23. Cora #3
He proved it, infuriatingly, thoroughly, mapping me with an attention that took its sweet time about everything, making a liar out of every clever thing I'd ever said about efficiency, his mouth finding my throat and then lower, learning exactly which shift of his weight made my hips rise to meet him, which press of his palm against my ribs made my breath stutter, filing every reaction away and using it against me with a precision that would have been infuriating if it hadn't felt so unbelievably good.
I gave up trying to narrate any of it somewhere around the time his hand slid between us, slow and certain, finding the exact rhythm that turned my usual running commentary into nothing but his name and a sound I didn't recognize as my own voice.
"Dmitri." It came out half question, half plea, both of us already past the point where either of us needed the other one to answer with words.
He answered anyway, low against my ear, something rough and half Russian and entirely unguarded, the kind of thing I understood by tone alone even without the translation, and it undid something in me faster than anything English could have managed.
When he finally settled over me fully, when there was nothing left of the distance either of us had spent years perfecting, he went still for one long second, forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we'd run the whole way from the dock.
"Still sure," he said, an echo of another night in another bed, except this time there was nothing careful left in the question at all.
"Extremely."
He reached down between us, guiding himself to where I wanted him most, and paused there a moment, just the blunt press of him against me, watching my face with an attention that missed nothing, memorizing whatever it was doing to me before he'd even moved.
I lifted my hips into him, out of patience, out of every last scrap of restraint either of us had left, and he sank into me slow, inch by inch, giving my body time to open around every part of him instead of taking what I was already offering.
The stretch of it pulled a sound out of me I didn't recognize, half gasp, half his name, and he stilled completely once he was fully seated inside me, forehead dropping to mine, both of us breathing like the last few seconds had cost us something neither of us minded paying.
"Okay?" he asked, rough, still checking on me even now.
"More than okay." I tightened around him on purpose, just to watch what it did to his face. "Move, Dmitri."
He moved then, slow at first, deliberate, like a man determined to memorize every second of it rather than rush toward the end, withdrawing almost entirely before sinking back into me with a control that made my whole body arch up to meet him.
I met him with everything I had, my hands dragging down his back, my legs locking around him, both of us finding a rhythm the grass and the stars and the whole quiet lake seemed to hold their breath for.
It built the way the whole day had, easy and unremarkable right up until it wasn't, his mouth back on mine to catch every sound I couldn't help making, his palm braced flat against the ground beside my head like he needed something solid to hold onto too.
When it finally broke over both of us, it broke seconds apart, his own release chasing mine so closely I felt the tremor of it move straight through him and into me, and for a long, wrecked, wonderful stretch afterward neither of us moved at all, just lay there tangled in grass and starlight and each other, the lake lapping quietly against the dock a few feet away, patient, unbothered, the only witness either of us needed.
"I have grass in new places now," I said eventually, into the dark, my voice wrecked in a way that made him laugh against my hair.
"I told you I'd take responsibility."
"This is not what I meant by that."
"I'm a man of very broad interpretations."
We drove home the next morning in the kind of comfortable, wrung out silence that only comes after a truly good day, my hand resting on his knee, his thumb tracing slow absent circles against my wrist at every red light we hit once the world started catching up with us again.
Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but I think we both felt the driveway behind us for what it actually was: the last easy hour before real life reached back out and reclaimed us both.
His phone buzzed the moment we crossed back into range, once, then again, and I watched him glance down at the screen and go very still, one second longer than a normal message should have required.
His eyes moved back to the top and started over, the way you read something twice, hoping it says something different the second time.
"Everything okay?" I asked.
He looked up, and whatever had been sitting behind his eyes a moment ago smoothed itself over so completely I almost doubted I'd seen it at all. He smiled at me, easy, warm, entirely convincing.
"Nothing's wrong," he said. "Just Nik."
It wasn't a lie, not technically. I just had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that it wasn't the whole truth either, and I decided, for one more mile at least, to let myself believe it anyway.