Chapter 19 #2
Actually smiles. The rarest thing he owns, spent here, on me, in the dark where no one else will ever see it.
The heat between us isn’t the frantic thing from before.
It’s bigger, quieter, so much more dangerous, the heat of two people who have run all the way out of lies.
When I come apart it’s everywhere at once, my whole body pulling tight around his cock, my hands fisted in his hair, his name breaking in my mouth, and the wave keeps rolling because he keeps moving through it, slow, merciless, wringing every last shudder out of me before he lets himself go.
He follows with a groan torn out of somewhere deep, spilling hot inside me, his face buried in my throat, his whole shaking weight pressing me down into the warm metal.
And in the middle of it, his guard all the way down, he says my name.
Not Cindy. Cynthia. He’s said it before, but never like this.
Before it was an order, or a fact, or a taunt thrown across a table full of cash, always with that flat cold edge on it.
This time it falls out of him soft, unguarded, almost helpless, my real name said like it belongs to someone he loves instead of someone he owns.
It goes through me like nothing else tonight. The gentleness in it is the thing that finally breaks me all the way open, more than his hands, more than his mouth, more than any of it. I can take him rough. I have no idea what to do with him tender.
After, we end up tangled in the back seat, half-dressed, both doors open to the night.
His arm lies warm and solid across me, my head on the inked cathedral over his heart.
The desert ticks and breathes around the car.
Something far off yips once and gets no answer.
He traces one line down my spine, slow, like he’s signing something.
For a few minutes I’m happier than I’ve been since I was nineteen, lying in the worst possible arms under a billion stars.
I let myself, just for those few minutes, believe this is real and I get to keep it.
That’s when I feel him start to leave.
He doesn’t move. That’s the terrible part.
His body stays exactly where it is, his arm still over me.
But I feel the warmth go out of him the way it went out of him in the car, the way I’ve felt it go three times now, except this time is worse, because this time we meant it.
I lie there with my cheek on his chest and feel the walls going back up course by course inside the man underneath me, the tenderness recoiling like it touched a hot burner.
By the time he speaks, his voice has gone flat and far away again.
“We should get back.”
I sit up. I look at him. His face has closed completely, the raw undefended thing from twenty minutes ago locked behind the pakhan, and he won’t quite meet my eyes.
I understand with a sick lurch that I’m watching him try to take it back, not the act, the meaning.
He’s reaching for the cold like it’s the only solid thing in arm’s reach.
I have no idea what I did. I only know the one thing this man can’t survive is for that to have mattered.
It mattered. And now he’s afraid of me in a way Morozov could never manage.
“Sevastian.”
“Get dressed, Cynthia.” And the cold’s all the way back in it. Just like that. The same name that came out of him soft a minute ago, gone flat again, shutting me out. “It’s late.”
So I get dressed. In the dark, in the back of his car, in the desert that started all of this, I put my clothes back on next to a man who just held me like I was the only good thing left in his world and is now sitting a careful foot away pretending he didn’t.
Roma comes back. He doesn’t look at either of us, and we drive home in a silence with knives in it. The dash lights make a stranger of the side of his face. Forty minutes of dark roll past the windows with nobody reaching across three feet of leather that might as well be the whole Mojave now.
I should be angry. Part of me is. He cracked me open like an egg out there, said my name so softly it wrecked me, then went behind glass and left me out in the cold with my heart in my hands. Any sane woman would be furious. I am, a little.
But mostly what I feel, watching the dark desert slide past the window, is a terrible aching tenderness for him, which is the worst possible thing to feel, because it means he’s already won and neither of us meant for that to happen.
You can guard against a man who’s cruel to you.
I have no defense at all against a man who’s only cruel to himself.
But here’s the thing he can’t undo, no matter how cold he goes. It happened. I felt him mean it. I heard my name fall out of him soft and helpless. A flat voice afterward doesn’t unsay it.
The desert gave me a body in the dirt the first time. Tonight it gave me a man who loves me and would rather die than say so, the warmth of him still on my skin while the cold of him fills the car back up. The same sand, both times. Death, then this.
I don’t know which version of him climbs out at the ranch. I’m terrified it’s the cold one. I’m more terrified that I’ve gone and fallen in love with both.