Chapter 10: A Week of Gentle Hands
Morning light spilled across the breakfast nook in long amber bars, catching the silver on the table and the steam rising off a pot of coffee that no one had poured. Elara stood in the doorway a moment too long, still in the sweater she had slept in, her hair unwashed and hanging flat against her cheeks. She had spent the night with her eyes shut against the dragging sound in the hall and had woken to the smell of butter and the quiet certainty that everyone in this house had heard her breathing catch in her sleep.
They all looked up when she entered. Nick was at the head of the table, sleeves rolled, newspaper folded beside his plate. Katie sat with a ledger and a half-eaten scone, pen tucked behind her ear. Will had his phone in one hand and a cup in the other. Adelaide and Theo sat together as they always did, close enough that his hand rested on the back of her chair.
"Come here," Nick said.
It was not a question. Elara walked around the table, and before she could reach for the chair beside him, his hand closed around her wrist and drew her down onto his thigh, settling her sideways against his chest like a parcel he had been waiting to unwrap. Her body went rigid. Her thoughts flared white, a panicked static she could not shape into words.
Nick pressed a corner of a croissant to her lips. "Eat."
"I can sit in my own chair."
"You can." He held the pastry steady. "Eat."
She opened her mouth and bit. Flakes scattered down the front of her sweater. Nick brushed them away with the flat of his thumb, moving slowly across the swell of her breast, and did not pretend the touch was accidental. "See," he said. "Good."
Katie did not look up from her ledger. "She's not eating enough. Look at her wrists." Her pen moved, scoring a line. "Have her sleep through the night and the appetite comes back."
"She slept through the night Monday," Will said, without lifting his eyes from his phone. "Tuesday I heard her up at three."
"Wednesday too," Theo said, quiet, from the other end of the table. He was watching Elara with the patience of a man solving a puzzle he already knew the answer to. "The floorboards over the east hall. You know the ones."
Elara's stomach turned. She had crossed that hall at three in the morning on Wednesday, convinced she was the only thing awake in the house. She had stood at the top of the stairs listening for the dragging sound and told herself she heard nothing. She had told herself everything was fine. That was the night she had decided to be good, to stop asking, to stop running, to fold herself small enough to fit inside whatever shape they wanted her in, and she had thought the decision had been hers alone, made in a dark hallway, unwitnessed.
Now Theo folded his napkin and set it down. "It's not a criticism, Elara. We only want to know where you are."
"I'm here," she said. It came out small.
"Yes," Nick said, and his hand came to rest at the back of her neck, thumb tracing the ridge of her spine. "You're here."
Adelaide smiled at her across the table. It was the warmest expression in the room, and somehow the most dangerous. "She's tired," she said. "Aren't you, sweetheart? You've had a hard few weeks." She tore her scone in half and reached across to lay a piece on the rim of Elara's saucer, as if Elara were a bird she was coaxing down from a ledge. "It's hard, coming home. You don't have to put on a brave face with us."
Something in Elara's chest did a complicated thing. The touch of Nick's palm against her neck, the smell of the coffee, Adelaide's soft voice saying a thing that was, in the plainest reading of the words, kind. She realized with a dim, guilty start that she had begun to lean. Just slightly. Just the weight of her upper back settling toward Nick's arm. She made herself sit up straight again, and Nick's grip tightened, not punishing, only there, as if to remind her that straightening and staying were not the same thing anymore.
That was the first morning.
By the second, the table had rearranged itself. Elara's chair at the far end had disappeared; when she came down, there was a cushion on the bench beside Katie and a place set only there. She ate her eggs with Katie's knee pressed to hers under the table. Katie read her correspondence out loud, not to her but in her general direction, and every so often would put down a letter and say something like, "Mother's foundation wants the east wing opened for an art program," and then, when Elara said nothing, she would reach over and tuck a strand of Elara's hair behind her ear, lingering with the backs of her knuckles against Elara's cheek. It was not the gesture a person made to a stranger. It was not even the gesture of a sister. It was the gesture of ownership, offered with such ordinary grace that Elara's body accepted it before her mind could object.
On the third morning Adelaide sat behind her. Elara came down with her hair knotted and damp from a shower, and Adelaide, without asking, gathered it up and began to braid. Her fingers worked slowly, taking sections, smoothing them down. "There," she said, and her voice was low and pleased. "Look how pretty that is."
Elara had not looked. She was looking at Theo across the table, watching them, and at Nick leaning back with his coffee, watching her watch them, and she understood that the braid was not for her. It was for them. They were braiding her, winding her in, and she sat still for it the way she had learned to sit still for everything.
"Good girl," Adelaide murmured, and something in Elara went briefly, shamefully warm.
She hated that. She hated that she heard those two words and her shoulders dropped half an inch.
On the fourth morning, Katie's hand went under the table. They were talking about the foundation gala, about a catering contract, about whether Will would make the drive into the city. Elara was pushing a strawberry around her plate, half listening, when a light pressure settled over the underside of her sweater, just below her breast, and cupped her through the cashmere as casually as a hand resting on a knee. Katie did not look at her. She continued her sentence about the caterer. Her fingers moved once, feeling the shape of her, and Elara flushed so hard she had to put down her fork.
"Too sweet?" Katie asked, mid-sentence, still not looking. "You've gone red."
"I'm not used to strawberries at breakfast."
"Mm." Katie's hand slid away as though nothing had happened, and the absence of it was somehow worse, a small cold patch of skin where the warmth had been. Elara caught herself looking at Katie's hand resting in the tablecloth, and then catching herself was its own confession, and the hot well of her own stunned wanting, when she finally let herself name it, made her press her thighs together under the table.
By the fifth day she had stopped making excuses to sit anywhere else.
Nick drew her onto his lap again that morning, and this time her body folded without a fight. She ate from his hand, the strips of bacon, the buttery bread, and when he held the coffee cup for her she drank what he offered, tilting her face up to meet his eyes because he asked her to and there was no part of her left that wanted to climb down. His hand slid along her thigh, unhurried, and she felt her own weight go soft against him, felt the small animal part of her that had spent a week listening for monsters in the hall simply give up and put its head down.
"You're doing so well," he said, low, near her ear, where the others could hear. "Look at you. Not shaking anymore."
She was not shaking. She had not noticed. The dragging in the hall, the sour smell, the ledger with her name written in it, all of it had gone somewhere distant and foggy, and in its place was this: five people who wanted her, who touched her like she was theirs, who fed her and braided her hair and called her good.
Will leaned over and took her chin between his thumb and forefinger, turning her face to look at him. "You're not a ghost today," he said. It was almost an accusation. "Good. I was tired of watching you drift." Then he kissed the corner of her mouth, brief, proprietorial, and went back to his phone as if he had just straightened a picture frame.
That night she lay in bed and touched her own mouth where he had kissed her, and then, without quite deciding to, she slid her hand lower and did something about the ache the whole day had built in her. She was embarrassed and quick about it and came with her face pressed to the pillow, her thoughts a jumble of Katie's fingers on her breast, Nick's voice calling her good, Adelaide's hands in her hair, and she fell asleep before she could feel bad about any of it.
On the sixth morning it rained. The gardens grayed behind the glass, and the breakfast nook smelled of wet stone and coffee, and the day felt enclosed, the walls pulled in tight. Elara sat perched on the edge of Nick's knee with her legs across his thigh, wearing one of Adelaide's cardigans because hers had been taken away to be washed and had not come back. Adelaide sat beside them, her hand on the inside of Elara's knee, drawing small circles through the wool of the borrowed cardigan.
"I want to keep this one," Adelaide said, to Nick, over Elara's head, as if she were discussing a adopted cat.
"For the weekend."
"I don't mean for the weekend."
Nick's thumb moved at the nape of Elara's neck. "She's staying here."
"I know she is." Adelaide's hand slid up, higher, until her palm lay flat over the upper part of Elara's thigh, and Elara, who had spent a week learning the temperature of these touches, felt her breath catch and her hips shift and knew that everyone at the table knew. Theo was watching from the window with his coffee. Katie had stopped pretending to read. The rain ticked against the glass.
Elara's thoughts, for once, were almost too simple to be dangerous. Please don't stop. The words came up whole, unguarded, in a voice that was not the frightened animal voice and not the analytical voice and not the woman who poured over ledgers looking for her own name. It was the voice of a body that had been fed and warmed and held for a week and wanted to be held harder.
No one said anything about it. That was the cruelty and the kindness of them. They only drew her closer, all at once, the way a hand closes over a coin. Adelaide leaned in and brushed her lips against Elara's temple and murmured, "That's what we thought," and Elara understood, with a flush that ran from her scalp to her stomach, that her thoughts were not private and never had been and that the thing they were all doing, this slow week of hands and food and braided hair, had never been about whether she would admit it. It had been about showing her.
By the seventh morning she leaned in without being pulled.
Nick had not even reached for her. He was reading the paper, and Elara came in, and she walked to his chair and waited, standing there, until he understood that she was waiting, a small and humiliating and utterly willing thing. He looked up slowly, folded the paper, and opened his arm, and she climbed into his lap and settled her cheek against his collar and felt the whole room exhale around her.
"There she is," Katie said. It was the first time all week that Katie had looked openly pleased with her, and Elara wanted, obscurely, to cry.
Will passed her a plate of pastries and did not make her ask. Adelaide combed her fingers back through her hair and let her hand fall and rest on the back of Elara's neck, and Theo came and stood behind her and let his hands settle on her shoulders, thumbs working the tired muscle there, and Elara closed her eyes and let herself be held and touched and fed by all of them, leaning in, weight heavy, the last small resistance in her going soft as overripe fruit.
When breakfast was over and they began to rise, Nick lifted her off his lap and set her on her feet and let go, and Elara stood there in the middle of the sunlit nook with her hands empty and her body warm and the whole of her suddenly, desperately not wanting to stop.
"Wait," she said. It came out before she could catch it, thin and wanting.
They all paused. Five pairs of eyes turned to her, and the room went very still, and outside the rain had stopped and the gardens gleamed and the mistake she had just made hung in the bright air between them, entirely plain. Elara's face burned. She had whined, she realized, the way a dog whines when the hand comes off its head, and she had done it out loud, and everyone had heard.
Katie's mouth curved, small and slow. Adelaide's eyes went dark and pleased. Nick reached out and drew a knuckle down Elara's cheek, and his voice when he spoke was gentle, the way you are gentle with a thing that has just finally come to your hand.
"That's all right," he said. "You can stay a little longer."
And Elara did, and the monsters in the hallway were, for the whole morning, an enormous and dangerous and distant thing, a story told about someone else in a house no longer hers.
They did not go far. Nick carried the plates to the sideboard and came back, and by the time he sat down again Adelaide had produced a deck of cards and was shuffling them with the quick, showy flick of someone who had done it at parties for years. Elara stood where he had set her, not sure whether she was dismissed, and Adelaide looked up and patted the space on Nick's thigh.
"Sit," she said. "We're playing."
Elara sat. Nick arranged her without ceremony, turning her sideways so her back rested against his chest, one arm loose around her waist, and then he pulled her legs across the gap so that her calves lay over Katie's lap on the other side. The dress Adelaide had put her in that morning was short and pale green and clung at the hips before it fell loose, and it rode up a little when she settled, and no one did anything about it. Under it she wore the thin bralette Adelaide had laid out with it, no more than a scrap of lace, and she could feel the cool of the room on the parts of her the fabric did not cover.
"There," Adelaide said, dealing. "That's better."
Katie took her cards and set them face down on her knee, and let her free hand come to rest on Elara's shin. She did not stroke or squeeze. She simply held it there, warm palm flat against the bone, as if it were the natural place for a hand to be, and picked up her cards again and began to play.
Will and Theo had taken the far end of the table. Adelaide sat across from Nick. The four of them played without much talk, the low murmur of bids and passes, the slap of cards on the cloth, and Elara did not know the game and no one offered to teach her. She was not there to play. She understood that now, the way she understood most things in this house, slowly and then all at once.
For a while nothing happened. That was the game they were playing, she thought. The patience of it. The hand on her shin, the arm at her waist, the warmth of Nick breathing behind her ear. Her body, which had spent the week learning to expect the touch before it came, began to wait for it, and the waiting was a kind of touch all its own.
Nick's mouth came to her neck first. He did it lazily, between his turns, nuzzling the hair away from her ear with his nose and pressing his lips to the place under her jaw where her pulse had started to run. He kissed down the side of her throat, slow, and Elara's head tipped back against his shoulder before she had decided to let it.
"Play your card," Adelaide said, watching them over the fan in her hand.
Nick played his card. He did not stop kissing her neck.
Katie's hand began to move. It slid from Elara's shin to her knee, and then along the top of her thigh, up and back, a slow petting that crossed the hem of the dress and stopped just short of anything, and then slid back down again. Each pass went a little higher. Elara kept her eyes on the table and her breath shallow and felt the small bald wanting gather low in her belly like heat under a stone.
"You're quiet," Will said, from the end of the table. "Losing badly?"
"She's not playing," Adelaide said.
"Then she's doing very well."
Theo laughed, low. He had not touched her at all, and that was its own pressure, his patience, the way he sat back with his coffee and simply looked. Elara felt looked at. She felt it from all of them, from the far end of the table, from Adelaide's dark and idle eyes, and the gaze of it did more than the hands did, some mornings. She pressed her legs together under the dress without thinking, and Katie's palm was there, between her knees, holding them apart with the most ordinary pressure.
"Don't," Katie said, still reading her cards.
Elara went still.
The play went on. Adelaide won a hand and swept the cards in. Nick's fingers found the strap of the bralette where it showed at the neckline of the dress and drew it up her shoulder and let it snap back, and then his whole hand covered her breast over the fabric, not squeezing, just holding the shape of it, thumb finding the nipple through the lace and the thin green cloth and rubbing once, slow, until it stiffened under his palm. Elara's breath came out of her in a small huff. He did it again, the flat of his thumb circling, no hurry in it at all, and it was the kindest thing and the cruelest thing she had felt in a week, because he was not trying to make her come, he was showing her that he could do this forever.
"Good girl," he said, into her hair. "Lie still."
She lay still. Her whole body was listening now, every inch of her turned up toward the two hands that had her, Katie's on her thigh and Nick's on her breast, and the room had gone soft and underwater at the edges and she did not care what the others were saying, or what the game was.
She did care, though. That was the thing. Part of her was still sitting at the table with Theo and Will and Adelaide, watching herself be handled, and knowing they could all hear the inside of her head, and the humiliation of that was hot in her face and hotter between her legs, and she could not tell any more which one she wanted more.
Katie put down her cards and turned in her chair so she faced Elara properly and drew both her legs up onto her lap. "Come here," she said, and the flat of her hand slid up the inside of Elara's thigh, under the dress, unhurried, all the way to the edge of her underwear. She found her with two fingers held flat, pressing the lace against her through the cloth, and she moved them in a small slow circle and looked at Elara's face while she did it.
Elara made a sound. It was not a word.
"She's wet," Katie said, to the table, as calm as if she were reporting the weather. "Feel."
Nick's hand slid down from her breast to her belly and then lower, under the hem where Katie's hand was, and two of his fingers pressed in beside hers, and they both felt it, the soaked lace and the soft, swollen give of her, and Elara's hips rolled up into their hands of their own accord, once, seeking.
Everything stopped.
Katie took her hand away. Nick took his away. Elara's legs were left open on Katie's lap and her dress was pushed up around her hips and the whole table had gone quiet and she felt the absence of their hands like a slap.
"Look at her," Katie said. "Humping the air."
"Please," Elara said. She did not know what she was asking for.
"Please what?"
"I don't know."
"You do."
"I want your hand back."
"What do you say?"
Her face burned so hard she could feel her own pulse in her ears. Adelaide had set down her cards. Theo was leaning forward with his elbows on the table. Will had put his phone away at last and was watching her the way he watched the numbers move in the market, calculating and patient, and she understood that they had all been waiting, the whole week, the whole month, for her to say it out loud in front of them.
"Please," she said. "Please touch me."
"Better," Katie said, and did not move. "But that's not the whole of it, is it. You want more than a hand. You want someone to put their fingers in you and work you until you can't think. Don't you."
"Yes."
"Even though we can hear every filthy thing that goes through your head. Even though you sat here on your brother's lap with your legs across your sister's and let us watch you get wet, and you loved it." She let that sit. "You're a mess, Elara. You're our mess. Say it."
"I'm your mess," Elara whispered.
Nick's hand came back, and this time it was not gentle. He caught her breast in his palm through the dress and squeezed hard enough that she gasped, and then he lifted his hand and brought it down flat on the same breast, a stinging slap through the lace that made her jerk against his chest and cry out, and the sound was sharp in the quiet room and her eyes went hot and watering all at once.
"A good girl," Nick said, low, holding her still against him, "takes what she is given. Do you understand me. You don't whine for it. You don't roll your hips at it. You open your mouth and you say thank you, and you wait."
"Thank you," she said. It came out thick, and she meant it, and that was the thing that undid her more than the slap had, that she meant it all the way down.
"Again."
"Thank you."
He did it a second time. Her nipple had gone aching and tight against the lace and the slap landed right on it and she made a small choked sound and did not move her hips this time, did not roll, only held herself still while her thighs shook on Katie's lap and the heat between them turned into something liquid and obvious, and she knew they could all see it, the way the pale dress had gone damp at the front where she was pressed together and open.
"Better," Nick said. "Look at you. Learning."
Katie reached out and flicked the strap of the bralette off her shoulder, and the cup fell, and one small breast came out over the top of it, and the room looked at it. Adelaide wet her lips. Theo's chin rested on his knuckles and he did not blink. Will tilted his head the way he did when a deal was going his way, and said nothing, and that was somehow the loudest thing in the room.
"She's got the face for it," Adelaide said, soft. "She has from the start. I saw it the first breakfast back. She came down the stairs and looked at the five of us and went pink, and I thought, there she is, there's the one." She smiled at Elara across the table, warm and terrible. "You were looking at us, sweetheart. Theo and me especially. I noticed even then. Everyone noticed."
"Adelaide," Elara said, half a plea, her bare breast out in the morning light and her dress around her waist and wet through.
"You wanted us before you wanted them," Adelaide said. "Ask Theo."
Theo did not move. "She thought about us," he said, quiet. "In the bath. When I put my hand on her collarbone she thought about my mouth there. And Adelaide's mouth on the other side. She thought it very clearly."
Elara closed her eyes.
"Open your eyes," Nick said.
She opened them.
"Now," he said, and his hand slid back down her belly, past the waistband of her underwear, and into her properly this time, two fingers parting her and sliding into the wet heat of her slow and deep, and she made a sound that was not a word again, a small broken syllable that the whole room heard. "You've been wanting this for a week. Longer. Since the bath. Since before. So take it. Don't push. Don't beg. Just lie there on my lap with your legs open and be our good girl."
And Elara did.
He worked her slowly. Two fingers, then three, curling into her while his thumb found her clit, and he kept the whole thing unhurried, as if he had all morning, as if she were a thing he had already decided to keep and was in no rush about. Her head went back on his shoulder. Her dress was bunched at her waist and one breast out of her bralette and the other still under the lace and Katie's hand was back on her thigh, holding it open, and Adelaide had come around the table now to stand behind Nick's chair and look down at her, at the place where Nick's fingers disappeared into her, and her eyes were dark and curious and pleased.
"Look how wet she gets them," Adelaide said, to no one in particular. "Look at that. Poor thing. She's been holding this in for years."
"Four of them," Will said, from his chair, and there was something in his voice now, the pride of a man watching his own work. "She came back to us with all of that in her head and a week of us feeding her out of our hands, and this is where she ends up. Open on her brother's lap. I'd call that a correction."
"Say the rest of it," Katie said, watching Elara's face.
"She's not frightened of us anymore," Will said. "That's the rest of it. She came back scared of the hallways and now she's holding still for it because she wants it. She wants us. All of us. And she'll say so."
Elara was not going to say so. Her mouth was open and her eyes stung and Nick's thumb moved in small tight circles and she was not going to say so, and then her body crested and broke, without permission, hard, and the words came out of her anyway in a wet rush while she shuddered around his fingers.
"I want it. I want all of you. Please. Please don't stop."
"There," Adelaide said, softly, into the crown of her head, and stroked her hair. "There she is."
Nick did not stop. He worked her through it and past it, and when she tried to close her legs he only pressed Katie's thigh down to hold them open, and did not let up, and she came a second time on his fingers with her face turned into his neck and her hand gripping Katie's wrist because it was the only part of any of them she could reach. The room smelled of coffee and wet wool and her, and Adelaide was still petting her hair, and Theo had come around at last and stood behind Katie with his hands in his pockets, watching with an expression Elara was too far gone to read.
"That's two," Nick said. His fingers withdrew slowly and she felt the drag of it and whined, small. He let her feel the wet on his hand, held it up in the light where she could see it, glistening, and then he wiped his fingers on the hem of her bunched dress, deliberate, leaving the cloth damp, marking her with it in front of all of them. "Good girl."
"A good girl takes what she's given," Elara whispered. She did not know she was going to say it until she had.
"That's right." He settled her upright against his chest, fixed the bralette back over her breast with two fingers, drew the dress down over her lap. He did it all with a tenderness that made her want to weep. "And you can take more."
Behind the table, Adelaide picked up the cards and began to shuffle them again, the same showy flick, and Will took out his phone, and Katie let Elara's legs slide off her lap and put her hand back on her own cards as if nothing at all had happened, and Theo came and sat down at the far end and lifted his cup. The game resumed. The first hand was dealt out. And Elara sat on Nick's lap with her dress smoothed and her underwear wet and her body still trembling and her cheek against his collar, and watched the five of them play, and waited, entirely willingly, for the next thing they decided to give her.