"Everything is a game."
"Not this." I put my hands flat on the counter. "Not what you did. Not what I— not the way it felt. That is not agame,Aleksei."
He looks at my hands on the counter. Then at my face.
We're both very still. The under-cabinet light does amber things to the shadows, and the kitchen smells like scotch and cedar and the late hour, and outside the narrow window November is doing its November thing — bare trees, no moon, the kind of dark that has weight.
"What do you want me to say?" he asks. His voice has changed — not soft, but lower, the control dialled back just enough to feel like honesty. "That it meant something? That I couldn't stop thinking about you? That I'm standing in my own kitchen at midnight because I can't?—"
He stops.
The kitchen is very quiet.
"Can't what?" I ask.
He looks at me for a long moment with an expression that I have never seen on him before and cannot categorize — it's too much of something, too open, whatever it is — and then he crosses the distance between us.
I don't move back.
He stops with his hip against the counter, close enough that the warmth of him is a physical presence. He reaches out and takes my chin in his hand — not roughly, just precise — tilting my face up.
"You're furious," he says.
"Yes."
"Good." His thumb drags across my lower lip, which is either threatening or something else entirely. "Stay furious."
"Don't tell me what to feel?—"
He kisses me.
Not gently. Not a decision — more like a detonation. His hands find my waist and drag me toward him in the same motion, and I make a sound against his mouth that I would be embarrassed about if I had any remaining capacity forembarrassment, and then his hands are in my hair and I'm kissing him back with the full fury I've been suppressing for three days, which turns out to be considerable.
We knock the glass of scotch and I hear it hit the counter — don't break, doesn't break — and his hands are everywhere with that same focused precision he brings to everything, like he's cataloging, like he's learning, like he has a plan and the plan involves dismantling me by degrees.
I hate you,I think.
His teeth graze my neck and I change my mind.
He lifts me onto the counter in one smooth motion and steps between my knees and I let him, I pull him closer, because the anger and the wanting are the same thing tonight and I'm done pretending otherwise.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
His eyes are dark and very close and the controlled blankness is entirely gone — he looks like a man who has stopped pretending to be a machine, which is either the most dangerous thing I've ever seen or the most honest, and the distinction no longer seems important.
"Tell me to stop," he says. "And I stop."
"Don't stop,"I say.
He doesn't.
His hands move to the hem of my shirt — slow, deliberate, the question in it even though he's already asked and I've already answered. He pulls it over my head and sets it aside and then he just looks, which is somehow worse than anything that came before, the full weight of his attention on my skin in the amber under-cabinet light like he's making a file entry he intends to keep.
"Aleksei—"
"I'm looking." His voice has dropped to something I've never heard in it before. Not the command register, not the controlled-performance register. Just low and private and entirely honest. "Let me."
