I don't stop.
"If you don't stop I'm going to?—"
I look up at him. His eyes are black. His composure is gone — fully gone, not set aside but shattered, the man who walks into rooms two steps ahead of everyone else reduced to his hands inmy hair and his breath coming in broken rhythms and his hips fighting not to thrust.
I pull back just long enough to say, "Then don't stop," and take him deep again.
He comes with his hand fisted in my hair and his back arched off the bed and a string of Russian that I catch maybe half of — my name in the middle of something desperate and tender and profane — and I swallow and don't look away and when he's done I kiss my way back up his body and find his mouth and let him taste himself on my tongue.
He pulls me against him. His heart is hammering under my palm.
After a long moment he moves — rolls us, my back on the sheets, him above me — and I can feel him already hardening again against my thigh.
"I told you," he says against my throat. "I won't stop."
His hand moves between my thighs and finds me wet, and he makes a sound of approval. He reaches for the nightstand without looking — the practiced efficiency of a man who is always prepared for contingencies — and produces a condom from the drawer. I take it from him. I roll it onto him myself, watching his jaw tighten at my touch.
"Now," I say. "Aleksei. Now."
He pushes inside.
The first stroke is slow — the full length of him, inch by inch, the stretch and fullness and the specific shock of being joined — and I make a sound against his shoulder that he answers with something low and rough in Russian. He sinks in to the hilt and stops, giving me a moment, giving himself a moment, his forehead against mine, his breath uneven.
"Look at me," I say.
He does.
He moves.
There is a quality to the way he fucks that I have no prior framework for — not the urgent collision of the kitchen, but something deeper and more deliberate. He moves with the full attention of a man who is not managing anything, not performing anything, not running any calculation exceptwhat does she need next.His hips roll in a rhythm that builds by degrees. His hands know answers before I ask the questions. His mouth finds the places that undo me and stays — the hollow behind my ear, the curve of my shoulder, the place where throat meets collarbone that makes my nails dig into his back.
"Like that," I say on an exhale. "Exactly?—"
"I know." Against my skin. "I know exactly."
He shifts angle and drives deeper and finds a place inside me that makes my vision blur at the edges. My legs wrap higher around his waist, my heels digging into the small of his back, and we find a rhythm together that has nothing managed in it — just two bodies learning each other in real time, adjusting and answering and building toward something I can feel gathering at the base of my spine.
"Again," he says. "Let me feel it."
I reach between us and touch myself. His rhythm stutters when he realizes what I'm doing — watching, memorizing even now — and then deepens, and the dual sensation of him and my fingers and the way he's looking at me builds faster than the first orgasm did, bigger than the second one did.
"Aleksei — God — right there?—"
"I know," he says. Rough. Like the word costs him and he's paying it gladly. "I know. Let go. I have you."
I do.
The orgasm hits slow and total — a full-body thing that has me clenching around him and crying out against his mouth and my nails carving half-moons into his shoulders. It pulls him over the edge with me. His rhythm breaks, his control finallyand completely gone, my name in his mouth in the specific way that means he's not performing anything — and he comes with a sound torn from his chest, Russian syllables I don't know yet, his forehead dropping to mine as his hips drive deep and stop.
Afterward the city blazes on outside the glass, indifferent and brilliant, and he holds me like a man who has decided on this completely and is no longer going to argue with himself about it. His arm is across my ribs. His face is in my hair.
He says something in Russian.
Low, quiet — not directed at me, or maybe completely directed at me.???????-??.Finally.
And then something else. Something careful and precise and not clinical at all.
I don't ask him to translate.
