Chapter 27 #2
I push the shirt from his shoulders. He's been in this world so long that the body underneath surprises me anyway: the specific leanness of a racing driver, all function and no excess, the kind of physical form built entirely around what it can do rather than how it looks.
There's a scar at his left ribs — old, well-healed, a white line I don't ask about yet. I file it. Later.
I run my palms down his chest. The muscle is there but it doesn't announce itself — it's the body of a man who has never needed to be seen using his strength, only to have it when required. His stomach tightens under my touch. His breathing changes.
He reaches for the zip at my back. No urgency.
He draws it down slowly, mouth following the line of exposed skin — vertebra by vertebra, the heat of his breath arriving a fraction before his lips — and the dress falls and he catches it and sets it aside with the same care he gives to everything he has decided is worth keeping.
He looks at me the way he looked at the photograph.
I know this now — I know the quality of that attention, what it costs him to let it show.
He looked at a woman in a courtyard and couldn't look away, and he's looking at me now with the same expression and this time I'm here.
I'm not in a photograph. I know he's watching.
I let him see me.
The bra goes next — his hands at the clasp, efficient, no fumbling. He draws the straps down my shoulders with the same deliberation he'd use to unwrap something valuable. His mouth finds the hollow of my throat and stays there long enough that my pulse beats against his tongue.
"Come here," he says, and his voice is low and entirely private, the register that belongs only to rooms with no audience.
He brings me to the bed with the Las Vegas skyline blazing through the glass wall behind us — the whole impossible glittering city, indifferent and brilliant, and he lays me down against it like I'm something he's been carrying for a long time and has finally found somewhere to put.
He takes his time.
This is the thing I couldn't have calculated — that under all the cold precision, under the methodology and the control, what exists is this patient, devastating focus.
He moves down my body like he has hours and intends to use them, like learning this is the only task.
His mouth traces my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder.
He finds the places that make me catch my breath and stays with them, unhurried, until I'm pulling his hair to move him along and he simply holds position and waits for me to stop.
"Aleksei—"
"I have you." Against my ribs. "Let me."
His mouth finds my breast and I stop pulling his hair.
His tongue circles my nipple — slow, deliberate — and when I arch into it he makes a low sound of approval and takes more of me into his mouth, and the combination of suction and the edge of his teeth and the way his free hand is doing the same work on the other side makes my hips lift off the bed without my permission.
He presses me back down with a palm flat on my stomach and continues, unhurried, switching sides only when the first breast is too sensitive to bear and the second is aching for the same attention.
"You're—" I lose the sentence when his teeth graze.
"Yes," he says against my skin. "I know."
His mouth travels lower. The plane of my stomach.
The crest of my hipbone, which he bites — actually bites, a sharp bright point of pressure that makes me gasp and then dissolves into the heat of his tongue soothing the mark.
I will find bruises there tomorrow. I will find the shape of his mouth in purple on my hip and the thought does something to me that it probably shouldn't.
The swallow tattoo sits below my ribs, right under my heart.
He finds it with his mouth and stops. Traces it once with his tongue and then covers it with his palm — flat and warm, the full weight of his hand.
I watch his face while he does it. Something is happening in his expression that isn't clinical and isn't assessment.
It's acknowledgment. The specific gravity of a man who knows exactly what he took and is choosing not to look away from that.
"I know," I say, though he hasn't spoken.
He lifts his head and looks at me and whatever the expression is, it doesn't have a word in any language I've learned so far.
He continues down.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my underwear and draws them off with the same care he used for the dress — no tearing, no rush, just the slow revelation of skin.
He looks at me, all of me, spread across his bed with the city blazing at my back, and the look on his face is the one I saw in the kitchen: a man making a file entry he intends to keep.
"Aleksei. You're staring."
"Yes." No apology. No deflection. "I am."
He lowers himself between my thighs and I feel his breath against me, warm and close, and then his hands on my knees, pushing them apart, opening me to him.
The vulnerability of the position — naked on his bed, legs spread, him still half-dressed above me — should terrify me.
Instead it feels like the first honest thing that's happened between us since October.
His mouth finds the inside of my thigh and he kisses his way inward, slowly, deliberately, avoiding the place I want him most until I'm making sounds that aren't words and my hands are back in his hair and I'm pulling.
"Patience," he says against my skin.
"I've been patient since October."
He makes a sound that might be agreement and might be satisfaction and then his mouth finds me, and the sound I make is not dignified.
He knows what he's doing. The kitchen gave him data and he's using it — the exact pressure, the exact rhythm, the exact alternation between broad strokes of his tongue and focused attention that he learned would unmake me.
But he's not repeating the kitchen. He's building on it.
His tongue circles and his fingers slide inside me — two this time, curling forward to find the spot he found before, and when he does my hips lift off the bed and he presses me back down with his free arm across my pelvis and doesn't stop.
"You're doing that on purpose," I manage.
He lifts his mouth just long enough to say, "Everything I do is on purpose," and the vibration of his voice against me is almost enough to finish it right there.
Then his mouth returns and his fingers find a rhythm and the combination of inside and outside, pressure and friction, the specific curl of his knuckles — it builds like a wave I can see coming from a long way off and can do nothing about.
"Look at me," he says. "Sofia. Look at me."
I do. His eyes are dark above the plane of my stomach, watching me come apart, watching what he's doing to me register on my face in real time.
The eye contact breaks the last thread of my control.
I come with his name fractured across my teeth and my thighs tightening against his ears and my hands gripping his hair hard enough to hurt, and he doesn't stop — works me through the peak and the oversensitivity, his tongue gentler now but still there, still moving, pulling the last pulses of it out of me until I physically have to push his head away.
He rises, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His expression is the one I'm learning to recognize — satisfaction and hunger in equal measure, composure deliberately suspended.
"Again," he says. Not a question.
"Again yourself," I say, and reach for his belt.
The leather gives under my hands. I push his trousers and boxers down together and he kicks them aside.
His cock is hard against his stomach — has been hard, I realize, the whole time, without him once rushing toward his own finish — and the sight of him fully naked, the lean lines of his body, the evidence of his arousal thick and flushed against his abdomen, reorganizes several thoughts I was trying to have.
I wrap my hand around him. He's thick enough that my fingers don't meet, hot and smooth in my palm, and the sound he makes when I grip him — a sharp exhale, his composure cracking along a specific fault line — is the most satisfying thing I've heard in months.
"Sofia."
I stroke him slowly. Learning the weight. The texture. The way his jaw tightens when I pass my thumb over the head and find the moisture there and spread it down the shaft. His hand closes over mine — not stopping me, just contact. Just the need to touch while I touch.
"Tell me," I say. "Tell me what you want."
The reversal hangs in the air. His eyes meet mine. For a moment he's still — the man who always has the answer, being asked the question — and then something shifts and he says, quietly: "Your mouth."
I shift on the bed. He reads the movement and adjusts, lying back against the pillows, and I follow him — my mouth tracing down his chest the way his traced down mine, finding the places that change his breathing: the hollow of his throat, the line of his collarbone, the scar at his ribs which I kiss without asking.
Then lower.
I take him in my hand and guide him to my mouth.
The first taste of him — salt and skin and the specific musk of his arousal — is something I've been thinking about since November, in the abstract way you think about things you're not sure you'll ever have.
I lick the length of him, base to tip, and his hand finds my hair. Not pushing. Just there.
I take him into my mouth.
The sound he makes is not a word in any language.
His hips lift slightly — involuntary, immediately checked — and I press a palm flat on his stomach and take him deeper, finding the rhythm his breathing asks for.
My tongue works the underside. My hand handles what my mouth can't reach.
He says something in Russian, low and fractured, and I recognize enough of it to know it's not meant for translation.