[Heroes/The Godfather] Redemption (Peter/Claire, Nathan/Peter, NC-17) - {Part Two}
Title: Redemption
Fandom: Heroes/The Godfather
Art: Stunningly wonderful accompanying art by eryslash (spoilery for the fic; the works are linked individually in the text but can be found all together HERE.)
Pairing: Peter/Claire, Nathan/Peter (plus minor mentions of Peter/OCs)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 10,880 (W)
Warning: Incest, underage, general violence.
Spoilers: None for Heroes (apart from some quotes you have to know the series to catch); many for The Godfather I.
Thanks to: snopes_faith, the best beta in the Net who doesn't get a title this time but a lot of random snuggly love, just because she doesn't receive as much as she deserves.
Notes: Written for the 2008 edition of heroes_bigboom. I've been happy and proud to participate. Thanks to the mods for organizing it!
More notes: This fic is a more-or-less official sequel to my fic Godblessed. They can be read independently, although I think "Redemption" makes much more sense read as a sequel than a stand alone.
Summary: May 1947. After two years, Peter Petrelli's back home from Sicily, but something's changed. Now there's Claire, Nathan's long-lost daughter that Angela decided to reunite to the family. Claire's not happy to be there; Peter's happy she is. Nathan has to deal with both.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
After your plan’s failure, Nathan (or your mother, you’re not sure) takes measures to be sure the “unpleasant occurrance” won’t be repeated. First, the car trips are abolished. The thing is not stated explicitly - nobody says “abolished” - but the chauffeur has been ordered to go and pick up Claire from school and drive her to the city whenever she wants to take some fresh air, and your chauffeur has got a very precise idea about the hierarchies in your house. He was your father’s driver.
Noah Bennet has been informed about it all, and you’re sure it was your mother who made the call. When Claire put the receiver down, she had the palest face and most miserable expression you ever saw on her. When you asked if it was alright, she said “Yes” in the same tone Nathan did when he called you one year ago to tell you to get back home immediately. (Your father had just died in the middle of a street with five bullets in his chest.)
In your family’s house you could still meet and talk as always, but too many times you caught a shadow and a soft noise of heels behind your back. Your relationship with Nathan is icy and everything says it’ll remain so, Claire looks more depressed than usual and that’s undoubtedly your fault.
You end up finding the loneliness of your student flat, with the dusty remains of your old life, more comfortable. It has been years since you felt so useless, so adrift. You admit to yourself that yes, you’ve screwed it all up once again. But in spite of what they say, admitting it doesn’t make you feel better. Last time you felt like this you had to join up and have yourself sent to the other side of the world so that the pieces of your life could get into the right frame.
You put the mocha on the fire and let yourself down on the creaking mattress, with your shirt out of your pants and your unshaved stubble, ruffled, disheveled, your shoes thrown to the opposite sides of the room. You’re the epitome of the beggar, and it’s hilarious to recall that time you walked around Dresden’s bombed ruins and you thought this apartment looked shamefully luxurious. For a period, any hole with a roof above looked shamefully luxurious.
When you hear the key bustle in the keyhole and the door get open with a painful squeak, you thrust your hand under your pillow, reaching for the gun, following a forced habit that will never be natural to you.
It’s Nathan, always gloriously out of place in the chaos of your life. From this side of the bedroom, you see him shove his keys inside his front pocket. He’s come alone.
“You can go back the way you came,” you declare, letting yourself down again. It’s four in the afternoon, it’s not time for brotherly clarifications. For what concerns you, that time is still far to come.
Nathan steps slowly about the flat, one hand still in his pocket around the keys, as if he was wondering about taking them out and do as he was told. He moves to the kitchen corner and raises carefully the mocha’s lid, checking the coffee.
“We need to talk,” he starts, like a thousand other times. You open your mouth to object, but he forestalls you: “Let’s just spare ourselves the part when you say there’s nothing to talk about and we carry one like two morons for fifteen minutes, shall we?”.
You remain still and silent, until Nathan appears calm and slow on the doorway of the bedroom.
“If I say I don’t want to talk, will you send the guys to convince me?”
“I myself know a couple of ways,” he answers quietly.
You rub the palm of your hand against your face and sigh. “Talk.”
“Putting Claire on a plane at six in the morning is not the right way to convince me you’re now able to take decisions.”
You sit up, feeling your ears burn. “What the fuck do you mean? I didn’t do that for me. I did it for Claire.”
“Ah,” Nathan comments, sitting on the edge of the bed, far from you. “Not to show me you can do things your way and I can’t stop you?”
“This had nothing to do with it,” you reply, fiercely.
“Right.” Nathan looks away, like there was something interesting on the wall. “Bennet didn’t like your plan very much.”
“He would’ve liked it if I’d brought him his daughter back,” you grind your teeth.
“I don’t know how much he would’ve liked me to suspect it was his idea.”
“What...”
“Then I could’ve sent somebody to take my daughter back, and never let him see her again as long as he lives.”
His face is horrible, so inexpressive.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I?”
“I know you. You wouldn’t. For God’s sake, Nathan!”
“You don’t know half the things I’ve done.” He looks at you firmly, with that something dangerous passing again in his eyes. You can see he’s tired. Tired of you. “I love you, but you must stop doing every fucking thing that comes to your mind.”
“You don’t understand,” is all you’re able to say. “You don’t understand,” you repeat, more firmly. “You haven’t seen her eyes, Nathan, because if you had you’d know she can’t stand this shit anymore.”
“You’ve known her for three months. Stop playing out this little scene.”
“Three minutes is enough to understand you’re ruining her life.”
Nathan scratches his nape thoughtfully, like he always does when something makes him uneasy. It usually happens when you said something so mindbogglingly stupid that he looks ashamed just for having heard it.
Eventually he looks at you and says with a clear, slightly reluctant tone: “Claire’s not you, Peter. And I’m not Dad. This isn’t the rerun of your life. The sooner you get that, the better for everybody”.
This has you speechless. Nathan watches you peacefully, waiting for the information to be swallowed and digested properly. Since he knows you better than you do, he knows some time will be required - a lot of time - before you really understand, and some more before you accept it. But it doesn’t matter; Nathan is used to waiting for you.
“I want you to stay in the family,” he’s saying, his calm voice finding his way through your momentary daze. “And you should find a decent job. Do something with your life. This flat’s a sewer.”
“I like it this way,” you reply, but it’s not clear what you’re referring to.
The mocha gurgles savagely in the other room.
Nathan reaches out to give a little slap - or maybe a caress - to your cheek. “The coffee’s come up,” he reminds you, moving his hand to your neck’s side. With that tone, it could be the most romantic thing he’s ever told you.
You grab his jacket’s collar, twisting the fabric in your fists, and tug him jumping on your knees on the mattress. You catch the shadow of a smile at the corner of his mouth before you cover it with yours, fiercely. It shouldn’t be so easy to make your anger evaporate - for anybody, not even him. You bite his lips, receiving a moan and a light taste of blood under your tongue. Nathan squeezes your shoulder as if he wanted to keep you at distance and stop you from escaping at the same time.
“Fuck you,” you growl on his mouth, taking his jacket from his shoulders. He lets you, and meanwhile he kisses your neck, while you unbutton his shirt and pull down his suspenders.
“Down,” he orders, pushing you on your back. Your fists itch to punch that smug smile right off his face, but the faded mark of a blood drip smeared on his chin is enough to give it a less perfect look, a more fragile one. You close your arms behind his neck, pressing your mouth on his chin, passing the tip of your tongue on the dimple and moving it up to lick the blood away and push it hard between his lips. With an approving growl, Nathan pins you to the bed.
An uncertain doorbell ring freezes you. Nathan looks up, then he moves his eyes back to you, warily. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I’m not going.”
“You’re waiting for somebody?”
“I’m not fucking anybody, if that’s what you want to know.”
“If I want to know, I don’t need to ask.”
You watch him menacingly, but Nathan opens his lips into a sort of smile and moves towards the end of the bed, letting you get up. You button your shirt and tug it into your trousers, recovering your shoes, while Nathan rubs his thumb against your throat to remove a faint blood stain.
Annoyed by the interruption, you close the bedroom’s door behind your back and turn the fire off below the mocha. (The coffee overflowed and started burning. Thanks, Nathan.) You open the front door while another, weaker ring starts...
She looks at you from the doorstep, slightly uneasy. You feel her eyes inspecting your disorder, your unkempt hair and your swollen, red lips, and her unease grows more and more until it coagulates in two red pools beneath her cheeks.
“Hi, Peter. I know it’s a bit sudden and I should’ve called you first, but... I hope I’m not bothering. Perhaps you were resting?”
You smile, trying to hide a little discomfort. What if she had arrived ten minutes after? “Come in,” you just tell her, moving aside. When Claire steps in your apartment, you distinguish the chauffeur’s silhouette inside the car parked in front of your door.
“I just stopped by to say hi,” she says, following your glance. She squeezes her hands nervously. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. You were worrying?”
You wave her to sit on the shabby couch, the one with the rips badly hidden by the cushions. In a couple of spots, if you’re not careful, you risk sinking down like in jelly.
“No... Okay, just a little,” she admits. “It’s just that, you’ve not come home for three days and I thought that maybe, that if something were wrong he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Course he would,” you reply.
Claire looks at you holding back an unhappy sigh. “He didn’t see me go out,” she informs you. “He took the car before I did.”
“Was my mother at home?”
“Yes.”
Who knows why Claire thinks Nathan is the problem.
Then she stretches out and hugs you. Under her coat, she’s wearing a chaste blouse that makes her look older and she’s got a new womanly smell, a light mixture of perfume, soap and clean skin. Her hair covers your mouth like an octopus. “I missed you,” she whispers at your ear. “It’s like hell without you.”
“I know,” you answer, wishing you could embrace her, but you’re suddenly aware that Nathan’s just a few metres away, separated from you by just a thin wooden door. When you hear the hinges creak, you move Claire away and readily take your hands off her hips.
Nathan is almost perfectly in order, but “almost” on Nathan has got a disconcerting effect. It’s just tiny details, and if it weren’t you, you wouldn’t even notice: a small tuft slipped from the grease’s catch and fallen on his forehead; one side of his collar slightly higher than the other; that tiny cut on his lip, nearly invisible if it weren’t still so new. You, being you, find them more explicit signs than if he’d stepped out of your bedroom completely naked.
Claire looks away. Nathan contemplates the scene for a second, then he declares in a calm voice (from which you would never imagine that until a few minutes ago he was fucking your mouth with that very tongue): “I’m going home. See you at dinner”. He watches you.
You nod. For the first time since Claire has entered in your family, you see Nathan hesitate in front of her, uncertain whether to say goodbye and how (he usually just nods at distance). Eventually he leans a hand on her arm and presses quickly his lips on her temple. Claire stiffens at once, but Nathan’s already gone.
“What was that?” Claire mutters, blinking.
“Nathan loves you,” you answer automatically. You’re surprised too.
She looks up at you, with an understanding glint in her eyes. “Did you talk?”
“Something like that.”
Her face darkens. You can almost hear the little wheels in her head turn and tick; you see her eyes reviewing your hair and your neck, where you can still feel a light tickling. And there’s Nathan’s cut lip... “You fought, didn’t you?”
“It’s alright, Claire,” you tell her quickly.
“He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
You smile, but as crooked as your mouth is, it looks rather like a grimace. “Maybe I hurt him,” you say, and she drops the topic.
In the few minutes you spend together, Claire tells you about Debbie, who’s been found out drunk in the back courtyard, near the enclosure that divides the female section from the male one. Her face was all red and she was rambling about having seen Claire throw herself from the building’s roof and land without so much as a scratch. Really, Claire had just jumped over the little gate of the emergency stairs and run down because she was late for the afternoon lessons, but from Debbie’s point of view the stairs were out of sight. You find it funny, because you both hate Debbie, that stupid cow.
When you finally accompany her to the door, because, her words, “he saw her and she’d better go now”, she hugs you again and asks you if you’re going to come for dinner. You nod, stroking her back with the palm of your hand. Under your fingers and through the light fabric of her shirt, you could count her vertebrae one by one.
“I’ll try to be at home more often,” you promise, moving her hair from her cheek. You think about Nathan, his “I want you to stay in the family” speech, before pressing your lips to Claire’s temple and leaving them there for some second. “I’m sorry about that mess. The flight and everything.”
“It’s alright,” she whispers. “Peter?”
You draw back to look at her in the eyes.
“Do you love me?”
“Very much,” you answer.
Then you have her lips on yours, still fresh with Nathan’s memory, and her hand clings with slippy fingers to your shoulder. It’s just a small peck, really, a superficial contact that the very moment you try to deepen is already disappeared. But you thread your fingers through her hair, fascinated, and you follow her mouth covering it with yours again. Your free hand opens against the door, and with a soft flinch Claire’s back is pushed against it. You touch her tongue with yours, drinking in her surprise and the so light tremble of her shoulders that fades when she closes her arms around your neck.
“You could stay awhile,” you mutter on her lips, caressing her shoulders. “We could go back home later. Together.”
She watches you with her burning face, but with what looks like a considerable effort of will, she answers she wouldn’t know how to explain it to... to him. For a moment you think you’ve scared her and she’s going to escape from you, but then she moves closer for another kiss that tastes like an apology.
“See you at dinner, then?”
“At dinner.” She smiles like the two of you were accomplices of some secret; then she leaves you alone.
Around the couch there is still, persisting, Claire’s perfume. If you went back to the bedroom, you know you would perceive distinctly, between the sheets, the fragrance of Nathan’s cologne. The smell of burnt coffee covers both.
Part 3
Fandom: Heroes/The Godfather
Art: Stunningly wonderful accompanying art by eryslash (spoilery for the fic; the works are linked individually in the text but can be found all together HERE.)
Pairing: Peter/Claire, Nathan/Peter (plus minor mentions of Peter/OCs)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 10,880 (W)
Warning: Incest, underage, general violence.
Spoilers: None for Heroes (apart from some quotes you have to know the series to catch); many for The Godfather I.
Thanks to: snopes_faith, the best beta in the Net who doesn't get a title this time but a lot of random snuggly love, just because she doesn't receive as much as she deserves.
Notes: Written for the 2008 edition of heroes_bigboom. I've been happy and proud to participate. Thanks to the mods for organizing it!
More notes: This fic is a more-or-less official sequel to my fic Godblessed. They can be read independently, although I think "Redemption" makes much more sense read as a sequel than a stand alone.
Summary: May 1947. After two years, Peter Petrelli's back home from Sicily, but something's changed. Now there's Claire, Nathan's long-lost daughter that Angela decided to reunite to the family. Claire's not happy to be there; Peter's happy she is. Nathan has to deal with both.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
After your plan’s failure, Nathan (or your mother, you’re not sure) takes measures to be sure the “unpleasant occurrance” won’t be repeated. First, the car trips are abolished. The thing is not stated explicitly - nobody says “abolished” - but the chauffeur has been ordered to go and pick up Claire from school and drive her to the city whenever she wants to take some fresh air, and your chauffeur has got a very precise idea about the hierarchies in your house. He was your father’s driver.
Noah Bennet has been informed about it all, and you’re sure it was your mother who made the call. When Claire put the receiver down, she had the palest face and most miserable expression you ever saw on her. When you asked if it was alright, she said “Yes” in the same tone Nathan did when he called you one year ago to tell you to get back home immediately. (Your father had just died in the middle of a street with five bullets in his chest.)
In your family’s house you could still meet and talk as always, but too many times you caught a shadow and a soft noise of heels behind your back. Your relationship with Nathan is icy and everything says it’ll remain so, Claire looks more depressed than usual and that’s undoubtedly your fault.
You end up finding the loneliness of your student flat, with the dusty remains of your old life, more comfortable. It has been years since you felt so useless, so adrift. You admit to yourself that yes, you’ve screwed it all up once again. But in spite of what they say, admitting it doesn’t make you feel better. Last time you felt like this you had to join up and have yourself sent to the other side of the world so that the pieces of your life could get into the right frame.
You put the mocha on the fire and let yourself down on the creaking mattress, with your shirt out of your pants and your unshaved stubble, ruffled, disheveled, your shoes thrown to the opposite sides of the room. You’re the epitome of the beggar, and it’s hilarious to recall that time you walked around Dresden’s bombed ruins and you thought this apartment looked shamefully luxurious. For a period, any hole with a roof above looked shamefully luxurious.
When you hear the key bustle in the keyhole and the door get open with a painful squeak, you thrust your hand under your pillow, reaching for the gun, following a forced habit that will never be natural to you.
It’s Nathan, always gloriously out of place in the chaos of your life. From this side of the bedroom, you see him shove his keys inside his front pocket. He’s come alone.
“You can go back the way you came,” you declare, letting yourself down again. It’s four in the afternoon, it’s not time for brotherly clarifications. For what concerns you, that time is still far to come.
Nathan steps slowly about the flat, one hand still in his pocket around the keys, as if he was wondering about taking them out and do as he was told. He moves to the kitchen corner and raises carefully the mocha’s lid, checking the coffee.
“We need to talk,” he starts, like a thousand other times. You open your mouth to object, but he forestalls you: “Let’s just spare ourselves the part when you say there’s nothing to talk about and we carry one like two morons for fifteen minutes, shall we?”.
You remain still and silent, until Nathan appears calm and slow on the doorway of the bedroom.
“If I say I don’t want to talk, will you send the guys to convince me?”
“I myself know a couple of ways,” he answers quietly.
You rub the palm of your hand against your face and sigh. “Talk.”
“Putting Claire on a plane at six in the morning is not the right way to convince me you’re now able to take decisions.”
You sit up, feeling your ears burn. “What the fuck do you mean? I didn’t do that for me. I did it for Claire.”
“Ah,” Nathan comments, sitting on the edge of the bed, far from you. “Not to show me you can do things your way and I can’t stop you?”
“This had nothing to do with it,” you reply, fiercely.
“Right.” Nathan looks away, like there was something interesting on the wall. “Bennet didn’t like your plan very much.”
“He would’ve liked it if I’d brought him his daughter back,” you grind your teeth.
“I don’t know how much he would’ve liked me to suspect it was his idea.”
“What...”
“Then I could’ve sent somebody to take my daughter back, and never let him see her again as long as he lives.”
His face is horrible, so inexpressive.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I?”
“I know you. You wouldn’t. For God’s sake, Nathan!”
“You don’t know half the things I’ve done.” He looks at you firmly, with that something dangerous passing again in his eyes. You can see he’s tired. Tired of you. “I love you, but you must stop doing every fucking thing that comes to your mind.”
“You don’t understand,” is all you’re able to say. “You don’t understand,” you repeat, more firmly. “You haven’t seen her eyes, Nathan, because if you had you’d know she can’t stand this shit anymore.”
“You’ve known her for three months. Stop playing out this little scene.”
“Three minutes is enough to understand you’re ruining her life.”
Nathan scratches his nape thoughtfully, like he always does when something makes him uneasy. It usually happens when you said something so mindbogglingly stupid that he looks ashamed just for having heard it.
Eventually he looks at you and says with a clear, slightly reluctant tone: “Claire’s not you, Peter. And I’m not Dad. This isn’t the rerun of your life. The sooner you get that, the better for everybody”.
This has you speechless. Nathan watches you peacefully, waiting for the information to be swallowed and digested properly. Since he knows you better than you do, he knows some time will be required - a lot of time - before you really understand, and some more before you accept it. But it doesn’t matter; Nathan is used to waiting for you.
“I want you to stay in the family,” he’s saying, his calm voice finding his way through your momentary daze. “And you should find a decent job. Do something with your life. This flat’s a sewer.”
“I like it this way,” you reply, but it’s not clear what you’re referring to.
The mocha gurgles savagely in the other room.
Nathan reaches out to give a little slap - or maybe a caress - to your cheek. “The coffee’s come up,” he reminds you, moving his hand to your neck’s side. With that tone, it could be the most romantic thing he’s ever told you.
You grab his jacket’s collar, twisting the fabric in your fists, and tug him jumping on your knees on the mattress. You catch the shadow of a smile at the corner of his mouth before you cover it with yours, fiercely. It shouldn’t be so easy to make your anger evaporate - for anybody, not even him. You bite his lips, receiving a moan and a light taste of blood under your tongue. Nathan squeezes your shoulder as if he wanted to keep you at distance and stop you from escaping at the same time.
“Fuck you,” you growl on his mouth, taking his jacket from his shoulders. He lets you, and meanwhile he kisses your neck, while you unbutton his shirt and pull down his suspenders.
“Down,” he orders, pushing you on your back. Your fists itch to punch that smug smile right off his face, but the faded mark of a blood drip smeared on his chin is enough to give it a less perfect look, a more fragile one. You close your arms behind his neck, pressing your mouth on his chin, passing the tip of your tongue on the dimple and moving it up to lick the blood away and push it hard between his lips. With an approving growl, Nathan pins you to the bed.
An uncertain doorbell ring freezes you. Nathan looks up, then he moves his eyes back to you, warily. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I’m not going.”
“You’re waiting for somebody?”
“I’m not fucking anybody, if that’s what you want to know.”
“If I want to know, I don’t need to ask.”
You watch him menacingly, but Nathan opens his lips into a sort of smile and moves towards the end of the bed, letting you get up. You button your shirt and tug it into your trousers, recovering your shoes, while Nathan rubs his thumb against your throat to remove a faint blood stain.
Annoyed by the interruption, you close the bedroom’s door behind your back and turn the fire off below the mocha. (The coffee overflowed and started burning. Thanks, Nathan.) You open the front door while another, weaker ring starts...
She looks at you from the doorstep, slightly uneasy. You feel her eyes inspecting your disorder, your unkempt hair and your swollen, red lips, and her unease grows more and more until it coagulates in two red pools beneath her cheeks.
“Hi, Peter. I know it’s a bit sudden and I should’ve called you first, but... I hope I’m not bothering. Perhaps you were resting?”
You smile, trying to hide a little discomfort. What if she had arrived ten minutes after? “Come in,” you just tell her, moving aside. When Claire steps in your apartment, you distinguish the chauffeur’s silhouette inside the car parked in front of your door.
“I just stopped by to say hi,” she says, following your glance. She squeezes her hands nervously. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. You were worrying?”
You wave her to sit on the shabby couch, the one with the rips badly hidden by the cushions. In a couple of spots, if you’re not careful, you risk sinking down like in jelly.
“No... Okay, just a little,” she admits. “It’s just that, you’ve not come home for three days and I thought that maybe, that if something were wrong he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Course he would,” you reply.
Claire looks at you holding back an unhappy sigh. “He didn’t see me go out,” she informs you. “He took the car before I did.”
“Was my mother at home?”
“Yes.”
Who knows why Claire thinks Nathan is the problem.
Then she stretches out and hugs you. Under her coat, she’s wearing a chaste blouse that makes her look older and she’s got a new womanly smell, a light mixture of perfume, soap and clean skin. Her hair covers your mouth like an octopus. “I missed you,” she whispers at your ear. “It’s like hell without you.”
“I know,” you answer, wishing you could embrace her, but you’re suddenly aware that Nathan’s just a few metres away, separated from you by just a thin wooden door. When you hear the hinges creak, you move Claire away and readily take your hands off her hips.
Nathan is almost perfectly in order, but “almost” on Nathan has got a disconcerting effect. It’s just tiny details, and if it weren’t you, you wouldn’t even notice: a small tuft slipped from the grease’s catch and fallen on his forehead; one side of his collar slightly higher than the other; that tiny cut on his lip, nearly invisible if it weren’t still so new. You, being you, find them more explicit signs than if he’d stepped out of your bedroom completely naked.
Claire looks away. Nathan contemplates the scene for a second, then he declares in a calm voice (from which you would never imagine that until a few minutes ago he was fucking your mouth with that very tongue): “I’m going home. See you at dinner”. He watches you.
You nod. For the first time since Claire has entered in your family, you see Nathan hesitate in front of her, uncertain whether to say goodbye and how (he usually just nods at distance). Eventually he leans a hand on her arm and presses quickly his lips on her temple. Claire stiffens at once, but Nathan’s already gone.
“What was that?” Claire mutters, blinking.
“Nathan loves you,” you answer automatically. You’re surprised too.
She looks up at you, with an understanding glint in her eyes. “Did you talk?”
“Something like that.”
Her face darkens. You can almost hear the little wheels in her head turn and tick; you see her eyes reviewing your hair and your neck, where you can still feel a light tickling. And there’s Nathan’s cut lip... “You fought, didn’t you?”
“It’s alright, Claire,” you tell her quickly.
“He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
You smile, but as crooked as your mouth is, it looks rather like a grimace. “Maybe I hurt him,” you say, and she drops the topic.
In the few minutes you spend together, Claire tells you about Debbie, who’s been found out drunk in the back courtyard, near the enclosure that divides the female section from the male one. Her face was all red and she was rambling about having seen Claire throw herself from the building’s roof and land without so much as a scratch. Really, Claire had just jumped over the little gate of the emergency stairs and run down because she was late for the afternoon lessons, but from Debbie’s point of view the stairs were out of sight. You find it funny, because you both hate Debbie, that stupid cow.
When you finally accompany her to the door, because, her words, “he saw her and she’d better go now”, she hugs you again and asks you if you’re going to come for dinner. You nod, stroking her back with the palm of your hand. Under your fingers and through the light fabric of her shirt, you could count her vertebrae one by one.
“I’ll try to be at home more often,” you promise, moving her hair from her cheek. You think about Nathan, his “I want you to stay in the family” speech, before pressing your lips to Claire’s temple and leaving them there for some second. “I’m sorry about that mess. The flight and everything.”
“It’s alright,” she whispers. “Peter?”
You draw back to look at her in the eyes.
“Do you love me?”
“Very much,” you answer.
Then you have her lips on yours, still fresh with Nathan’s memory, and her hand clings with slippy fingers to your shoulder. It’s just a small peck, really, a superficial contact that the very moment you try to deepen is already disappeared. But you thread your fingers through her hair, fascinated, and you follow her mouth covering it with yours again. Your free hand opens against the door, and with a soft flinch Claire’s back is pushed against it. You touch her tongue with yours, drinking in her surprise and the so light tremble of her shoulders that fades when she closes her arms around your neck.
“You could stay awhile,” you mutter on her lips, caressing her shoulders. “We could go back home later. Together.”
She watches you with her burning face, but with what looks like a considerable effort of will, she answers she wouldn’t know how to explain it to... to him. For a moment you think you’ve scared her and she’s going to escape from you, but then she moves closer for another kiss that tastes like an apology.
“See you at dinner, then?”
“At dinner.” She smiles like the two of you were accomplices of some secret; then she leaves you alone.
Around the couch there is still, persisting, Claire’s perfume. If you went back to the bedroom, you know you would perceive distinctly, between the sheets, the fragrance of Nathan’s cologne. The smell of burnt coffee covers both.
Part 3