Thirty-Five
Caiden
Today is the day for problems. The most annoying problem currently is that Ari and I have ruined normal touches for ourselves.
Everything means something now. I’m in the gym — it always ends up being the gym.
Because it’s one of the only places on base where everyone expects men to be sweating, grunting, and furious.
No one looks twice at the tension in that room.
I’m wiping my hands down, trying to focus on literally anything else, when I feel him behind me.
I glance up into the mirror, and there he is.
Arseny Zakirov. Hair tied back and sleeves shoved up.
Forearms like carved stone, with that expression he has when he’s about to be a problem.
He catches my eyes in the mirror and holds them.
He gives me that steady, unnerving look that makes my stomach drop and my pulse jump.
He steps close, like he’s reaching past me for the dumbbells, and his shoulder brushes mine. My body betrays me, sending a chill up my spine. He leans in, barely, so his mouth is near my ear.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he whispers, low enough that it’s just me who hears.
“Like what?” I whisper back.
“Like you are going to snap.”
My mouth goes dry, and I hate that he can see it. I hate that he’s right even more. I force a laugh. “You’re imagining things.”
His hand comes up to adjust my grip on the bar; it’s nothing that anyone would think of as strange in a gym.
A correction, if anything. A teaching moment.
A completely normal thing. Except for his fingers curling around mine, the movement makes the back of my neck prickle.
“Mm,” he says, like he doesn’t believe me.
Then, calm as sin. “Come.” It’s one word.
But it makes something squeeze inside me like a rope tightening.
I should say no, especially now, but instead, I follow him out a few minutes later like I’m under orders, because maybe I am.
Maybe I always have been.
He takes the service corridor behind the gym — it’s less foot traffic, more concrete, pipes, and shadow — stops at a storage door and pulls it open. He steps inside without looking back. I follow behind, and the door shuts behind me.
The air is cooler in here. It smells like dust, oil and metal. The kind of place you’d forget existed unless you had a reason to hide. Ari turns and leans back against a shelf like he’s got all the time in the world, waiting for me to come to him. “Are you insane?” I whisper.
“Yes,” he says, lifting one shoulder.
“Someone could—” he crosses the distance in two steps. No warning, no ramp-up. One hand on the back of my neck, fingers sliding into my hair, and his mouth on mine like he’s been waiting to do it properly. My hands lift on instinct, grabbing him, pulling him closer like I’m starving.
Because I am.
Because the second his mouth touches mine, my brain goes blessedly quiet.
I make a sound I hate myself for, but he hears it anyway, his mouth curves against mine — so fucking smug.
His other hand slides to my waist, pulling me flush, and for one sharp second, my whole body lights up.
Then he breaks the kiss, not because he wants to, but because he has to.
He keeps his forehead pressed to mine; his eyes locked on my mouth like it’s a problem he’s trying not to solve.
His thumb brushes my jaw. “You’re going to kill me,” I whisper.
He huffs a laugh, quietly. “You are dramatic.”
“Don’t pretend you’re not feeling it.”
His eyes flick up to mine. “I feel everything,” he says. Then he kisses me again, shorter, rougher, like he’s cutting himself off before he does something reckless.
He pulls away and steps back enough to put air between us. Enough to remind me we’re on base, not in a cabin where the world can’t reach us.
I grab his wrists and shove him back into the shelving, just needing to feel him under my hands. As his back hits the metal, he gasps, just once, and it’s enough to light me up. “Shhh,” I whisper. “Someone could hear.”
“Let them,” he murmurs, and then his mouth is on mine again.
This one isn’t careful at all. It’s teeth, heat and frustration, his hands gripping my hips like he’s holding himself back from doing worse.
I feel the press of him against me; it’s unmistakable, and it nearly wrecks me on the spot. “Fuck,” he breathes, sounding strained.
I tilt my head, my mouth nibbling his neck. “We should stop.”
“Yes,” he says immediately, while his hand slides under my shirt, and his palm is now flat against my lower back. I keep nibbling his throat, his Adam’s apple, his jaw.
“This is stupid,” I mutter.
“Yes,” he repeats. His mouth finds mine, kissing me more slowly now, lingering in a way that feels almost intimate, and more dangerous. He kisses me like he’s memorising, not taking. I close my eyes and let myself feel it without tipping over.
This is the line. We both know it. The sharp, stupid edge where everything tips from, we can survive this to we absolutely will not.
His fingers flex once at my back. Then he pushes me away gently.
That alone tells me how bad it was getting. I take another step back, and he runs a hand through his hair, as if he’s furious at himself. When he looks at me again, the fire is still there, but it’s controlled, boxed up. “We can’t do that here,” he says.
“Then why did you start it?”
His eyes flick up. “Because you looked at me like... that.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “So, stop doing it.” The silence stretches between us, and I straighten my shirt while he adjusts his. We put ourselves back together like two people pretending this hasn’t already gone too far. Then he walks over to the door and opens it. “Don’t follow me,” he says quietly.
I frown. “Why?”
“Because if you do,” he says, his voice low in a way that makes my chest ache, “I won’t stop next time.” Then walks out the door, and he’s gone.
I stand there alone in the stairwell afterwards, my pulse still racing, my skin buzzing where he touched me, thinking. This isn’t restraint; this is foreplay stretched over weeks and it’s going to end badly, one way or another.
The notice board outside admin is crowded.
Men are stopping and starting in front of it like it’s nothing more than a rota, another list of names.
I wasn’t looking for anything — okay, that's a lie. I knew what I would see before my eyes locked in on my name. Below are the departure date, time, and location. It doesn’t feel like I thought it would.
It’s like a hollow... click. Or a door shutting somewhere deep inside me.
Ten days. That’s all that’s left.
Ten days to pretend it’s not already over.
Later, I’m halfway back to my bunk when I hear my name behind me. “Varrik.” I stop and turn. Ari is standing at the far end of the corridor, half in the shadow, arms folded as if he’s been waiting there a while. No one else is around, and my heart jumps straight into my throat.
He jerks his chin once; it’s a silent ‘come here.’ When I’m close enough, he speaks without looking at me. “Motorpool. Twenty minutes. After lights out.”
That’s it, no explanation, reassurance, or “are you okay?” No mention of the schedule that’s currently making my insides twist and turn. “Ari...”
He finally looks at me then; his eyes are unreadable. “Don’t be late,” he says quietly. Then he turns and walks away, already disappearing back into the base like he didn’t just knock the air out of my lungs.
I stand there for a second with my heart pounding and my brain scrambling to catch up. This is stupid and reckless. This is exactly how everything with him works. As I head back toward my bunk to wait it out, a thought settles in the back of my mind.
He knows.
He’s seen the posting.
By the time I reach the motor pool, I’m already wound tight and feeling the nerves. This isn’t new; it’s routine. We’ve been doing this for weeks now, finding the spaces no one bothers to check twice; the gaps between orders and lights out where the base forgets to watch.
The motor pool is one of ours. Covered trucks parked nose to tail, canvas sides, engines cold and dead for the night.
I circle around the back of one of them and tap twice against the metal.
The tarp lifts from the inside. Ari’s already in there.
He reaches out, grips the front of my jacket, and hauls me up without a word.
The canvas drops behind me, and suddenly everything is dark.
I smell the diesel and feel the familiar press of him against me.
His mouth is on mine before my back hits the truck bed.
I make a sound I don’t mean to, his hand slides to the back of my neck, and his fingers thread into my hair like he knows exactly how much pressure it takes to knock my brain offline.
“Missed you too,” I murmur into his mouth, but he doesn’t answer.
He’s too busy trying to turn my brain to mush.
My hands slide up under his jacket, along the familiar path of muscle, body heat, and the steady rise and fall of his breathing.
He hums quietly when I kiss along his jaw, when my mouth finds that spot on his throat that makes his shoulders dip just slightly, and his body visibly shiver.
We’ve taught each other in fragments like this.
Stolen minutes, lips and fingers tracing the same lines repeatedly, like repetition might make it permanent.
Ari shifts, nudging my legs wider, and I laugh softly against his mouth. “Always bossy,” I whisper.
He smiles against my lips. “Always obedient,” he murmurs back. I roll my eyes, but my fingers tighten, digging them into his back anyway, pulling him closer until there’s no space left between us.
Ari presses his forehead to mine, breathing steady, close enough that I can feel the brush of his lashes when he blinks.
For a second, we stay like that, basking in the quiet of being exactly where we’re not supposed to be. His thumb brushes my cheek; it’s absent, and thoughtful. I tilt my head, chasing his mouth again, because if I stop moving, my brain might start doing things I don’t want it to do tonight.
He kisses me back, slower now, deeper. His hand slides to my waist as he eases us sideways so I’m half under him, half tangled with him.
Ari murmurs something in Russian against my mouth. I smile into the kiss, teasing. “You’re going to have to translate that for me.” He doesn’t answer. He kisses me again instead. And somewhere, deep under the heat, habit and hands I already know, something’s shifted — just enough that I feel it.
It’s not danger.
It’s something worse.