He continues down.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my underwear and draws them off with the same care he used for the dress — no tearing, no rush, just the slow revelation of skin. He looks at me, all of me, spread across his bed with the city blazing at my back, and the look on his face is the one I saw in the kitchen: a man making a file entry he intends to keep.
"Aleksei. You're staring."
"Yes." No apology. No deflection. "I am."
He lowers himself between my thighs and I feel his breath against me, warm and close, and then his hands on my knees, pushing them apart, opening me to him. The vulnerability of the position — naked on his bed, legs spread, him still half-dressed above me — should terrify me. Instead it feels like the first honest thing that's happened between us since October.
His mouth finds the inside of my thigh and he kisses his way inward, slowly, deliberately, avoiding the place I want him most until I'm making sounds that aren't words and my hands are back in his hair and I'm pulling.
"Patience," he says against my skin.
"I've been patient since October."
He makes a sound that might be agreement and might be satisfaction and then his mouth finds me, and the sound I make is not dignified.
He knows what he's doing. The kitchen gave him data and he's using it — the exact pressure, the exact rhythm, the exact alternation between broad strokes of his tongue and focused attention that he learned would unmake me. But he's not repeating the kitchen. He's building on it. His tongue circles and his fingers slide inside me — two this time, curling forward to find the spot he found before, and when he does my hips lift off the bed and he presses me back down with his free arm across my pelvis and doesn't stop.
"You're doing that on purpose," I manage.
He lifts his mouth just long enough to say, "Everything I do is on purpose," and the vibration of his voice against me is almost enough to finish it right there.
Then his mouth returns and his fingers find a rhythm and the combination of inside and outside, pressure and friction, the specific curl of his knuckles — it builds like a wave I can see coming from a long way off and can do nothing about.
"Look at me," he says. "Sofia. Look at me."
I do. His eyes are dark above the plane of my stomach, watching me come apart, watching what he's doing to me register on my face in real time. The eye contact breaks the last thread of my control. I come with his name fractured across my teeth and my thighs tightening against his ears and my hands gripping his hair hard enough to hurt, and he doesn't stop — works me through the peak and the oversensitivity, his tongue gentler now but still there, still moving, pulling the last pulses of it out of me until I physically have to push his head away.
He rises, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His expression is the one I'm learning to recognize — satisfaction and hunger in equal measure, composure deliberately suspended.
"Again," he says. Not a question.
"Again yourself," I say, and reach for his belt.
The leather gives under my hands. I push his trousers and boxers down together and he kicks them aside. His cock is hard against his stomach — has been hard, I realize, the whole time, without him once rushing toward his own finish — and the sight of him fully naked, the lean lines of his body, the evidence of his arousal thick and flushed against his abdomen, reorganizes several thoughts I was trying to have.
I wrap my hand around him. He's thick enough that my fingers don't meet, hot and smooth in my palm, and the sound he makes when I grip him — a sharp exhale, his composure cracking along a specific fault line — is the most satisfying thing I've heard in months.
"Sofia."
I stroke him slowly. Learning the weight. The texture. The way his jaw tightens when I pass my thumb over the head and find the moisture there and spread it down the shaft. His hand closes over mine — not stopping me, just contact. Just the need to touch while I touch.
"Tell me," I say. "Tell me what you want."
The reversal hangs in the air. His eyes meet mine. For a moment he's still — the man who always has the answer, being asked the question — and then something shifts and he says, quietly: "Your mouth."
I shift on the bed. He reads the movement and adjusts, lying back against the pillows, and I follow him — my mouth tracing down his chest the way his traced down mine, finding the places that change his breathing: the hollow of his throat, the line of his collarbone, the scar at his ribs which I kiss without asking.
Then lower.
I take him in my hand and guide him to my mouth. The first taste of him — salt and skin and the specific musk of his arousal — is something I've been thinking about since November, in the abstract way you think about things you're not sure you'll ever have. I lick the length of him, base to tip, and his hand finds my hair. Not pushing. Just there.
I take him into my mouth.
The sound he makes is not a word in any language. His hips lift slightly — involuntary, immediately checked — and I press a palm flat on his stomach and take him deeper, finding the rhythm his breathing asks for. My tongue works the underside. My hand handles what my mouth can't reach. He says something in Russian, low and fractured, and I recognize enough of it to know it's not meant for translation.
"Sofia—" A warning. His hand tightens in my hair. "Sofia, if you don't?—"
