Chapter 6 #2
I took my time. I got the buttons. I pushed the wet shirt off his shoulders and I saw, for the first time, all of him in one piece instead of in the pieces I had been collecting.
The arms I knew, with the dark ink running down them.
A pale ridge of a scar along the side of his ribs I had not known about.
The dark line of hair on his stomach that went down past where his belt was, and which I had imagined more than once and gotten wrong.
I put my hand flat on the center of his chest, the way I had in the hallway, and this time there was no shirt under my palm. Skin. Warm. The drum of him under it.
"Okay?" he said, low, watching me.
"Yes."
He got the rest of his clothes off. He stepped into the spray and held his hand back out for me.
The water was almost too hot for a second and then it was right.
He pulled me in under it and the steam went around us and his hands came up to my face and pushed my wet hair back from my forehead like it was the thing he had been wanting to do for an hour.
He kissed me under the water. Long. Deep.
Hungrier than the kiss in his bed had been, the one I had thought was the hungriest a kiss could be.
Then he gentled it. Then he went deep again, slower this time, like he was learning the shape of what he was doing.
His hands moved. Down my back. The first time he touched me bare, an open palm sliding down the wet line of my spine and around to the small of my back to bring me closer to him. I made a sound into his mouth I had not planned to make. He made one back, lower, against my lips.
I let my hands learn him. The slope of his shoulders.
The hard plane of his back. The scar on his ribs under my fingertips, an old smooth ridge, and I did not ask.
I touched the small white scar at his temple with my thumb, the one I had memorized weeks ago, and I touched the small white one on the knuckle of his left index finger when his hand came up to cradle my jaw. He let me. He watched me do it.
"You are looking at me like you are reading me," he murmured.
"I am."
He kissed me again. The water ran down between us.
I had not said it yet. I needed to.
"Daniil."
"Mm?"
"I have not... done this. Before."
He stopped.
He did not pull back. He stayed close, his forehead going down to mine, the water running off the back of his head and around our faces.
"Look at me, Chloe."
I did.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"I'm sure. I want you. I picked you."
Something in his face moved. Not surprise. He had known. He had read it in me already, in the way I had taken the buttons, in the steady of my hands by the end of them. What moved in his face was something else. The understanding of what he had just been handed.
He cupped my face in both his hands. He kissed my forehead, slow, the way a man kisses a thing he has been allowed to hold.
"Then we do this the way you deserve," he said, against my temple. "Slow. You tell me anything. Anything. You say stop, I stop."
"I know."
"Say you know."
"I know."
He kissed me again, and the kiss had changed. It had a different weight in it. It was the kiss of a man who had decided to be careful in a way that was going to cost him, and he did not care what it cost him.
His mouth moved. Down my jaw, down my throat, into the wet curve of my shoulder.
His hands moved with his mouth, learning me by inches.
He took his time at my breasts. Slow circles with the flat of his tongue, then the catch of his teeth, light, deliberate, the kind of light that pulled the air out of my chest in one long word.
My legs stopped being interested in standing on their own.
I leaned back into the cold tile of the shower wall.
The cold against my shoulder blades, the heat of the water down my front, the warm working shape of his mouth on me.
My hand went up and found the lip of the tile above the soap shelf and I held on.
He took his time lower. He went to his knees again, on the floor of the shower this time, and he looked up at me through the water, and he asked the question with his eyes that he had been asking all night.
"Yes," I said, before I had even finished hearing it.
The first touch of his mouth on me was a thing I had no shape for.
I had read about it. I had imagined it badly.
I had no way to have known what it would be.
The flat of his tongue. Then the slow drag of it.
Then the kind of careful pressure that made my hips jerk forward without my permission.
His hand came up and pinned me to the tile, fingers spread on my belly, his thumb at the hollow of my hip.
My fingers tightened on the shelf. My other hand went into his hair without my permission and I held on too hard, and he made a low approving sound against me that I felt more than heard.
"Open for me," he said, low, against the inside of my thigh.
"Let me have you." I did. He learned what I liked the way he had learned everything else about me, with attention, with patience, with the fact that he was not in a hurry.
The small sound I made became a not-small sound.
The sound after that was not a sound I had known I had in me.
He stayed with me. He worked me with his tongue and his fingers until my hand on the tile slipped, and he braced me with a flat palm at the small of my back to keep me upright, and my head went back against the wall hard enough that I felt the dull of it in my skull.
He did not slow down. "Right there," he said into me, low, almost a growl.
"Just like that. Give it to me." My thighs went, and I went with them, and the long break of it pulled a cry out of my mouth that would have embarrassed me any other night and did not embarrass me tonight, because he was the one I had given it to.
He kissed the inside of my thigh. He stood up slowly, the water sluicing off him, and he put his arms around me and held me while my legs remembered themselves.
"Beautiful," he said into my hair. "My girl. So beautiful."
He turned the water off. He got the big towel off the hook and he wrapped me in it like I was a small thing he had been entrusted with, drying me in slow careful passes, my hair, my arms, the back of my neck.
He dried himself half as carefully and tossed his towel over the rail and lifted me again, still wrapped in mine, and carried me out of the steam into the dim of my bedroom.
The lamp was on low on the nightstand. The sheets were the ones I had washed two days ago, the soft gray ones. He set me down on the edge of the bed and then he laid me back on it, the towel falling open under me, his weight coming down over me slow, on his elbows, careful of me.
He kissed me a long time. He kissed me until my hand found his ribs again the way it had on his bed the morning I had brought him the soup, that flat splay of fingers along the bone, and he made the small low sound he made when I did that, and I felt the restraint in him crack a little along its edge.
"Are you with me?"
"Yes."
"Tell me if anything is too much."
"I will."
He took his time with such patience I almost laughed because the man was a wall of held breath, and I told him so, low, into his neck, and he laughed against my collarbone, the two notes of it.
"You will not rush me on this," he said. "Not this. Not the first."
When he finally moved to be over me properly, he braced on one forearm and used the other hand to push my damp hair back off my face and look at me. The look was the look. The one he had given me across the seafood restaurant table. The one that had no jokes in it.
"Tell me yes one more time."
"Yes."
He went slow. So slow I felt every inch of him going into me, every part of my body learning what to do with him.
The slow stretch. The small ache of the new and the strange right of him both at once.
He paused. He let me adjust. He watched my face the whole time, and when I let out the breath I had been holding and gave him a small nod he moved a little further, and paused again, and the muscle in his jaw worked, and I knew what it was costing him to keep this pace.
"Daniil."
"I have you. Fuck, you feel..."
"I know."
When he was all the way in he stayed still.
His forehead came down to mine. He breathed.
I breathed. He said my name like it was the first word in a language he was learning.
Chloe. Chloe. Then lower, under his breath, almost not for me: "So tight.
Fuck, baby. So tight." His arms shook a little where they held him up over me.
"Move," I said.
He moved.
Slow first. So slow. Then a little less slow, finding the rhythm, finding the place where my breath caught and going back to it, learning me on this too, the way he had learned me in the shower.
The restraint in him was visible. It lived along the line of his shoulders, in the set of his teeth, in the white knuckles of the hand braced beside my head.
He was holding back because he had promised he would.
"You feel like nothing else," he said into the side of my throat, voice gone low and wrecked.
"Nothing else, Chloe." His other hand came down to my hip and gripped there, possessive, taking what he was allowed to take.
I lifted up to meet him. I put my mouth on the underside of his jaw. I let him hear the sound I was not bothering to keep down anymore. "More," I said into his neck. "Don't be careful with me." The line of him broke, just a little, in the rhythm. He let out a breath that was nearly a word.
"My girl. Mine."
"Yours."
"Say it."
"I'm yours."
He said something low in Russian I did not have.
He picked the pace up. The slow steady drive of him hit somewhere deep enough that the edges of the lamp light went white.
He brought me to the edge and held me there, his forehead to mine.
"Come for me, baby," he said, voice gone rough.
"Come for me. Let me feel it." That tipped me.
I went over hard, my back arching up off the bed, my nails dragging down the muscle of his back, and I called his name the way a person calls a name when there is no other word left in the mouth.
My hand found his ribs the same way it had on his bed the morning of the soup, the same flat splay of fingers along the same bone, and his rhythm broke and he followed me a few thrusts later, his hips snapping forward one last hard time, his face going into the curve of my neck, his weight coming down on me in the good way, and the sound he made was low and not quite contained, and it was for me.
The room was dark. The lamp had gone out, I did not remember when.
Our breath was loud in the dark. He kept me in his arms, on our sides, my back along his chest, his arm heavy and warm under my breasts.
He kissed the top of my shoulder once. I did not want to be anywhere else in the world.
I told him so. He made the low approving sound into my hair.
Some unmeasurable time later I was on a small stool on the bath mat in nothing but his shirt, the soft white one with the sleeves I had pushed up to my elbows.
He was behind me in his boxer briefs, hair still damp at the ends, the hairdryer in one hand.
He was working it through my hair in long slow passes, his other hand smoothing the section he had just dried.
The mirror was fogged in the corners. The dryer hummed.
The bathroom smelled like him, like the cedar of his soap and the warm of his skin and steam.
"Are you regretting it?"
"From the sound I made earlier, no."
He laughed. The two low notes of it. He bent and kissed the crown of my head, and went back to the slow work of drying my hair.
I looked at us in the fogged mirror. The shape of him behind me. The shape of me in his shirt. My eyes met my own eyes in the glass.
I am his. And I said yes with all of me.