Chapter Mia
Mia
It's late. We've both said so. That should be enough. In any normal situation, with any normal man, I'd already be on my feet, saying goodnight, and performing the small retreat that keeps things safe and contained.
But I don't move.
He's watching me. Not in the way men usually watch me, the quick up-and-down, the assessment that's really a calculation. He watches me the way he does everything. Steady. Direct. Like I'm something he's decided to give his full attention to.
"You're not leaving," he says.
"Neither are you."
My heart thumps in my chest. Something shifts in the air between us.
It's been shifting all evening, so gradually I could pretend I wasn't feeling it.
The way his voice drops half a register when he asks me a question.
The way I've been aware of his hands on the pages of his book for the last hour, the size of them, the way his thumb presses flat against the margin when he's reading.
I've been noticing things I shouldn't be noticing.
"I should go to bed," I say. My voice sounds different. Quieter. But I still don't move.
"You should," he agrees, his voice lower too. He doesn't move either.
The lamp throws warm light across the space between our chairs. It's maybe six feet. A bit less. Close enough that I can see the place where his collar sits open against his throat. See the tattoos there that spread out and disappear beneath his shirt.
I think about what he said this morning.
You're beautiful in ways I've never noticed in other women.
I've been thinking about it all day, turning it over the way you turn over a stone to look at what's underneath.
He said it so plainly. No flourish. No performance.
Just a fact, delivered with the same flat certainty he uses for everything.
He's attracted to me. He told me so.
And he told me he wouldn't act on it. Because I'm vulnerable. Because the timing is wrong. Because he's the kind of man who refuses to take what's available when the person offering it might not be offering freely.
The thing is, I don't feel like I wasn't offering freely.
I felt clear this morning when I said it.
Scared, yes. Exhausted, yes. But clear. And I feel clear now, sitting in his chair with his book on the arm and his lamp warming my face, and I feel something I haven't felt in a long time, which is want.
Plain and specific. Not gratitude, not desperation, not the confused mess of emotions that comes with crisis. Want.
I want him.
It's simple and terrifying, and it sits in the center of my chest like a held breath.
"Iosif. I need you to know something," I say. My heart is doing something fast and insistent. "This morning, when you said no. You were being decent. I understand that. But I need you to know that I wasn't offering because I was desperate."
He doesn't say anything. He's very still in the way that means he's listening with everything.
"I was, am, exhausted. But I’m not confused." I hold his gaze. "I knew what I was saying."
A muscle moves in his jaw. Small. Controlled.
"Mia."
"I'm not done." My voice is steadier than I expected.
"You said you wouldn't take advantage of someone who's vulnerable. And I heard that. I respect it. But I need you to stop deciding for me what I'm ready for. I appreciate you’re protecting me. But I’m still a person who is capable of…
things outside what has happened to her. "
The silence that follows isn’t comfortable, and I wonder if I’ve pushed too far. It's charged. Like the air before a storm when you can feel the electricity on your skin.
He stands. For a moment I think he's leaving and my stomach drops. But he doesn't go to the door. He comes to my chair. The one I've been curled up in all evening, and he stands in front of it and looks down at me. He is very tall and very close and I have to tilt my head back to see his face.
"Say that again," he says, voice low.
"Which part?"
"The part where you tell me to stop deciding for you."
My pulse is everywhere. My throat. My ears. Behind my eyes.
"Stop deciding for me," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment. I can see the war happening behind his expression. Control versus something else. The man who handles everything versus the man underneath who has been watching me all evening.
He reaches down. His hand stopping just short of my face, his fingers hovering near my jaw, and he waits.
He's asking.
"Yes," I say on an exhale.
His thumb brushes my jaw. Light. Testing.
The touch is so careful it almost undoes me more than if he'd just kissed me.
He traces the line of my jaw to my chin and tilts my face up, looking at me like he's reading something, like he's making sure, like this is the last checkpoint before something irreversible.
"If you change your mind," he says, "at any point. You say stop and I stop. That's not negotiable."
"I know."
"I mean it. I don't care if—"
"Iosif." I put my hand over his where it rests against my face. His skin is warm. "I know."
This time, he exhales. It's the first time I've heard him make a sound that isn't completely controlled.
Then he bends forward and kisses me.
It's not gentle. That's the first thing. I expected gentle, from the way he touches everything with such deliberation, from the way he's held himself at a careful distance since I showed up at his club with blood on my dress. I expected measured.
This isn't measured.
His mouth finds mine and his hand slides from my jaw into my hair and he kisses me like he's been thinking about it for hours. His other hand grips the arm of the chair beside my head, and I feel the leather shift under his weight as he leans in.
I make a sound. Small. The kind of sound I didn't plan on making. He hears it and pulls back just enough to look at me, breathing hard, his eyes dark and searching.
"Okay?" he says.
"Don't stop."
Something flickers across his face. He looks like he is suddenly ravenous.
He pulls me up from the chair with one arm around my waist, like I weigh nothing.
My feet find the floor and my hands find the front of his shirt and we're standing in the space between the two chairs and he's kissing me again, deeper this time, and I feel it in my whole body.
My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt, his heartbeat fast and hard under my knuckles, and I think it's the most human thing about him.
This man who controls everything, whose pulse is hammering against my fist.
I pull at his shirt. He makes a sound low in his throat.
"Here?" he says against my mouth.
I look around the library. The leather chair. The warm lamp. The books.
"Yes," I say.
His hands go to the hem of the grey jumper. He stops. Looks at me. Checking. Always checking.
"I'll tell you if I want to stop," I say. "I promise. But right now, I don't want to stop. I want you to take me and make me something more than what I was before."
He pulls the jumper over my head. His eyes track the skin as it's revealed. His expression does something raw and unguarded that I don't think he'd let me see if he could help it. He looks at me like I'm something that requires his full attention. Like the rest of the room has fallen away.
I reach for the buttons of his shirt, quickly pulling them open.
Underneath he is exactly what he looks like with clothes on, which is solid. Broad. Built in a way that isn't decorative. Scars I don't ask about. The kind of body that belongs to a man who uses it for things other than aesthetics. Tattoos tell a story I hope he shares with me someday.
I press my palm flat against his chest. His skin is hot. His heart is going fast under my hand. I look up at him.
"You're shaking," I say.
"No, I'm not."
"You are."
He looks down at me with an expression that is almost, almost, close to a smile. "Don't ever tell anyone."
I laugh. It comes out soft and real and a little breathless, and his eyes change when he hears it. Something opens. Something that was being held very carefully in check.
He lifts me again. Both arms this time, picking me up like it's nothing, then sits in the chair with me in his lap, straddling him. His hands settle on my hips, and I can feel all of him.
All of him.
My breath catches. He watches it happen. Watches my eyes widen and my lips part and the flush that I can feel climbing my chest and neck. He looks at me with an intensity that makes my skin feel like it's being lit from underneath.
"Tell me what you want," he says. His voice is lower than I've ever heard it. Rough at the edges. "Be specific."
The directness of it. No games. No performance. Just tell me what you want like it's the most natural question in the world, like my answer matters, like whatever I say is what will happen.
I have never had a man ask me that. Not really. Not like this. Not with his hands steady on my hips and his eyes locked on mine and absolutely zero agenda other than hearing the answer.
"I want you," I say. "I want this. And I want to stop thinking for a while. I want you to be my first."
“I didn’t realize…” he trails off, as I unclip my bra and let it fall down my arms until I pull it away and drop it onto the floor. He groans.
“Only came close one, but he came early and left embarrassed and never called again. Then I moved here and…” the rest is history, I want to say, but stop myself.
I roll my pelvis, grinding against him, and shiver as arousal heats my core.
He dips his head forward, sucking one nipple into his mouth and flicking his tongue, while he palms my other breast in his big, warm hand.
My hips continue their rocking motion, chasing the buzz that I’ve found with him as he continues to lavish attention on my breasts.
He pulls away, his pupils blown. “You’re going to have to stop grinding on me, Mia, or I’ll come in my pants like some horny teenager.”
I stop what I’m doing and stand, pulling my borrowed jeans and new plain panties down over my hips, shucking them off my ankles. He lifts his hips, pushing his trousers and boxers down in one swooping motion.
My eyes go to his erection. Thick and long and resting against his stomach.
“It’s okay if you want to stop,” he says, but I shake my head no.
He pulls me gently, guiding me back to his lap, his mouth finding the side of my neck.
I stop thinking entirely.
His mouth traces down from my neck to my collarbone.
One hand comes up to cup my breast and his thumb moves across my nipple in a way that makes me moan.
It would embarrass me if I had any capacity left for embarrassment.
He does it again, watching my face, learning what makes me react and cataloguing it with the same focused efficiency he brings to everything.
He's studying me.
I lower myself until I’m resting over his length, unable to stop myself from trying to find friction again, I slide back and forth over him, my wet heat coating him until I shiver with need. He inhales sharply through his nose and his fingers tighten, hard. Not enough to hurt, but enough to feel.
"Do that again," he says.
I do.
His gaze drops to where I’m sliding over him without yet taking him inside me and his jaw tightens. He looks like a man exercising truly heroic restraint, and something about that, about the fact that I'm doing this to him, is the most powerful thing I've ever felt.
"Iosif." I lean forward, my tight nipples stroking over his chest. My lips brush his ear. "Stop holding back."
His hands come back to my breasts and he groans, a deep rumble that I feel everywhere.
"You don't know what you're asking," he says.
"Yes, I do."
He watches me for one more second. Then something in his expression changes. Like a door opening. Like a decision being made.
I reach between us and line him up with my entrance, then press down and wait for the pain.
There’s a sharp sting, and a burning sensation as I stretch, but the desire in me to do this overrides both.
“Take it steady,” he says, for me or him, I don’t know.
“Stop deciding for me,” I say, mimicking my earlier statement. This time his mouth drops open as his hands grip my hips.
I begin to ride him, taking the first few strokes carefully until I figure out the range of motion I need. Once I’ve found a rhythm I’m comfortable with, I pick up speed.
“Guide me,” I pant, needing the extra help in the confined space of the chair.
He does as I ask, lifting my hips and pushing them back down in time with my forward and backward motion.
“Fuck Mia, you look like a fucking goddess.”
I must look wild, riding this man like my life depends on it. Chasing the orgasm that’s building torturously slowly.
“Look at how well you take me,” he says, but I can’t see at this angle.
I press my hands against his chest and move quicker, the orgasm within reach now.
He digs his thumbs into the front of my hips, changing the angle of my pelvis so I grind against him on the down, backward stroke, and something in me snaps loose.
My head drops back as wave after wave of pleasure chases through me. The stinging pain has disappeared entirely, replaced by glittering shivers of pure ecstasy. I lift my head up and open my eyes, watching as Iosif loses himself inside me, watching the space where we’re joined.
His hands have stilled now, no longer lifting me up and guiding my rhythm, but pushing me down hard onto his throbbing cock.
The sounds he makes lights up something inside of me, and I want more. More of my own pleasure, more of his.
His teeth are gritted as he pushes up against me, trying to get deeper still, before his eyes go dazed and his muscles quiver one last time with a sound of startled surprise.
We’re both breathing heavily, staring at each other with something close to shock, blinking our way back to reality as my walls continue to spasm around him.
Neither of us have any words.