Ruslan
I sit alone for a long time after she leaves the room.
The cottage is quiet in the way only places with sleeping children can be quiet. Not empty. Not peaceful exactly. Just full of small breathing lives behind thin walls and the knowledge that one noise too loud will wake them all.
My daughters.
Even in my own head, the words do not sit normally.
I never thought I would have a child.
Men like me do not build their lives around children.
We inherit enemies before we inherit furniture.
We learn early that loving anything too openly gives other people somewhere to aim.
I watched my father treat family like territory, not tenderness.
I told myself I would be better by simply being colder.
Now I have two girls with my eyes and Zoya’s mouth and the undeniable proof that they belong to me.
It does terrify me. It also makes something harder and stranger move through my chest every time I think of them.
I picture Mila half on top of me on the couch, warm and unafraid, telling me not to die.
I picture Nadia with her frog book and her narrow stare, measuring me like a problem she intended to solve eventually.
I picture Zoya in the grocery aisle dropping pasta because a stranger said the girls looked like me, and that was the moment my life divided into before and after.
Two daughters.
Five years old.
Years I missed because I thought letting her go was mercy.
The more I think about it, the uglier it becomes.
I push myself up from the chair, leg stiff and angry, and stand still for a second until the room steadies. The shower is running down the hall.
Zoya.
Of course she’s the thing my mind reaches for next. Not the men trying to kill me. Not the leak in my circle. Not the list of names I need to tear apart. Her.
The messages start playing in my head before I even reach the bathroom door.
Are you awake?
Tell me what you want.
I’m touching myself.
I picture her writing those words with my daughters asleep down the hall and not knowing she was sending them to me. I picture the years she spent alone, holding herself together with one hand and using the other to reach for a stranger she trusted because strangers are safer than ghosts.
I knock once.
There’s a pause. Then her voice, muffled by water. “What?”
“I need the shower.”
She laughs softly, tired and disbelieving. “You are unbelievable.”
“Yes.”
Another pause.
Then: “Come in, then.”
That should not feel like permission to sin.
It does.
I open the door. Steam hits me first, warm and thick, and then I see her through the glass. Head tipped back under the water, hair slick to her shoulders, skin flushed from heat. She turns when the door shuts, sees me, and for one second I just stare.
Her body is all the things I’ve spent years remembering badly. Full breasts. Soft stomach. thick thighs. The kind of beauty men like me are not supposed to reach for because once we do, we stop wanting anything else.
“You said shower,” she says.
My eyes move over her once, slowly. “I lied.”
Her mouth twitches despite herself. “That’s comforting.”
I strip without answering. The movement pulls at the wound, but I barely feel it over the fact that she’s watching me now too. Not shy. Not exactly. Just direct in the way women are when they already know what a man looks like hard and desperate.
When I step in, she shifts back to make room.
The shower is small.
We are not.
Her breasts brush my chest before either of us says anything, and that’s enough. My hand goes to the back of her neck, and I kiss her.
She kisses me back harder than I expect, as if she was waiting to punish me with it.
Water runs over both of us. Her hands slide up my chest, over my shoulders, into my hair. Mine go down her back, over the curve of her ass, and I drag her against me until she gasps.
“Careful,” she says against my mouth.
“With what?”
“Your leg.”
“I’m not thinking with my leg.”
That makes her laugh, and the sound does something filthy to me.
She reaches down between us and wraps her hand around my cock. The shock of it nearly folds me in half.
“Zoya.”
“What?” she asks, stroking me once, slow and wet under the water. “You want to be practical now?”
“No.”
“Good.”
She gets on her toes to kiss me again and keeps pumping my cock with that same slow, deliberate grip until I’m breathing hard into her mouth. I palm one breast, then the other, heavy and slick under the stream, and when I drag my thumb over her nipple she makes that small helpless sound again.
I bury my face against her neck for a second, then lower my mouth to her breast. She braces one hand against the tile behind her, fingers slipping in the water.
I suck her nipple into my mouth and feel her whole body tighten.
Her hand jerks on my cock. I do it again, harder, tongue and teeth just enough to make her arch.
“Fuck,” she whispers.
I switch to the other breast, greedy now, burying my face between them because I want her everywhere at once and I have already waited too long for every part of her. Her fingers dig into my shoulders. Her knee lifts against my hip.
I slide my hand between her thighs.
She’s already wet again.
My fingers find her pussy easily, slick even under the stream, and when I push two into her she drops her head back against the tile with a broken moan.
“That’s what I wanted,” she says.
“What?”
“This. Not thinking. Just this.”
I fuck her with my fingers while she works my cock with her hand, both of us getting rougher by the second, the water turning every movement slick and urgent.
She rides my fingers shamelessly, clit brushing the heel of my palm, and I watch her face while I do it.
Eyes half-closed. Mouth open. Hair plastered to her cheeks.
She notices me watching and says, breathless, “Don’t stop.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
I pull my fingers out and turn her.
Not hard. Just firm enough that she catches herself on the tile with both hands.
There’s a second where she goes still and looks back over her shoulder at me, wet and flushed and open in a way that makes my control feel temporary.
“My leg,” I say, voice rough. “I’m not lifting you.”
“I can stand.”
“I know.”
“And if you hurt yourself doing this, I’m not taking responsibility,” she teases.
I crowd in behind her, one hand on the wall beside her head, the other spreading her thighs a little wider. “You already are.”
She snorts, then sucks in a breath when I slide my cock between her legs and line myself up.
The first push into her is almost enough to make me come.
She’s hot, wet, and so ready that my head falls forward against her shoulder as I force myself to go slowly.
Her pussy grips every inch of me like it’s angry I kept it waiting.
By the time I’m fully inside her, both of us are breathing like we’ve run.
“There,” she whispers.
I kiss the side of her throat. “You still think about the messages?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Then I start to move.
There’s no room in the shower for gentleness that isn’t hungry.
I keep one hand braced on the tile, the other on her hip, and fuck her carefully but deep, pulling out just enough to feel her take me over and over again.
She pushes back into me without pretending she doesn’t want it, and the sound of skin and water and breath in that small space turns obscene almost at once.
Her breasts press against the tile when I drive into her harder. I slide a hand up and cup one from behind, thumb rolling over her nipple while I keep fucking her, and she curses under her breath, the sound almost drowned by the shower.
“That’s it,” I tell her.
She laughs once, shaky. “You are so full of yourself.”
I thrust deeper, hit the angle that makes her knees weaken, and she chokes on a moan. “Yes,” I say. “And you like it.”
Her answer is to reach one hand down between her legs and start touching her clit while I’m inside her. The sight nearly finishes me.
Water runs over her arm. My cock is sliding in and out of her slick pussy. Her fingers are on her clit, quick and desperate now, because she wants release and I understand that need too well.
I pull her back harder against me and let her use my cock however she wants. Her ass smacks my hips in the cramped space. Her breath goes ragged. My mouth goes to her shoulder, her neck, the place behind her ear where she once told me in a text she liked being bitten when she was close.
So I bite her.
Not enough to hurt. Enough to mark.
She cries out and comes almost immediately after. Her whole body tightens around me. Her hand slips. Her pussy clamps down on my cock so hard my vision blurs, and I thrust through it twice, maybe three times, before I lose it too.
I come deep inside her, forehead against her wet shoulder, one hand crushing the tile, the other locked around her waist to keep both of us standing.
For a while, neither of us moves. The water keeps running. Her breathing is still uneven. Mine is worse.
Finally she says, voice hoarse, “This is a terrible idea.”
“Yes.”
“You agree too fast.”
“It’s still true.”
She turns her head just enough to look at me over her shoulder.
There’s anger in her still. Need too.
History, obviously.
I kiss her neck once and pull out carefully.
She shivers and straightens slowly, then turns in the narrow space to face me. Her hands go to my chest, not pushing me away, just resting there while she catches her breath.
We stand under the water like that, both too wrecked to pretend this was just release.
It was release.
It was also everything else.