I let him.
He takes his time with my breasts. His mouth finds one nipple and his fingers find the other, and the dual attention is precise in a way that makes me wonder if he approaches everything like this — gather data, test response, refine method. The answer seems to be yes, because when I arch into his mouth he makes a note of it and does it again, and when his teeth graze and I gasp he makes a note of that too and stays with it longer than is strictly survivable.
His free hand maps the geography of my ribs, my waist, the plane of my stomach — not groping, not rushing, just reading. He traces the waistband of my shorts with one finger and I feel the question reform in the pause.
I lift my hips.
He takes them off with the same efficiency he applies to everything, and I am sitting on his kitchen counter in only my underwear and he is still fully dressed, which should feel like an imbalance of power but instead just feels like Aleksei — like him, specifically, the way he enters every room two steps ahead of everyone else.
"You're thinking," he says against my thigh.
"I'm always thinking."
"Stop."
He pulls the fabric aside with one thumb and his mouth finds me, and I stop thinking.
The first contact is a question. The second is an answer. By the third his tongue has found a rhythm and a place and a pressure that suggests he's been taking notes since the moment we met, filing observations I didn't know I was providing.He works me with the same methodical focus he brings to everything — learning what makes me gasp, what makes me pull his hair, what makes my thighs tighten against his ears — and then he does those things again, in sequence, building toward something I can feel coiling at the base of my spine.
His tongue circles and two fingers slide inside me and the combination of pressure and fullness and the specific curl of his fingers finding somewhere I didn't know someone could find on the first attempt — it unmakes me by degrees, thought by thought, until there's nothing left but his mouth and his hands and the edge of the counter digging into my palms.
"Right there," I manage, and he makes a sound of acknowledgment against me that I feel everywhere, and he doesn't change pace or angle or pressure because he already knows, he already read it off me before I said it, he was already there.
I come with his name broken across my teeth and my heels digging into his back and my hand fisted tight enough in his hair to hurt, and he doesn't stop, works me through it, through the peak and the fall and the oversensitivity until I have to pull his head back because I can't.
He looks up at me. His mouth is wet. His composure is gone — not absent, not lost, but deliberately set aside, the way you set aside a tool when you need both hands.
"That," I say, breathing like I've run a mile, "was still not?—"
He pulls me to the edge of the counter and kisses me, and I taste myself on his mouth, salt and the specific evidence of what he just did to me, which reorganizes several of my remaining thoughts entirely.
I reach for his belt. The leather is expensive and the buckle is simple — Aleksei doesn't wear anything that announces itself — and I work it open with hands that aren't entirely steady. He watches me do it. That same look, the cataloguing look, likehe's memorizing the image of my fingers on his belt, my hands pushing his trousers down, my palm finding the shape of him.
He's hard. Has been hard, I realize, for a while, which means he spent all that time focused on me without once rushing toward his own finish. The recognition of that does something to my chest that I refuse to examine right now.
The sound he makes when I grip him — a sharp exhale, a fraction of composure lost — is the most satisfying thing I've heard all night.
"Sofia." Just my name. But the way he says it is a whole sentence.
I stroke him once, twice, and his hand closes over mine — not stopping me, not guiding me, just contact. The gesture is so unexpectedly tender that I look up. His expression is unguarded. The face of a man who has just realized something he didn't plan to realize.
"Now," I say. "Aleksei. Now."
He reaches past me and finds his wallet on the counter. I take the condom from him. I roll it onto him myself, watching his jaw tighten at my touch, and that small loss of control is a gift I tuck away for later.
His hands find my hips and pull me to the very edge of the counter. I wrap my legs around him and feel him pressing against me, and then he pauses — actually pauses, with his forehead against mine and his breath uneven — and waits for me to meet his eyes.
"Da," I say, because I know enough Russian for this. "Yes."
He pushes inside.
The sound I make is not dignified. The sound he makes is less so — a groan pulled from somewhere deep, Russian syllables I can't parse, his forehead dropping to my shoulder as he sinks in to the hilt and stops, giving me a moment, giving himself a moment, his breath hot and uneven against my collarbone.
"Christ," I manage.
He lifts his head. His eyes are very dark. "You—" He stops. Swallows. "You feel?—"
"I know."
