Chapter 15 Polina
Polina
Lev knows he’s losing.
We’ve been playing durak for almost an hour at the kitchen table; the rain has just started outside, and a bottle of wine between us is steadily going down.
He picked the game up fast, because he picks everything up fast. Fast isn’t the same as good, though, and the look on his face when I take another trick tells me he’s been expecting to beat me since he sat down.
“You could have mentioned you were good at this,” he grumbles.
“You never asked.”
He squints at his remaining cards, and I top off my glass and wait, because patience is the only real weapon in durak, and I have considerably more than he does.
At least I do here, at a kitchen table in the middle of nowhere with no pager going off and no one needing anything from either of us for the first time in longer than I can remember.
He plays his card, but it’s the wrong one. I cover it, and a frustrated look makes me smile into my wine.
“Best of three.” He pretends to sound annoyed.
“We’re already on three.”
“Okay, then. Best of—”
The power goes out, interrupting him and shrouding us in darkness with the rain hammering the roof. A beat of quiet passes, and then thunder rolls through the walls close enough that I feel it in the table under my hands.
“Storm took the power,” I observe.
“Clearly.”
He stands from the table, opens a drawer, and strikes a match against its box, the small flame pushing back the dark.
He lights two candles, setting one on the counter and carrying the other back to the table.
The flame throws amber across the angles of his face, and the kitchen shrinks to just the two of us and the small circle of light between us.
He looks at my cards, which remain fanned out in my hand, and then looks at me. “The universe decided you’d won enough for one night.”
I set my cards on the table with a giggle. Outside, the storm settles into a steady rhythm with rain that means hours and not minutes. We’re not going anywhere.
He refills his glass and holds my eyes over the rim with a sly smile. “So…”
“So,” I repeat.
The candle flickers between us, and I’m all too aware of how quiet the rest of the world has gone.
I stand, and he watches me come around the table. When I stop in front of him, he tips up his chin and something in his face goes still. I reach out and start on the top button of his shirt, working it open slowly to show that I intend to take my time with him tonight.
He holds eye contact as I take his wine glass and set it on the counter, and then take his hand and pull him up.
He follows me silently down the hall.
The bedroom is darker than the kitchen. The single candle that I set on the nightstand does what it can, but mostly, it’s shadow and the sound of rain.
“Sit,” I order.
He takes a seat on the edge of the mattress and watches me saunter over to the dresser. Inside the top drawer, folded beneath a spare shirt, is a tie. I take it out and fold it.
I’ve seen him command rooms without raising his voice. I’ve watched men step back without fully understanding why. He carries a natural authority, and there’s no impatience in it tonight. Just attention, absolute and unguarded. He’s sitting where I put him, watching me, and waiting.
When I tell him to lie back, he does it without argument. He drops his weight back against the mattress and settles his arms at his sides. The act of him allowing me to take control, even for just this moment, sends heat straight through my center.
I climb onto the bed and straddle him. He’s already hard through his trousers, and when I settle against him, his breath punches out. He reaches for my thighs, and I look down at his hands.
“Not yet.” I shake my head.
A muscle works in his throat, but he lifts his hands and lowers them back to the mattress.
I lean forward, and he allows me to loop the tie across his eyes and knot it loosely at the back of his head. The exhale that comes out of his mouth when I sit back is strained, and I note that with considerable satisfaction.
I pull my shirt over my head and drop it behind me, watching his expression, the way his jaw has gone tight, and the way his breathing has gotten faster and shallower.
He can hear every fabric rustle, but he can’t see any of it.
This man who never stops watching is now entirely dependent on what I choose to give him.
I reach down and work his shirt buttons open the rest of the way before spreading the fabric back and running my palms up his stomach. He drags in a slow breath through his nose, and his hands come up from the mattress toward me.
“No,” I remind him, and he grits out a sound and forces them back down.
I unhook my bra and let it fall, and then I drag my mouth along his collarbone, across the old scar I’ve only ever traced with my fingers, and he makes a noise against the back of his teeth and fists the sheets.
“Polina…” My name comes out almost pained.
“I haven’t told you to talk yet,” I murmur against his throat, and he goes quiet.
I work my way down his body, taking my time with every inch.
Every time he reaches for me, I pull back and wait until he goes still again.
By the time I stand to push off the rest of my clothes and remove his pants, the sheets beneath his hands are pulled taut, and the tendons in his forearms are standing out like wire.
I wrap my hand around his cock and stroke him once, slowly enough to make a point, and the sound that tears out of him sounds as though it’s been dragged up from somewhere he doesn’t usually let me near.
“Christ.” His voice is barely recognizable. “Please.”
Lev Morozov saying please is the most satisfying thing I have heard. I stroke him again, slower this time, and watch his hips jerk off the mattress before he catches himself and forces them back down.
“Stay still,” I order.
“I’m trying,” he grits out. “I am genuinely trying, Polina.”
I position myself over him and sink onto his cock in one slow, rolling stroke, taking every inch of him, and we both moan.
His dick fills me so completely that I have to brace myself against his chest and breathe through the aching pressure of the fit and the overwhelming certainty that this is right.
Beneath the blindfold, his mouth has fallen open, and his hands stay on the mattress, though they’re shaking with the effort of keeping them there.
I set the pace at what I want, slow enough to feel every ridge on every stroke.
I want to feel him tremble as he struggles against the urge to seize my hips and take over the way he normally does when we have sex.
I know that if he decided the blindfold and my instructions were obstacles instead of rules, this would go very differently.
The fact that he’s choosing to stay where I put him makes something coil tightly in my stomach.
I roll my hips forward, searching for the angle that sets fire to my body, drawing a moan that I don’t bother trying to swallow.
“Tell me what you look like right now,” he prompts, and his voice has gone rough and low and stripped of all its polish.
“You know what I look like,” I reply, and roll forward again, and his head tips back hard against the pillow.
“Tell me. I want to hear you say it.”
“I’m riding your cock,” I remind him, “and you’re going to stay where you are and take it.”
His low growl sounds almost animalistic, and I smile at his frustration as I reach between my thighs and work my clit in tight circles while I ride him.
The layered pressure builds faster than I expected.
I know he can feel the change in my body in the way my thighs tighten against his hips and my rhythm loses its evenness.
“Don’t,” he snaps. “Don’t you dare come without telling me first.”
“I’ll come whenever I want.”
“Polina.” It’s a warning and a plea, and the combination does something catastrophic to my composure. “If you come before I say so, I will spend the rest of the night making sure you regret it.”
“You don’t get to give orders right now.” I clench around him on purpose, and his full-body shudder travels all the way up through me.
“Say my name again,” I tell him.
“Polina… oh, God. Polina.”
Without warning, he shoots his hands off the mattress and grabs my hips, not directing me or taking over, just holding on. The pressure of his fingers is enough to leave bruises, and I want every one of them.
His body is shaking beneath me. I know he’s right on the edge because I haven’t said he can let go. Knowing that this man could overpower me effortlessly, but instead is white-knuckling himself still because I told him to, tips me over before I see it coming.
“Now,” I manage. “Now you can come.”
With permission, he squeezes my hips even more and drives up into me so hard that I seize his shoulders to stay upright. I cry out above him, my body clenching and shaking through the orgasm in waves.
He follows within seconds with a guttural, broken sound, and his cock pulses deep inside me as he spills while my aftershocks continue rolling through me.
I fall against his chest, heaving in pants of air. When I finally reach back and pull the knot loose, the tie falls away, and he blinks. Even in the near-dark, I can see that his pupils are enormous, and there’s something wild in the look he fixes on me.
He takes my face in both hands and just holds it. The bruises on my hips are already forming. I’ll feel them for days, every time I sit down at my desk or stand at the OR table, and I’m delighted by the thought.
He doesn’t speak, and neither do I. The rain fills the silence.
The power comes back on at some point in the night. I notice it when I get up for water. The kitchen lamp blazes, and the little green indicator on the smoke detector blinks steadily. I switch off the lamp and stand at the window with my glass, watching the rain thin while Lev sleeps.
By morning, it has stopped. Pale grey pushes through the windows, and Lev is already at the stove when I come out wrapped in the blanket from the bed, shirtless and looking delicious.
He sets a cup on the counter without being asked or turning around. He already knows my footsteps in a space we’ve only occupied for two days, which is the part I keep snagging on. Two days shouldn’t be enough time for someone to know how you move through a room.
I climb onto a kitchen chair and pull up my knees, wrapping both hands around the mug, and for a while I just watch him move.
The ease of him in a kitchen that isn’t his.
The fact that he remembered how I take my coffee on the second morning without a word from me.
These are small, unremarkable things, and somehow, they’ve become the texture of how these two days have felt. I’ve stopped trying not to notice.
“This is the happiest I’ve been in years.”
He turns from the stove, and for barely a flicker, something moves across his face that looks an awful lot like guilt.
Then it’s gone, replaced by a disarming smile that leaves me wondering if I imagined the whole thing.