The kiss broke, but we didn’t move, just breathed painfullyagainst each other, too disoriented to know what to do.
“Vitaliiiiii!” the Devil’s voice tried again.
Without letting me down, he buried his face in the crook of my shoulder. His chest heaved harder than mine, and his intimate exhales against my skin held physical weight. We were both about to buckle.
I turned my head toward the hallway. “What!”
“I can’t get it to work!”
I felt Vitali let out a silent half laugh, and he carefully set me down. We kept eye contact because breaking the connection felt like it would leave scars. The way he looked at me only fueled the fire in my core—as if it took all the restraint on Earth not to take me right there on the kitchen floor.
“Kaaaatyaaaaa!”
I gulped, mesmerized by the swell of his lips.
“Viiiiiitaaaaalliii!”
“Blyad…” I whispered.
“Don’t swear,” he said, and rubbed the back of his head, turning this way and that to find the furniture that’d been so carelessly thrown about the kitchen. “What!”
“I can’t get it to work!”
Vitali went ahead of me, and we both stopped in the doorway of Maxim’s room, where a bunch of TV cables were already tangled with those of the Sega.
“Move this to the living room,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re not putting this in here; Mama will kill you.”
“Mama will kill you,” Vitali confirmed when Maxim glanced to him for support.
My brother’s face pinched up with regret for having called us. That was somewhat comforting but nowhere near adequate, considering what he’d interrupted. I was stillhyper aware of Vitali’s body so close to mine. Then his fingers grazed my lower back just above the beltline, and my vision blurred with colorful dots.
“Can you help me?” Maxim asked as he carried the electronic heap past us.
“Please,” I corrected him.
“I like it when you say that,” Vitali whispered in my ear as he followed Maxim to the living room.
I’d have to throw away the panties… maybe the pants, too. The scales kept tipping from horrendously hungover to excruciatingly aroused, but God is cruel, so I got to experience both at once.
The frustration only intensified as I watched him lie on the floor and scoot under the TV to connect the wires. His already maddening body took my brain apart while he explained how it worked to my brother, showing him the coordinating colors and plugs. He didn’t stop there and briefly gave everyone a lesson on electric circuits. It made sense in theory, but his sleeves were rolled up tightly against his forearms, and I heard next to nothing about the importance of not overloading sockets.
I didn’t realize how late it had gotten until Vitali picked up his coat and laid out four keys on the kitchen table. He patiently waited until I choked down the rest of the meat pastry, and then we silently stood in the hallway for a long minute, and for once, it wasn’t because I was the one lacking words.
“It will be a week or so until I can get Maxim into the school,” he said finally after staring at me for a good twenty seconds, which is a really long time when you’re alone in a hallway and know that no matter how much you want it, the clothes have to stay on. “It was too late to call by the time we got here.”
Crap.
I looked away, interlocking my fingers. “He hasn’t been to school in a while…”
“How long?”
“A bit over a month…”
“Katya.”
My momentary irritation of him minding his business quickly became shame, and when I glanced up, his expression was as reproachful as I’d feared.
“He can’t miss school,” Vitali said. “It’s a privilege. I’ll have him registered tomorrow. Does he have uniforms?”
