I consider it for half a second, then decide I’m too tired and too far gone for the performance.
“That I don’t know how to be at ease either,” I say.
The confession sits between us, simple and bare.
His face changes instantly. Something in him gives, just a little. “Nikolaj…”
“No, listen.” I tighten my hold on him when he tries to turn more fully, not to stop him, just to keep him close while I say it. “I don’t know how to sit here with you and not feel the countdown in the back of my head. I don’t know how to be happy without waiting for a gunshot after. I don’t know how to have something this fucking good and not look for where it’ll be taken.”
The words come out rougher than I meant for them to. More honest too.
His fingers slide up and touch my face, just the backs of them at first, like he’s measuring the damage in me with the gentlest thing he’s got.
“You don’t have to be at ease tonight,” he says, shrugging one shoulder slightly in the water, elegant even here. Bastard. “Be restless. Be impossible. Be suspicious of every calm room on earth. Just stay in the bath with me while you do it.”
The answer is so painfully him that I laugh before I can stop myself.
“That’s not helpful.”
“It’s honest.”
“Same problem.”
“No,” he says, and his hand settles fully against my cheek now, warm and wet. “Not with us.”
I turn my head and kiss the heel of his hand. He exhales softly, and his eyes go darker. The bath shifts with him when he leans in, and the room narrows to the line of his mouth, the heat of his body, and the knowledge that we still have time, just not much.
I lower my glass to the ledge, then take his from him before he spills it trying to look at me like that.
I slide both hands to his waist beneath the water and pull him fully onto me, settling him there so he has no choice but to straddle my lap if he wants the argument to continue. He lets out a shaky breath that might’ve been a laugh if it weren’t already turning into something warmer.
“I was doing very well at being serious,” he says.
“You’re welcome.”
“That is not how welcome works.”
I kiss him before he can continue, gently, because I mean what I told myself when we got in here.
I’ll make sure he’s relaxed until he has to leave again. I’ll do it with whisky and bad jokes, my hands and my mouth, and every bit of steadiness I can fake or feel. Because he came to me carrying betrayal, self-doubt, and all the cracks in his structure, and I know too well what it costs him to show me those things.
The first slide of our mouths together is mostly steam and whiskey and a low hum of relief that I taste more than hear. Vincenzo’s lips are warm, his tongue slow at first as if he’s asking permission when he damn well knows he already owns me.
I palm the back of his neck, thumb brushing the short hairs at his nape, and deepen the kiss because gentleness is good, but I need him grounded, need him feeling the same weight in his bones that I do in mine.
Our teeth click; he huffs a laugh into my mouth, and the sound vibrates down my spine like a new pulse.
He shifts on my lap, knees scraping porcelain, thighs bracketing my hips under the foamy water. The move bumps our cocks together—half-hard and lazy from heat—but the jolt of contact makes him break the kiss with a sharp inhale.
The muscles across his stomach tense, slick and glistening, a bead of water trailing from his collarbone to the bruise I left under his throat earlier. I follow it with my gaze, then with my mouth, licking the droplet before it can vanish. He shivers for real this time, head tipping back against my knuckles.
“Relax,” I murmur against the bruise, letting my teeth graze the edge but not biting. “We’re not on a timer now.”
“That’s a filthy lie,” he says, but his voice is softer, less brittle. “There’s always a timer with us.”
“Not tonight.” I press another kiss to the side of his neck, taste salt and faint smoke. “Tonight, nobody’s storming in, bleeding out in the hall, or knocking on the door with orders. Just me and the most expensive bathtub on the Adriatic.”
“And the ugliest chandelier above us,” he mutters, tilting his head just enough to glare at the fixture. “Who the fuck designed that?”
