Chapter 28 - Viktor #2
She reached between them. Her hand found him through his pants, and her palm pressed flat against him, and the contact—deliberate, unhurried, her fingers tracing the shape of him through the cloth with the same methodical attention she gave to everything—made him swear, a single bitten-off word against the curve of her breast that he couldn’t have held back with both hands.
“Take it off?” she asked, and together they got the rest of it gone—his pants, her underwear, the last barriers removed with a practicality that was its own kind of intimacy, two people who had spent weeks negotiating distance discovering that the removal of distance was simpler than the maintenance of it had been.
He kissed her stomach. Pressed his mouth to the soft curve below her navel and stayed there—one second, two, three—long enough that she could feel the intention in it, the deliberate attention he was paying to the part of her body she’d spent the longest learning to hide.
Her breath caught. Her fingers, still in his hair, went from pulling to holding, the grip changing from urgency to something more fragile, and he felt the moment land in the bond between them—the recognition that he was not passing through on his way somewhere else, that the staying was the point, that he would stay here as long as she needed him to because this was the body she’d offered him whole and he was receiving it whole.
She exhaled—a long, shaking breath that carried something out of her, something she’d been holding for years—and her hand relaxed against his scalp, and she let him stay.
He moved lower. His mouth found the crease of her thigh, the soft skin of her inner leg, and she opened for him with a trust that sat in his chest with a weight he would carry for the rest of his life.
He put his mouth on her, and she trembled—not the jerk of the first time, the startled, desperate response of two people acting on instinct, but a trembling that came from deeper, the full-body shudder of a woman who was being touched exactly the way she wanted and had chosen to be present for every second of it.
Viktor was slow. Patient. His tongue moved against her in long, steady strokes, and her hips rose to meet him.
Olivia’s breathing fractured into sounds that were quiet and specific and devastatingly unguarded—small moans, his name spoken in pieces, the sigh that came when he found the exact pressure and rhythm she needed and held it there.
Her thighs tightened against his shoulders.
Her hand left his hair and found the sheet beside her hip and gripped it, and she was close, he could feel it through the bond—the climbing tension in her body registering in his own as a tightness across his chest, a heat at the base of his spine—and he stayed with her, matched her, let the pace remain hers.
“Viktor—don’t stop, stay right—yes, there—”
She came with a sound that was devastatingly quiet—a long, wrenching exhale that seemed to empty her of everything she’d been holding, her body curving off the mattress in a slow arc, her hand finding his shoulder and gripping hard enough that her nails left crescents in his skin.
He worked her through it until the trembling softened and her hand loosened and her breath came back in ragged, hitching pulls.
She pulled him up. Her hands on his face, drawing him over her body, and she kissed him—tasting herself on his mouth, kissing him deeper for it—and her legs wrapped around his waist and the feeling of her skin against his, all of her, nothing between them, made his vision narrow to the point where she ended and he began, which was nowhere, which was the point.
“I want to see you,” she said. “The whole time. Don’t close your eyes.”
He pushed into her, and her lips parted, and her eyes stayed open, and his stayed open, and they looked at each other while he filled her, and the intimacy of it—the watching, the being watched, the refusal of either of them to retreat into the privacy of closed eyes and the dark behind them—was more naked than the nakedness, more exposing than any removal of clothing, because what they were showing each other was not bodies but the wanting itself, laid bare, held up to the light.
He moved. She moved with him. The rhythm they found was unhurried, deep, each stroke a sentence in a conversation neither of them had known how to start, and were now having with their whole bodies.
She gripped his forearms, her nails pressing into the muscle, and when he shifted the angle and pushed deeper, she made a sound that vibrated against his chest—low, sustained, the sound of a woman being taken apart by someone who knew exactly where the seams were because he’d been studying them for a decade.
Olivia rolled her hips against his, changing the friction, and his breath broke.
She did it again, watching his face, and the smile that crossed her mouth—fierce, pleased, the satisfaction of a woman who had found a man’s undoing and intended to use it—made him groan against her throat and drive into her harder.
She answered with her heels digging into the backs of his thighs, pulling him deeper, demanding more with her body in the way she demanded everything, directly, without apology.
“There,” she breathed, and her head tipped back, throat exposed, and he pressed his mouth to the column of it and felt her moan vibrate against his lips. “There, Viktor, God—”
He braced one hand beside her head and pressed the other flat against her stomach—her stomach, the soft curve of it, feeling it tighten beneath his palm with each thrust—and the gesture was deliberate and she knew it, knew what he was saying with his hand on the place she’d spent years covering, and her eyes went bright and her breath shattered and she came, hard, clenching around him with a force that dragged a raw, gutted sound from somewhere behind his ribs.
He followed her. The orgasm hit him with a totality that whited out the edges of the room, his body shuddering against hers, his forehead dropping to the space between her neck and her shoulder, the bond between them blazing with a depth that felt permanent, structural, the foundation of something that had been built to last.
Afterward, they lay tangled. Her head on his chest. His arm across her ribs.
Their breathing slowing in unison, their heartbeats finding each other through the bond and settling into a shared rhythm that felt less like synchronization and more like a return—two instruments that had been playing the same piece from different rooms, finally in the same one.
She traced the scar at his temple with her fingertip. He caught her hand and pressed his mouth to her palm.
“Stay,” she said, and the word was the same one she’d said during the first time, except that time it had been a plea torn from the wreckage of two people who hadn’t chosen each other yet. This time it was quiet, and certain, and she already knew the answer.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
She fell asleep with her palm flat against his sternum, over his heart, and the weight of it anchored him to the mattress more completely than gravity ever had.
He stayed. He watched the light fade through the window and felt her breathing slow and let the bond carry her sleep into his awareness, and for the first time since the morning he’d left her bed before dawn, Viktor Hale did not reach for the machinery that put him back together.
He didn’t need it. She’d built something better in its place.