Chapter 17: The Threshold
Joaquin shut the door behind him with his heel and stopped just inside the mat.
Her lip had swollen on one side. The blood had reached her chin and dried there in a thin brown line, and she still had the paper towel in her left hand with her fingers printed into it. The broken cup lay in three clean pieces by her shoe.
He crossed the tile. He stepped around the pieces without looking down, and then his hands were on her face.
Both of them, one at her jaw and one up past her temple, and his palms were still cold and wet from his own sink. His thumbs came up along her cheekbones and stopped at the corners of her mouth. He tipped her head back into the grey light off the front window.
She let him.
Nobody had held her face like that in ten years of this house. Hugh grabbed. Hugh's hands found her throat and her hip and the back of her neck and every one of them was a question he couldn't say out loud. This was something else. This was a man reading a page he already knew.
The dish towel slid off his shoulder and hit the floor and neither of them picked it up.
"Who did that," he said.
"Your wife's friend." Her voice came out low and flat. "He came home with no shirt under his jacket and a wet patch on his trousers. He wanted me to ask him about his day."
"Ask you a question."
"That's what I said."
The thumb on her right side slid down an inch and found the split. He pressed it, slow, the way you'd press a bruise to learn how deep it runs. The blood came up bright over the pad and he looked at it for a second. Then he put the thumb in his mouth.
Marnie watched him do it with her head tipped back in his hand, and something unlatched low in her ribs.
He pulled the thumb out. It left a print of red on his lower lip.
"He will never touch you again," he said.
"No," she said. "And she'll never touch you again either. That's what we already said."
"That's not what I said."
She let it sit.
Then he said the thing he had come thirty feet to say, and his voice came out thinner than he wanted. "She sent me over here."
Marnie's face didn't move. "Sent you over here."
"Two hours ago. On the phone." He let go of her and took half a step back and put both hands on the rim of the counter, because they didn't know what else to do. "She wants me close to you. Borrow a ladder. Fix a gate. Her words. She says you're hiding something and she wants it found out."
The microwave timer fired four beeps into the quiet. The tea had gone long past steep.
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her okay."
"Good." Marnie turned to the sink and took up both cups and poured them out. The tea went down the drain the color of weak whiskey and smelled like lemon. She racked the cups and came back and stood in front of him with her arms crossed, her hips an inch off his belt.
"She's been at this since Saturday," she said. "She's counting. She watched that message sit there and go unanswered. That's not a hunch anymore. That's a prickle she can't scratch."
"You deleted it."
"The last one. Do you think she knows. That was the whole message."
Joaquin laughed with no sound in it. "She doesn't know."
"Not yet. But she's the kind that starts asking things out loud." Marnie uncrossed her arms. "How fast can we move the timeline?"
"Which one."
"Hers."
He looked at the ceiling, at the pale ring where the old fixture used to hang. "Her heart works better while the merger's still in escrow. Everybody at Merrick has been told she's got a condition. If she goes down in her office after a board meeting..."
"That's a building full of witnesses and a hundred people who'd cheer." Marnie shook her head. "I want her in her own house with the door locked and her shoes off."
"Then you don't want me in the room."
"I want you across the fence with the hose running so nobody hears a chair go over."
He nodded slowly. "And him?"
She went to the sink and came back with a fresh paper towel folded small and held it to her mouth. "He dies the same week. Not in six. I'm done counting to ten in my own kitchen."
"Does he drink at night?"
"Every night. Two fingers of bourbon by nine, ice first, and he leaves the glass on the counter because he knows I'll get it." She moved the towel off her lip and looked at the red on it. "Ten years, Joaquin. I know what that man does in the dark better than he does."
"What do you want me to bring you?"
"Nothing yet. When I say."
"Feet first," he said.
"Feet first."
He took the paper towel out of her fingers and folded it once more and set it on the counter, because he didn't want to watch her press it anymore. Then he stepped into her and got a hand in her hair at the back, down at the roots where it was still damp from the day, and pulled her face up.
"You want to know what she said about you at my table Wednesday." He kept his voice down. "She said you'd be easy to break because there's nothing inside you to break."
"Is that what you think."
"No." His thumb came back over her mouth and pressed on the split until she made a sound in her throat. "I think you've been wearing a whole life like a skin. And I'm the only one who's ever seen the thing underneath it."
Her breath came out through her nose.
"He will never touch you again," he said again, closer this time.
"Neither will she."
"Baby girl." He said it low, into the space above her eyebrow, his fist still full of her hair. "I want to make you mine."
Marnie tipped her head back and smiled at him with the blood on her teeth. "Show me something, then, Daddy."
He didn't answer with words. He got both hands under her and lifted, and she came down on the counter edge by the sink with her heels knocking the cabinet door. The flour jar tipped and rolled and stopped against the backsplash. He shoved the rack of plates out of the way with his forearm and it rattled but held.
She pulled her shirt over her head herself and dropped it on the towel. No bra under it. She'd stopped bothering with one in the house years ago. His mouth went straight to her left breast and he bit down on the nipple hard enough to make her arch into the cabinet, and his hand was already between her legs, pressing the cotton of her shorts up into her cunt.
"You're soaked," he said against her skin.
"I've been standing here bleeding for fifteen minutes."
"You liked it."
"I liked that his hand was shaking." She got a fist in the front of his shirt and dragged it up out of his waistband. "Now take this off before I cut it off you."
He yanked the shirt over his head and threw it. The dish towel was still on the floor. She got her hand down the front of his pants and found his cock already hard and wet at the tip, and she worked it once, root to head, and he made a noise like something giving way.
He hooked both thumbs in her shorts and dragged them and the underwear down her legs and off over her heels and dropped them. Then he dropped to his knees on the tile and put his mouth on her.
Marnie's head went back against the upper cabinet. His tongue went flat up the length of her cunt and then in, and his nose pressed into her clit while he worked two fingers up into her and curled them. She got both hands in his hair and held his face there and rode it, grinding down, and the counter edge cut into the backs of her thighs and she didn't care.
"Don't stop," she said. "Don't you dare stop."
He didn't. He kept his fingers moving and his mouth where it was until her legs started to shake and the cabinet door under her heel drummed, and then she came with her teeth in her own lip and the blood running fresh down her chin.
He stood up licking his mouth. There was red smeared across his chin now, hers and hers.
He turned her by the hip and bent her over the counter, and she went with it, both palms flat on the tile, feet apart on the floor. He got a hand on the back of her neck and pushed her face down against the countertop, and she felt the head of his cock slide up the wet of her from behind, once, twice, and then he put it in.
He fucked her the way he did everything, slow at first and then not slow at all. The counter took every stroke and gave it back. The faucet rattled in its housing. She could hear her own voice coming out of her in time with him and it didn't sound like the voice she used at the HOA meetings.
He got a hand in her hair and pulled her head up off the tile and put his mouth at her ear.
"Say it," he said.
"I'm yours."
"Say the whole thing."
"I'm yours and he's dead." She was breathing hard through the split in her lip. "And she's dead, and there's nothing left on this street but you and me."
He came with his teeth against the back of her shoulder, hard enough to leave marks, and held there while it finished. Then he pulled out slow and she felt it run down the inside of her thigh.
Neither of them moved for a minute. The house ticked around them. Out on the counter Hugh's tea cup sat on its coaster, gone cold an hour ago, the ice long melted into a pale ring.
Joaquin stepped back and found the towel and wiped her thigh with it and then his own hands. She stayed bent over the counter a second longer, letting the blood drip off her chin into the sink, and then she straightened up and pulled her shirt back on over her head.
His phone, still in the pocket of the trousers on the floor, lit up and buzzed against the tile.
Marnie looked down at it. Then she bent and picked it out and read the screen and held it up so he could see.
Vera Marsh, 6:08 p.m. Well?
Joaquin looked at the screen one more second. Then he set the phone face down on the counter, next to the cold cup, and turned it over so the light couldn't get out.
"She can wait," he said. "I'm not done with you yet."
"Good."
He got an arm under her knees and the other across her back and lifted her off the counter. She weighed nothing in it. Her shirt was still untucked from pulling it on and the cotton rode up her thighs while he carried her, and she let her head fall against his collarbone like a woman riding an elevator.
He set her down on the couch. The middle cushion, where the dent still sat from the afternoon, and where she'd had her tea in her lap while her husband stood over her talking about his day.
Joaquin stepped back and looked at the rug. A piece of the broken cup had slid there off the tile, the rim of it, thin and curved with the gold line running through. He bent and picked it up and turned it over in his fingers, both sides, like a man reading a receipt.
"Pathetic," he said.
"They both are." Marnie was sitting with her knees together and one hand still up at her mouth. "This morning he told me he was working out. He left the house at six with his gym bag and his gym bag still had Tuesday's towel in it."
Joaquin turned the shard again. The gold line caught the light from the window and made a small bright arc across his palm.
Marnie held her hand out. He put it in her fingers and sat down beside her, close, and she shifted to face him with one knee up against the back of the couch.
She looked at his chest. There was a thin white scar under his left pec, old, and a newer one over his ribs, and nothing at all between them. She laid the edge of the shard against the skin above his left nipple and didn't press.
"Can I mark you?"
Joaquin's breath went in through his nose and stayed there. He looked at the piece of cup, then at her face, at the split in her lip and the dried line on her chin.
"Please," he said.
She turned the shard so the curved rim faced out and drew a short line with it. Not deep. Just through the top layer, straight down his sternum an inch. The blood came up in a bead and ran sideways into the seam of his ribs.
He let his head fall back on the couch cushion and made a sound low in his throat that wasn't quite a word.
She drew the second line, curved at the bottom. Then the third, angled in, and the fourth, short, and the fifth, and when she was done the letter M sat over his ribs an inch high, the blood welling slow in each stroke and running down the side of his chest into the waistband of his trousers.
Joaquin looked down at it. His stomach was going in and out fast under her hand.
Marnie bent her head and put her tongue flat at the top of the letter and licked it clean in one long stroke, root to tip, down through all five cuts.
He cursed under his breath. His whole body went rigid, hips coming up off the cushion, and his cock stood up in his trousers like it had been hit with something.
She sat back and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. Then she got her hand down the front of his waistband and took him out and worked him slow, root to head, thumb over the slit at the top where he was already wet.
"I don't want to hurt you like she did," she said.
"You could never."
"How do you figure."
He was breathing hard. He had one hand fisted in the couch cushion and the other flat on his own thigh, and the blood from the M was running down to his belt line, dark in the grey light.
"Vera hurts me because she thinks I'm weak." His jaw worked. "The pain she causes doesn't feel like this."
"Tell me what it feels like."
She worked him a little faster, wrist twisting at the top of each stroke, and he pushed his hips up into her grip and dropped his head back again.
"It feels like you mean it." His voice was coming apart at the seams. "It feels like you, like you're in it with me, and she's just, she's just doing a thing to a thing."
"Use your words."
She stopped stroking and got her hand under him instead, cupped his balls, and squeezed. Not gentle. He made a sound halfway between a growl and a whimper and his hips jerked up into the empty air where her hand had been.
"It feels like you love me," he said, all in one breath. "Baby, please, I'm gonna, don't, I'm right there, don't stop."
She didn't move her hand. She held him there, squeezed tighter, and leaned in with her mouth at his ear.
"That's because I do."
He grabbed her. One hand in the back of her hair and the other hard on her hip, and he pulled her across the cushion into his lap and kissed her with the blood still on her mouth, and she opened under it and gave it back, teeth and tongue, tasting copper.
He got her shirt off her in one pull over her head and threw it and it landed on the floor by the dish towel. She was already working her shorts down her hips with both thumbs and he helped, yanking them off her ankles and dropping them, and then she was straddling him on the middle cushion with his cock standing up between them and her cunt wet against the shaft.
She reached down and put him in herself, slow, all the way to the root, and both of them stopped breathing for a second while she took it.
"Fuck," he said. "Fuck, baby girl, you're so fucking wet."
"Because of you." She rocked up and came back down on him. "Because a man came home with his hand shaking and I've been wet since the door."
He got both hands on her ass and took over, hauling her up and slamming her back down, and the couch frame knocked against the wall behind it. She rode him with her hands braced on his shoulders and her tits in his face and he caught one nipple in his teeth and bit and she groaned out loud like a woman in pain and moved harder.
Her first one came fast. She clenched down around him and ground her clit against his pelvis and came with a string of filth in his ear about what she was going to do to his wife, and he held her through it and didn't stop moving.
When she came back to herself he tipped her backward onto the cushions and got up over her and put it back in, and from there it was long and hard and neither of them quiet. He fucked her with his thumb on her clit and his mouth at her throat, biting the four old marks, and she took it and told him she loved the weight of him and the smell of him and the way he said her name like it was the only one he knew.
"Tell me who you belong to," she said.
"You, Daddy, I'm yours."
"Wrong answer."
He laughed, breathless, buried to the root. "You. I belong to you. Baby girl, please, I'm gonna come, I can't hold it."
"Then come in me."
He did, with his face in her hair and both hands under her hips and her name once, low, and she came again while he was finishing and rode it out under him with her nails dug into his back.
They lay there a while with nothing on but their own sweat. The house was quieter than it had been all day. The shard of cup sat on the cushion beside Marnie's hip with the gold line up.
Then headlights came across the wall. They swept the living room ceiling, slow, turning, and went out, and a car door shut out front next door, and then the Range Rover's lock chirped twice.