Chapter 9 #2
"I'll keep that in mind." He's close now — not alley-close, not wall-close, but close enough that the candlelight catches the angles of his face and the pale of his eyes, and I am very aware that the apartment is dark and small and Evie is not in it and there is no one in the world who knows this man is standing in my living room right now.
"Tell me to leave and I'll leave," he says. "Mean it, and I'll go."
"Leave," I say.
"Say it like you mean it, and I will." His voice is soft, and that, coupled with his accent, does things to my body that it shouldn’t.
I look at him. He looks at me. The candles do what candles do — they flicker, making everything softer, closer, more intimate.
They strip away the logic of bright lights and create an ambiance that causes my usually rational thoughts to run amok.
Making him something I want to reach for rather than run from, and I hate that, I hate all of it, I hate that my body has not once responded to this man the way self-preservation requires.
"You had no right," I chastise. "Whatever you think this is, whatever you've decided about me — you had no right to listen to my life without my permission.
To sit across the hall and listen." My voice is steady, despite the emotions raging within.
It is always steady when I need it to be.
"I have a daughter. Do you understand what that means?
I have a child to think of, to care for, in this apartment and you—"
"I know," he says.
"Then you know why I can't—" I stop.
"Can't what?" He takes another step, caging me against the wall now, the familiar geometry of it, his eyes piercing my soul, his body close.
"Can't let someone in? Can't trust anything that comes toward you because everything that has come toward you has required you to run away from it?" His voice is low, gravely. "Can't stop running long enough to consider that some things are worth standing still for?"
"Don't," I say. "Don't do that. Don't take what you heard and use it against me."
"I'm not using it against you." He reaches up and takes the phone from my hand, carefully, and sets it on the shelf beside us with his own, and now his hands are free, and so are mine.
"I'm telling you I know. I know what you're carrying.
I know how long you've been carrying it. And I'm still here."
"You're here because you don’t trust me."
"I'm here," he says, "because I heard you say my name and I have been in 4D for three days trying to talk myself out of crossing the hall and finding out exactly what my name on your lips sounds like without a single barrier between us. And I have failed. I am done pretending."
His hand comes up and finds my face — just his fingers at my jaw, tilting my chin up slightly, the lightest possible contact — and I stop breathing. "You are the most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to me," he says. "I hope you know that."
"Victor—"
"There it is," he says, quietly. "That right there. My name on your lips just like that. That is why I’m here."
He leans down and kisses me.
Not like in the alley. The alley was a point being made, controlled and deliberate, a powerful man flexing his will and then walking away.
This is different. This is a man with desires, and the difference is undeniable.
I kiss him back, wrapping my arms around the back of his neck, just as I’ve been wanting to do since that day.
The moment his mouth touched mine, I stopped pretending I didn’t want him.
Grasping at his collar with my fingers, slipping one hand beneath his shirt there to touch the skin at the back of his neck.
That gets a reaction, and he makes a sound low in his chest. A sound that sends my nervous system into a frenzy.
His hands move from my jaw into my hair and along my waist, pulling me against him harder. I got on my tiptoes, winding the hand beneath his neck down further, my other hand finds the front of his shirt and grips it desperately.
He pulls back enough to look down at me, his eyes in the dim light darker than usual. And I can see him deliberating.
“Alex,” he whispers, voice husky.
“Don’t,” I say, and pull his mouth back down to mine.
He laughs wickedly against my mouth, and then his hands move, finding the curve of my waist. I can feel the warmth of his palm through the fabric of my shirt, and just like when he touched me in the alley, I make that sound that I can’t take back.
His hand grips my waist, and my breath goes uneven, my hand that had been gripping his shirt releasing the fabric in exchange for burying in his hair instead. Encouraged, he picks me up, settling me against his hips, my legs instinctively wrapping around his waist.
He walks backward, carrying me with him until we reach the couch, then turns and sets me down on the soft surface. I sit there, looking up at him, and there is no version of this where I pretend I don’t want him.
He crouches in front of me, putting us at eye level, then takes my face in both hands. His thumbs caressing my cheek as he just looks at me for a moment, with that completely unhurried attention that I’ve somehow never been able to stay ahead of.
“Tell me to stop,” he says, “and I stop. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He leans in and kisses me again. This time, there is no restraint, none of the carefully managed hunger he was always holding onto. I lean into it as his hands move from my face to the hem of my shirt.
“Mogu?” he asks against my mouth. May I?
“Yes,” I say.
His hands slide under the fabric and find my skin, the warmth of them intoxicating as he moves his mouth down my throat, to my collarbone. A hiss escapes, and my hands are in his hair; he mutters against my skin in Russian, low enough that I can’t make it out.
“Victor–” I whine.
“Hands,” he commands against my throat. One word, low and demanding.
“What?”
He pulls back enough to look at me, eyes bright. “Put your hands behind your back,” he says. “And keep them there.”
I stare at him for a moment, his expression completely serious. I put my hands behind my back.
A satisfied grin dawns across his face. “Khoroshaya.”
He leans in, and his mouth finds my throat again. Instinct makes me reflexively want to pull my hands from behind my back and grip his hair. But he shifts his weight against me, not giving me an inch of room to do so, simultaneously sinking his teeth into the soft curve of my neck.
“Uh-huh,” he growls. “Ne dvigaysya.”
His hands are at my waist now, moving with deliberate slowness, refusing to rush anything, his patience a quality that I have been finding alternatively maddening and devastating since the storage room. And right now, in the dim light of my apartment, with his mouth on my skin, it’s devastating.
Both of my hands grip the couch at my back, and my eyes close as his mouth explores my skin where my shirt used to be. The rise of my breasts where they peak out from beneath my bra, the flat of my stomach down to the hem of my pants.
“Skazhi mne,” he says. His mouth against my ear once more, his voice lower than I have ever heard it. “Chego ty khochesh.”
“You,” I say in a raspy voice. “I want you.”
He makes that sound low in his chest again as his hands move to the button of my jeans, and I stop thinking altogether as he unbuttons them, sliding the zipper down next. Placing soft kisses on each piece of flesh uncovers as he does.
“Victor,” I breathe, his name barely more than a husky whisper.
His eyes lift to mine. The look he gives me is devastating, giving me every possible chance to tell him to stop, but absolutely hoping I won’t.
“Tell me what you want,” he says, voice low with desire of his own.
I swallow hard, my fingers gripping the couch cushion harder. “Don’t stop.”
His restraint thins instantly, jaw tightening, his hands settling over me more possessively than before.
Then his mouth is on me again, lower this time, and my head lolls back in response.
Heat is building throughout my body, every place his hands touch, every spot his mouth makes contact with, pushing me further.
I try desperately to stay quiet. The sensation is nearly overwhelming as I hold on to my own sense of control with every ounce I can muster.
But I find out quickly that Victor is very good at breaking that control with his tongue. He learns my body with terrible patience, discovering each place that makes my breath stutter, my hips rise, or a moan escape. Everything I fail to hide.
“Look at me,” he commands.
When I do, it undoes me. His eyes are dark and focused entirely on me, and what he is doing to me. The pleasure crests so fast I almost resent him for it. My body tightening as the room narrows around us, his hands, his mouth, the low murmurs of praise he mutters against my skin.
I tip over the edge with his name caught on my tongue somewhere between a gasp and a plea for release.
For that one suspended moment, there is nothing. Just us, just this moment. No danger. No past. No reality. Just his hands at my waist, his mouth on me, and the tremor that runs through my body.
And then my phone rings.
The ringtone is Evie's — a specific one I set for her, different from everyone else, the one that means I answer it no matter what, no matter where, no matter what I'm in the middle of.
The sound, mixed with the light of the screen, cuts through the dark apartment and through the candlelight and through the specific gravity of this man's mouth and that look in his eyes, pulling us both from the moment.
I put my hand on his chest and push. He steps back immediately, no resistance, reading the situation fast, not asking for me to explain.
I answer before the third ring. "Evie. What's wrong."
Her voice comes through high and thin, the voice she uses when she is frightened and trying not to be, the voice that I have heard exactly twice in three years and that does something to my nervous system that nothing else on earth does.