Chapter 17 #2
“You look,” he says slowly, searching my face, “like you’ve been holding your breath for years.”
A disbelieving laugh leaves me then. “I have.”
He closes his eyes briefly at that, and when they open again, there’s too much in them for me to look at cleanly. So, I don’t. I look at his mouth instead, bruised from earlier, still a little swollen, and brush my thumb across the split there before I can stop myself.
His hand catches mine and turns it, pressing a kiss to the inside of my wrist so quickly it almost feels unconscious.
My knees nearly give out.
That specific tenderness from him, that quick, thoughtless reverence, is so tied to before that it knocks loose another memory in me before I can defend against it.
My wrist in his hand in the dark, his mouth there. The whisper of Prince against my pulse. The smell of smoke, vodka, and him. The way he used to look at me when the rest of the world dropped away, and he forgot to hate me for half a night.
His forehead drops to mine. His hand is still at the nape of my neck, thumb moving once, absently and devastatingly tender.
“My king,” he says, voice wrecked and all wrong for my pulse. “I’ve missed you.”
The words are simple; the damage they do is not. My entire body responds before dignity gets a vote. He notices instantly, and a dark, pleased little look flashes through his eyes before he softens it into something almost reverent, and that somehow makes it worse.
I laugh once, but the sound catches on the edge of tears. “That’s not fair.”
His eyes search mine. The old pale blue is darker tonight, blown wide and aching, so open that, for one terrifying second, I can see every missing year reflected in them.
“Nothing about us ever was,” he says.
Then he kisses me again.
This one is slower. Now the urgency is layered with recognition, and recognition is sometimes more devastating than desperation. I let my mouth move over his like I’m relearning something holy by touch.
He takes his time too, as if he’s testing every angle, every pressure, searching for old familiarity and finding enough of it to shake him. Our breaths mingle. Our hands map each other with the kind of aching care that belongs to men who lost years and know it.
We cross the room in fragments of contact.
A kiss against my mouth. Another on my cheekbone. When the backs of my knees hit the edge of the bed, we both stop at once. Nikolaj pulls back so we can look each other in the eye.
“Nikolaj,” I whisper, and his eyes close for one brief second, as if hearing that out loud physically hurts him.
When they open again, he pushes me down on the bed, slides both hands up to frame my face, and holds me as if I might break. That, more than the kisses, more than the nickname, more than the room and the invitation and the five long months, nearly undoes me.
“My king,” he says again, and this time the title is less teasing and more reverent than anything I ever would’ve expected from a man like him.
I lean forward and kiss him first for once. He makes that same rough sound into my mouth, like surprise and relief collided at speed, and his hands tighten on my face.
The kiss turns messy quickly, because of course it does. We don’t know how to want gently. We never did. Even now, with all this care running under it, there’s still desperation in the seams.
My heart is hammering hard enough to hurt. His too, when my hand slips to the center of his chest and feels it there.
When we part again, we stay close enough that our lips still brush when either of us speaks.
“I hated you for obeying me,” he says.
I let out a breath that might’ve been a laugh if it didn’t hurt so much. “I hated myself for it.”
His thumb strokes once under my eye, catching nothing yet and everything almost there. “You should’ve come anyway.”
“You asked me not to.”
“I know.”
The words land with all the misery they deserve.
I hook one finger under his jaw and make him meet my eyes fully. “Then stop punishing yourself for getting what you asked for.”
He gives me a look that says if I’m wise, I’ll shut up now. I’ve never been wise where he’s concerned, so I don’t.
“You needed time,” I say. “You took it. I hated every second of it, but I would’ve hated violating it more.”
He breathes hard through his nose, gaze pinned to mine. “You talk like I make sense.”
“You do, to me.”
That earns me another one of those rare, real smiles that make him look too much like the boy I lost and the man I found all at once.
He leans down until his forehead rests against mine and just breathes for a second. “I remember more now,” he says quietly.
My fingers tighten on his wrists before I can help it. “How much more?”
His mouth brushes mine when he speaks. “I remember enough to know I’ve been missing half my soul and calling it survival.”
I don’t know what to say to that. So, I do the only thing that has ever made sense between us. I pull him down and kiss him until speech stops mattering.
This time, he breaks first by making a low, shaking sound into my mouth that tells me he’s barely holding himself together under the weight of everything returning at once.
I wrap both arms around his neck and hold on while he leans into me, into the bed, into the moment, into every ugly, beautiful thing we’ve both been trying not to name since Bucharest. He kisses me like a man crawling home through fire.
When he finally rests his forehead against mine again, both of us are breathing hard.
“I don’t know how to do this right,” he says, and hearing that from Nikolaj—proud, brutal, impossible Nikolaj—might be the most honest thing he’s ever given me.
I thread my fingers through his hair and hold him there. “Neither do I.”
He laughs softly, wrecked and warm at once. “That’s reassuring.”
“It’s truthful.”
“Worse.”
“Usually.”
His mouth curves against mine.
“My King,” he says once more, stripped of any edge until it’s just truth, reverence, and devastation. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life making up for every second they took from us.”
My throat tightens around a laugh and a sob at once. “You’d better,” I whisper.
For tonight, for this one impossible, merciful stretch of time, there is no summit, no wife, no fathers, no ruined kings, no bloodlines, and no past except the one we’re finally allowed to touch together.
There is only Nikolaj above me, looking at me like he found his way back to something holy and terrible, and me beneath him, heartsick and alive enough to want.
And when he says My King again against my mouth, I know with brutal, useless certainty that I was never going anywhere else.