She looks up at me through wet lashes, lips swollen, cheeks flushed. For once there’s no mask. No quick deflection. Just her, soft, wrecked, and looking at me like I’m the safest place she’s ever been.
I cup her face with both hands. Thumb tracing the arch of her cheekbone.
“You okay?” I rasp.
She nods, but leans back against the tile to take some of the exertion of standing. Her nipples are peaked and rosy, a flush rising over her chest and neck.
I can’t help myself, I dip my head down and feast on her tits, sucking and tugging at her nipples as her fingers thread through my hair and hold me closer.
Then I’m on my knees, the hot spray still pounding at my back, and I’m licking and sucking her pussy lips as she lifts a leg over my shoulder.
“Aidan I can’t,” she says, her voice breaking a little when I nip at her clit.
“I need you to,” I counter as I slide two fingers into her flooded channel. “I need you to come with my mouth on your cunt and my name in your mouth.”
I eat her pussy like i t’s the last time I’ll ever be able to. I work her hard until her pelvis is grinding forwards and backwards. I drag my other hand over her thigh and around to her ass, squeezing the globe in my palm as I pull her closer to me.
She tastes of both of us and I can’t stop, even when her body locks, then spasms through another orgasm, I keep eating her sweet cunt until her screaming subsides and she pushes my face away.
Epilogue
Tanya
Two months ago, I married a man I told myself I didn't want.
I was wrong about a lot of things back then. I was wrong about what want looks like when you've spent your whole life being told that wanting is weakness. I was wrong about what safety feels like when you've only ever known the kind that comes with conditions. And I was wrong about Aidan Orlov, in every way that matters, except one.
I was right that he would change everything.
The morning is cool and bright and I'm standing in front of the bathroom mirror, and my hands are shaking.
Not the way they used to shake. Not the controlled tremor of a woman holding herself together through sheer force of will. This is different. This is nervous energy. Excitement. The kind of shaking that happens when you're about to do something you've wanted for years and you can't quite believe it's real.
My first day of school.
I study my reflection and I barely recognize the woman looking back at me. I've not changed physically, although Saoirse insists I look healthier, which is her polite way of saying I was too thin before and she's spent two months feeding me intowhat she considers an acceptable state. It's something behind the eyes. Something that wasn't there before.
I look like someone who's allowed to want things.
I'm wearing jeans and a cream knit sweater with flat boots, and my hair is down because Iris told me that wearing it up on the first day makes you look like you're trying too hard. Iris has never been to college, never wanted to, but she has opinions about everything and delivers them with such conviction that you find yourself obeying before you realize what happened.
My bag is by the front door. Inside it: a notebook, three pens, a laptop that Aidan bought me without being asked and left on the kitchen counter two weeks ago.
It's been a process. Two months doesn't undo twenty-four years of ice and armor, and there are still days when the ice comes back without warning. Days when someone says something, or a silence lasts a beat too long, and my body defaults to the old programming. Aidan can tell when it happens. He doesn't push. He just stays close and waits, and sooner or later, I come back to him, and each time it's a little faster than the last.
My father called once. Three weeks after the wedding. I stared at his name on my phone for a long time, standing in Saoirse's kitchen with a cup of tea going cold in my hands, and then I declined the call and blocked the number.
He tried to reach me through Liam after that. A formal message. Something about family obligations and maintaining the relationship between the Savitsky’s and the Orlovs. Liam showed it to Aidan, and Aidan showed it to me, because that's what we do now. Honesty, even when it's ugly.
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
"Nothing," I said. "He's nothing to me now."
Aidan nodded, the message went unanswered, and my father's name hasn't come up since.
But my mother's has.
She wrote to me. An actual letter, handwritten, forwarded through three different addresses before it reached the Orlov estate. I found it in the pile of mail that Saoirse brings in every afternoon, and I recognized the handwriting before I read the return address. I sat on the bed and held it in both hands for twenty minutes before I opened it.
