Chapter 13 #2
His hand returns to the back of my neck. My forehead drops to my forearms. His other hand is slick when it touches me---behind, his fingers working me open with patient precision. One finger. The stretch burns. My breath comes in punched-out sounds.
"Breathe," he says.
The same word from the study. The same voice.
I breathe. The second finger is harder. I make a sound that is close to his name.
He curls his fingers, and the sensation that hits me is a colour---white, blinding, a flash of cadmium yellow at the base of my spine that sends my hips back against his hand.
"You like being my mess."
"Yes." The word is wrecked. I am wrecked.
The lapis lazuli is under my hands and the paint is on my skin and his fingers are inside me and I am saying yes to a man who locked me in a gallery and washed my hands and told me I was an instrument, and the yes is the most honest brushstroke I have ever made.
He enters me in one slow, continuous push.
The stretch is immense---the specific, devastating fullness of a body accepting what it has been refusing, and the sound I make is long and raw and fills the studio the way the music used to.
His hand tightens on my neck. His hips meet my body.
He holds---still, deep, letting me feel the complete fact of him.
"Rory."
My name. He says my name, and it sounds different in his mouth than it has ever sounded in anyone's---heavier, claimed, a word that belongs to him now the way the paintings on his walls belong to him.
He moves. The rhythm is slow at first---controlled, deliberate, each thrust a statement. My fingers curl against the worktable. The lapis grinds into my palms. His breath is audible behind me---rough, fractured, the control fraying at its edges for the first time.
The rhythm builds. My body opens for him with a willingness that would shame me if I had any shame left, but shame burned out of me in the study.
What's left is a hunger that matches his, a need that has been building since the gala, since the first time I looked at this man and saw the absolute dark and wanted to know what lived underneath.
The sounds he makes are quiet. But I can hear the seams splitting---a low groan caught behind his teeth, the grip on my neck tightening and releasing in a rhythm that mirrors his hips.
The metronome is breaking tempo. And the knowledge that I am the one breaking it is the most powerful feeling I have ever had.
His hand leaves my neck. It wraps around me---around my cock, slick with the lapis dust and sweat and the specific wetness of a body that has stopped holding anything back. He strokes me in time with his thrusts, and the dual sensation collapses whatever was left of my control.
I come. The orgasm tears through me like a colour I've never mixed---white and red and a blue so deep it's black, and I hear myself saying his name, and my body clenches around him, and the sound he makes in response is the first honest sound I have heard from Kazimir Volkov---a broken, guttural thing that rises from his chest and fills the studio the way north light fills a window.
He follows. His hips slam forward, his hand grips my hip hard enough to leave the marks I will catalogue in the morning, and he comes with his forehead pressed between my shoulder blades and his breath shattering against my spine.
* * *
The studio is a crime scene.
Lapis lazuli on the worktable, the floor, ground into both our skins.
Cadmium red on his chest, his shoulders, his ruined suit jacket crumpled on the concrete.
Handprints on every surface---mine, in paint; his, in the pressure marks that are blooming on my hips and thighs.
The Soutine watches from the easel, its carcass-reds appropriate for the aftermath.
We are on the floor. My back is against the cabinet beneath the worktable.
He is beside me, shirt gone, chest streaked with red and blue.
His head is tipped back. His eyes are closed.
His breathing returns to normal with the disciplined efficiency of a man who, even post-orgasm, cannot permit disorder to last.
I look at him. The silver at his temples. The scar beneath his collarbone. The paint on his skin---my paint, my colours, the evidence of my hands written across his body in a language that cannot be denied or retracted.
He opens his eyes. He looks at me. And the expression on his face is the one I have been chasing since the gallery, since the handprint on his suit, since the first time I pressed paint to canvas and wanted someone to see what I'd made.
He is looking at me the way he looks at the Rothko. The way he looks at the real one, the one in his private gallery, the one that breathes. He is looking at me like I am the only art in the room that matters.
His hand finds mine on the concrete. His fingers lace through mine---the first time he has held my hand, which is absurd, given what his hands have done to the rest of me. His palm is warm. Our fingers are painted blue.
He doesn't speak. Neither do I. The north light falls across us in its cool, devoted wash, and the studio holds its silence, and somewhere in the penthouse the monitors flicker and the locks hold and the cage is still the cage, but the thing inside it has changed shape, and the shape is something that neither of us planned for.
He lifts our joined hands. He presses his lips to my knuckles. The gesture is so gentle---so impossibly gentle from a man who has unmade and owned and used me---that my vision blurs.
I am not an instrument. I am not an acquisition. I am a painting he didn't know he was making, and his hands are covered in the colour of me, and neither of us knows what the finished work will look like.
But for the first time since I walked into his gallery wearing a stolen name, I am not afraid of the canvas.