And that was all he could fucking take. Not even sure if she was finished, he threw his head back and roared as he let loose.
She wasn’t finished, but she got there while he was hard, going quiet and rigid with little spasms, until she sagged back against his chest.
He sat there, stunned and panting, for several swings of the black cat’s tail. He didn’t know if she was okay. Hell, he didn’t even know if she was awake.
“Manny, let me put my hands on you. Please.”
She sighed heavily, then held her arms out wide, toward his hands, which were still holding onto her sofa. He let go, flexing his fingers a couple of times to work out the clawed muscles, then put his hands around hers. She wrapped his arms around her waist and then crossed her own over them, lacing her fingers with his.
He kissed her little shoulder, and she didn’t tense up. She smelled like…cherries, or something. No—pomegranate. Nice.
They were cuddling. Instead of getting itchy to be done with it, Luca felt it like an honor. He wasn’t yet ready to let her go.
But after a few minutes, Manny murmured, “I need you to go now. But I’d like to see you again sometime. If you’d be into that.”
Perplexed by his disappointment as much as by the sudden eviction, Luca cleared his throat and said, “Yeah. Yeah. I would.”
“Okay.” She pushed off his legs, and his eyes rolled back as he slid, semi-soft, out of her.
She went into another room, through a glittery curtain of beads, while he got dressed. When he was ready to go, he said as much, and she came out wearing a pink fuzzy robe with white bunnies all over it. It made her look about twelve.
She saw him to the door, but refused his request for a kiss goodnight.
As Luca went down the stairs toward the main door, he heard her turning a series of locks.
6
Unless she took Ambien, which she hated and was one of the few meds she had an actual choice whether to take or not, Manny didn’t usually sleep much. Her nights were generally segmented into two or three naps lasting an hour each, maybe two. She was used to that and operated pretty well on it. Every now and then, she’d not sleep at all. Just as randomly, she’d have a night when she’d get seven, eight, or even nine hours of uninterrupted sleep. Those nights usually foretold an illness coming on, though.
The night after Luca left was a night she didn’t sleep at all. It hadn’t even been eleven o’clock when she’d locked the door behind him. They hadn’t even been together for three full hours, but her brain felt shaken and stirred. She’d stood in the middle of her living room, staring at the mussed sofa, and her clothes still strewn over the papasan and wadded on the floor. The room smelled of sex.
For long minutes, she’d just been frozen, staring, unable to move while her brain did all kinds of acrobatics. She couldn’t process any of what had happened, or how she felt about it. None of it had a place in the cubbies in her head, where she kept her experiences.
She had sex pretty often—at least often enough for her. Two or three times a month, give or take. But they were just one-off encounters. It drove Dmitri crazy, because he was sure she was going to bring some nutjob home and get hurt, but Manny found one-night stands much easier to navigate. Plus, she was the nutjob.
She had sex, but she didn’t date. Dating was not something she understood. Talk about people not saying what they meant—dating seemed to be founded on the concept of subterfuge. Besides, once somebody had known her long enough to ask her out, she’d more than likely reacted wrongly to something, or done something otherwise weird, and exposed herself as maybe not exactly dating material. She’d never been on a date. She’d thus never had a boyfriend.
Tonight, though, she’d had a date—a short one, but a date nonetheless. There was dinner, of a sort. Actually, that had been a wicked badass dinner, sitting on the beach and talking. So much better than being stuck in some hoity-toity restaurant with snooty waiters and shit like that.
And Luca was…nice. Patient. He looked like a caveman—broad, hard muscle everywhere, his nose with the slight hitch that said it had been broken at least once, the knuckles of his mallet hands all scarred, and scabbed on his right—but he’d been gentle with her. He’d asked if he could do things, and he hadn’t pushed—at all—when she’d said no.
She could tell that he’d been really trying not to cross her lines. Like he was trying to understand her. Nobody understood her, except Dmitri. Not ever her mom and dad really understood her. They understood her limits, and they understood where they came from, but they didn’t understand why their love couldn’t just fix her. Hard as they tried, they couldn’t understand that. They never stopped trying, though.