Chapter 24: Monthly Tradition
The balcony air was a cold slap after the heat of the bedroom. You leaned against the railing, the marble biting into your forearms, the chaotic symphony of Rome seven stories below a distant hum. Matteo stood behind you, a solid wall of warmth. His chest pressed against your back, his hands sliding around to rest on the slight curve of your stomach. He’d been quiet since the last video ended, his breathing now steady against your neck.
“You’re shivering,” he murmured, his lips moving against your skin.
“It’s cold.”
“It’s not the air.” He turned you gently to face him. In the intermittent neon glow from the hotel sign across the street, his face was all shadow and stark angles. “What is it?”
You looked past him, through the open balcony doors, to the chaotic landscape of their bed. The Polaroids were strewn across the silk like fallen leaves. Your phone, now dark and heavy with another private file, lay beside the lamp. The images felt less like trophies and more like evidence.
“It just feels… documented,” you said, the word inadequate.
“It is.” He didn’t shy from it. “I want the record. I need it.” His thumb stroked your hip. “When I’m in fucking Dortmund for a Champions League match, or when I’m ninety and my knees are shot to hell, I want to remember my pregnant wife riding my cock like it was her only purpose. Is that so wrong?”
“No.” You traced the line of his collarbone, the familiar scar. “It’s just a lot. The pictures. The video. It’s like you’re trying to… pin us down. In case we float away.”
He went very still. His eyes searched yours, and in them, you saw the boy from Napoli who’d had nothing, the man who’d built an empire on discipline and fear, and the raw, terrified father-to-be who’d fucked you senseless an hour ago. They were all there, warring.
“Maybe I am,” he admitted, his voice low. “Everything good in my life has been fast. A pass. A goal. A contract. You. This.” His hand pressed a little firmer on your belly. “It’s the first thing that’s supposed to be slow. And it’s the thing I’m most afraid of losing. So yes, I’m documenting it. I’m building a fucking shrine. To us.”
He kissed you then, not with the consuming fire from before, but with a desperate sincerity that stole your breath. It tasted like espresso and him, and a faint, metallic trace of fear.
“Come inside,” he said against your mouth. “I’m not done.”
He led you back to the bed, the silence between you now charged with a different kind of electricity. He didn’t push you onto the mattress. Instead, he sat on the edge, pulling you to stand between his knees. The discarded Polaroids crinkled under your feet.
“Look at these,” he said, his voice a rough command. He picked up one, you on your knees, your back arched, the lines of your body taut. He held it up next to your living form. “See? Right here.” His finger touched the photo, then your hip. “This curve. It’s sharper here. In the picture. Already, it’s changing.” He dropped the photo and picked up another, you bent over the dresser. “And here. Your ass is fuller. Rounder. Like it’s preparing.” He looked up at you, his eyes dark. “I want to see it. I want to see all of it.”
He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to your stomach, a kiss so tender it made your eyes burn. Then he hooked his fingers into the waistband of the loose sweats you’d pulled on and tugged them down, following the descent with his lips, his tongue, tracing the path his child was taking.
“On the bed,” he breathed, his words hot against your pubic bone. “On your back. Legs open. I want to look. I want to remember what this looked like today. Now.”
You obeyed, settling back into the nest of silk and scattered photos. The cool air touched your exposed skin, raising goosebumps. He loomed over you, not touching, just looking. His gaze was a physical weight, traveling from your swollen breasts, down over the gentle dome of your belly, to the thatch of hair between your thighs. He was studying you like a complex play he needed to memorize.
“Touch yourself,” he said, his voice thick. “Let me see how wet you are for me. After all that. After the pictures, the video, my shitty mood. Let me see it.”
A flutter of self-consciousness sparked, but it was quickly drowned by the sheer intensity of his focus. Your fingers trailed down your own body, over your stomach, through your curls, finding the slick, swollen flesh beneath. You gasped as you touched your own clit, the sensitivity heightened, a direct line to the pulse low in your belly.
“Yeah,” he encouraged, a dark, approving sound. “Just like that. Show me.” He finally moved, kneeling between your legs, his hands pushing your thighs wider. “Christ, look at you. So fucking beautiful. All mine. Pregnant and pink and perfect.”
He replaced your hand with his mouth.
There was no teasing build. He ate you like a starving man, with a single-minded, brutal devotion. His tongue speared into you, fucking you with deep, languid strokes, then flattened to lap at your core. He sucked your clit into his mouth, applying a relentless, rhythmic pressure that made your back arch off the bed, a sharp cry tearing from your throat.
“Matteo… god…”
He didn’t let up. One hand slid under your ass, lifting you, angling you for his deeper consumption. The other hand found your breast, his thumb scraping over your nipple, pinching just shy of pain. The sensations collided—the exquisite, rough pleasure of his mouth, the possessive claim of his hands, the visual of his dark head buried between your thighs. The scattered Polaroids swam in your vision, a fragmented echo of the pleasure-pain he was wringing from your body.
You came violently, a silent scream locked in your chest as your body convulsed under his hold. He drank you down, his tongue gentling, coaxing every last shudder from you until you were limp and boneless.
He rose above you, his mouth glistening with your release. He was painfully hard again, his cock jutting angrily against his abdomen. He grabbed his phone from the nightstand, his movements fluid and purposeful.
“Again,” he said, his voice wrecked. “I want to film you coming on my cock. I want to hear you.”
He propped the phone against the base of the lamp, the screen facing the bed. A tiny red light blinked. He didn’t kiss you. He positioned himself, the blunt head of his cock nudging your soaked entrance. He held your gaze, his own eyes black and unblinking in the dim light.
“Tell me,” he demanded, his hips pressing forward, an inch, two, a breathtaking, full stretch. “Tell the camera who you belong to.”
You were still spasming from your first orgasm, oversensitive, full of him. “You,” you choked out. “I belong to you.”
“Who’s the father of this baby?” He thrust deeper, seating himself to the hilt, making you gasp.
“You are. Daddy. You are.”
A feral groan ripped from him. He began to move, a slow, grinding, deep rhythm designed to torture. Each withdrawal was almost complete, each plunge a reclaiming. The bed rocked, the phone’s steady red light a silent witness. You could see your own reflection in the dark screen—your legs wrapped around his waist, your head thrown back, his powerful back muscles flexing with each drive.
“Look at it,” he panted, his pace quickening, becoming harder, less controlled. “Look at my cock fucking my pregnant fiancée. Look how she takes it. Look how her greedy little cunt sucks me back in.” His words were filthy, meant for the microphone, for you, for himself. They stoked the fire building again in your core.
He shifted, hooking your legs over his arms, spreading you wider, penetrating you impossibly deeper. The angle changed everything, rubbing a spot inside that made you see stars. “You feel that? You feel how deep I can get now? That’s me. Marking my territory. Planting my flag.”
You were babbling, a stream of incoherent pleas and affirmations. Your second orgasm built faster, a crushing wave rising from your toes. He saw it on your face, felt it in the fierce clench of your body around him.
“Come,” he snarled, his own control splintering. “Come all over my cock. Let the camera see. Let the world see if I fucking cared. This is my life. This is my family.”
The permission, the raw possessiveness in his words, shattered you. Your climax was a silent, breathtaking rupture, your body seizing around him, pulling his own release from him with a force that seemed to hurt. He shouted, a raw, guttural sound of triumph, as he pumped into you, his hips jerking erratically, flooding you with heat.
He collapsed, his weight a welcome anchor, his face buried in your neck. The only sounds were your ragged breaths and the faint, electronic hum of the phone still recording. After a long moment, he reached out a trembling arm and stopped the video.
He rolled, taking you with him, your bodies still joined. He held the phone up, the screen now showing the frozen final frame: his body draped over yours, your face turned toward the lens, eyes closed, an expression of shattered peace on your features.
“Proof,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. He dropped the phone and wrapped both arms around you, his hand splayed wide over your belly. “Proof I existed here. With you. Like this.”
Outside, a siren wailed, a distant reminder of a city that didn’t sleep, of a world that would soon demand him back. But here, in the tangled sheets, surrounded by the ghosts of captured moments, you both drifted, anchored by the weight of the secret you were building, frame by explicit frame.