CHAPTER 30 Nadia #4
The devastation of it. Not like the first one.
This one is pulled from somewhere deeper, somewhere his body reaches that no one else has reached, and it takes me apart.
I clench around him and I make a sound that is almost a sob and my arms shake and he holds me up, his hands on my hips, his cock still inside me, still moving through it, extending it.
"That's it," he says. His voice rough. "That's. God, Nadia, you feel."
"Don't stop. I want to feel you come. I want."
He moves faster. The urgency of a man past the edge of his own control, and I watch him in the mirror. The way his rhythm loses its precision and becomes something rawer, something he is not managing anymore.
"Nadia."
"Yes. Yes, come."
He does.
He buries himself deep and his hands grip my hips and his face presses into the back of my neck and he makes a sound, not words, just sound, just the noise of a man coming inside a woman he wants, his cock pulsing inside me, the heat of him filling me.
We stay like that.
His forehead on my neck. His hands on my hips. His breathing rough and uneven against my spine. My hands on the barre, holding on. The after. Not separate yet. Still joined.
The studio is quiet except for our breathing.
The work lights are warm on our skin. The floor is good under my feet in the slippers he chose. The mirrors show us. Tangled. Undone.
He kisses the back of my neck. Soft.
"Are you all right," he says.
I laugh. Just a small one. "Yes."
"I didn't hurt."
"No." I turn my head. I find his mouth. I kiss him. "You didn't hurt me."
He pulls out slowly, carefully, the tenderness of him now after the roughness of him before. I feel the loss of him, and then his arms are around me, turning me, pulling me against his chest.
I press my face into his neck. He smells like sweat and the faint trace of his cologne from earlier, and underneath all of it, just him.
He holds me.
The rain starts while we're still in the studio.
I hear it first — the specific percussion of it on the old brick exterior, building from tentative to committed in the way of winter rain that has decided to mean it.
He hears it a moment after I do and we look at each other in the lateral warmth of the work lights and the quality of the moment is the quality of something that knows it's about to end and doesn't need to be extended because it was exactly what it was.
"Ready," he says.
"The coat," I say.
He finds it. He holds it for me, which is a gesture I receive in the specific way I've been learning to receive his gestures — not as performance, as habit.
I button it.
He turns off the work lights.
We go out the side door into the rain, which has gone from tentative to enthusiastic in the time we were inside, and the street is wet and dark and reflecting the yellow of the streetlights and the two men at forty feet emerge from a doorway with the expressions of people who are professionally committed to not commenting on the fact that their principal and his —
Whatever I am.
Are emerging from an unlocked side door in Carroll Gardens at midnight in the rain.
We walk back.
Not quickly. There is no operational reason to walk slowly in the cold rain — the sensible thing is to cover the three blocks at the speed three blocks in cold rain deserve.
We walk slowly anyway.
His hand finds mine at some point in the second block, which happens the way things happen between us that neither of us has decided on consciously — just the thing that occurs when two people have been in enough proximity for long enough and the body makes the decision the mind hasn't gotten to yet.
The rain comes down.
The city reflects it in the street.
We walk.
By the time we reach the house we are thoroughly wet in the specific way of people who have been in the rain long enough to stop minding it and have arrived at the other side of minding, which is the place where it's just weather and you're just in it.
He unlocks the front door.
Inside the house is warm.
He closes the door and we stand in the front hall, wet and slightly laughing, and he looks at me with the expression that is the fully realized version of everything I've been reading in fragments for two months.
"Tea," he says.
"Yes," I say.
We go to the kitchen.
The house is warm and the rain is outside and the fig tree in the garden is being rained on, which I think is what it needed, and tomorrow Viktor will still be somewhere recalibrating and the Vore will still be a word in an intelligence summary and Marco will still be waiting to meet me and all of it will still be what it is.
But tonight we make tea in the kitchen with wet coats on the hooks and the rain on the windows and the particular warmth of a house that is beginning, in ways I didn't plan for when I stepped off a plane in New York with a cover story and a mission, to feel like somewhere I might want to be.
Not a box.
Not a target location.
Not an operational asset's temporary housing.
Somewhere.
I hold my tea with both hands.
He holds his.
Outside the rain commits to the night.
Inside, we are warm.