A-Splendid-Ruin(93)
From the other room came the clacking of the typewriter. I closed the door softly behind me and leaned against it, catching my breath, trying to calm my pulse and my fear. I was safe. He had said he would let nothing happen to me. He would not let them take me away again. He would look for me . . . In some part of my mind it seemed impossible that I might trust him, or anyone, to do those things, but the truth was that I did. He had seen what I’d put in that drawing at Coppa’s. He’d recognized me in that library. He understood what no one else did.
The clacking stopped abruptly, and then he was in the bedroom doorway. “Where the hell have you been?” he snapped, and I saw the worry in his face, the way his thick hair stood on end as if he’d raked his hand through it a dozen times. “I was just getting ready to go looking for you.”
“Someone was following me.”
He took two strides to the door and pulled me into his arms, and I fell against his chest with relief. “Are they still?”
“I think I lost them. I know I did.”
He locked the door. “Who was it?”
“Some man . . . I don’t know who he was.”
Dante pulled me closer and rested his chin on my hair. His hands went to my back, soothing—I was trembling, I realized. “You can’t go out again, May. Not alone. Not until this is resolved.”
I pulled back. “I can’t not go out. Who knows when it will be over?”
His hands came to my face, his thumbs at my jaw, caressing, rubbing. “What’s this all over your face?”
I reached up to feel. “I don’t know. Soot? I hid in a chimney.”
“A chimney?”
“All day. It was very uncomfortable.”
He stilled. “You hid in a chimney all day.”
“I didn’t want to be found.”
He laughed. Short, at first, in disbelief, and then in real amusement. “What a survivor you are, May Kimble. You’ll still be among the ruins when the world ends. You don’t need me; you don’t need anyone.”
I gripped his wrists, keeping his hands on my face. “Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true. You have a remarkable—”
“I don’t want to be among the ruins when the world ends. I’m . . . I’m so very, very tired of . . . being alone.” The last words slipped out before I knew I would say them.
Dante’s smile died. In his eyes I saw an emotion I did not want to escape.
He whispered, “May,” and then he kissed me. It was as if I’d been waiting always for this kiss, and when he started to draw away, I pulled him closer. I put my arms around his neck and opened my mouth to him, and he made a sound deep in his throat that dropped into my stomach and pulled at my every nerve so I was like those houses during the fire, glowing from the inside out until they burst.
Disaster is the best aphrodisiac, he’d written. The knowledge that everything could change in a heartbeat, that a mother could die on the way home from picking up piecework, or a whole life could be upended by a word, by a lie, by the earth waking, or a spark catching from a fallen chimney. After what I’d been through, how did one stop at a kiss? Who knew what tomorrow would bring, if it came at all?
Whatever it was, the uncertain future, the city in ruins, the fact that I’d felt Dante belonged to me months before I knew him . . . I don’t know which it was. Perhaps all of those things. What I do know is that I wanted him. I was starving for him. I had his shirt open and my hands on his skin, my fingers in the hair on his chest, and it was not enough. When he shoved my own shirt from my shoulders, I pressed my breasts to him and it was not enough. His tongue on mine was not enough. I fumbled at the buttons of his trousers, and then we were at his bed, and it wasn’t until then that he paused, that he drew away and looked at me in question, and I knew he would stop if I said no, enough, and I heard my mother’s voice in my head as she warned me away from the boys in the neighborhood. “You must always watch yourself, May. There are expectations for you. You don’t want to be known as that kind of girl . . .”
“I’m a modern woman,” I breathed.
Dante lifted a brow and gave me a look that turned me inside out. “That you are.”
“Please don’t stop. I don’t want you to stop.”
His expression softened, so unbearably sweet and wondering, with that hunger too that matched my own. “I’ll be careful. I promise you.”
After that, we did not slow, and though it hurt when he first eased into me, it was a pain I welcomed, and one soon swept away as the pleasure mounted along with my desire, and then, at last, it was enough. Then, at last, I had what I didn’t know I was looking for: the antidote to my loneliness, which shriveled and withered away. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much of me it had been.
It wasn’t until long after, when we were physically exhausted but unable to sleep, that I said, “I’ve changed my mind. I want you to run the advertisement. Choose a sketch you like and we’ll have inquiries sent to the Bulletin office, as you said. I’ll call my firm the Brooklyn Company.”
He’d been tracing circles on my shoulder, but now he paused. “What of your family? What about this private detective?”
“You were right, what you said before. It’s time. In Blessington, I knew I had enough of their secrets to destroy them. All I needed then was you and Shin. China Joe has the evidence, and I’m done running. I want them to know I’m alive. I don’t need to have my money to show the city what they are or what I am.”