Elena
I’ve never felt anything like it. The hot, slow stretch as he fills me. The way our body crush together when he’s fully inside me.
It hurts, but in a way that tells me I’m still alive and that’s okay.
When he begins to thrust in and out of me at a pace that is to punish us both, there’s a moment of blind panic that I can’t handle the pain, the stretch, the heat.
That I’ll burn beneath him and he’ll burn with me.
Then his mouth finds my nipple and my brain short circuits.
The pain changes from hot and sharp to warm with a current of something else in it’s place.
He moves to a slightly different angle and slides his hand between us, pressing against my mound, a finger finding my clit and the world tilts as pleasure shoots through me again.
My body wracks with release as it pulses through me. I don’t realise I’m screaming his name until the blood stops pounding in my ears and when my vision clears enough to look at him he is barely holding on to his own restraint.
“Artem,” I gasp, “please come, I can’t—” I don’t need to finish, to tell him I can’t handle any more. He throws his head back and comes. Each thrust into me now punctuated with a gutteral groan as he empties himself inside me.
When he looks at me again, his face is unrecognizably soft. He blinks a couple of times, taking me in. My legs are locked around his waist, his cock is still twitching inside me, and this is the moment I know we’ve crossed a line we can’t uncross.
The world feels weightless for a moment after he moves away.
The bed shifts under his weight as he rolls onto his back, arm flung over his face like he can’t bear the light.
The room smells like us, heat, sex, something new and dizzying.
My pulse is still racing, but the silence that follows is louder than any sound.
I stare at the ceiling, trying to breathe through the knot in my chest. I should say something. Anything. But the words don’t come.
“What happens now?” The question slips out before I can stop it, small and almost childlike.
Artem turns his head toward me. His eyes are softer than I’ve seen them, but there’s no answer waiting there. Only the same bewildered awareness I feel.
“I’m not sure,” he says finally, voice low, rough with exhaustion. “I’ve never—” He stops, sighs. “I don’t know what to do with this.”
I swallow, nodding even though he isn’t looking at me anymore. “Me either.”
The truth is, I don’t know how any of this is supposed to work.
I’ve never done this before, never been with anyone, never woken up next to someone whose touch still echoes in my skin.
I think I should feel ashamed, but I can’t seem to make myself feel that way knowing I won’t be alive much longer to feel that way.
He drags a hand through his hair and sits up, shoulders tense, the sheet sliding down his body. For a second I think he’s going to leave, but he doesn’t. He just sits there, breathing, the silence stretching until it feels like the walls might crack under it.
I reach out, trace a line down his spine before I can think better of it. “It’s okay,” I whisper.
His breath catches. “Nothing is okay,” he says, but it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.
He stays there, spine taut under my fingertips, every muscle drawn tight like he’s waiting for a verdict.
I push myself up onto one elbow, watching the shape of him in the half-light.
He looks carved out of everything I’ve ever wanted and never dared to touch, broad shoulders, the line of his jaw, the small tremor in his hand where it rests on his knee.
He’s usually all control, deliberate and contained. Now he looks lost.
I touch him again, just the curve of his shoulder. “You can talk to me,” I say quietly. “You don’t have to pretend you know what this is. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
He huffs a soft breath, a sound that could almost be a laugh if there wasn’t so much weight in it. “I’m not pretending. I really don’t know.”
He turns his head just enough for me to see his eyes. They’re clearer now, stripped of everything that used to hide behind them. “It’s been a long time since I felt… anything that wasn’t anger.”
Something in my chest twists. I know that kind of emptiness; it’s been my shadow for months. “Maybe that’s what this is,” I whisper. “Two people trying to remember how to feel.”
He studies me for a moment, then reaches for my hand. His fingers close around mine, rough and warm. “You shouldn’t have had to find it with me.”
“I don’t think I could have found it with anyone else.” The words leave before I can stop them. They hang there, solid and true.
He shakes his head, staring at our joined hands. “You don’t know what I am, Elena.”
“I know enough of our world to know what you are, Artem.”
We sit there in the dim light, breathing the same air, trying to find a place for what we’ve just done.
The room swells with heat and guilt and something dangerously close to peace.
For the first time in months, the ache in my chest isn’t only grief, it’s the ache of being alive and I don’t want to lose it.
The night stretches around us like a held breath.
The city hums below, but up here everything is still.
Artem lies on his back beside me, one arm draped across his chest, eyes fixed on the ceiling as if it might give him answers.
The sheet has slipped low on his hips, and the sight of him, bare, quiet, and unguarded, does something strange to my heart.
I don’t know what to say, so I listen to the rhythm of his breathing, the steady rise and fall that feels almost fragile. I wonder if he’s counting each breath, the way I do when I’m afraid of waking the pain that sleeps inside me.
After a while I whisper, “You play piano, don’t you?”
His gaze cuts to me, surprised. “How would you know that?”
“Lev told me,” I say. “He said your hands were too precise for the kind of life you have to live. He said you could have been a musician.”
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “He said that?”
I nod. “He said you used to argue about it.”
The silence that follows is heavier than any confession.
His eyes flicker away from mine, toward the window, where the skyline bleeds silver into the dark.
“It wasn’t just an argument,” he says finally.
“It was the last thing we talked about. I told him his place was with the family not running off to some fancy music school thousands of miles away. He told me I’d stopped hearing anything but orders.
” He lets out a slow breath. “He was right.”
The words land heavy in my chest. “Artem…”
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he goes on, voice low. “But part of me was jealous too. Jealous that he could go and live his dream.” His hand curls into a fist on the sheet. “I didn’t know I was driving him toward the fight that would kill him.”
I sit up, pull the sheet around me, and touch his shoulder. The tension there feels like steel under my palm. “You couldn’t have known.”
He looks up at me then, eyes raw. “But I do now.”
There’s nothing to say to that. The truth sits between us, quiet and unbearable.
I swallow. “He loved the violin. He said it was like a conversation with himself. He wanted to teach, one day. He said people forget that music isn’t about perfection, it’s about emotion. Feeling things we can’t always put a name to.”
Artem’s mouth twists. “Sounds like him.”
“I used to want that too,” I admit. “To make something that mattered. To create beauty that could survive me. But after he died, I couldn’t touch the strings. It felt wrong, like I’d stolen his voice. Tonight was the first time I’ve played a cello since he died.”
He shifts closer, his fingers brushing my wrist, tracing the faint veins beneath my skin. “It was his favourite piece.”
The words undo something inside me. “I know.”
“Maybe you should start again,” he offers.
I smile weakly, “I don’t know if I can remember how to without the pain.”
His thumb strokes the inside of my wrist, slow and deliberate. “Then let me help you remember.”
It’s such a simple sentence, but it feels like a promise. He doesn’t mean just the music. He means breathing again. Feeling again.
We stay there, our bodies inches apart, the silence between us no longer hollow but full of something tentative and alive. The tension has changed; it’s softer now, edged with reverence instead of rage.
When he leans in, it isn’t the desperate hunger from before. It’s quieter, a slow, inevitable pull, like gravity remembering its purpose. The kiss is warm and soft and touches parts of me I didn’t know longed to be touched.
He pulls back to look into my eyes, searching for something before taking a deep breath and saying, “I’ve never had sex without a condom before.”
“Okay,” I answer, trying to understand what he is telling me.
He frowns briefly, sliding his hand over my body, watching where it touches.
“I meant it when I said I’ll ruin you.”
I nod, “I understand.”
“No, you don’t. Now I’m going to eat your pussy again. Then I’ll fuck you raw until you forget who you are. Until you feel some kind of peace.”
His words make the muscles in my thighs clench and I know he feels it because his eyes darken.
“You like dirty talk,” he says. “That surprises me.”
I shrug lightly, then gasp as his fingers begin to work their magic over my clit.
His mouth clamps over my nipple and he sucks hard, pulling a moan from my throat.
He worships me like he’s trying to atone, and I let him, because for the first time since Lev died, being alive doesn’t feel like a punishment.
When he releases my nipple I miss the warmth of his mouth immediately but in seconds his head is between my thighs and he is working me into a frenzy with his tongue.
He is relentless and unwavering in his determination as my pleasure lifts to the peak and he holds me there, painfully on the edge of release.
“That’s in Elena,” he says, his voice gravelly low against my wet center. “Look at you on the edge of coming undone on my face.”
His words drive me wild but I can feel myself receding from the edge when his mouth claims me again. Drives me up there again, and then he pulls back, again, and I think I might lose my mind to frustration and rage.
“I could eat this pretty pussy all night long and keep you right here.” His words aren’t threatening, and yet that’s exactly what it feels like as my body relaxes again, the pleasure beginning to fade.
“I’m going to make you come so hard you forget your own name.
” This time, I think he is going to take me all the way over, and my body begins to tense with the onslaught, then he stops and I let out a frustrated growl.
“How much do you want to come on my face, Elena?” he asks and I bang my fists either side of me before grabbing my tits and squeezing.
“Please, Artem, just let me come,” I beg, my hips rocking, my pussy searching for friction.
He swipes his tongue over me in one quick motion.
“Not yet. My cock is so hard and dripping for you. I can’t wait to fuck you again.”
I can only moan at his words, the desperate need for release turning my vision blurry.
“I’m going to fuck you so hard you forget everything but the feel of my cock filling your tight, little cunt.”
Then his mouth is on me again, only this time there’s no slowing down.
He chases my orgasm with feverish obsession and when I come apart he follows my jerking body with his mouth, never relenting.
Sucking and licking my clit until my thighs squeeze tight around his head, my body bucking with the force of coming apart.
He prises my legs apart before the orgasm has fully passed through me, and flips my onto my stomach, spreading my legs and lining himself up in one swift move. Then he is inside me again, thick and hard and throbbing.
“That’s it,” he grunts into my hair as he pulls out all the way to the tip.
“Take all of my cock.” He slides in on the word cock then pushes a little harder, a little deeper.
One of his hands is braced beside my head and the other is between us, squeezing my ass.
“Fuck you’re so fucking sexy.” His words are beginning to come out sounding fractured and disjointed but they still heat me up from the inside.
The thought that I’m driving this man wild with my body does something to me.
I rock my pelvis, chasing my own pleasure again.
“I could worship this greedy, needy cunt forever.” His pace picks up and I truly believe I’m going to lose my mind. “I can feel you tightening up,” he says. “That’s it, Elena, come on my cock.”
The world around me explodes and I’m fairly certain I do too.
He lets go of my ass and curls his arm beneath me, squeezing my breast as he comes too with words of worship and reverence I never expected to hear about myself.
And words that should make me feel dirty and cheap, but somehow make me feel like I belong to him.