4. Zoya
ZOYA
I’m still panting when the phone slips from my hand and lands beside me on the bed.
My fingers feel boneless. My thighs are trembling.
My whole body is too warm, too sensitive, too aware of the damp slickness between my legs and the way my pulse still won’t settle.
I stare up at the ceiling and try to breathe like a normal person, but every inhale catches halfway in my chest and turns into something shakier.
Jesus Christ. I actually came.
For a stranger. For a faceless man on the other side of a screen who told me what to do in that low, controlled way that somehow felt even filthier because I couldn’t hear it, could only imagine it.
I drag one hand over my face and let out a breath that’s closer to a helpless laugh than anything else.
This is insane. Completely insane.
My pussy gives a weak little throb at the memory of the last messages, and I squeeze my thighs together on instinct, only to suck in a breath at how sensitive I still am.
My fingers are sticky. My skin is damp. I can still feel the ghost of that rough, possessive voice in my head, the one I built out of nothing but a few careful texts and my own ruined imagination.
Mystery Number.
Tall. Dark hair. Bad habits.
I close my eyes.
At first, like before, the picture in my head is vague.
A broad body. A hard chest under my palms. A large hand gripping my thigh, spreading me wider.
A faceless man sitting back against the mattress while I climb onto his lap, his mouth brushing my neck, his voice at my ear telling me to take it slow, to stay still, to be good.
I press the heel of my hand to my sternum and try to steady myself, but that just makes me more aware of my own body.
My nipples are still tight under my T-shirt.
My skin still feels too electric, too hungry.
I can practically feel that imagined hand sliding up the inside of my thigh again, feel the rough command in those texts sinking into me all over again.
I swallow.
The faceless man in my head shifts. The shoulders get broader. The stillness changes shape. The imagined mouth becomes more severe, the imagined hands larger, more controlled, more dangerous. And suddenly it isn’t faceless anymore.
It’s Ruslan.
My eyes fly open. “No,” I whisper to absolutely no one.
My body does not agree.
Because now that it’s him, I can’t unsee it. Ruslan sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, dress shirt open at the throat, dark hair slightly mussed from his own hand, those calm, unreadable eyes fixed on me while I straddle his lap.
Ruslan gripping my hips like he owns the exact place my body fits against his.
Ruslan looking up at me with that terrifyingly composed face while I sink onto his cock inch by inch, that control of his finally slipping just enough for me to see how much he wants it.
My breath catches so hard it hurts. “Oh my God.”
I turn onto my side and press my face into my pillow like that might somehow stop the thought, but it only makes the image sharper.
Because I know what his hands look like. Long fingers. Strong wrists. Clean nails. Expensive watch.
I know what his mouth looks like too. The hard line of it. The way it almost smiles instead of fully doing it. The way one corner shifts when he’s amused.
And now my brain, traitorous filthy thing that it is, gives me that mouth on my skin. On my throat. On the inside of my thigh. On my breast while his hand spreads me open and his voice, that deep impossible voice, tells me exactly how wet I am for him.
My thighs part before I even mean them to. I lie there staring into the dimness of my room, breathing hard all over again, and the thought gets worse. Hotter.
Because now it’s not just Ruslan, vaguely. It’s Ruslan specifically.
Ruslan in the library aisle, looking down at me while I say something stupid. Ruslan asking, Would you recommend this? Ruslan saying, Hypothetically, Miss Hart…
My cunt clenches so hard I make a humiliating little sound into the pillow.
No.
No, absolutely not.
I cannot be lying here freshly fucked up from sexting a stranger and imagining my gorgeous older patron taking me apart on his lap. That is too much. That is a crisis. That is enough bad decisions for one night.
But the thing about my body is that it doesn’t care what I think is too much. Now that it’s him in my head, everything feels even more vivid.
I know how tall he is, so when I imagine him towering over me beside the bed, one hand braced on the mattress and the other pushing my knees apart, my whole body goes molten with it.
I know how controlled he is, so when I imagine that control finally thinning, his jaw tightening, his breathing roughening because I’m wet under him and he can feel it, I almost whimper.
I know how his eyes look when they settle fully on me, and in my head they’re fixed between my thighs now, dark and intent and devastatingly calm while I squirm under the attention.
I squeeze my legs together again. It doesn’t help. It just reminds me how soaked I still am. How easy it would be to slip my hand back down. How easy it would be to pretend, just for one more minute, that the stranger texting me and the man haunting my library Thursdays are somehow the same person.
The thought hits me so hard I go still.
My pulse jumps. My mouth goes dry.
That’s ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. They’re obviously not the same man.
One is a faceless stranger with filthy hands and a filthy mouth through text, and the other is Ruslan Karelin, who checks out books about wars and biographies and stands too close in library aisles until I lose basic motor function.
Still. The fantasy won’t let him go now.
In my head, Ruslan is on the bed behind me, pulling me back against his chest, one big hand flattening over my stomach while the other slides under my panties.
He’s not hurried. That’s the thing that makes it unbearable.
He never hurries. Even imagined, he’s patient.
Thorough. The kind of man who would take his time driving me insane just to watch me come apart properly.
I can almost hear him.
Spread your legs.
Look at you.
You’re so wet.
That does it.
A broken breath tears out of me, and before I can stop myself my hand slides down between my thighs again.
My fingers brush the slick mess there and I nearly jolt from the oversensitivity, but it only takes a second for the ache to change.
It isn’t the sharp, desperate need from before.
It’s deeper now. Heavier. A slow, fresh throb building on top of what I just did.
“Fuck,” I whisper into the pillow. I’m not even pretending I’m being good anymore.
I touch myself gently this time, circling, shivering, and all I can see is Ruslan watching me do it.
Hungrily, yes, but controlled even in that.
Like he’d sit back and make me show him exactly how I touch myself before he ever let me touch him.
Like he’d watch every twitch of my face, every breath, every little sound I try to swallow, and memorize what undoes me.
Heat floods my face and my chest.
In my head I’m kneeling between his spread thighs now, my hands on his hard legs, my cheek tipped against one of them while I look up and he looks down at me with that awful, devastating calm.
Then I’m in his lap again.
Then I’m on my back with him between my knees.
Then I’m bent over the circulation desk after hours, his hand over my mouth, his body pinning me down while he growls in my ear that I should have stopped looking at him like that if I didn’t want this.
I gasp and press my face harder into the pillow. This is so far past reasonable it’s not even visible anymore. And it’s making me dripping wet all over again.
I rub a little faster, helpless now, the fantasy running wild with me.
Ruslan pushing my skirt up in a dark library corner.
Ruslan backing me against a shelf, his hand between my thighs while he tells me to be quiet.
Ruslan sitting in one of the reading chairs with me stretched over his lap, splitting me open slowly while I cling to his shoulders and lose my mind.
I turn on my side. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”
I open my phone and type the word nymphomaniac into the search bar. Am I going crazy? Has it finally gotten to me? Am I going crazy for being a sex-starved twenty-three-year-old virgin?
Sanity returns to me and I turn my face into the pillow, screaming into it. I never should have let Karina talk me into this. And honestly? All I want to do is text the stranger again. It’s like he’s opened a flood gate for me, and there’s no closing it now.
I come to a decision. The next time I see Ruslan, I’m going to have some kind of conversation with him. Maybe even finally gather the courage to ask him out.
Only real dick can solve my problem.