Chapter 30 #2
He released my wrists and erupted inside me. He encouraged me to keep going.
His fingers dug into my hips as I continued rolling them forward and back. I could feel his cock pulse deeply inside me. Wrapping his arms around me, he held me close. I let my forehead drop on his good shoulder, thoroughly sated and spent.
We didn’t say anything for a while. It was frightening.
The power he had over my body, how he could easily command me like an addict needing a hit.
To surrender and become vulnerable was to experience an all-consuming inferno that burned all my inhibitions to the ground.
I couldn’t surrender physically and not have my emotions compromised.
I already cared for him. It was alarming that I might be falling in love with my husband.
The crackling of the fire and our breathing were the only sounds in the cabin. A messy afterglow surrounding us. Warm, thick with uncertainty, it was making me feel sticky from the shroud of sweat coating my skin.
“I can feel you thinking too hard,” Kirill murmured in my ear. He nudged me, making me raise my head from his shoulder so we were staring eye to eye. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m afraid.”
His eyes grew alert, searching. “Of what?”
“I can’t separate the physical from my heart,” I whispered. “You asked about what the difference is between love and in love?”
He shook his head. “I don’t care anymore as long as I’m the only one who can fuck you like this.”
“That’s exactly it.” I attempted to unseat myself, but Kirill kept me planted.
“Don’t,” he rasped. “You feel so good.”
I huffed. “That’s just it, Kirill. For you, it’s just physical. Your possession. As long as no one is intimate with me like this. For me, I might want more.”
“More? What more is there?”
“Never mind.” I looked away.
He gripped my chin and turned my face back his way. “Tell me.”
I want you to be crazy about me. Because I have a feeling, I’ll become hopelessly in love with you. “I want you to genuinely care for me and respect me.”
His face grew pensive and confused. “Isn’t that what I’m showing you?” His chest made a rumbling sound. “I’m not good at expressing feelings. I’m not sure if I have them.”
“Then why did you ask me if I loved my boyfriend?”
His nostrils flared, and his eyes grew flinty. “Because that’s what normal expectations are with romantic relationships. People willingly go into one because there’s love or physical chemistry. Having both constitutes a healthy relationship. Or that’s what I expect.”
Oh my God. This man. Emotion was like a science to him. He analyzed them like a mathematical equation. X+Y=Z.
“But I don’t care anymore. That’s why I did not push you when you said there was a difference between love and being in love because it’s not something I can understand, but this is what you need to know.
” He clasped my face so I couldn’t look away.
“You consume me. I think I am obsessed with every single part of you. Your face, your body, your mannerisms. Even down to the way you annoy me. I’m obsessed.
I hate seeing you go hungry; I don’t want to see you get hurt, unless it’s the good hurt that leads to you coming on my cock”—I rolled my eyes, but he squeezed my jaw to pay attention—“anything that brings a smile to your face, I want to be the one to put it there.” He exhaled heavily.
“I’m still trying to understand what this is, baby. Do I make sense?”
His fingers clasping my jaw slackened.
I smiled. It was all I could do not to cry, because I think in his own way, Kirill was also saying he was falling in love with me.
“Oh my God, that doesn’t fit.”
“Sure it does.”
“Says the man who tried to put the church steeple on top of the mountain. Is everything with you about brute force?”
“I could make it fit.” Kirill smirked at me before conceding I was right and discarding the offending puzzle piece.
Four days after we arrived and on day three of Winter Wonderland, we were halfway done with our Van Gogh jigsaw puzzle.
Ten inches of fluffy snow had fallen, and although that was nothing of consequence in these parts of New York, the temperature dropped below freezing and kept the snow on the ground.
No melting happened. We weren’t exactly snowed in, and we didn’t lose power.
Kirill said at least it wasn’t cold enough to worry about the pipes bursting.
Despite my initial perception of him—that he was just a spoiled bratva king who had his lackeys do the dirty work for him, Kirill was actually a handyman.
He’d fixed a squeaky floorboard that had been driving me crazy; he’d tuned up the generator just in case the power went out, plus he was at ease keeping the fire going.
The brutal winters he’d lived through in Russia had honed his survival instincts.
He was a terrible jigsaw puzzle player though, and I knew he was simply humoring me.
I tried to make it more fun, so I made it into a contest. Whoever reached fifty pieces first got to ask a personal question.
Then, each round was reset. That was why, four nights later, we were only halfway done.
Plus, of course, Kirill’s condition of sex every quarter finished.
And that was not the only time he’d fucked me.
We had sex in every corner of the cabin.
In fact, I told him my pussy was too sore already, not to mention my limbs seemed to be in eternal exercise.
“You’re just dying to at least ask one question,” I teased.
“I’m sure it’ll be better than the last one you asked,” he shot back.
The question being: “What was the dumbest thing you did in your teens?”
He’d taken a while to answer it. And I asked him if it was because he’d done so many idiotic things that it was hard to choose one, but he answered arrogantly that it was the opposite.
Finally, he said, it was when he put laxative in their brigadier’s food because he punished Kolya for defying an order.
He’d been thirteen then. Kirill got caught of course and was banished to a military camp to polish soldiers’ boots.
As for me, it was many little things. A rite of passage.
Like coloring my hair bottle blonde simply because Mamma told me not to.
It ruined the texture of my hair, and I had to cut it short to regrow.
Basically, some of the dumbest things I did was to annoy my mother only to realize that she had my best interests at heart.
She just wasn’t very good at the delivery.
“Okay, since obviously I’m better at jigsaw puzzles and you haven’t asked at least one question in the past ten we had, how about you ask one?”
His face expressed surprise, but he quickly asked, “First job?”
“Define ‘job.’”
He thought for a moment. “One that paid, not the internship kind.”
I thought for a moment, then I laughed. “Even one where I got fired after one week?”
His eyes gleamed with interest. “Yes, I want to hear about that one.”
“So, Dad suggested since I was a bookworm but needed help with organization that I try working at a bookstore. True crime was a popular section, so I thought of a catchier category and I organized them under how to get away with murder.”
Kirill visibly stilled. Then his eyes crinkled at the corners before he threw back his head and laughed.
“You’re not laughing because I got fired?” I asked indignantly.
“No, Lusenka.” He had tears in his eyes, and his entire face turned a shade of red. “I’m just surprised given your sense of justice for mafia victims. Tell me, what would you have done if you had managed to kill me?”
“Ugh, you had to bring that up. That wasn’t funny.”
“It is,” he insisted. “We have to laugh about it, baby. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, our relationship will always have a sense of the macabre because of who we are.”
“What? Like the Addams family?”
“Surprisingly, I know that one,” Kirill admitted.
Since he didn’t watch television or movies a lot and didn’t grow up with a normal childhood, many pop culture references went over his head.
Aralina had helped to make sure he wasn’t totally in the dark.
“Kolya and I were quite entertained by the comic strip.”
Something Kirill said reminded me of what I overheard Zio Luca tell Dom. That I had a little criminal in me and I just had to come into my own time and accept it.
“So tell me what you would have done, hmm?” he prodded.
“I don’t know. My first instinct would be to call Dom, and then we could go from there. I’d assume a new identity.”
“I’m glad I didn’t die.”
I laughed. I laughed because Kirill reached out and caressed my cheek tenderly. “Me too.”
“I was never afraid to die, Lucy, but I don’t want you to go into hiding. The thought that you would have to do that after killing me hurts me more. Now, I want to live and spend more time with you. Which is why I’m glad I didn’t die.”
My mind was spinning with what he was telling me. It was so overwhelming. Complex emotions that weren’t defined as love in his mind, but for me the glaring signs were there. Did I really need the words? “So how about you? First job?”
He appeared disappointed that we hadn’t pursued more of this line of conversation. But these were supposed to be fun icebreaker questions. Not a discussion of life and death.
“First paying job that wasn’t about using me as muscle?” Kirill made a smacking sound. “Money laundering at a toy store in Berlin.”
“Kirill!”
“What?” he asked in all innocence. “People started buying cheap toys, and we needed to bolster quality and keep the craftsmen who took pride in their work and business.”
He had a point. I understood his motives and how his mind worked, and I couldn’t say he was wrong.
Maybe I was becoming a little criminal.