A muscle moves in his jaw. Small. Controlled.
"Mia."
"I'm not done." My voice is steadier than I expected. "You said you wouldn't take advantage of someone who's vulnerable. And I heard that. I respect it. But I need you to stop deciding for me what I'm ready for. I appreciate you’re protecting me. But I’m still a person who is capable of…things outside what has happened to her."
The silence that follows isn’t comfortable, and I wonder if I’ve pushed too far. It's charged. Like the air before a storm when you can feel the electricity on your skin.
He stands. For a moment I think he's leaving and my stomach drops. But he doesn't go to the door. He comes to my chair. The one I've been curled up in all evening, and he stands in front of it and looks down at me. He is very tall and very close and I have to tilt my head back to see his face.
"Say that again," he says, voice low.
"Which part?"
"The part where you tell me to stop deciding for you."
My pulse is everywhere. My throat. My ears. Behind my eyes.
"Stop deciding for me," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment. I can see the war happening behind his expression. Control versus something else. The man who handles everything versus the man underneath who has been watching me all evening.
He reaches down. His hand stopping just short of my face, his fingers hovering near my jaw, and he waits.
He's asking.
"Yes," I say on an exhale.
His thumb brushes my jaw. Light. Testing. The touch is so careful it almost undoes me more than if he'd just kissed me. He traces the line of my jaw to my chin and tilts my face up, looking at me like he's reading something, like he's making sure, like this is the last checkpoint before something irreversible.
"If you change your mind," he says, "at any point. You say stop and I stop. That's not negotiable."
"I know."
"I mean it. I don't care if—"
"Iosif." I put my hand over his where it rests against my face. His skin is warm. "I know."
This time, he exhales. It's the first time I've heard him make a sound that isn't completely controlled.
Then he bends forward and kisses me.
It's not gentle. That's the first thing. I expected gentle, from the way he touches everything with such deliberation, from the way he's held himself at a careful distance since I showed up at his club with blood on my dress. I expected measured.
This isn't measured.
His mouth finds mine and his hand slides from my jaw into my hair and he kisses me like he's been thinking about it for hours. His other hand grips the arm of the chair beside my head, and I feel the leather shift under his weight as he leans in.
I make a sound. Small. The kind of sound I didn't plan on making. He hears it and pulls back just enough to look at me, breathing hard, his eyes dark and searching.
"Okay?" he says.
"Don't stop."
Something flickers across his face. He looks like he is suddenly ravenous.
He pulls me up from the chair with one arm around my waist, like I weigh nothing. My feet find the floor and my hands find the front of his shirt and we're standing in the space between the two chairs and he's kissing me again, deeper this time, and I feel it in my whole body. My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt, his heartbeat fast and hard under my knuckles, and I think it's the most human thing about him. This man who controls everything, whose pulse is hammering against my fist.
I pull at his shirt. He makes a sound low in his throat.
