14. Fourteen
The safehouse on Garfield was a two bedroom above a payday loan place, and I'd been pacing the length of it for twenty minutes while Fin ate.
Fin sat on the couch in my coat and his underwear, working through a burger, color coming back into his face by degrees.
Collins had come and gone an hour ago, run his numbers and dosed him, and pronounced him a lucky idiot.
I rubbed my hands together and stopped facing the wall, but it didn't help. All I wanted to do was put my hands back on him, put my lips back on him, taste him, feel him, crawl inside his skin and sign my name on his bones.
It wasn't logical. Hell, it wasn't even possible. Didn't stop me from wanting it.
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my texts, half expecting to find a new one from Nikita.
There wasn't one, which was worrying. It was taking him too damn long to figure out what I'd done.
I'd shot one of our own men in the back in some Italian leather shop in Greek territory, someone who'd been with the organization longer than I'd been alive.
If this didn't start a war with the Greeks, and somehow didn't escalate things with the Italians, then I still might find a bullet in my back before the night was out.
"Ye're going to wear a hole through the floor."
"Shut up and eat your burger."
"Aleksi." There it was. That fucking bedroom voice of his. "Come and sit down."
I looked back at him. There was nowhere to sit except right fucking beside him, right where I'd have to sit with my hands on my knees, smell him, pretend I didn't want to suck bruises onto his skin.
Fuck.
"I'm good."
"Yer either gonna have a heart attack or pass out if ye don't eat something, Aleksi."
God damn him for using my name like that. I turned away from the wall, stomped across the room, scooped up my untouched burger, and took a big bite. "There. Happy?" I said, throwing it down. "Fucking brat."
He stared at me while I chewed. "Aye. I'm a brat. But yer pretty damn good at taming me, seems."
I scoffed and looked away. "Don't talk to me like that. I could kill you. I should fucking kill you."
"Ye dinnae want to kill me." He put his burger down and stood up. "I think you want something harder." He licked his thumb and reached for me.
I flinched back. "Fin, what the—"
He drew his spit damp thumb over my bottom lip. It came away yellow with mustard. He stuck his thumb between his lips and sucked. My knees nearly buckled.
The fucker was still grinning when I yanked him in by the hair and bit his lip.
He hissed and sank his teeth into my lower lip hard enough that I tasted blood. Not his.
I pulled back. He was breathing hard, bottom lip swelling where I'd caught it, and he looked at me like I'd finally done something worth his time. I went back in, and he turned his head at the last second, catching my jaw instead, teeth dragging slowly along the bone.
"Ye want me," he said against my skin, "ye're going to have to mean it."
I hauled him through the bedroom door by his shirt. He hit the wall, and I was on him before he bounced off it.
I kissed him hard with teeth because that's the version of me he deserved, the version of me he wanted. And I kissed him with teeth because he'd never stop running his fucking mouth if I didn't, because I liked the violence of it. Judging by his answering moan, he did too.
Fin's hands hit my chest and yanked my shirt open.
"Christ," he said against my mouth, "even yer buttons are uptight."
I wanted to shut him up. I also wanted to let him keep talking, because his lips on mine while he was being a smartass about my suit was the best thing that'd happened to me in forty years and I was furious about it.
I shoved the coat off his shoulders, and then there was just him, all that pale, freckled skin in the dark.
I didn't know what I'd been expecting, but it wasn't this.
No curves. No softness. Just lean muscle and sharp bone and the ridge of his ribs under my palms when I put my hands on him.
I ran my thumbs along his ribs. He shivered, and I wanted to put my lips on every freckle.
I wanted to find out how far down they went.
I wanted things I didn't have words for yet. That terrified me, and I did it anyway.
Fin let me look. He stood there with his hands loose at his sides and let me put my palms on him and figure out what I was doing, and he didn't say a word, which for Fin was its own kind of answer.
Then thirty seconds were up.
"Ye going to stand there all night wanting to be inside me," he said, "or are ye going to do something about it?"
I met his eyes and swallowed. Not because of nerves.
I wasn't a complete idiot, and I wasn't about to get sappy over some Scotsman in his underwear.
It was because I was used to being the most experienced, competent man in every room I walked into.
But this? I knew next to nothing about this.
I hadn't even seen gay porn except by accident that one time and I....
I don't want to hurt him.
"C'mon, Aleksi," Fin said, arching an eyebrow. "Ye think I didnae see the drugstore bag that come with the meal?"
"It's not that. I just..." My face burned, and I had to look away. "I don't know what I'm doing, okay?"
Fin closed the distance and took my face in his hands.
"Lucky for ye," he said, "I do. Ye knew what ye were about fine when ye were giving orders, Aleksi. It's the asking that's got ye scared." His thumbs pressed along my jaw. "So dinnae ask. Do as yer told."
He kissed me again, slower, and walked me backward until my knees hit the bed. I sat because he pushed. He climbed into my lap like he'd done it a hundred times, knees either side of my thighs, and took my hands and put them on his hips.
"There," he said. "That's where they go. Ye'll work the rest out."
"You're enjoying this."
"Aye. Bossing a vor around in his pants. Wee bit." He rolled his hips. "Less talking."
He kissed me like he had something to prove.
The bag from the drugstore was digging into my hip where I'd dropped it on the bed.
He found it without looking, which meant he'd clocked exactly where it landed, which was Fin all over.
He pulled the bottle out and pressed it into my hand and went back to my mouth.
"Ye know what that's for."
"I'm not stupid."
"Debatable." He bit my jaw. "Open it."
I got the cap with my thumb. My hands were not as steady as I'd have liked, and he felt it because he caught my wrist and held it a second.
"Hey." He pulled back far enough to look at me.
The brat was still there in his eyes, but underneath it was the other thing, the steady thing, the one that had counted me through breathing on my own floor.
"Yer no going to hurt me. I'll tell ye if ye do.
I'm a mouthy bastard, aye? Ye think I'll go quiet about it? "
"No."
"No. So." He let my wrist go. "Slow. Lots of this." He tapped the bottle. "And ye listen to me. Can ye do that? Take an order for once in your miserable life?"
"I can try."
"He can try. Mark the day." He reached back, got the bottle out of my hand, pressed it back into it the right way round. "Here's how this goes. Ye do exactly what I say, when I say it, and if ye get clever, I stop and ye get nothing. Ye understand the rules, big man?"
"You're enjoying this too much."
"Aye, I'm having the time of my life. Forty-year-old killer in his pants doing as he's told.
" He bit down on the cord of muscle at my neck, and I felt it go all the way down my spine.
"Now. Slow. And ye keep yer eyes on me, because if ye go away in yer head I'll know, and I'll bring ye back, and ye'll no enjoy how. "
I kept my eyes on him.
He tipped the bottle over my fingers, slicked them, pressed them back behind him with his hand guiding mine.
"Slow," he said into my mouth. "Push in.
" I pushed in. The heat of him closed around me, and the sound he made went down my spine like a struck wire.
Tight. Hot. Nothing I had a comparison for.
He sank onto my hand, greedy, and took it deeper.
"That's it. Curl it. There, ye bastard, right there." His nails went into my shoulders. "Ye've hands like a surgeon. Use them."
I used them.
"More." The word came out of him cracked. "Another. C'mon, I can take it."
I gave him a second finger, slow, the way he'd told me. He swore and pushed back onto it like he'd been waiting on it his whole life.
"There. God, there. Curl them. No—aye—like that." His head dropped onto my shoulder. "For a man who swore blind he was straight, ye learn awful fast."
"Shut up, Fin."
"Make me. Ye won't, but." He bit my jaw, grinning. "Ye like the commentary. Ye like being told ye've got it right." He worked himself down on my hand, filthy and slow. "There. Like that. Good lad."
The praise landed somewhere it had no business landing, and I added a third finger before I'd decided to. He moaned loudly.
"That's the one." The brat thinned out of his voice. "Right there. Dinnae ye dare stop. Ye stop and I'll have yer guts for garters."
"You threaten everybody mid-fuck, or just me?"
He laughed, ragged, against my throat. "Just the one in front of me." He took my wrist, slowed my hand, and held my eyes. "Feel that? That's me opening up for ye. Ye did that." He rolled his hips down, slowly taking in my face.
"Enough." He pulled off my fingers and slicked me with a grip that whited out the edges of my vision, rose up on his knees over my lap, reached back, lined me up and sank down.
I forgot how to breathe.
He took me to the root in one long roll of his hips and held there, flush against me, the whole heat of him on my thighs, his forehead dropping to mine.
"There," he said, wrecked. "Now ye know."