His body is shaking beneath me. I know he’s right on the edge because I haven’t said he can let go. Knowing that this man could overpower me effortlessly, but instead is white-knuckling himself still because I told him to, tips me over before I see it coming.
“Now,” I manage. “Now you can come.”
With permission, he squeezes my hips even more and drives up into me so hard that I seize his shoulders to stay upright. I cry out above him, my body clenching and shaking through the orgasm in waves.
He follows within seconds with a guttural, broken sound, and his cock pulses deep inside me as he spills while my aftershocks continue rolling through me.
I fall against his chest, heaving in pants of air. When I finally reach back and pull the knot loose, the tie falls away, and he blinks. Even in the near-dark, I can see that his pupils are enormous, and there’s something wild in the look he fixes on me.
He takes my face in both hands and just holds it. The bruises on my hips are already forming. I’ll feel them for days, every time I sit down at my desk or stand at the OR table, and I’m delighted by the thought.
He doesn’t speak, and neither do I. The rain fills the silence.
The power comes back on at some point in the night. I notice it when I get up for water. The kitchen lamp blazes, and the little green indicator on the smoke detector blinks steadily. I switch off the lamp and stand at the window with my glass, watching the rain thin while Lev sleeps.
By morning, it has stopped. Pale grey pushes through the windows, and Lev is already at the stove when I come out wrapped in the blanket from the bed, shirtless and looking delicious.
He sets a cup on the counter without being asked or turning around. He already knows my footsteps in a space we’ve only occupied for two days, which is the part I keep snagging on. Two days shouldn’t be enough time for someone to know how you move through a room.
I climb onto a kitchen chair and pull up my knees, wrapping both hands around the mug, and for a while I just watch him move. The ease of him in a kitchen that isn’t his. The fact that he remembered how I take my coffee on the second morning without a word from me. These are small, unremarkable things, and somehow, they’ve become the texture of how these two days have felt. I’ve stopped trying not to notice.
“This is the happiest I’ve been in years.”
He turns from the stove, and for barely a flicker, something moves across his face that looks an awful lot like guilt.
Then it’s gone, replaced by a disarming smile that leaves me wondering if I imagined the whole thing.
