He keeps me there, trembling and desperate, held on the edge with no mercy. My nerves are live wires under his touch.
"Who do you belong to?" His hand grabs my hair, turns my head so our eyes meet.
He can't be serious, but the steel in his gray eyes says he is.
"Who. Do. You. Belong. To?" He asks again, accentuating each word by a long push and pull of his cock and a teasing twirl of my clit.
"Fuck," I bite my lower lip. I've never been so close to the edge before. I'm dancing right there, on the crest. It's the sweetest torture imaginable. I can feel my juices drenching my pussy in anticipation, feel the pressure in me building, building.
"You!" I finally scream when the dance becomes too intense.
"That’s right. You're fucking MINE!" He roars, and fuck me, but that statement drives me over the edge.
Hot heat and wetness pour out of me, drenching him. I feel my walls milk his cock, and he roars again. "That's right. Oksana. Come for me. Make a mess."
I shatter on the spot, the orgasm tearing through me like a goddamn shotgun blast. Everything inside me spasms around him, locked and burning. I hear myself sob, and it’s pure surrender, nothing left but the throb of my cunt and the heat of his cock against my walls.
He rides me through it, relentless, milking every last pulse, then tips me to the side, where he fucks into me for another minute or two, like he hasn’t just come, purposefully driven like a machine, making me think of him like a god. He pulls out and flips me over, manhandling me onto my back like I weigh nothing. He lines up and pushes in again, this time facing me. He wants to see every second of ruin on my face. I can’t even try to hide it.
He paces himself now, driving slow and deep, letting me feel the drag and stretch. He leans over and kisses me, hard, rough, and filthy, tongue tasting of everything he’s done to me. Then he pulls back and stares, eyes boring into mine.
"You're mine," he says. "This—" another thrust, "—is what you live for."
All I can do is nod, dizzy, half-sane from the aftershocks.
He rearranges us, holds both of my ankles in one hand, shoves my legs up to his shoulder, and fucks me with clinical force. I’m too limp to resist and too hot to want to. The new angle feels even more intense if that is even possible. Heat and sweat are a blur and a fugue, and the only anchor is the relentless drive of his cock.
He comes for the second time without warning. His face tenses hard, his neck tendons standing out, before going slack as he empties into me, the pulse of cum volcanic and raw. He rides it out, breathing hard, then collapses over me, always mindful of my stitches, keeping hisweight off me. For a long minute, I just lie there, counting heartbeats, feeling the twitch of him still buried inside me, the flutter of my own pulse against my battered ribs.
"Not so boring," he says, tone almost gentle. He pets my hair and brushes his lips across my brow.
"Fucking ruthless." I agree. I hook an arm around his neck and drag him down for a kiss, teeth on teeth. "Next time, I’ll break your nose," I whisper. He grins against my mouth.
"Promise?"
We stay like that, bodies tangled, until the sweat cools and the world stops spinning. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He doesn’t need to. I am. I’m perfect. This is the kind of hurt that makes a person real.
The next morning…
The first lightslants through the curtains and paints the room with gold. It’s too much, too bright, like a flashbulb at a crime scene: every shine a forensic sweep over this gaudy suite, faux marble floors, poured in swirls of ancient bone; faux silk curtains fluttering in the forced chill of the AC; and a chandelier that could put out the sun, its glass arms stranded with crystal tears. Whoever designed this room thought opulence was a force field. A place where nothing bad could touch you, so long as you stayed inside. The joke, obviously, is on them.
None of it matters. Not with her in my arms.
Oksana. My fuckingwife. I keep running the word through my mind, the syllables as heavy and improbable as a loaded gun left on a nursery pillow. Wife. There’s noreality in which that word fits the two of us, or that it fits her at all; she’s too sharp for something so soft, too hot-blooded for something so domestic. But there’s the ring, thin and brutal as a razor, a circle of gold biting into fingerbone. No one in their right mind would ever call it delicate, not after the way we celebrated our vows.
She’s tangled against me, half-draped over my chest, a bare leg thrown across my gut, the length of her spine pressed to my side. Her hair is a shambles—red, wild, radiant even in this haze—fanned out over the ruined sheets and my arm. Her face is slack with something that might be peace, or at least the closest thing to it after a lifetime spent sleeping with one eye open for the next metaphorical knife. There’s a little crease at the corner of her mouth, the glimmer of a smile that only shows itself when she’s fully off guard. I’ve never seen her look like this. Not even in the aftermath of other nights, other abandonments, when pleasure was just a prelude to pain, and neither of us pretended otherwise.
Now she’s here, actually sleeping. Breathing in slow, even drags, her pulse steady and unafraid against my ribs. An ordinary couple would call this spooning. For us, it’s a declaration of war against the universe.
I stare up at the ceiling, which is painted some idiotic Renaissance tableau—cherubs and saints and clouds—and wonder what type of person decorated it.
Last night was everything. Every wall I ever built came down in her hands, and she didn’t even have to try. I canstill feel her mouth at my throat, her voice in my ear, the way she saidI dowith a look that promised to burn the world for me. There was violence in it, the same way there’s violence in the tide, or the breaking of an ice shelf. There was also something else, something I don’t have a word for, because I gave up believing in words a long time ago.
I tighten my arm around her, not because I think she’ll get up and leave, but because I need to know she’s real, that the weight of her isn’t some hallucination conjured from chemical exhaustion and hope. She grumbles in her sleep, shifts closer, and nudges her nose into the hollow of my neck. The heat of her breath, the tickle of her lashes, I could die like this, and it wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
We’re married. Actually married. Not a metaphor, not a ruse, not some elaborate piece of theater played for the old men in the room or the ghosts in our heads. We stood in front of two witnesses and a judge with a death wish, and when it came time for objections, there was nobody there. She called me marito. I called her zhena. We didn’t even flinch.
I laugh, soft and raw, the sound nearly lost in the humid, perfumed air. Me, the man who has made a religion out of detachment, whose whole life has been curated to avoid belonging to anything or anyone. And now I’m wearing a ring I can’t take off, with a woman whose idea of a honeymoon is plotting to overthrow an entire Venezuelan cartel.
