.
“Stef come on. We don’t even have soldiers.”
I look back at him. “Are you afraid of an old woman and two kids under six?”
He purses his lips and I get the feeling he wants to say something but decides to keep his mouth shut, which is a good thing.
I make my way up the street to the front door of the house and ring the doorbell. Here, too, a worn curtain with the same floral pattern billows. It’s tucked into the locked metal gate that serves as a door.
It’s two more rings before I hear little feet running toward us, kids speaking in rapid Italian, the one telling the other they’re not supposed to open the door.
A moment later, two heads peer out from around the curtain. A boy and a girl.
“Is that your car?” the little boy asks. He appears to be the younger of the two.
Rafa chuckles.
I crouch down. “Yes, that’s my car,” I answer.
The boy whistles appreciatively. “A Bugatti. I prefer red. A real sports car.”
“Do you?” Mine’s black. I smile, straighten. “Is your grandmother home?”
The girl looks to her brother, then at me. She tries to shove him behind her and shakes her head in response to my question.
“She’s at the market,” the boy says, peering around her.
“Maybe we can wait for her out back.”