Eighteen
Arseny
For a moment, I stand there in the hallway, breathing heavily as if I’ve just sprinted. “Blyad’,” I mutter to the empty corridor, dragging a hand down my face. I can still taste him. “You’re fucked now, detka,” I whisper to myself.
The air out here is cold, but I feel like I’m burning up.
My back’s pressed to the wall, and all I can see when I close my eyes is the look on his face right before he kissed me.
It’s not like the first time. This one was deliberate, premeditated even.
He hunted me down, waited for me between the crates and racks, with all that righteous British fury pulsing under his skin.
And then... his hands were all over me.
A shove into the racks, and my laugh died halfway out of my throat when his mouth crashed into mine. I didn't question it; I just grabbed hold and answered him with my tongue down his throat.
His kiss was intense, as if he were trying to win some invisible battle. There were teeth, tongue, and that little caught sound in his chest he made the first time I bit his lip. His fingers dug into my shirt like he was trying to climb inside me.
I push off the wall slowly. My heart is still going hard enough that I can feel it in my throat. My mouth is — well — wrecked. In a good way, but it’s still unacceptable.
He’s just a man. Yeah, just a man whose tongue you nearly swallowed. I snort at myself. Walk it off, Zakirov.
Men like him don’t let unresolved tension exist; it offends their sense of order. That’s why I threw gasoline on it every chance I got by ignoring him. And he stepped right into the trap. The best part is he still thinks it was his idea.
By the time I finish the bare minimum of “working” so no one can say I was lazy, the worst of the buzz is gone. The heat isn’t, but that I can manage.
The base feels different when you’re trying not to look guilty. Same shitty fluorescent lights, same scuffed floors, but everything is cranked up a notch now. Every person in my peripheral vision feels like they’re walking toward me. Every passing glance feels like it’s going on a report.
No one knows anything, I remind myself.
From the outside, we’re just two soldiers who don’t get along. That’s all anyone expects. A group of my guys come down the corridor, laughing at something. One of them — Petrov — tips his chin at me. “Sergeant, you look suspiciously happy,” he says. “Someone died?”
“Not yet,” I reply. “Why are you volunteering?” The others laugh, and Petrov flips me off, good-naturedly. It’s almost disappointingly simple to slip back into the role.
“Briefing in ten,” he adds as they pass. “Niko wants you there.”
“Of course he does,” I mutter. I take the stairs two at a time, more to bleed off energy than because I’m late. On the landing, I nearly collide with Niko himself. He stops dead and he reaches out instinctively to steady me by the arm.
“Whoa,” he says. “Where’s the fire?”
I freeze for a second, and he squints at me. “What?” I say, too fast.
He tilts his head, studying my face with infuriating big-brother accuracy. “You look...” He gestures vaguely at me. “Wired. Did you start drinking already?”
“Do I look stupid?” I say, offended.
He snorts. “That’s not a no.”
“I’m fine,” I add, rolling my shoulder out of his grip. “Just had an argument.”
“With who?” he asks, and then his eyes narrow in immediate suspicion. “If you say ‘with one of the British’, I’m going to have an aneurysm.”
“Relax,” I say, letting my mouth curl. “Your pet Lance Corporal is still alive.”
Niko makes a face. “He’s not my pet.”
“Mm,” I hum. “You talk about him a lot for someone who isn’t your pet.”
He opens his mouth to deny it, then seems to realise he’s walking into a trap, and scowls instead. “Whatever you’re doing, don’t,” he mutters under his breath. “Joint ops are headache enough without you starting an international incident.”
“Define ‘incident’,” I say. He glares. I pat his shoulder, infuriatingly gentle. “I’ll behave,” I promise.
He rolls his eyes. “You always say that right before you don’t.”
“Tell your pet to stop walking around looking like a kicked puppy, then,” I add. “It’s confusing.”
Niko’s brows knit together. “Is he?” he asks, genuinely worried. “I thought he was just British.”
I bark a laugh. If only you knew, solnyshko. “Don’t worry about it,” I say, moving past him. “If he breaks, I’ll glue him back together.”
Niko looks at me like that answer has not reassured him in the slightest. “Arseny,” he says warningly.
“I’m going to the briefing,” I sing-song, ignoring the way my name always sounds like I’m three and have jam on my face. “Try not to miss me too much.”
I leave him standing there in the corridor, rubbing at his temple like he’s already regretting bringing me within a hundred kilometres of his very serious joint operation.
Good. If I can keep Niko focused on ‘Ari is being a menace,’ he’s less likely to focus on ‘Ari is sleeping with one of your allies.’ Because I am.
Or I will be.
It’s a question of timing, not possibility.
The briefing is mercifully dull. I stand at the back again, absorbing just enough information to function, and translating the rest into mental white noise.
The Brits are on the left this time. Caiden’s in his usual spot; his posture is textbook, his eyes are fixed on the front, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think nothing had happened.
His face is perfectly neutral. However, when the CO says something particularly pointless about cohesion, and Niko cracks a joke that ripples the room, Caiden’s gaze flicks sideways, not to my brother anymore... but to me.
For a second, our eyes meet, and it’s like a spark hits me, making my mouth twitch. He doesn’t move, but a tiny bit of colour climbs up his neck, then he looks away quickly, back to the front.
Got you, detka.
You can run out of the room if you want to, but you can’t outrun wanting it.
For the rest of the briefing, I look at the map, at the CO, at my own nails — but I can feel him, like a heat source in the corner of my awareness.
When we’re finally dismissed, the room erupts in movement.
Chairs scrape, papers shuffle, and people shove past each other in the cramped space.
Caiden is swallowed by his unit’s cluster, heading toward the door in a tight little knot of khaki.
I let the crowd carry me the other way, out a side exit, feeling very smug.
By the time lights-out hits the barracks, the adrenaline has ebbed, but not by much. I lie back, fold an arm over my eyes, and the first thing that rises behind my eyelids is his mouth. It’s stupid. I’ve kissed plenty of people.
Men, women, combinations of both. I’ve had sex in alleyways, hotels, and once in the back of a stolen van. I know how this works. I know what I like; none of this is new. So why does the memory of his lips feel like someone’s hooked an electrical charge directly into my nervous system?
Maybe because of how hard he tried to fight it. Or maybe because he’s not some random stranger in a bar; he’s a soldier. Another uniform, another man who knows exactly how dangerous this is and did it anyway.
That might be it.
The mattress springs squeak as I shift out of restlessness. We have drills in the morning, but my body is stuck in some loop of replay — shed, shower, obstacle course, fight in the trees, armoury — his face at each escalation, from annoyed to confused to furious to... that.
Fuck.
It’s not just lust — don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of that. Every time I think about the way his breath hitched when I slid my thigh between his, I have to force my hips not to move.
But underneath is something nastier.
Curiosity, and the sick, sharp satisfaction of being right about him. Of seeing past the polished, promoted surface to whatever messy thing lives underneath. It’s addictive — which is exactly why I have to be careful. I know how this story ends for men like us.
It doesn’t end in houses and warm beds and ‘let’s move in together’ fantasies. That’s not my genre. That’s not my country. It ends in lies and distance if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, it ends like Kolya.
My chest pains just thinking of his name.
I found out what happened to him when I came back from leave. “Did you hear about Kolya?” Petrov had asked casually. We were in the smoking area, behind the motor pool.
“No,” I’d said. “What?”
“Shot on exercise,” he shrugged. “Accident. They say.”
I remember the exact feeling I had and the way my stomach dropped. “They say,” I’d repeated.
Petrov had glanced around, then leaned closer. “You know he was caught, in someone’s bunk, right?” he murmured. “After lights-out.” He’d made a crude gesture, like it was a funny story. “CO walked in. Two naked men, very surprised.”
I’d stared at him. “And then?” I’d asked, even though I knew.
“And then,” Petrov said. “Rumours. Suddenly he’s on an exercise he wasn’t supposed to go on.
Mist in the trees, poor visibility, such a tragedy.
Apparently, a stray bullet. Happens all the time, right?
” He’d flicked ash, not meeting my eyes.
He didn’t have to say the rest; no one in command liked having that kind of problem on their books.
Easier to let the forest solve it.
After that, Kolya’s name wasn’t spoken again. His locker was cleared fast, and his file was stamped in red with something bland and final. The official story was a training accident. The unofficial story was don’t get caught.
So, I don’t.
I have rules. Simple ones. No kissing where someone can walk in. No sex on base. No men who can’t walk away. No men I have to see every day in formation. And now here I am. On base. Kissing someone who sleeps two buildings away and walks past my brother every morning.
I promised Niko I’d be careful. The night he caught me drunk at eighteen, flirting with a boy in a bar in town.
He’d hauled me outside by the collar, rattling with terror and fury, and told me in no uncertain terms what happens to men like me in uniform.
He hadn’t used the slur everyone else uses — he never has — but the meaning was clear.
“You want to get yourself killed, fine,” he’d hissed in my face.
“But don’t make me stand over your body explaining to Maman why they can’t find your murderer. ”
So I’d promised — for him, more than for me — I’d be careful.
I’d be clever and keep any disasters contained to places without official paperwork.
I stayed mostly true to that. Bars, apartments, fleeting strangers who only knew me as the guy who gave them the best fuck of their lives and left before dawn.
This thing with Caiden? This is not contained. And still, when I think about the way he looked at me in the armoury, like he wanted to hit me and kiss me and maybe do both at once — I feel that stupid, traitorous curl of satisfaction in my gut.
I like aggression, control, and knowing I can push someone to the edge and hold them there until they beg. But this isn’t just about sex. This is about who he is when the control cracks — how he looks when he realises he wants me, and how he sounds when speaking my name.
I scrub a hand over my face, hard, until my skin stings. New rule, then. No sex on base. No being an idiot. No dying for British dick. I snort softly at my own phrasing, but the humour dies quickly.
I realise I’m going to have to tell him, eventually. If this goes past kissing in dark rooms and verbal sparring in the woods, he needs to know the stakes.
He thinks he understands risk.
He’s a soldier, he’s seen people blown apart, shot, bled out. But that’s clean danger. Honest danger. Nothing like this quiet, hateful kind that looks like ‘friendly fire’ on a report and whispers ‘good riddance’ behind closed doors.
He grew up in the UK, where it’s... not entirely safe, but safer, where you can — in theory — live long enough to marry your boyfriend and argue over curtains.
Here, a commander who doesn’t like the way you look at another man can just put your name on a list and let gravity and bad weather handle the rest.
I turn onto my side with my face to the wall, and stare at the cracked paint inches from my nose. Maybe it’s just heat and boredom, and in a month, all that will remain is a memory of his mouth and an itch under my skin when someone mentions his name.
Then I think about my cabin — the one an hour away, with no neighbours for miles. I think about him there instead of here — no chains of command, barracks, or weapons rooms that smell like state-sanctioned death.
Just him, me and a bed that doesn’t squeak when you breathe.
I close my eyes, replaying the armoury one last time, and the sound he made when I nipped his lip. He can’t stay away. Now we see how far he’s willing to go. My hand curls into the blanket to stop it from doing anything stupid, like sliding down my own body and making this even worse.
Tomorrow, I’ll be normal. I’ll spar too hard, call him names, look at Niko like nothing’s changed and roll my eyes when he nags me about diplomacy.
But tonight, in the dark, I let myself imagine his mouth again, but only for a little while. Then I picture Kolya’s easy grin, his file stamped ‘accident,’ and the imaginary bullet that could so easily have my name on it if I’m sloppy.
Somewhere between wanting and warning, I drift off, one thought looping stubbornly in the back of my mind.
You’re mine now, Caiden Varrik.
And I’m going to have to find a way to keep that from killing us both.