Replacingit.Overwritingit.
I imagine the skin under his touch sloughing off and regrowing as something new, something that has only ever knownthistouch.
I open my mouth and he licks into it gently, like he has all night to learn the shape of it. Which, I realize, he does. He’s not running anywhere. He’s not on a clock. He’s not going to disappear out a service exit and leave me wondering if I imagined him.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs once more against my lips. He must know that I’m still so uncertain, so afraid. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”
With each promise, he kisses another part of me. The corner of my mouth. The hinge of my jaw. The soft spot just under my ear. I go limp in his arms, liquid with all the things surging through my poor, overwhelmed body.
He lowers me onto the rug, sure to cup the back of my head with his hand. He braces over me on one forearm and gazes down.
“You’re shaking,” he observes.
“It’s not because I’m scared.”
“I know that. Don’t worry. Give me time and I’ll have you shaking for a very different reason.” He bends down and kisses me again. His mouth is so warm I want to cry. “Tell me what you want,” he says.
I huff a small, watery laugh. “I wish I could. I don’t know how towantanything anymore. I don’t even remember the verbs.”
“Then I’ll go slow. You stop me if it isn’t right.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I trail my fingers up the placket of his shirt, button by button, and try to think about whatwantfeels like, the way it used to feel before I taught myself out of it. Before I started flinching every time a man’s hand moved in my peripheral vision.
What I want,I think,is to feel safe.For someone to touch me like I’m not in the way. To be held without the air around me going hazy and dangerous.
I tip my chin up and whisper, “I want you to be very, very gentle with me. Just this once.”
The look on his face nearly kills me.
“Dikarka,” he swears, “I can do gentle.”
He starts at my collarbone. Then he kisses the soft hollow above it. Then he hooks one finger under the strap of my dress and slides it off my shoulder so slowly I can feel each individual thread of silk drag across my skin.
He does the same with the other strap. His mouth follows, passing over the point of my shoulder. The slope down towardmy chest. He hooks his fingers in the neckline of the bodice and eases it down over my breasts.
The fabric pools at my waist. The firelight is so warm on my skin that I don’t even feel the cold.
“You’re a mirage in the desert, baby,” he croons.
He bends and kisses the inside curve of my breast, where the skin is thin and pale. From there, he works his way down the dip of my sternum and across the plane of my belly. He stops there for a long moment.
“Hello, little princess,” he whispers, so quietly I almost miss it.
I have to look at the ceiling and breathe through my nose for a while so I don’t fall to pieces right there on the rug.
He keeps going. He drags the dress down over my hips, an inch at a time, kissing the new skin as it’s revealed. He pulls it off my legs entirely, then lays it over the arm of the settee that ate my wedding ring.
Then he comes back to me, and he undresses himself.
I watch greedily. I have earned that right, I think, and if someone disagrees, well, screw them, because I’m watching anyway. The black silk of his tuxedo shirt hits the floor. The white undershirt follows. The trousers, the boxer briefs. The unused Glock at the small of his back goes on the side table, and as much as that should startle me, it turns out that I don’t care about anything right now except the long, lean line of him in the firelight, the dagger and the rose and the Cyrillic tattoos running down his forearm, the scar at his side where he took a knife so I could keep walking.
He kneels back down between my thighs and pulls me up against him so I’m sitting in his lap, my legs around his hips, my arms around his shoulders, my face tucked into the curve of his neck.
He doesn’t push inside me right away. He just holds me.
