I Left My Husband Bleeding, and the Mob Boss Said Good novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Unless I Say

In his bedroom she starts everything: a kiss, his mouth on her at the edge of the bed, praise in Arabic she understands and tells him nothing about, and her hand on him until he comes on her stomach.

He came in behind me and shut the door.

Then he stood with his back against it and did not touch me.

The room was dark except for one lamp on the dresser.

It smelled of cardamom and soap and the cold air he'd brought in on his coat.

I was wearing his housekeeper's flannel nightgown.

My bare feet were freezing on his floor.

"Say it again," he said.

"I'm saying."

"Say what you want, Nahla."

It was the first time he had used my name.

I heard it all the way down my back.

"I want to start," I said. "I want to be the one who starts."

"Then start."

I crossed the room and took his face in both hands.

His beard was rougher than I had thought it would be.

I kissed him.

He stood perfectly still and let me, with his hands hanging at his sides.

His mouth opened under mine slowly.

I kissed him harder.

I bit his lower lip, and a sound came out of his chest that I felt in my own.

His hands were still hanging.

"Put them on me," I said.

"Where?"

I took his wrists and put his hands on my hips.

He closed them there and held on.

His fingers pressed into the flannel hard enough that I knew exactly how much he was holding back.

"Like that," I said. "Good. Now take this off me."

He gathered the nightgown in both fists and drew it up over my head.

He dropped it on the floor and stood there looking.

I had nothing on under it.

I waited for the old flinch.

It didn't come.

The lamp lit one side of me.

His eyes went down it slowly and came back up.

He said something in Arabic so low I almost didn't catch it.

"Ya Adra," he said. "Look at you."

I understood every word, and I kept my face still.

"Your turn," I said, and pulled his shirt up.

His chest was broad and dark-haired.

Across the left ribs ran a long pale scar, and under it a burn, puckered and shiny, the size of my palm.

I put my hand on the burn.

He caught his breath.

"That's old," he said.

"I didn't ask."

I leaned in and kissed the scar, and then the burn.

Then I bit him gently below the collarbone, and he made that sound again.

I undid his belt myself, and the button, and the zipper.

I pushed his trousers down until he stepped out of them.

He was hard already, straining the front of his black cotton shorts.

I did not touch him yet.

I took his hand instead and walked backward to the bed.

I sat on the edge of it and looked up.

"On your knees," I said.

He went down on them on the rug without a word.

His hands came up to my knees and stopped there.

"Say stop and I stop," he said. "With my mouth on you or not."

"I know," I said. "Open me."

He eased my knees apart and looked at what he had uncovered.

He made that sound again, lower.

Then he put his mouth on me.

The first stroke of his tongue went the whole length of me, slow and flat and hot.

I made a noise I had not made in two years.

"Again," I said.

He did it again.

His beard rasped the soft skin inside my thighs, and the contrast was so sharp I felt it in my teeth.

I put my hands in his hair and held on.

"There," I said. "No. Higher."

He found my clit with the tip of his tongue and stayed there.

He circled it, and pressed.

"Hek," he murmured against me, in Arabic. "That's it. Like that. Good, habibti, so good."

I understood him.

Every word went straight into me and stayed there.

I rolled my hips against his mouth, and he took the weight of it and gave it back.

"Don't stop," I said. "Don't you stop."

He didn't.

He slid two fingers inside me while his tongue kept working.

They curled, and found a place so exactly right that my back came off the bed.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, God, there."

"Tayyib," he said into my skin. "Come for me. Let me hear it."

The first one hit me hard and quick.

My body clenched around his fingers, and I cried out and tried to stop it with my fist.

He took my fist away from my mouth and held it down on the blanket.

"No," he said. "Nobody in this house is going to tell you to be quiet."

"Marwan."

"Again."

His mouth went back to me, softer now.

I was still shaking, and I did not think I had another one in me.

I was wrong.

He sucked my clit between his lips and flicked it with his tongue.

His fingers kept their slow, steady pressure.

It rose up in me again, bigger, from somewhere I had thought was closed.

I came with my heels digging into his back and his name caught in my throat.

I lay there open and wet and wrecked.

He kissed the inside of one thigh and then the other.

He rested his forehead against my knee, and his shoulders were shaking.

I looked down at the top of his head.

I had never in my life made a man shake by letting him do what I asked.

"Up here," I said.

He climbed onto the bed.

I pushed him onto his back, hard, and he went.

I straddled one of his thighs and sat down on it.

His thigh was solid and hot, and the hair on it dragged over me.

I was so wet I left a shine on his skin.

"Nahla," he said.

"Don't move."

He didn't.

I rocked against his leg, slowly at first, and then harder.

My hands were flat on his chest, and his hard cock pressed against my hip through the cotton.

I watched his face while I did it.

He watched me.

His mouth was open and his hands were knotted in the sheet.

I saw him count his breaths so he wouldn't grab me.

"You can touch," I said. "Put your hands on my breasts."

He put them there.

He cupped me with both palms and rolled my nipples between his fingers, firm and unhurried.

I ground down on his thigh and felt the third one start low in my belly.

"Ya albi," he said, rough. "Look how you move."

"Tell me," I said.

"You're beautiful. You're wet all over my leg. I want to taste it off you."

"Later," I said.

"Yalla, habibti. Come on me."

I came a third time, on his thigh, with his thumbs on my nipples.

The sound that came out of me was one I didn't recognize.

I fell forward onto his chest.

He wrapped both arms around me and held me while I shook.

Then he sat up against the headboard and took me with him, so I knelt across his lap with a knee on either side of his hips.

He did not push into me.

I felt how badly he wanted to, hot and hard and heavy against my stomach, and he kept his hands on my back.

He kissed my mouth, and I tasted myself in his beard.

"Salty," I said.

"Sweet," he said. "You're wrong."

He kissed down my collarbone and went around the bruises on my throat without being told.

I noticed that, and I put it away to think about later.

His mouth found my breast.

He took the nipple between his teeth, very lightly, and pulled.

I arched into him and said a word my mother would have slapped me for.

"Softer," I said, because I was raw everywhere.

He went softer, and softer was worse.

He circled me with the flat of his tongue, so slowly that I held his head with both hands and shook.

"Ya Rab," he murmured against my skin, in Arabic. "How soft you are. Every part of you is a gift. I could stay here until morning."

My nipple was wet and cold where the air touched it, and then his mouth was back.

He gave the other breast the same slow, patient hunger.

My hips began to rock against his stomach without my permission.

"You're going to make me come again," I said.

"Is that a threat?"

"It's a request."

"Then not yet," he said, and his hands came off my back and gripped my hips hard to stop me.

"I want you to wait. I want to see how long you can."

I laughed, breathless, and bit his ear.

"You are a bastard," I said.

"Yes," he said, with great satisfaction.

I pushed him flat on the bed again, because I had decided what I wanted next.

When I could move properly, I slid down his body and pulled his shorts off.

He was thick and heavy and hot, flushed dark at the head.

When I closed my hand around him, he jerked.

"You don't have to," he said.

"I know what I have to do."

I stroked him from base to tip, slowly.

I ran my thumb through the wet that had gathered at the slit and put it in my mouth.

He made a sound low in his throat that was nearly a word.

"Ya Rab," he said. "Nahla."

"Is that good?" I said.

"It's too good."

"Then it's right," I said.

I worked him in long firm strokes, tightening at the head, loosening at the base.

I watched the muscles in his stomach jump.

His jaw was tight and his eyes held mine.

His hands were still knotted in the sheet.

He didn't touch me.

I took one of his hands and put it in my hair.

"Hold on," I said.

His fingers closed in it, gently.

"Harder."

They tightened.

I leaned down and kissed him, deep, and he groaned into my mouth.

I stroked him faster.

I put my lips against his ear.

"I'm going to put my mouth on you," I said. "Not tonight. Soon."

His whole body jerked in my hand.

"Say that again."

"I'm going to take you in my mouth and make you beg me to stop," I said.

"I will never beg you to stop."

"Then I'll do it all night," I said.

He swore in Arabic, long and low, and I felt him swell against my palm.

"Say it in Arabic," I said against his lips. "Whatever you're thinking. I won't know what it means."

He laughed, one short broken breath, and said it.

It was a long sentence, filthy and tender.

It described exactly what he wanted to do to me when he was allowed to, in order, starting with my mouth.

I kept my face perfectly straight and my hand perfectly steady.

"Say it again," I said.

He said it again.

Halfway through it his hips lifted off the bed.

He came against my stomach in long hot pulses, with my name in his mouth and my hair wrapped around his fist.

I kept stroking until the last of it.

For a moment he lay with his eyes closed.

I stayed where I was and felt him go loose under me, bit by bit.

I thought: I can say stop and go and more, and nothing breaks.

I was crying.

I hadn't known I was.

He opened his eyes and saw it, and his hands went still on my back.

"Don't you dare let go of me," I said.

He pulled me down against his chest, wet and sticky and shaking.

He wrapped both arms around me and held on.

I lay there with my cheek on his scar and listened to his heart slow down.

"I'll get a cloth," he said eventually.

"Not yet."

A thin cry came out of the baby monitor on the nightstand.

He lifted his head.

"Go," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

He slid out from under me, and found his trousers, and went out.

I lay in his bed in the lamplight, in his smell.

My mother's scarf was in a bag down the hall, and the brass key was still in the inside of my own door.

I did not reach for the lamp.

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