Roman #2
I slide into her slowly, and this time there’s no hesitation, no pause, no question in her body. She takes me with a deep, shaking breath and wraps both legs around my waist, and I feel the exact moment she stops holding anything back.
It hits me harder than it should.
I start moving, slow at first, because I want to feel all of it. Her hands on my shoulders. Her mouth open under mine. The little helpless sounds she keeps trying and failing to hide. Morning light across her hair. Her body warm from sleep and opening for me like it remembers me too well.
She clings tighter with every stroke.
The pace builds on its own. It always does with us. The softness burns into need too fast, and then I’m driving into her harder, kissing her when I can, losing the rhythm whenever her nails dig into my back, or she says my name like that again.
She’s close before I am.
I can feel it in the way her body tightens around me, in the broken breaths, in the way she turns her face into my neck and says something I almost hear and then doesn’t finish.
I know what it was.
Or maybe I only know what I want it to be.
Either way, I take her mouth again and kiss her hard enough to stop the words, because I’m not sure either of us survives them cleanly if she says them now.
She comes with a muffled cry against my lips, clutching at me, trembling under me, and the feel of her breaking like that’s enough to push me right to the edge.
I bury myself deep and lose the last of my control. My forehead drops to hers, my hand gripping her hip hard enough to leave a mark, and when I come it feels less like release than surrender.
For a long moment after, neither of us moves.
She’s breathing hard beneath me, her arms still around my shoulders, my weight half on her, half on my forearms. The room is quiet except for the sound of us trying to recover.
I lift my head just enough to look at her.
Her eyes are open now. Soft. A little stunned.
I kiss her once, slower this time, and she answers me with the kind of sweetness that makes me want to drag the whole morning back into bed and keep the world outside until it gives up.
By the time we make it to the kitchen, the light outside has turned from gray to pale silver.
It’s still early. Too early for the city to be fully awake, but not early enough to pretend the world can be kept out much longer.
Katerina has showered. So have I. She’s wearing the same clothes she arrived in, though they sit differently on her now, softened by sleep and sex and the fact that she’s been in my bed. I shouldn’t notice that. I do anyway.
Mikhail has had breakfast brought in without comment. Coffee, eggs, dark bread, fruit, smoked salmon, and some pastry I know Katerina will pretend not to want before eating half of it while distracted.
She sits across from me at the small table by the window, wraps both hands around her coffee, and stares into it for a second before drinking.
“You don’t sleep much, do you?” she asks.
“No.”
“That wasn’t really a question.”
“I know.”
She gives me a look over the rim of the cup.
There’s still softness in her face from the morning, but it’s fading now. The mother is back. The daughter too. The woman who has to go home and put her mask on properly before anyone notices how far she let herself slip.
She glances toward the clock on the oven. “I need to get back soon.”
“Why?”
She blinks. “Because I don’t live here.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Her mouth tightens. “Because if I’m gone too long, my father starts asking questions.”
For a minute we just eat. She picks at toast. I drink coffee. It should feel ordinary, but nothing with her does.
Finally she says, “I keep thinking about Moscow.”
I look at her.
“My father spent years acting like the Morozov alliance was the smartest thing he ever did,” she says. “Like it made us stronger. Safer. More respectable, somehow.”
I almost smile at that last part. “Respectable?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
She tears a piece of bread and doesn’t eat it. “I was too young to understand most of it at first. I just knew your family mattered. Then Lev came into the picture and suddenly it was all about timing and dinners and whether I said the right thing at the right table.”
“You were part of the deal.”
“Yes.” She says it plainly. “I know that now.”
I lean back in the chair. “Sergei wanted the tie. My father did too.”
She nods once, like that confirms something she’d already guessed.
“But then everything fell apart,” she says. “And that’s the part I can’t make sense of. If the alliance mattered that much, why did it all go bad so quickly?”
Because men like our fathers don’t really believe in alliances. They believe in advantage. The second that changes, the language changes too.
I don’t say all of that.
I say, “Because those arrangements only work until someone sees a better option.”
She looks down at the table. “That sounds like them.”
She looks at me for a second, then says, “Did you always know you’d end up fighting him?”
I know who she means.
“No.”
“When did you know?”
I think about that before I answer.
“When I was young, I thought I wanted his approval,” I say. “By the time I was old enough to do something useful, I was done with that.”
She studies my face, and I can almost see her deciding whether to ask more. She doesn’t.
Instead she says, “You really don’t hesitate, do you?”
“About what?”
“Violence.”
The word sits there between us.
I don’t dodge it. “No.”
She nods slowly, as if she already knew that and just needed to hear me say it. “That should bother me more than it does.”
I look at her sitting there in my kitchen, wearing my shirt, hair still damp, talking to me like this after everything, and for one stupid second I think how easily I could get used to it.
Her at this table. The children somewhere in the next room.
The whole thing close enough to touch if I were the kind of man who believed wanting something made it possible.
I shut that thought down immediately. She doesn’t belong in my life like that. And I don’t get to imagine otherwise.
She looks at the clock again. “I really do have to go.”
“I know.”
Her phone rings before either of us moves. She reaches for it without looking, distracted, already half out of her chair. Then she sees the screen.
Everything changes in her face.
She answers immediately. “Hello?”
I’m standing before I realize I’ve moved.
She doesn’t hear me. She’s listening now, and all the color is draining out of her so fast it doesn’t look real.
“No,” she says. Quietly. “No, where are they?”
My stomach drops.
She listens for another second, then the phone slips in her hand and I catch it before it hits the table.
“Katerina.”
She looks at me, but she’s not really seeing me yet.
I take hold of her shoulders. “What happened?”
Her mouth opens. She swallows once. Then she says, “The twins.”
That’s enough to stop my own breathing for a second.
“What about them?”
Her eyes fill, but she’s still too shocked to cry.
“They’re gone,” she says.
Then, more clearly, because she needs to hear it herself if it’s going to be real. “They took the twins.”