30. Mikhail
MIKHAIL
Her fist is closed around the front of my coat.
Taylor looks down at it as if the hand belongs to someone else. For one second, neither of us moves.
I expected the recording to make her admit the truth.
I was expecting to have that satisfaction, to be able to pick her up and ravish her.
Instead, she’s in front of me with a vulnerability that I did not expect from her.
Maybe I should have after she ran from my home.
Maybe a man who was not half monster would have expected it.
Maybe some part of me hoped the monster half was what she liked about me, was what she was touching herself to that night. Maybe that’s what she’s afraid of. Maybe it’s everything.
Her bottom lip is wobbling, and her fist is closing around the front of my coat like it’s a lifeline.
She drops her forehead to my chest. Fuck.
She’s beautiful, golden and warm, and I want her.
I want to devour her from the outside in.
Or the inside out. But I want her to want it.
She has walked to me. She has grabbed me.
She wants me. I need her to say it. I need her to stop being ashamed and just say it.
“Look at me,” I say.
Her chin lifts slowly. Her cheeks are flushed. Her breathing is uneven. She’s angry, humiliated, frightened by what she wants.
I know fear. I know how to use it. I will not use hers.
My lips are still close enough to hers that I can feel the flutter of her breath. “If you want me to leave,” I say, “open your hand.”
Her fingers tighten against my coat. It is enough.
I close my eyes. “Just say it, Taylor. You will feel so much better.”
“You always need to be obeyed,” she groans. “It’s always about power with you.”
“Not this time,” I whisper. “I want to ravish you so badly, but it is no fun if you do not want it too.”
“You already know the truth.”
It’s agony, her breath inside my mouth. I place my hands on her collarbones so that I can feel her blood beneath her skin. She’s clammy from holding back. “What did you mean by ‘it’s yours’? What is mine?”
She hisses, and her lips part even further. She groans, “My pussy.”
I can’t stand it any longer. I slide my hands up her neck and grip her jaw, trail my hand up the base of her skull and grip her hair. I use my mouth to open her lips even wider and our tongues touch. “And is it still mine?” I growl.
“Yes,” she whispers.
The word breaks something inside me. I kiss her.
There is nothing restrained in the way she answers. Her free hand catches at my shoulder, and she rises onto her toes, pressing herself against me as though she has spent days fighting the momentum that brings her here.
Perhaps she has. I cup the back of her head and deepen the kiss. Her fingers clutch harder at my coat. “Tell me again,” I say.
Her eyes are unfocused. “What?”
“That you want this.”
She stiffens slightly. I feel the change and release her immediately. Her hands remain on me. Her face burns brighter. I touch her cheek with the back of my fingers. She lets me.
“I need your permission,” I say.
Her expression softens. Not trust. Not yet. But perhaps the beginning of it.
“I want you,” she says.
I lift her onto the table. She gasps against my lips, arms locking around my neck. I step between her knees, and the position brings her body flush against mine. She feels how much I want her. Her breath catches.
I press my mouth to her jaw, then the soft place beneath her ear. She tilts her head before she can stop herself. I kiss the exposed line of her throat slowly. She shivers. Every reaction feels like a gift I have no right to receive.
“Mikhail.”
The sound of my name in person is worse than the recording. Better. Real.
I pull back enough to look at her. “Do you know what that message did to me?”
Her eyes close. “Please don’t.”
“Not what you think,” I say. She looks at me again. “I wanted to come here that night. I wanted to put you over my shoulder, carry you out of this apartment, and make you repeat every word while looking at me.”
Her thighs tighten around my hips. I feel it. So does she.
“But I didn’t,” I continue.
“Why?”
“Because you were drunk.” The answer surprises her. I see it. Something sharp moves through my chest. She expected less of me. Perhaps she was right to.
I slide one hand beneath the hem of her sweater, resting my palm against the warm skin of her waist. She inhales.
“Tell me to stop,” I say. She shakes her head. “Slovami.” Words.
“Don’t stop.”
She has never done this before. That knowledge sits beneath every question I ask her, every pause I give her. Fear is one thing. Inexperience is another. I will not allow her to give me either one by accident and spend tomorrow wondering whether I took something she did not actually choose to give.
I kiss her again. My hand moves slowly upward, giving her time to object. She arches into the touch instead, impatient now, dragging my coat from my shoulders. It falls to the floor.
Her hands move over my chest, clumsy with urgency, searching for buttons. I catch her wrists gently. Fear flickers through her face. It vanishes when I bring one wrist to my mouth and kiss the faint mark left around it. Her breathing stops. I kiss the other.
“I am sorry,” I say.
Taylor stares at me. I do not apologize often. Perhaps she understands this. Perhaps she does not. I release her wrists and remove her sweater, then pause. She is beautiful.
She knows what I am and has chosen, for this moment, not to run. She is beautiful because she discovered me. She is beautiful because she is not me. She is beautiful because she is vulnerable and brave and smart.
I lower my mouth to her shoulder, her collarbone, the center of her chest. She threads her fingers through my hair.
I kneel before her. I place my hands on her knees and part them slowly. Her cheeks flush as she watches me. I kiss the inside of one thigh. Then the other. Her fingers tighten in my hair. I take my time.
I have imagined devouring her so many times before and after hearing the recording.
I imagined her once when I watched her across the room at the bar.
I imagined it while I was touching her. I imagined it in the shower the next day.
I imagined it when I first listened to the voicemail, and I have imagined it over and over, pressing play and stroking myself, consuming every sound for my pleasure.
Every time I have imagined it, I’ve gone straight for her center and I’ve taken what I wanted until I was milked dry and she was a sweaty heap beneath me.
But with her trembling above me, I want patience. I want to learn which touch makes her breath catch, which makes her whisper, which makes her forget she is supposed to resist me.
When my mouth finds her through the thin fabric, she jerks forward with a broken sound.
I hold her steady, my palm on her lower stomach. “This is what is mine?” I ask her.
She whimpers, “Yes.”
“Pull your panties to the side for me.”
She does, her eyes on me, watching me as I paint the inside of her lips with my flattened tongue, memorizing the grooves.
I worship her breaths and tremors and the helpless movements of her hips.
I pull back and slide her soaking underwear down her legs.
She lifts her hips to help me, and I feel tenderly toward her, the shared moment, the intimacy that goes into stripping each other.
I toss her underwear aside and spread her lips apart, letting my finger slide up and down the part where she is continually leaking. “This pussy is all mine?” I ask her gently, tilting my head at her.
“Yes,” she says again.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Look at me,” I say. She does. “Tell me.”
“My pussy is yours, Mikhail.”
“And what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to take me.”
Her eyes remain on mine as I plunge my tongue and fingers inside her. Her breasts heave, and she moans out, “Oh, I feel so full.” Her breathing becomes ragged and she breaks apart with my name and God’s juxtaposed on her lips.
I rise and hold her while the shaking passes.
She presses her face against my neck, breathing hard. I kiss her and stand, but she pulls me closer and whispers, “Take me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Please, I’m sure.”
My fingers slide down between her legs, and I push two inside her.
She is still sopping. “You are sure,” I repeat, thinking of when she said she felt full with my tongue and my two fingers three knuckles deep inside her.
If that was full, she is unprepared for what’s coming.
But I’m already standing and unbuckling my belt, my agonizing erection pressed against the zipper of my pants.
“I am sure,” she repeats in a Russian accent, mocking me.
I walk over and grab her chin, yanking her face up to look at me. “If you use jokes to deflect, I will think you are afraid.”
She looks at me with fire in her eyes. “I’m not afraid. I want you to take my virginity, Mikhail.”
I meet her fire with my own. There is no path back from this. No clean office. No careful separation. No version of my life in which Taylor returns to being merely an employee, a foreign student, a woman I once met in a bar.
I lift her into my arms. She wraps her legs around me. I carry her toward the bedroom.
For the first time since I met her, I stop pretending I intend to ever let her go.