Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Victor
She doesn't retreat.
That's the first thing I notice — she's held her ground through this entire conversation, chin up, green eyes sharp, and she hasn't moved an inch.
I'll give her that. Most people step back when I step forward.
It's a reflex, biological, the body understanding something the brain hasn't processed yet.
Alex understands exactly what I am, and she's still standing there with her hands at her sides and her jaw set like she's decided that moving is the thing she's not going to do.
So I move instead.
One step, two, slow and deliberate, and she tracks me the whole way and still hesitates to retreat, but when the choice is my body against hers or stepping back, she finally yields.
Until her shoulders hit the brick wall behind her, and there's nowhere left to go, and she realizes it at the same moment I plant my hand flat against the wall beside her head.
She looks up at me. Her eyes are very green and very angry, and underneath the anger, there is something else that she is working extremely hard to keep where I can't see it.
I can see it.
Her pulse is moving at the side of her throat.
Fast. Faster than the cold weather and the conversation accounts for.
I don't look at it for long because looking at it for long is a problem, but I note it the way I note everything — completely, without sentiment, and file it in the place I've been building for her since the storage room at Onyx when she stood in my jacket and told me she wouldn't sleep with me, and her face said something entirely different.
"Did you miss me?" I ask.
"Don't flatter yourself," she says.
"That's not a no."
"It's a no," she says. "It's absolutely a no."
It isn't a no. A no doesn't come with a pulse like that, visible and rapid and honest in the way that bodies are honest when the mind is busy performing something else.
A no doesn't come with hands pressed flat against the brick behind her like she needs something to hold onto.
I find I appreciate her stubbornness even when it's working against her, which it is, comprehensively, right now.
"You've been thinking about me," I say.
"I've been thinking about how to avoid you." Her voice is steady. She has an exceptional voice — harmonic, controlled, even, it almost never gives her away. Almost. "There's a difference."
"Not much of one," I say. "Either way I'm on your mind."
The flash of pure frustration across her face is something I feel in my chest, and I find it unreasonably satisfying.
"You need to leave me alone," she says. "I haven't said anything about what I saw. I'm not going to. You've been following me for six days and I haven't done a single thing that should concern you, so back up and leave me alone."
"I know you haven't said anything," I say.
"Then we're done here."
"We're not done." I lean in — not enough to close the distance between us, just enough to make her aware of how much of it exists and what I could do with it.
The cold air between us thins further. "Because I can't know what you'll decide tomorrow.
I can't know if something shifts — if someone offers you something that makes staying quiet feel less valuable than it does right now.
I can't know if you're patient enough to wait for the right moment and the right leverage.
" I hold her gaze and let the words settle. "You understand my position."
"Yes," I agree. "It is."
I watch the color deepen along her cheekbones, and I let myself look at it — really look, because she's pressed against a wall in a narrow alley and there's nowhere for her to redirect my attention to.
She is extraordinarily difficult to look away from.
She has been from the first moment in the club when she looked directly at me and kept looking, and didn't perform fear the way frightened people usually perform it.
"So let me be clear. I will be watching you.
Everything you do, everyone you speak to, every decision you make — I will be there.
You will not be able to look over your shoulder without finding me.
" I pause. "Consider it a standing arrangement. "
"That's not—" She stops. Swallows. Starts again. "That's not a life. You can't just insert yourself into someone's life like that. That’s not how people work."
"I'm not doing it because it's convenient, trust me on that.”
"Then why—"
"Because I find myself curious," I say simply. “People rarely intrigue me, Alex."
She stares at me like I've spoken in some exotic language she wasn't expecting me to speak. The pulse at her throat keeps its elevated pace. This close, I can feel her breathing, and they're nowhere near as steady as her voice.
She is close enough that I can see every small thing happening on her face — the frustration, the alarm, the thing underneath both of those that she has been managing since the storage room at Onyx when she told me she wouldn't sleep with me and blushed furiously while she said it.
She's been managing it for six days. She's very good at managing things. It hasn't worked.
I can see exactly how well it hasn't worked, and I find I have run out of restraint, out of the sanity that lets her go back to her life where I manage her as a simple liability from a careful distance.
And with that loss comes the impulse to touch her that I can no longer resist as I move my hand from the wall to her waist.
The contact is deliberate. My palm settles against the curve of her waist, and I feel the warmth of her through the fabric of her jacket, and I feel also the precise moment she registers the touch — the slight tension, the breath she pulls in too fast, the way her body decides before her mind does.
And then the sound escapes her. Small. Involuntary.
A sharp, soft intake of breath that she cannot take back and that she is immediately, evidently furious about, and it travels through me like something lit.
I feel her breath catch before I hear it — the slight tension through my palm where I'm touching her, the way her body registers the contact before her mind has finished deciding what to do about it.
Then she makes the sound. Small, involuntary, a sharp inhale that she cannot take back, and it does something to my self-control that I am going to have to deal with in a moment.
I look at her face.
She's flushed. She's looking at me with those green eyes, and she is furious, but she doesn’t make a move to push my hand away.
Her palms are flat on the brick behind her and she is holding herself perfectly, deliberately still the way a person holds still when moving will give away the rest of what they've been protecting, and it is too late for that — it was too late for that the moment the sound left her lips — but she is trying anyway because she is the most stubborn woman I have ever had the particular pleasure of standing next to in a November alley.
"There it is," I say, quietly.
"Don't," she says.
"Don't what?"
She doesn't answer. Her jaw is tight and her eyes are bright and the pulse at her throat is doing something that I am finding extremely distracting, and my thumb presses slightly into the curve of her waist and her breath goes completely uneven and I watch it happen and I want, with a specificity I haven't felt in a long time, to take her apart completely and put her back together the way I choose.
I don't. Instead, I dip my head and press my mouth to her neck.
Not gently. I don't do things gently when I want them, and I want this, and she should know I want it — she should know exactly what she's doing to the person who is supposed to be managing her as a liability and is currently kissing her pulse point in a service alley like a man who has lost the thread of his own priorities.
I press my mouth to her skin and feel her pulse jump under my lips, and she makes another sound, breathier than the first, and her hands are gripping the brick wall behind her hard enough that I can see her knuckles from here.
She doesn't push me away.
I drag my mouth slowly up the side of her neck and feel her shiver and file that too — the shiver, the sound, the way she tips her chin up slightly like her body has made a decision her brain hasn't authorized.
She is frozen and burning, and she wants me to keep going, and she is furious about wanting it, and I find all three of those things equally compelling.
"Victor—" She says my name, and it comes out wrong, it comes out soft, and that is the thing that does it. Her voice, stripped of every bit of cold she’s been using to keep me at a distance, makes a sudden heat radiate in my chest, a heat that soon spreads through every fiber in my body.
“Bozhe moy,” I mumble, barely a whisper of a growl beneath my breath. Not intended for her to hear.
I pull back enough to look at her face, and then I kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth that I am going to be thinking about for a considerable amount of time, and then she kisses me back.
She kisses me back like she's been angry about wanting to and has finally stopped fighting it, which is exactly what's happening, and her hands come off the wall and I feel them at the front of my jacket and she is kissing me with her whole self the way she does everything — completely, without half measures, all the stubbornness and the headstrong boldness of her redirected into this, and it is better than I calculated, which is a thing I don't often have cause to say.
I could ruin her completely.
The thought arrives with absolute clarity while my hand is at her waist and her mouth is against mine, and she is pressed between me and the brick wall of an alley behind a café in November.
I could take this as far as it goes right now, and she would let me, not because she's weak — she is the opposite of weak — but because this thing between us has been building since the storage room, and she has been managing it alone for six days, and she is tired of managing it. I could.
I don't.
I end the kiss. Clean, complete, no gradual withdrawal — I pull back and step back and put distance between us and look at her.
She is flushed from her chest to her hairline. Her hands are still slightly raised between us, where they were on my jacket. Her lips are parted, and she is breathing like she ran here, and her eyes, when they focus on my face, are the most unguarded I have ever seen them.
Something pulls tight in my chest that I don't examine.
"You shouldn't let me see you like that," I say. My voice is not entirely level. I notice this and address it and continue. "It makes it very difficult to resist ruining you completely."
She stares at me. Her mouth opens. Closes.
"Go back inside," I say. "Your shift ended twelve minutes ago."
"You—" She stops. Whatever she was going to say doesn't make it out. She is looking at me like she can't decide whether to finish the sentence or hit me, and either option would be more satisfying than the stunned silence, and I find I want to make her finish sentences for a long time.
"Go inside, Alex," I say again. Quietly.
I turn and walk to the end of the alley.
I don't look back. I don't need to look back. I know exactly what I'd see — her against the brick, flushed and furious and working through the fact that she kissed me back, cataloging the exact moment she stopped managing the thing between us and let it happen.
I know because I'm cataloging the same thing.
She is a problem I came to contain, a liability I came to assess.
She is a woman whose name sounds different in my mouth than other names, whose stubbornness I find more compelling than most people's compliance, whose pulse under my lips told me more truth in three seconds than six days of watching her from a distance.
She is a woman who kissed me back in an alley and is going to spend the walk home furious about it, and I am going to spend the drive back thinking about the sound she made when I pressed my mouth to her neck, and neither of us is going to say so, and that is fine.
That is, in fact, exactly where I want us.
I put my hands in my jacket pockets and walk out into the grey November afternoon and let myself want what I want without examining it too closely, which is a thing I almost never allow, and which feels, in this particular moment, entirely worth it.