Chapter 30 Lev
Lev
Three days without her voice, and the silence is doing things to me bullets never managed.
I don’t eat much. Sleep stopped being real after the first night.
On day two, Ruslan comes by with a stack of operational files and spreads them across the table in my bedroom, but I stare straight through him until he says my name four times without an answer.
Then he gathers his papers and walks out.
Even he can’t reach me right now.
I write her a letter the first morning and tear it up before the ink dries. I do it again that night. The third attempt makes it two sentences before I rip the notebook apart. None of it matters unless I say it to her face.
On the fourth night, I go to her door.
I don’t knock. There’s no point. If she wants to pretend I’m not here, knocking only gives her something to ignore. I flatten my palms against the wood and start talking.
“I’ve rehearsed this a hundred times over the last few months,” I say, keeping my voice low. “It always ends up sounding like a legal defense, and you deserve better than that.”
Nothing. No sound from the other side. No movement under the door.
“The part that matters most is the part I never said. Not the facts. You have those now. What I never told you was what it did to me, sitting across from you and knowing it. There were nights I came close. You’d say something about your father—some small detail, the way he laughed, what his hands looked like—and I’d open my mouth.
Every time, I told myself I was waiting for the right moment.
That was a lie I got very comfortable with. ”
I rest my forehead against the door.
“The way you looked at me was the first time in my life I wasn’t being measured for what I was worth.
You weren’t weighing me against what I’d cost. You looked at me like I was just a man, and I couldn’t bring myself to be the one who ended that.
” My throat tightens around the next words, but I force them out anyway.
“So I chose it. Every morning I woke up next to you and said nothing, I chose myself over you. I know that now.”
The door stays closed, but I keep going, desperate to get the words out now that I’ve started saying them.
“I’ve spent thirty years being useful to my father.
I don’t know how to be sorry for most of it.
But I know how to be sorry for this, because this is the one thing I did entirely for myself, at your expense.
You never had the information you needed to decide whether I was worth it.
” I step back from the door. “You deserved that choice. I took it from you. That’s what I came here to say. ”
I push off the door and take one step back.
“You can hate me for every year I have left. You’d have every right. But what you gave me before this mattered more than I ever said. I’m grateful for it.”
I turn to leave just as the door opens. The sound stops me cold.
When I turn back, I realize she’s been crying. The tracks on her face are still wet, and she’s wearing a gray sleep shirt I’ve never seen before. She looks at me the way she did in the trauma bay that first night, like she already knows what she’s about to do and hates herself for it.
“Don’t,” she orders with a sob.
One word. I don’t know what it means. Don’t keep talking, don’t ask for her forgiveness, or maybe don’t kiss her because everything inside me wants to. And before I can ask, she grabs a fistful of my shirt and drags me across the threshold.
The door slams shut behind me as her mouth finds mine, and it tastes like salt and fury and the particular grief of someone who has run out of places to put what they’re carrying. I don’t reach for her. I let her drive, because if I try to take over, she’ll stop, and I can’t bear for her to stop.
She walks me backward into the room with both fists locked in my shirt, and when the backs of my knees find the chair by the window, I fall backward. She doesn’t look grateful. She looks furious, like she resents her own hands for wanting this.
She stares at me for a second with tears still drying on her cheeks. Then she drops to her knees, and I stop breathing entirely.
She gets my belt open, and I hold onto both arms of the chair because I need to put my hands somewhere that isn’t on her. This needs to be her choice. When she wraps one hand around the base of my cock and looks up at me with those red-rimmed eyes, the look on her face is anything but forgiving.
The sound that leaves my throat when her lips slide over my sensitive flesh belongs to a man who has been coming apart for four days.
She takes her time, because she always does when she’s proving a point.
Long pulls with her tongue dragging along the underside, her hand working the base in a slow, twisting stroke that makes my thighs go rigid.
My hands are white-knuckled on the chair arms. She pulls back to the tip, licks once across the head, and watches my stomach contract before she takes me deep again. All the way. The back of her throat.
She’s sucking on my cock like she’s trying to take something back.
“Christ,” I breathe.
“Don’t talk,” she orders against me.
She keeps her eyes fixed on my face the entire time. That’s the part I can’t survive—her watching me unravel, watching every reaction, and choosing exactly where to apply pressure. She pulls back until only the tip is in her mouth, sucks hard, and my hips jolt off the chair before I catch myself.
Her free hand slides up the inside of my thigh and stops just short of where I need it.
She strokes again, base to tip, punishingly slow, and I can feel my pulse in my throat, in my hands, and everywhere at once.
I’ve been starving for weeks now, and she knows it, and she is absolutely using it against me.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” I grit out.
She looks up at me from under her still-wet lashes and says nothing, then takes me deep enough that she gags.
“Stop,” I manage, through my teeth. “Unless you want this over right now.”
She pulls back and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
Her cheeks are flushed, and when she stands and pulls her shirt over her head, my brain stops producing complete thoughts.
She’s not wearing anything underneath, and looking at her standing in front of me, so beautifully naked and full of rage, fills me to the brim with both pain and want.
She straddles the chair and settles against me, but she doesn’t take me in yet.
She braces both palms on my shoulders and rolls her hips once, just once, dragging herself along my full length.
I return my hands to the chair arms instead of her because I’m letting her set the pace even if it kills me.
“You don’t get to hold me after,” she tells me.
Every instinct I have rebels against that sentence.
This woman has been crying for four days over something I did, and she’s about to let me touch her, and I’m supposed to walk away after like she’s a stranger.
I want to tell her that’s not how this works.
That I have never once in my life left her without making sure she was all right, and I’m not going to start tonight.
But she’s not asking. She’s setting a boundary. She gave me the door. She pulled me through it. Whatever she’s offering, it comes on her terms or it doesn’t come at all, and she knows I know that.
“Okay,” I agree.
“I mean it.” Her eyes search my face for the argument she no doubt can feel me swallowing.
She’s right to look. It’s there. Every bit of it.
“I hear you, Polina,” I tell her, and I mean that, too.
She reaches between us, gets a hand around my cock, and sinks down onto me, tilting her head back as she descends. The heat that surrounds my dick draws a moan out from somewhere deep in my chest, and she chuckles at the sound before she starts moving again.
She rides me entirely on her own terms and at her own pace, with no interest in whether I’m keeping up.
Her hips roll forward and grind down, and the friction is merciless.
She’s hot and tight and soaking wet, and every stroke makes her whimper even as she tries to hold it back, like she’s refusing to give me the satisfaction.
I can feel her working to stay quiet. It’s the same fight she always loses.
“Touch me, Lev,” she breathes above me.
I nearly combust with relief as I slide both hands up her back, one between her shoulder blades and one low at the base of her spine.
The second I make contact, her rhythm stutters and she presses closer without meaning to.
Her breasts bounce in front of me as she moves, her breath hits my neck, and her hips still move even as her body tries to curl into me.
“Oh God, Lev,” she pants.
I drag my mouth up the side of her neck to the spot below her ear, and she tips her head back and swears at the ceiling.
Her hips keep moving. Faster now, chasing something.
I slide one hand from her back to her hip and hold her at the angle that I know from months of memorizing exactly this woman’s body.
She clenches around me so hard I grunt into her shoulder.
“There,” she breathes, though it’s not a request. More like an accusation.
I keep the pressure and feel her start to lose the fight with every sound she’s been keeping at bay. “You’re allowed to feel it.”
“Shut up.” She digs her fingers into my shoulders and rides harder, faster, with all restraint gone. “Don’t—don’t say anything.”
I put my mouth to her collarbone and stay quiet, because she doesn’t need words.
She needs exactly what she’s taking, and I give her every inch of it without trying to take the wheel.
Her forehead drops to mine, and for one fractured second, we’re the only two people with this particular, ruinous problem.
There’s grief in the way she moves. There’s anger in every stroke.
And underneath all of it, there’s something neither of us has figured out how to put down, and we both know it.
Then she comes apart.
Her whole body locks as her nails carve into my shoulders deep enough that I’ll feel them for days, and I’ve never been more thankful for pain.
She brings her open mouth into my hair and lets out a keening sound, devoid of any self-control.
I feel every pulse of it, wave after wave, her body clenching and shaking while I hold her and keep still beneath her.
I follow seconds later with my hands locked at her waist and her name somewhere at the back of my throat.
And then the room settles around us, and I wait for the fall-out.
She doesn’t move right away, and neither do I. I keep my hands where they are. I don’t try to pull her closer. She gave me one rule, and I’m keeping it even though every part of me wants to wrap both arms around her and not let go.
After a moment, she lifts her head. Her eyes are dry. The anger hasn’t softened at all, which is what I expected and what I deserve.
She climbs off without help, picks her shirt up from the floor, and pulls it over her head.
“You need to leave,” she orders as she wraps her arms around herself and looks somewhere past my shoulder.
It takes everything in me, but I fix my clothes, stand, and make my way to the door, where I stop with my hand on the knob. I pause, silently begging her to tell me to stop, to ask me to stay.
But when she doesn’t, I open the door and walk out into the empty corridor, standing there for one second with my hand still on the knob from the outside.
Then I let go and walk away.