Twenty-Nine #2
“Never,” I say before I can stop myself.
I feel him smile against my hair. “Good.” He rolls away first, untangling us with a sleepy sort of efficiency, dragging the blanket with him, exposing his skin to the cold air.
I grab for it on instinct. “Oi,” I protest. He swings his legs out of bed and stands, gloriously naked, stretching like a smug bastard, red marks standing out on his arse, chest, and neck.
I sit up slowly, wincing, and hauling the blanket up around my waist. Every muscle in my body protests in sympathy.
My lower back complains, and my thighs are going to be a problem later.
It’s not a bad hurt. It’s just... very noticeable.
He glances back over his shoulder, takes in the way I’m moving, and grins.
“You look like you’ve been hit by a tank. ”
“I feel like I’ve been hit by a tank,” I mutter. “Several times.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, smug as hell. I throw a pillow at him, and he dodges, laughing, and vanishes into the tiny bathroom.
I take the opportunity to breathe.
Okay. He doesn’t seem... weird. No post-sex regret or shift in behaviour. Still smirking and cocky, which helps a bit. I can do this. I can keep this normal. It’s just physical, fun, compartmentalised. The rest can sit quietly in the corner and keep its damn mouth shut.
I stand up, very carefully, and start gathering clothes.
I pull on my briefs, then the joggers I brought in my bag, and finally an oversized T-shirt.
The chill in the air creeps into my bones.
The cabin is small but genuinely cosy, once the fire’s going.
For now, the remnants of last night’s heat cling to the room.
The bathroom door opens, and steam rolls out. He appears in the doorway with a towel slung low on his hips, his hair damp and messy, and my brain buffers again. He pauses when he sees me staring and his mouth curves. “You like?” he asks.
“No,” I lie.
“You’re such a bad liar,” he says cheerfully, brushing past me to the tiny wardrobe. He doesn’t bother closing the towel properly, causing me to look away, which is stupid, because I’ve already seen every inch of him. But last night was last night, and this is daylight — different rules.
“You can go next,” he says. “Before the hot water gives up. Turn the dial all the way to the left, or it screams.”
“Of course it does,” I say under my breath, grabbing my wash bag.
The shower is small but hot, and I brace my palms on the tile and let the water beat into my sore muscles, my head tipped forward.
It feels so good; I could stay there all day.
I close my eyes and instantly see him above me, sweat-slick and flushed, his mouth open on a curse.
Heat punches straight through me. “Fuck,” I say softly, and thump my head lightly against the tile.
Don’t start what you can’t quietly finish, Varrik.
When I come out, scrubbed pink and feeling marginally more human, he’s in the kitchenette, barefoot, wearing joggers and one of my T-shirts.
He’s already managed to get the gas stove working, and the smell of something frying hits me.
Eggs, bread, all toasting in a pan. He glances over as I towel my hair dry. “Good. You didn’t drown.”
“Disappointed?” I ask.
“A little. Would’ve been a very dramatic funeral,” he says. “Tragic British soldier, dead in shower, killed by Russian plumbing.”
“You’re the worst.”
“You say that like it’s news.” He flicks a look down my body, then back to the pan. “Sit. You look like you’re going to fall over.” I sink into the chair at the minuscule table.
He moves easily in the tiny space, utterly at home. God knows how many half-legal cabins he’s stashed around this country. Watching him do something as normal as cook should be jarring, but it isn’t. It’s nice. Such a dangerous word.
“Didn’t know you could cook,” I say.
He shrugs one shoulder, then flips the eggs with an unnecessary flick of the wrist. Show-off. “I can make eggs and not die of food poisoning. It’s enough.”
“That’s more than most blokes in my unit,” I admit.
He smirks. “Congratulations. You’ve upgraded.”
He sets a mug of coffee in front of me. It’s strong and dark and exactly how I take it. “You guessed.”
“I paid attention,” he corrects. “You always put more coffee in than the others. Facial expression very serious. Like bomb disposal.”
“You’re unbelievable,” I say, huffing a quiet laugh.
He slides a plate over. Eggs, toast, and something that might be sausage.
It smells amazing. My stomach remembers it exists, and we eat in relative silence for a few minutes.
Well, I eat. He inhales his food like someone’s going to take it away.
It’s weirdly endearing. Every so often, our knees bump under the table.
He doesn’t move his away, and neither do I. It feels... domestic.
That’s a problem.
If we were still in fight mode — taunts, shoves, nearly breaking each other’s noses in the name of training — then this would be simple. I know how to manage conflict. I do not know how to manage this — a man making me breakfast like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
He finishes first, drops his fork, sits back, and just looks at me. “What?” I ask around a mouthful of toast.
“You are thinking very loudly,” he says.
“I’m not thinking anything,” I lie.
He snorts. “You keep saying that, and one day I will believe you. Today is not that day.” I roll my eyes and focus on my plate, but I can still feel him watching me. It makes heat crawl up the back of my neck.
“So,” he says eventually. “We have the whole day. No one to yell at us. No duties. No idiots. What do you want to do, detka?”
‘You’ is what my treacherous brain supplies. “Dunno,” I say instead. “What do you usually do out here?”
He shrugs. “Sometimes I read. Sometimes I sharpen knives. Sometimes I sleep. Very thrilling life.”
“You have books?” I ask, genuinely surprised.
He rolls his eyes. “Yes, Caiden, I do read. I even move my lips less than you do when I do it.”
I flip him off automatically. “What kind?”
He eyes me, then nods toward the shelf by the fireplace. “Go see.”
After we’ve cleared the plates — him rinsing, me drying — our shoulders bumping together in the cramped space, we gravitate that way.
I half-expect dusty military manuals or something equally as grim.
Instead, I find a weird mix. There are battered Russian paperbacks, a few English titles, spy novels, some American thrillers, and a copy of The Master and Margarita in English and Russian side by side.
Then I see a small poetry collection, dog-eared to hell, and I pull one out.
“You read poetry?” I ask, genuinely perplexed.
He shrugs, looking faintly defensive. “Sometimes. When my brain won’t shut up. It’s… quiet.” He takes the book out of my hand, flips the book open to a page, glances down, then snaps it shut again and shoves it back on the shelf. “Not that one,” he mutters.
I file that away in the mental filing cabinet for later.
We spend the morning not doing much of anything, which is apparently the point.
He sprawls on the short sofa by the fire, his feet in my lap, flipping through a book.
I pretend to read one of his English paperbacks, but I keep losing my place because every time he moves, my entire body screams at me.
Later, we go for a walk in the snow and he steals my beanie because he ‘forgot’ his own.
The air is sharp and clean, he points out animal tracks and tiny prints disappearing into the trees.
We end up throwing snow at each other like a pair of kids — he cheats, obviously.
I end up with snow down my neck, and he laughs so hard he almost falls over.
Back at the cabin, we thaw out in front of the fire. He insists I take the chair closest to it, muttering something about ‘fragile British bones.’ I pretend to be offended, but I don’t move.
At some point in the afternoon, my brain stops buzzing quite so loudly.
The constant low-grade panic that’s been humming under my skin for years quiets to something like...
background noise. I catch myself just watching him, the way his face softens when he’s concentrating on something small — like pulling a loose thread on his sleeve — and the way he hums under his breath, off-key, to some Russian song I don’t know.
He gets this tiny frown line between his eyebrows when he’s thinking about nothing in particular.
It hits me then, as I’m washing two mugs in the tiny sink and he’s behind me, fiddling with the radio with some fuzzy Russian station crackling in and out.
I could do this.
Not just the sex, the whole thing. Waking up in the same bed, arguing over who burned the eggs, him stealing my clothes, calling me names and translating poems at me in that rough voice.
I could be... his?
“Hey,” he says behind me. His knuckles brush the back of my arm as he reaches over to turn the tap off because I’ve just been standing there watching the water run like an idiot. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere.” My voice is too quiet. I clear my throat. “Just thinking.”
“Don’t,” he says automatically. “Very dangerous.” He nudges my shoulder with his. “Come on. You’re hogging the sink.” We bump shoulders again, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. That’s what scares me. The natural things are what you miss when they’re gone.
He herds me around with a hand on the back of my neck, guiding me out of his way to reach for a towel. It’s stupid how good that feels.
I realise, with a kind of horrible clarity, that this is going to destroy me. The thought makes my vision blur for a second. You don’t have to think about it now, a traitor part of me whispers. You have today. Maybe tomorrow. Take it.
I swallow hard and nod at nothing.