Twenty-Four
Arseny
My hands are shaking with a full, bone-deep, post-explosion tremor.
I’m braced on the edge of the admin desk, knuckles white, breath sawing in and out like I’ve just run a marathon.
I’ve just been... thoroughly and enthusiastically worshipped by a British Lance Corporal on his knees. “My fucking turn.”
My voice is still uneven, but Caiden doesn’t even have time to process it before I grab a fistful of his hair and pull him up from the floor. He rises fast, eyes wide, lips swollen, as I stand in the same motion, my body crowding into him, my chest pushing into his.
I don’t kiss him, not yet.
I turn us and shove him backwards, his legs hitting the desk with a muted thud.
He breathes out a little broken sound. “Turn around,” I demand.
He turns and braces his hands on the desk, muscles tight under his shirt, his shoulders heaving.
He’s trying to catch his breath, but he won’t, not with me behind him, and not with what I’m about to do to him.
“Good boy,” I murmur, dragging my palms down his back. He spreads his feet without being told, and I can feel his thighs tremble slightly. I hook my fingers under his waistband and yank his uniform and underwear down in one sharp motion, exposing him to me.
He gasps out of pure instinct, and I take a step back just to look at him. He’s spread open, flushed, hard, and dripping for me. His cock is already in his hand, his fist tightening then relaxing, like he doesn’t know whether he’s allowed to touch or not.
I rest my palm on the small of his back. “Stroke yourself for me, detka.” I say quietly. He groans, and his hand moves, slow at first, then faster as the need overwhelms him. I sink to my knees behind him, and he tenses. If he thinks I’m going to fuck him with my fingers first... he’s wrong.
I grip his hips, pulling him back toward my mouth, and drag my tongue up the length of his crack in one long, deliberate lick.
Caiden chokes on a sound. “Ari...” I don’t answer. I bury my mouth between his cheeks and devour him. His thighs lock, his knees nearly buckle, and his hand grips the edge of the desk to keep himself from collapsing.
I lick him open with slow, precise pressure, my tongue circling his rim until he’s gasping for air, cock jerking in his fist. “Jesus... Ari, fuck, please...”
I clamp my hands on his hips. “Don’t stop stroking,” I growl into him. He makes a strangled sound and obeys, his fist working faster, trembling harder. I spread him wider with my thumbs and push my tongue inside him.
Caiden’s entire body convulses.
He moans, loud, desperate, then slams a hand over his own mouth to muffle it.
His hips push back helplessly, trying to take me deeper.
I oblige, tongue-fucking him until his legs shake, and leaking onto the desk.
His strokes are messy and frantic. I keep going, burying my tongue inside his perfect hole while he moans and whimpers into his hand.
Only when he’s on the edge of sobbing with pleasure do I pull back.
I spit on my fingers and press one against his slick, open rim. “Breathe,” I tell him. He barely manages the first inhale before I push in. He gasps, arching, knuckles white on the desk.
His body clamps around my finger, desperate and greedy at the same time. I curl it inside him, brushing the spot that makes him jolt forward with a broken cry. I add another finger, and he chokes, his hand stuttering on his cock, his stroke faltering as the sensation hits too hard.
“No,” I warn. “Keep going.” His fist finds rhythm again and when I add a third finger, he nearly collapses.
“Ari, please, I’m gonna… fuck, I’m gonna come...”
“Good,” I say, pumping into him steadily, relentlessly. “Give it to me.” He begins shaking, and his voice is nothing but broken syllables and heavy breathing.
I curl my fingers inside him again, hard, and that’s all it takes.
He shatters.
Caiden comes with a strangled, muffled cry into his hand, his entire body jerking, spilling hot and violently across the desk, his hand, onto the floor, everywhere.
I catch him by the hip before his knees can give out.
His breath is wrecked, ragged, and beautiful.
I gently remove my fingers before standing and leaning over him, my chest to his back, my lips brushing the edge of his ear.
“Now,” I murmur, starving for more, “you’re going to turn around... and kiss me.”
He moves sluggishly, his muscles spent, his legs unstable, but he listens. He turns, the desk at his back, his hair a mess from my hands, and his face ruins me.
Flushed and lips parted like he’s drunk on me.
He looks ruined, and all I want is to ruin him more.
I grab his jaw with one hand and crush my mouth to his.
It’s not gentle or slow. It’s teeth and hunger and every fucked-up thought I’ve had about him since the moment I first saw him in that briefing room, with his too-green eyes and a chip on his shoulder.
He gasps into my mouth, too tired to fight, too desperate to think, and I swallow the sound, pushing him harder against the desk, my hips pinning him in place. His hands fly to my neck, gripping, clawing, dragging me closer even though he’s already caged under me.
I bite his lower lip... hard enough to make him hiss and I lick the sting away.
“Arseny...” he breathes, trying to catch air between kisses.
“No,” I snarl against his mouth, kissing him again, deeper.
“No talking.” My hands roam, one sliding up his chest, feeling the frantic hammer of his heart, the other squeezing his hip hard enough that he moans into my mouth.
He’s oversensitive everywhere, trembling from release, and it only makes me want more.
I break from his lips long enough to drag my mouth down his throat, nibbling the tendon until he gasps and tilts his head back for me.
“Fuck... Ari...” he moans, and I slam my lips back onto his. He’s still trembling when I pull back. God, I wish I could ruin him more. We’ve come far too close to the point where I stop caring about the consequences.
I run my hand over his hair, down his cheek, slow enough that his eyes flutter. “Get dressed,” I murmur, my voice coming out unsteady with the kind of need that hurts to hold back. “Before I throw you face down on this desk, and fuck you so hard they will hear you in Moscow.”
His breath catches, and I lean in, my mouth brushing the corner of his lips, but not kissing him. If I kiss him again, I’ll lose it. “Go,” I whisper, thumb stroking the corner of his jaw. “Now, before I ruin both of us.”
He doesn’t move at first, but after a few seconds, he swallows, nods, and straightens his uniform. I watch him, every second of it, and it takes all of my self-control to let him walk out the door.
The door clicks shut, and I stand there for a full ten seconds, staring at the space he occupied like an idiot. Then I catch myself on the desk, palms flat, and bow my head, laughing to myself. It comes out half-hysterical. “Fuck,” I whisper to the empty room. “Fuck.”
I’m still smiling. A big, wide, sharp thing that feels glued to my face.
It’s not my fault that my body hasn’t got the memo yet that we’re supposed to be in panic mode.
Every nerve ending is still busy replaying the image of Caiden’s broad shoulders between my knees, his hands bruising my hips, and the sound he made when he came.
I drag in a breath and force my hands to move, and to do something normal. Straighten papers, pick up the pen pot, right the chair, wipe off the desk. Anything to stop my brain from looping back to him kneeling and the way my name sounded when he moaned it.
“Mne pizdets,” I mutter under my breath. I’m screwed. Utterly, gloriously screwed. I catch sight of myself in the narrow glass of the filing cabinet. I look like I’ve been thoroughly fucked, which is technically not what just happened, but I’m not going to quibble with the visual.
I smooth my hands over my hair, straighten my shirt, and roll my shoulders until something in my spine cracks back into place.
There. Arseny Zakirov, picture of composure. Who will absolutely not crumble the second he is alone.
I take one last look around the admin room to make sure it doesn’t scream “we just committed multiple offences in here,” then step out into the corridor.
The fluorescent hallway lighting feels suddenly too bright.
It feels like every soldier who walks past me might as well have a spotlight in their pupils.
I tell myself no one knows because no one could possibly know.
“They can smell sex,” a paranoid little voice whispers. It’s in the air. On your skin. You’re marked. I tell my brain to shut up and start walking. A pair of privates nod at me as they pass. “Sergeant,” one says, and I grunt back.
I make it all the way back to the barracks without exploding. Sadly, they aren’t empty. Ivanov is sprawled on his bunk, boots still on, flipping through a dog-eared magazine.
He glances up as I come in. “You look happy,” he says suspiciously. “Who did you yell at?” See— this is why I keep him. He has a very particular picture of me, and I like to maintain it.
“No one important,” I say. “Where’s Niko?”
“Meeting,” Ivanov says. “Paperwork. Talks. Who knows. He said if you break anything while he’s gone, he will make you clean the latrines with a toothbrush.”
“His or mine?” I ask.
“Yours,” he says. “Obviously.”
“Rude,” I mutter, dropping onto my own bunk. Ivanov eyes me for another moment, as if deciding whether to poke. Then he apparently remembers that he values his continued existence and goes back to his magazine.
I stay exactly ten minutes. Long enough not to look like I’m running, short enough that I don’t start climbing out of my own body. Then I stand up again. “Going out,” I announce.
Ivanov doesn’t even look up. “Try not to start a war.”
“No promises,” I say lightly, and slip back out.
The roof is always my first choice when I’m in danger of feeling...
feelings. It’s cold enough up there that anything soft freezes solid and falls off, in theory.
In practice, I get up there, light a cigarette with fingers that aren’t entirely steady, and the first image that hits me as I exhale is Caiden again.
On his knees just now, obedient and furious and wanting like I’ve never seen him. I take a hard drag and blow smoke at the indifferent stars. “Fuck,” I say again.
Okay. Let’s think. On the surface, everything is glorious.
I got exactly what I wanted. More, even.
I’d told myself I’d hold the line, no sex on base, keep it to kisses and innuendo until we had somewhere we could breathe.
Then I dragged him into a room, his mouth on mine like he wanted to climb inside my skin, and my noble intentions evaporated like cheap vodka.
How the fuck am I supposed to not want more after that? I stub the cigarette out on the concrete, then light another immediately. My lungs protest and I ignore them.
Underneath the smug — and there is a lot of smug, I’m not a saint — there’s something sour curling in my stomach. If anyone had heard—
I drag smoke into my lungs until they sting. “Idiot. Complete, fucking, glorious idiot.” The worst part is that I would do it again. If he looked at me the way he had down there, I would go on my knees for him this time without thinking twice.
I flop down onto the low parapet, one boot planted on the concrete, the other swinging out over the drop.
My hands are still shaking mildly from leftover adrenaline, and my brain is having the time of its life.
It plays back every twitch, every sound, every breathless curse.
It even adds commentary. “Look at him, on his knees for you. Told you he’d come back.
Look how good he is when he stops fighting himself. Look how much more you could take.”
The rest of me is trying, and mostly failing, to be an adult about it.
To say things like “we have to be careful,” and “this can’t happen again on base.
” Just survive, Arseny, fuck. Wanting someone like this is not surviving.
It’s laying your own throat over the wire. And yet. He makes me feel... alive.
That’s the only word for it.
I feel awake when we’re fighting. I feel electric when he looks at me like he’s furious and fascinated in the same breath. I feel, which is the problem and the point.
I take another drag, tap ash off the end, and finally let the smug rise properly to the surface, because if I don’t, I’m going to drown in my own anxiety. I grin into the dark. “Fuck,” I say again, but this time it sounds almost delighted.
And I am. I’ve been pulling him in this direction from the first briefing, from the first time I caught him staring at Niko and decided he was too interesting to ignore. Every insult, shove, sparring match, taunt in the shower— all of it was pressure. And finally, he cracked.
So what now?
Someday soon, we’re getting off this base — even if I have to steal a jeep and drive us into the woods. Because I’m not doing this dance with bullets at our backs forever.
I hop down off the parapet, stamp life back into my toes, and head back toward the stairs. By the time I reach my bunk again, the plan has settled in my bones like a new rhythm.