Seventeen #3
I don’t know which part of me decides to react first. The angry bit, the terrified bit, or the bit that lies awake at night replaying his hands on me.
All I know is that suddenly I’m closing the last bit of space between us, grabbing a fistful of his shirt, and shoving him back against the gun rack hard enough that something metal rattles.
His eyes flare. He doesn’t look scared; he looks delighted. “This is what you want, yeah?” I growl. “A reaction? Fine.”
I kiss him — well, that’s what I tell myself I’m doing.
It feels more like slamming my mouth into his, all teeth and pent-up weeks of frustration.
For a moment, I think he’s not going to respond, that he’s going to let me flail against him and then laugh.
Then his hand is in my hair again, gripping hard and tilting my head exactly how he wants it.
His other hand finds my hip, his long fingers digging in and dragging me flush against him.
He kisses back like he’s been waiting for this precise moment, like every taunt, every shove, every “detka.” was a breadcrumb leading right here, waiting for me to crack.
The armoury, the guns, the potential career-ending idiocy of what I’m doing, all of it drops out of my awareness.
There’s only heat and pressure and the slick slide of his mouth over mine.
He licks into me slow, and I can’t help the noise that escapes my throat.
My hands go from his shirt to his shoulders, his neck, the rough line of his jaw. I want to touch all of him at once.
He pushes his thigh between mine like he did the other night.
Only now I’m already half-hard, and my body doesn’t even pretend it’s not into this.
I rock into him without thinking, chasing the friction.
My brain is screaming at me from somewhere very far away about regulations, every reason this is a terrible idea, but none of it gets through.
I suck on his bottom lip just to see what he does; he hisses against my mouth, and his fingers tighten in my hair. “Detka,” he breathes, breaking just far enough away to say it. “You pick fights very dramatically.”
“You started it,” I pant.
“Yes,” he says. “And now you’re going to finish it, da?
” I don’t know what that means and I don’t ask.
I drag him back to me instead. The kiss deepens, slows in places, then flares, like we’re testing limits.
He bites my lip — not quite hard enough to break skin — then licks over it.
His hand slides under the back of my shirt, his hot palm rests against my skin, and my whole spine arches into it.
If someone walked in right now, we’d be done. That thought should terrify me. The fear is there, threaded through the heat, but I’m not stopping. I can’t. It’s like trying to halt momentum mid-fall.
He shifts, strategically turning us subtly so my back brushes the edge of the steel shelves instead of the door. We break apart eventually, breathing like we’ve done a sprint in full kit. “Better?” he asks hoarsely.
“Fuck you,” I say, because my brain can’t come up with a better word for ‘yes but I hate you for it.’
“Eventually. If you ask me very nicely,” he laughs. Somewhere in the back of the armoury, the quartermaster’s chair creaks as he sits back down. The sound snaps a thin thread of reality back into place, and I step back like I’ve been burned, scrubbing a hand over my face.
“This is insane,” I mutter. “We can’t... If someone sees...”
“They won’t,” he says calmly, adjusting his shirt like we’ve just bumped shoulders in a corridor. “Unless you decide to shout about it.”
“You’re very confident,” I say, still trying to get my breathing under control.
He shrugs one shoulder. “I’m good at not getting caught,” he says. “You’re the one who needs practice.” I glare at him, but he just looks amused. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” I demand.
“Like you’re one wrong order away from throwing me over this table,” he says. “It’s very distracting.”
My face goes hot. “I’m not—”
“Liar,” he says gently.
I open my mouth, ready with some automatic denial, and nothing comes out. Because he’s right and we both know it. “I need to... finish the inventory,” I say eventually, grasping at the thin thread of professionalism left.
He grins. “Of course you do,” he says. “Productivity, remember?” He steps sideways, giving me space, heading for the door. “We’ll talk again later, detka.”
“That wasn’t talking,” I mutter.
He looks back over his shoulder. “No,” he agrees. “That was you finally doing something useful with your mouth.” I choke on nothing, and he laughs under his breath, walking out of the room and slipping back into Russian like he’s shrugging on another uniform.
I stand there, heart still pounding, lips swollen, fingers tingling, surrounded by racks of weapons and the ghost of his hands on my skin.
Avoidance has officially failed. Whatever this is, I’ve stepped into it with both feet, and the scariest part isn’t the risk or the rules or the fact that I might lose everything if it goes wrong.
The scariest part is the quiet, undeniable thought sitting in the centre of my chest.
It was fucking worth it.