29. Epilogue
Fin
"There," I got out, panting into the sheets, "right—Christ, Aleksi, right there, dinnae ye dare—"
He stopped moving.
Two months in and the man had finally learned to leave well enough alone when I told him to, which was more than I could say for him in any other room of the flat.
In bed he'd gotten good at listening, even if he’d never submit, which was just fine with me.
Everywhere else he was still a stubborn Russian bastard who loaded the dishwasher like he had a personal grievance against the plates.
He had me on my belly, ass in the air with my good hand fisted in the sheets and the bad one pinned under his, fingers laced through the gap where the ring finger used to be, and he was fucking me slow and deep the way he did on the mornings we had nowhere to be.
We had nowhere to be most mornings now. That was the thing nobody warned you about: a happily ever after.
It was a lot of mornings with nowhere to be and a man who woke up wanting you.
"Stop thinking," he said and kissed the back of my neck like he was trying to be romantic about it.
"Cannae. Yer no fucking me hard enough to manage it."
"Is that right?" He pulled out slowly, almost all the way, until just the head of him stretched me, and held there while I swore at him. "Say it again."
"Ye heard me, ye lazy—"
He slammed back in to the root. The headboard hit the wall, and I let out the most undignified moan yet.
He did it again, hard, the fat length of him dragging over that spot inside me that made my thighs shake, and again, until the slick filthy sound of him fucking into me filled the whole room and I'd nothing left to be smart with.
"There it is," he said, low and rough behind me. "That's what shuts you up. Look how pretty you are when you’re quiet."
"Fuck—Aleksi—" I shoved back to meet him, greedy, taking him deeper. "Harder. I'm no made of glass, I told ye—"
He got a fist in my hair and hauled my head up off the sheets and fucked me like he'd been waiting all his life for permission.
Deep, brutal, the wet slap of his hips against my arse obscene in the morning quiet.
My cock hung heavy and leaking between my legs, dripping onto the sheets.
He hadn't touched it yet, and I was already close just from the stretch of him, the weight, the way he had me pinned and open and taking it.
"Look at you," he growled. "Taking the whole thing. Greedy fucking thing, aren't you? My greedy thing."
"Aye—yours—Christ, just—" I was babbling, rolling my hips back onto his cock like I could get him deeper than deep. "Touch me, ye bastard, touch me or I'll—"
"You'll what?" He brought his hand up to my mouth instead, two thick fingers pushing past my lips, pressing down on my tongue till I gagged around them. "You talk too fucking much. Always have. Suck."
I sucked. What else was I going to do with my mouth so full—run it?
I closed my lips round his knuckles and worked them like I'd worked his cock earlier, sloppy and wet, drool spilling past them down my chin while he fucked me from behind and fed me his fingers from the front.
The filth of it lit me up worse than his cock had.
Spit-slick, gagging, my own noises coming muffled and obscene around his hand, and him watching over my shoulder like I was the best thing he'd ever ruined.
"There he is." He pushed deeper, till I gagged again and my eyes watered and I moaned around them anyway shamelessly. "Look at you. Quiet at last, and choking on it. This what it takes? Cock in your ass and my fingers down your throat to keep that mouth busy?"
I nodded around his hand because I couldn't speak and didn't want to. He pulled the fingers out slick and shining, a string of spit following, and shoved them right back in deeper. I took them, drooling, my cock jerking untouched between my legs at the sheer used filth of it.
"Filthy thing," he breathed. "You'd take anything I gave you, wouldn't you? Take it and beg for more."
He fucked me harder while I choked on his fingers, and the talking did me in worse than the rest. He'd found it months ago and never let it go—that I'd take his cock all day and stay mouthy, but call me his filthy thing in that low flat Ohio voice while he used my mouth and I came apart like a wire pulled tight.
He drove in deep and ground against my prostate and pressed his fingers down on my tongue all at once, and that was it.
I came untouched, shaking, gagging, soaking the ruined sheets, the sound I made muffled and broken around his hand.
My whole body clamped down on him and he swore, the flat calm gone out of him at last, and fucked me through it in three brutal strokes before he buried himself and spilled.
He pulled his fingers from my mouth slowly, wet to the second knuckle, and I sucked in air and let myself drop boneless into the mess we'd made.
For a second, neither of us moved. Then he found the bad hand in the wreck of the sheets, laced his fingers through the gap where my finger wasn't, and held on, and that—after all that filth—was the thing that put the sting behind my eyes.
"Yer goin' soft on me," I mumbled, half dead.
"Don't get used to it." But he didn't let go of the hand. He lay there a minute with his fingers in the gap, breathing, and then he said, to the ceiling, "By the way, you need to cancel your plans for Thursday.”
I frowned and pushed myself up to look at him. “Why? I’ve got nowhere to be except—”
“The courthouse,” he finished for me and rolled his head to the side to look at me. “Unless you expect me to marry my own shadow.”
I stared at him. "...Come again?"
"You heard me."
I sat up all the way and gave him a pinch on the arm.
“Ow! What the—”
"Aleksi Laskin, did ye just book us a wedding and tell me the way ye'd tell me the bins want putting out?"
He scowled and rubbed his arm where I’d pinched him. “Christ, that hurt!”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, boo-hoo. Look at the big bad vor crying ‘cause his trophy wife weren’t invited to his own bloody wedding!”
“You are invited! What the fuck do you think I’m doing right now, huh?”
"Ye're shouting at me is what ye're doing."
"I'm—" He scrubbed a hand down his face and muttered something in Russian that didn't sound flattering. Then he reached past me into the nightstand drawer. He came back with a little box that he shoved at my chest like it was nothing. "Here. Christ. I'm no good at this part."
I took it and opened it. My hands weren't quite steady, and I hated that he could see it.
It was a plain band. No stone, no fuss, just heavy dark metal worn smooth, the kind of thing a man could work in and never have to take off. The bastard had thought about the fact that I worked with my hands and picked a ring I could wear at the bench.
"Left hand," he said, gruff. "If—I mean. If you're—"
"If I'm saying aye?"
"Yeah."
I took it out of the box and held my left hand out to him, the ruined one, and let him do it himself. He slid it onto the middle finger, and neither of us said a word about the finger that wasn't there.
I let him hold the hand a moment. Then I pulled it back, because if I let him keep holding it, I was going to do something soft, and we'd both have to live with it.
"Right," I said, and cleared my throat. "Well. Ye've gone and ruined my surprise, ye impatient sod, because I got ye something an' all."
"Fin—"
"Dinnae Fin me. Stay there." I rolled out of the bed, found my pants, didn't bother with more, and padded out to the workroom on legs that weren't entirely cooperating after what he'd done to them.
It was on the bench under a cloth where I'd kept it the last week, finished, waiting for the right day. Turned out that was today.
I brought it back wrapped in the cloth and stood at the foot of the bed and lost my nerve for a second, which wasn't like me.
"I didnae ken when to give it to ye," I said. "There wasnae ever a good time. And then ye went and proposed at me like a caveman, so." I shrugged. "Now's as good a time as any."
I pulled the cloth off.
It was his da's jacket, the yuft leather gone deep and living again where it had been dying.
The cracks I'd spent weeks consolidating under the loupe had healed so fine you'd have to know they'd been there.
I'd re-oiled the whole of it, fed the birch oil back into a hide that had been suffocating in plastic for years, feathered the color at the shoulders so the new work vanished into the old wear. It hung from my hands, supple, whole.
And the bullet hole was still there.
I'd backed it from the inside so the leather around it would stop tearing itself apart, but the hole stayed, and the dark stain set into the grain around it stayed. I'd told him as much the first night, drunk and cuffed and reading the thing in his lap.
Aleksi didn't move.
He sat up in the wrecked bed and he looked at his father's jacket, whole again in the hands of the man he'd just put a ring on, and something went through his face that I'd only seen once before—on the floor of his entryway, the night Dragana died, the night he told me about his mother and the sewing machine.
The thing under all the cold had shown his face, the boy who came home at three o'clock and found his mum dead.
"Fin," he said, and his voice had gone thick.
He reached for it and stopped with his hand an inch off the leather. His fingers hovered over the bullet hole, and then he touched the collar instead, and ran his thumb along the seam where I'd feathered the new oil into the old.
"You finished it," he said.
"Aye."
"You weren't—" He stopped. Swallowed. "You could've dragged it out. Kept it half-done. Long as it wasn't finished, I had a reason to—"
"I ken." I'd known it for weeks. I'd known it was the leash that both of us were pretending not to hold. "I didnae need the leash, Aleksi. I'm no going anywhere. So I finished it."
He looked up at me then, his eyes wet, and the great daft murdering bastard didn't even try to hide it from me.