Lorik
Idon’t sleep. Not really, not in years. An hour here and there, shallow, one ear open. A man who has spent his whole life waiting to be killed doesn’t get to sleep like the innocent. I don’t get the reprieve the same as others.
So I’m awake, the way I am always awake on the fourth night, with a band on my left hand and a wife in my bed sleeping more soundly than she should with a monster this close.
I started sleeping in our bed on the second night and told myself it was strategy, that a captive left alone too long gets ideas.
When the truth is I lasted exactly one night in my office with a flight of stairs between us before I came up and lay down on top of the covers in a T-shirt and loose sweatpants like a coward keeping vigil.
She didn’t fight it. She just looked at me, and rolled to face the windows, and claimed her two feet of mattress, and left a cold no-man’s-land of sheet down the center of the bed that we have both been very careful not to cross.
Four days of that. Four days of her in my T-shirt and my boxers, padding around my house barefoot, eating Drini’s food, casing my exits, throwing knives with her mouth every time I’m in range.
Four days of watching her watch my hands and pretending I don’t catch her doing it, of her watching my mouth and pretending the same.
The air in here gets thicker every day. We are two people holding our breath at the bottom of the same pool, daring each other to surface first.
Tonight, in the early hours before the light meets the horizon she loses.
Brooklyn is dreaming. I know her sleep better than she does.
I’ve watched it on a screen for longer than I’ll ever admit, and I know the small sounds she makes when whatever’s behind her eyes turns warm.
She makes one now, low in her throat, and rolls.
Out of her two feet of mattress. Across the no-man’s-land. Into me.
I go to stone.
Her cheek finds my chest. Her bare leg hooks over mine, slow and heavy and sleep-drunk, and she fits herself against my side like she’s done it a thousand times, like her body decided something her waking mind would die before admitting.
I lie there and don’t breathe and tell myself this is fine.
She’s asleep, I’ll ease her back to her side in a moment because I am a man who does not take what isn’t offered.
But then her hand slides down my stomach and under the band of my pants and my boxers and closes around my cock that was already half hard simply because my wife was mere feet away, and every honorable thought I have ever had evacuates my skull like a lightswitch flicked down.
Move her hand you bastard. That’s the rule. That’s the line.
She’s dreaming; she doesn’t know it’s me, doesn’t know it’s anything; whatever she’s reaching for in that dream is not the man holding still as a corpse beside her.
Wake her, or move her hand, Kovaci, right the fuck now.
I don’t.
Forgive me, I can’t.
It’s been two years. Two years of nothing, not another woman, not my own hand, two years of pouring every want I have into a discipline that has just been undone by a sleeping woman’s careless fingers.
She’s stroking me now, slow and curious even in the dream, her thumb finding the first barbell and tracing it, then the next, then the next, learning the ladder of steel up the length of me like she’s reading something in the dark.
A breath leaves my parted lips—and she stills.
Her brow pulls, a small frown surfacing on her sleeping face, like the metal under her fingers is a word in a language she used to speak. Like she’s chasing something down a hallway in her dream and can’t quite reach the door.
My heart stops for an entirely different reason.
She knows that. She’s felt that once before.
The thought arrives with a spike of pure terror, because there’s exactly one place she could have felt it, one night that feels like a lifetime ago I have never let myself think about in this bed, and if she follows that frown all the way to the end of the hall—
But the dream pulls her back under. The frown smooths. And she keeps going.
And I am so close, so fast, it’s humiliating.
Two years collapses to nothing under her hand. I feel it coil at the base of my spine, feel my whole body gathering toward a release I have not allowed myself since before I knew her name, and I turn my face into her hair and grit my teeth against the sound that wants out of me—
She wakes.
I feel the exact second it happens. The change in her breathing, the snap of her body from soft to rigid, the dream falling away to leave her holding my dick in her hand in the shallow morning hours with her leg thrown over mine.
She goes absolutely still. Then she sucks in a horrified breath and her hand jerks, starting to pull back—
“Don’t.”
It rips out of me, low and wrecked, before I’ve decided to say anything at all, the need for her overpowering any rational thought that should be within my control.
Her hand freezes.
“Don’t stop.” I have never said that word please to another human being in my adult life.
I have never asked anyone for anything; asking is a weakness, and weakness is a way to die.
I say it now into the gray of our bedroom with my eyes shut like a man at confession. “Please. Brooklyn. Please don’t stop.”
The silence is a held blade.
I can feel her deciding. I can feel her awake and rigid and mortified, her pulse going wild where her wrist rests against my hip, and I know, I know, that the honorable thing, the only decent thing left for me to do, is to take her hand off me myself and let her flee to her side of the bed and never speak of it.
She’s a breath from doing it. I’ve given her the out; all she has to do is take it.
She doesn’t take it.
Slowly, so slowly, with her face still pressed to my chest where I can’t see it, my wife tightens her hand around me again. And strokes. Once. Deliberate. A choice. Hers, made awake, made knowing exactly whose body is in her grip.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” she whispers, fierce and shaking.
“Whatever you need it to mean,” I manage. “Don’t stop.”
My breath is ragged. She doesn’t stop.
She finds the rhythm fast, that quick, vicious competence she brings to everything, her thumb working the barbells on every pass like she’s already learned that’s what takes me apart, and it does, it absolutely does, and the noise I make is not a sound I recognize as my own.
I come almost at once, with a single torn breath and her name behind my teeth, spilling hot over her knuckles, two years of starvation ending in the careless, devastating fact of her hand.
My whole body shudders with it. For one suspended second the noise in my head, the noise that has not gone quiet ever, goes perfectly, blessedly silent.
Then it comes roaring back, and underneath the wreckage of it is one clear, savage certainty.
I am not letting her even the score.
I move before she can. I get a hand on her hip and I flip her under me, and she gasps, and I follow her down, settling my weight between her thighs, and her eyes go huge in the gray almost-light of dawn beginning to break, glassy and stunned and heated.
“Lorik—”
“My turn.”
I drag my mouth down her throat, and she arches, that beautiful traitorous body of her, before the words catch up to her.
“You touched what’s yours, sweetheart. Now I get to touch what’s mine.”
I hook my fingers in the waistband of the boxers, my boxers, on her, a fact that does something obscene to me, and drag them down her legs and off. She lets me, lifting her hips to help even as her mouth says, “I didn’t say you could—”
“Then say I can’t.”
I settle lower, my breath against the inside of her thigh, and look up the length of her body to where she’s propped on her elbows watching me with her chest heaving.
I wait. I will stop. If she says the word I will stop and hate myself sober for the rest of the day, and she has to see that I mean it.
Because the difference between me and every other man whose name she’s been taught to fear is that I will always, always wait for the word.
“Tell me to stop, Brooklyn, and I stop.”
She doesn’t tell me to stop.
What she says, after a long, ragged breath, in a voice that’s trying so hard to sound like a dare and lands somewhere closer to a plea, is, “We’re not leaving this room until you regret starting this.”
“Wrong.” I press my mouth to her, finally, the first taste of her in months, and she cries out and her hand flies into my hair, and I have to hold her hips down to the mattress to keep her under me. “We’re not leaving this room until you come.”
And then I make good on it.
I take my time, because I have wanted this for so long that rushing it would be a sin, and because every sound I drag out of her is a brick out of the wall she’s built against me.
She is loud. Gloriously, helplessly loud, past caring who in this house can hear her, and she tastes like the only clean thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.
When she finally breaks she breaks hard, both hands fisted in my hair, my name turning into a curse turning into a sob, her whole body bowing off the bed.
I don’t stop until she’s pushing weakly at my head, oversensitive and wrung out, and even then I press one last kiss to the inside of her thigh like a signature before I crawl up the bed and gather her shaking body against mine.
She lets me. That’s the part that levels me. She lets me hold her.
For a while neither of us says anything. Gray turns to gold at the windows. Her breathing slows.
“That can’t happen again,” she says finally, to the ceiling.
“It’s going to happen every morning for the rest of your life,” I tell her, and mean it with a completeness that frightens me. “I haven’t eaten a decent meal in far too long, wife. I don’t intend to skip another one.”
She makes a sound that’s half outrage and half something she’d never name, and I let her have the silence. I press my mouth to her hair, and I say the thing I should not say, the thing that’s been building behind my teeth since the altar.
“You should know,” I murmur, “now that I’ve had your mouth, there’s no version of this where I let you go.
You need to understand that. You could put a state between us.
An ocean. You could vanish so clean even your uncle couldn’t find you.
” I tip her chin up so she has to look at me, so she sees that I am not threatening her, I am telling her the shape of the rest of her life.
“And I would still come. I will always come for you, Brooklyn. There is nowhere you can run that I won’t be standing in the doorway when you stop. ”
I expect a fist. A blade in the soft of my voice. My wife is a fighter; she answers threats with threats.
Instead she just looks at me for a long moment with something unreadable behind her ocean eyes, something that looks almost like grief, and she whispers, “You sound like him when you say things like that.”
And the floor drops out of me for the second time tonight.
“Like who,” I say, very evenly.
But she’s already turning her face away, already shoving the thought into whatever locked room she keeps it in, already reaching down to find the boxers I pulled off her and finding them gone, kicked somewhere into the sheets.
“Forget it,” she mutters.
She doesn’t put them back on.
She doesn’t, that morning, or the next, or any morning after.
Just the T-shirt, nothing under it, and she tells herself and tells me it’s because she can’t find them, and we both let the lie stand, because we both know the truth is easier access, and neither of us is brave enough yet to say so out loud.