She kisses me back. Her hand comes up to my face tentatively.
“I want to take you to dinner,” I whisper against her mouth. “Saturday.”
She pulls back far enough to look at me. The confusion arrives again.
“Dinner?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Like a date?”
“Yes.”
Her lips curve at the edges. Not quite a smile, but in that direction. “Okay,” she says. “Sure.”
“Good.”
I leave to shower. When I return, she’s put the book away and moved to give mespace. I get into the bed beside her as she studies me.
“You seem off,” she says. “Are you okay?”
“It was a complicated day.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” I respond. “I don’t.”
“Okay.”
“I just need—” I stop.
She waits.
Youis the word that goes in the blank.I need you.
I pull her into a kiss instead.
This one is different from the one when I arrived. That was only a greeting; this is a proper reunion. She’s warm and present. Her hands find my chest, and all the days I spent out, all of it loosens, comes apart.
I take my time with her mouth and with every part of her after that. The slow removal of the shirt, her breath against my neck, the sounds she makes against my bare skin.
I position myself at her entrance, observing her face as I slowly enter the heat of her. How she receives me.
“God,” she breathes.
“No,” I sigh, a thread of guilt worming beneath the pleasure. “There is no god here.”
“It feels like heaven…”
I thrust as deep as I can go, and she claws at my back.
“Wrong again,moya koroleva.” I press my mouth against the shell of her ear. “Only hell can feel this good.”
My body is on top of hers, the skin-to-skin contact I’ve missed so fucking much. I take her nipple between my lips and suck, drawing from her the sound I like the most. My name.
“Rolan!”
No one’s ever made me finish so fast.
