Demetrio's POV
She searched my face for a long moment, running whatever calculation she ran behind those eyes, and then something settled in her expression.
"I won't go back," she said. "Not because you asked me to. Because I looked up the neighborhood on my phone in the car and you're right about what it is, and I'm not interested in being used as anyone's message to your family." She held my gaze steadily. "But those two things have nothing to do with each other."
"Understood," I said.
The air between us held the particular charge of something unfinished and we were both aware of it and neither of us was addressing it directly, which was its own kind of conversation.
I reached out and pushed a loose strand of hair back from her face and watched her go very still at the contact, her breath pausing, her eyes staying on mine.
I kissed her again.
This time slower, with less of the urgency that had driven the first one and more of something deliberate underneath it, my hand cupping her jaw, her body leaning into mine by degrees until there was no space left between us worth measuring. She kissed me back with a thoroughness that I was going to be thinking about for considerably longer than was useful, her hands moving from my lapels to my chest to my shoulders, touching me with the focused attention of someone learning something they intended to remember.
My hands moved. Down her sides, over the curve of her hips, pulling her closer, and she arched into it with a soft sound that I felt against my mouth and that did serious damage to what remained of my discipline. My lips found her neck again and she tipped her head to the side to give me better access, her fingers sliding into my hair, and I felt her pulse jumping under my mouth, quick and uneven, her whole body vibrating slightly with want.
"Tell me to stop," I said against her skin, low enough that it was only for her. "If you want me to stop, say so."
A beat of silence. Her grip in my hair tightened rather than loosened.
"I don't want you to stop," she said, and her voice was unsteady but the words were certain, and that certainty mattered to me more than I was going to examine right now.
My hands slid beneath the hem of her jacket, finding warm skin, tracing up her sides slowly, and she shivered against me and made a sound that was not quite my name and not quite anything else, just something wordless and honest that I filed away in the locked part of my memory without meaning to. I backed her more firmly against the wall and she went willingly, her leg hooking slightly around mine, pulling me closer, and I kissed down her collarbone and felt her chest rising and falling faster under my lips.
She was warm everywhere. Warm and responsive and completely unguarded in a way that I was not used to seeing from her, this woman who kept her armor on in every room she walked into and deployed her sharpness like a weapon, stripped of all of it now in this dim hallway with her hands in my hair and her head tipped back and her breath coming in short quiet sighs that were slowly dismantling what remained of my good judgment.
"Demetrio," she said, and this time it was a different kind of word entirely.
I lifted my head and looked at her and the expression on her face was the one I had seen briefly in the bathroom at the reception, the one she had not managed to close off in time, open and real and slightly furious at itself for being both of those things, and I understood it completely because I was having a version of the same experience.
I had told myself this would not happen again after that first night. I had told myself it was alcohol and proximity and an unusual set of circumstances and that I was not a man who made the same mistake twice.
I was beginning to suspect that the mistake framing had been the error all along.
I kissed her once more, slower, a kiss that was more about the fact of her than about where it was going, and I felt her exhale against my mouth, something releasing in her, the last of whatever she had been holding onto since the day dissolved into the contact between us.
When I finally pulled back far enough to breathe, we stood there in the hallway with our foreheads almost touching and her hands resting against my chest and mine at her waist, and the silence was the most comfortable silence I had experienced in recent memory, which was its own significant piece of information that I was not prepared to process in a building entrance at nine o'clock on a Tuesday.
"The function on Friday," I said, because I needed to say something structural.
She let out a short breath that was almost a laugh. "You're bringing up the function right now."
"Your mother called you about it."
"I know she called me." She pulled back and straightened her jacket, smoothing the front of it with both hands, reassembling. I watched her do it. "I'm going. I already decided."
"Good." I paused. "I'll be there. There are people you need to know and things about the landscape that will protect you from situations like today. I'll walk you through it."
She looked at me for a moment with that searching expression. Then she nodded, a small decisive thing, her chin coming up. "Okay."
"Okay," I repeated.
We stood there another beat too long, neither of us moving toward the door. I was aware of exactly how she looked, her red lip slightly marked from the kissing, her hair displaced, her eyes still darker than usual, and I was aware of my own hands being very deliberately at my sides when they wanted to be somewhere else entirely.
I stepped back. Deliberately. One step and then another.
"Go up," I said.
"You first," she said, and the corner of her mouth moved. "You're the guest. I live here."
"I'm aware."
"Then go," she said, and there was warmth underneath the sharpness of it, the same warmth that had been there in the hallway at the wedding, the one she tried to keep under everything else and occasionally failed at.
I reached out one last time and tucked the displaced strand of her hair back, slowly, watching her stay still and let me, and then I turned and walked to the door and let myself out into the night.
Sergio was waiting at the curb.
He said nothing. He started the engine.
I sat in the back seat with my hands in my lap and looked at nothing in particular and thought about the way she had said I don't want you to stop with that specific certainty, like it was a decision she had made and owned entirely.
I had an organization to run. Enemies that were becoming more creative. A father newly married to a woman I did not yet fully trust. A drug negotiation that the afternoon's events had complicated. Three hundred men who required a don that was fully present and fully in command of himself at all times.
I pressed two fingers briefly to my mouth and then dropped my hand.
"Office," I said to Sergio.
He pulled into traffic.
I did not look back at her building.
I looked back at her building.
I faced forward and told myself, with the diminishing conviction of a man who was running out of ways to believe his own argument, that this was going to stop before it became something neither of us could manage.
I had been telling myself that for weeks.
I was telling it to myself with considerably less certainty now.