9. Cass #2
When his fingers touch the bare skin of my thigh crease, he hisses. I do, too. Both of us are suddenly taut and straining.
His eyes search mine. Whatever he finds there must satisfy him, because his hand keeps going, inching up under the thin cotton of my gown until his fingertips brush somewhere much more interesting than the crease of my thigh.
My hips promptly spring off the mattress.
“Shh,” he murmurs. His mouth is still an inch from mine, not kissing, just breathing against me. “Quiet, dikarka . There’s a nurse on the other side of the curtain.”
“Then don’t make me?—”
“I absolutely will make you.” His fingers tease up and down my swollen lips. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
I bite down on my own lip. He takes that as an invitation to press harder, to part me and find exactly how ready for him I already am. When his middle finger pushes inside, I whine into the crook of his arm.
“Look at me,” he orders.
I can’t do it. I shake my head against the pillow.
“Cassandra. Look at me.”
That second one isn’t a request. I open my eyes.
“Good girl,” he murmurs.
Raymond says those same two words and they make me want to peel my own skin off. Matvei says them and I feel it everywhere, low and crackling like heat lightning, at the base of my spine and the tips of my fingers and the arches of my feet. They bring me to life.
“Don’t—” I gasp. “Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?”
“Because he says it.”
Something hot flares behind his eyes. He adds a second finger and I forget every single word I’ve ever known in any language.
“Then I’ll say it until you forget he ever did,” he tells me. “Good girl. Ride my hand.”
He crooks his fingers, and my hips chase on their own, lifting off the mattress to meet him. He doesn’t move his hand much. Or at all, really. Something about the way he stays perfectly still and forces me to pursue my own pleasure is insanely erotic.
I roll against his palm. The scratchy hospital blanket drags against my bare legs. His thumb finds exactly where I need it, and I have to shove my fist against my mouth to keep from making a sound that would bring the whole ER running.
“Look at you,” he whispers, and there’s wonder in his voice, a hungry, savage kind of awe. “Do you know how long it’s been? Six weeks, Cassandra. For six weeks, I’ve been wondering where you are. And now, I have you. Soaking my hand in a hospital bed.”
“Please—”
“Please, what?”
“Please don’t stop.”
“I’m not going to stop.” He drops his forehead against mine, careful of the stitches. “Not until you cum for me. Now.”
And, because he told me to, I do.
It happens fast and not pretty. I clamp my thighs around his wrist and shake. My mouth opens against my own fist and a thin sound comes out, a wet little whine. My eyes stay on his. They have to. He told me to, and I would never dream of disobeying someone who could make me feel this good.
I shake and stutter and drool for a long half-minute.
When it’s finally over, Matvei eases his fingers out of me with the same careful slowness he put them in with. For a split second, I’m stupid enough to believe that that’ll be the end of it.
All I needed was a little taste. Enough to tide me over. Enough to send him back out the curtain and me back to my fucked-up dumpster fire of a life.
Wrong.
Dead wrong.
The second his hand leaves me, I want it back.
I want more of it.
I want all of it.
My whole body feels like a struck tuning fork, still humming. Heat pulses between my legs where his fingers were, and instead of fading, it’s getting louder.
I crane my neck past his shoulder toward a thin gap in the curtain. No shadows moving out there. No footsteps. It’s quiet and dark, broken only by the occasional cough or beep of a machine.
Fuck it.
I reach over and flatten my palm over the front of his pants.
He’s so hard it feels unfair, like maybe I should apologize to him on behalf of all the world’s zippers. Sorry that YKK’s finest isn’t enough to contain you.
He sucks in a breath through his teeth. His hips jerk forward into my hand before he can stop himself. His eyes close for a second. When they open again, they’ve gone almost black.
“You’re going to get us caught,” he warns.
“Probably.”
He tilts his head to look at me. “Can you be quiet?”
I consider the question honestly. Then I remember the sounds I made when his fingers first pushed inside me and the ones I made when he took them out. On a good day, I’m a woman who cannot keep her mouth shut about anything—and today is definitely not a good day.
“Probably not,” I admit.
He huffs a laugh. Then he straightens up just enough to pull a black, rolled-up tie out from his jacket pocket. “Open,” he orders.
“Matvei—”
“I said open your fucking mouth , dikarka. ”
I do as he says.
He feeds it between my teeth as if it’s a horse bit. The silk tastes like he smells: woodsy, dark, cool, male.
“That’s perfect,” he says, pleased with himself. “Now, bite down if you need to. But remember the one rule: Don’t you dare make a noise.”
I bite down experimentally. The silk gives between my teeth in the most satisfying way.
“Good girl,” he whispers, and this time, I don’t tell him not to say it. I just whimper around the gag and reach for him again.
He lets me fumble at his belt for about three seconds before he gets impatient and does it himself, one-handed. The other hand is back under my gown, two fingers pushed deep, working me open while he flicks his buckle loose and pops the button of his slacks.
I make a needy whine around the silk.
“Shh.” He presses his mouth to the unbruised side of my face. “None of that. You want the whole hospital to know you’re about to get fucked behind a curtain?”
His fingers leave me. I whine again around the gag, loud enough that his palm comes up and clamps over my mouth on top of the silk. His eyes, though, are laughing at me.
“One more sound out of you and I’m putting my clothes back on and walking out of here,” he threatens, though I don’t believe him at all. “Do you understand me?”
I nod.
“Good girl.”
He rips the blanket aside, then tugs me by the waist until I’m half-off the bed, ass hovering in the air. He shoves the hospital gown up my hips until I’m bare before him. Then he steps closer to the bed, spreads my knees apart with one hand, and lines himself up against me.
I feel the blunt head of him drag twice through the mess he’s made of me. On the third pass, he guides it in.
My whole back arches off the mattress. Thank God I’m not hooked up to any heart rate monitor, because my stats right now might melt the machine.
The only thing that registers is Matvei’s hand on my hip, holding me down so I don’t buck, and the slow, aching, perfect stretch of him filling me up.
He pauses halfway. “Breathe through your nose,” he orders. “Look at me.”
I do. Tears leak out the corners of my eyes—not sad ones, just overwhelmed ones—and he watches them track into my hair. That look in his eyes, it’s like watching someone stare at a wedding cake. As if he can’t believe something so delicate and beautiful exists…
… and he also can’t wait to fucking wreck it with his mouth and bare hands.
“There she is,” he whispers. “There’s my filthy girl. Taking it so well.” My eyes flutter closed, but he snaps, “No. Eyes on me. The whole time.”
He sinks the rest of the way in.
I bite down on the silk tie so hard my jaw aches. He’s too much, and yet exactly enough. My hands fly up and clutch the front of his shirt. I need something to hold onto or I’ll float clean off the gurney.
Matvei bends over me, one forearm braced on the pillow by my head, the other gripping my thigh and holding it against his hip. He starts to move.
Slow, at first. Deep. Each thrust pushes a little huff of breath out of me that catches on the silk gag. I can feel his stomach muscles working against my belly where my gown has ridden up. I can feel the cool metal of his belt buckle, still half-hanging off him, knocking against my thigh.
“Look at you,” he breathes into my ear. “Whining for my cock. Letting me fuck you with his ring on your finger.”
My eyes sting. He sees it and kisses the shell of my ear.
“That wasn’t a complaint, dikarka . It was a compliment. Do you know how brave you are? Do you know how brave this is?”
I shake my head.
“Braver than any of the men at that bar where we met. Every single one.” He thrusts harder. My head knocks back against the pillow. “You came in there with fifty grand and a death wish, looking like that . And now, you’re here, spasming on my cock, looking like this. ”
A whimper climbs up my throat and dies against the silk.
“Good girl. Good girl. So fucking good for me.”
Each bit of praise settles somewhere soft and starved inside me. I’ve gone four years without hearing a kind word that didn’t come wrapped in a threat or accompanied with a side serving of backhand. Matvei’s praise feels like sunlight on a face that’s been underground too long.
I clench around him and his whole body goes rigid. He hisses through his teeth.
“Do that again and I’m going to cum before you do. And that’s not how this is going to go.”
I do it again, on purpose, because I am a brat and also because I want to see what he does when pushed.
What he does is pin my hip to the mattress, angle me up, and start fucking me in earnest, taking all the control out of my hands.
The gurney doesn’t squeak. Small miracles. But the mattress shifts under me and my breath saws hot around the tie. I can’t bring myself to care about that, though, not when Matvei is above me, around me, inside me, and the rest of the world has ceased to matter.
“Filthy thing,” he pants against my temple. “Soaking the sheets in a hospital bed. With a nurse a few feet away. You like that, don’t you? You like being a secret?”
I nod frantically.
“Of course you do. Nobody’s ever seen the real you, have they?”
I shake my head.
“I see you, Cassandra.” His mouth drags along the hinge of my jaw, the only part of my face he’s allowed to touch. “I see the real you, and I’ve decided she’s mine .”
I clench around him so hard that he curses in Russian and has to stop moving for a second, forehead pressed to my collarbone, shoulders heaving.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he breathes. “Alright. Alright.”
He lifts his head. His dark hair has flopped down in his eyes. There’s a flush high on his pale cheekbones that I don’t think anyone else in this hospital or maybe even this planet has ever been lucky enough to see.
“You’re going to cum on my cock now,” he informs me. “And then you’re going to clench around me again until I fill you all the way up. Nod if you understand.”
I nod so hard my stitches groan under the stress.
He drops a hand between us. His thumb finds my clit. He doesn’t rub so much as press, firm and circular, while he fucks me at a pace that is not remotely sustainable for anyone involved.
“Come on, dikarka . Give it to me. Come on, pretty girl. Pretty, brave, perfect, reckless girl. Come for me.”
All of those words are perfect and any one of them might be responsible for the fireworks that follow.
Whichever culprit did the trick becomes irrelevant, though, as my body locks up and my eyes fix on his and I shatter around him with the silk clamped between my teeth, his name moaned breathlessly behind it.
He fucks me through every pulse until I’m boneless and drooling. Then, when the flutters of my orgasm make me clench around him, he does exactly as he promised: slams into me until we’re flush hip-to-hip and unleashes everything he has.
I don’t know how long we stay like that. Him buried in me, me soaked through under him, both of us breathing hard around the silk tie still wedged between my teeth.
Eventually, he eases out of me. “I know,” he croons when he sees me wince. “I feel it, too.”
He works the tie out from between my teeth and sets it on the little wheeled table. My jaw aches. He notices that, too, and presses his thumb gently against the hinge of it, rubbing small circles until it loosens up.
Then he grabs a handful of paper towels from the dispenser by the sink. He runs them under warm water and tests the temperature on the inside of his own wrist before he brings them to me.
Kneeling, he cleans me up between my legs. Then he tugs my gown back down over my knees and pulls the blanket up to my waist.
When I’m back the way he found me—I mean, more or less—he bends and brushes his lips across my forehead above the stitches. “I’ll see you soon, Cassandra.”
I start to ask how, when, What does that mean ?—
But the curtain is already rustling shut behind him.