“It doesn’t matter.”
“That is genuinely not a rule that was?—”
He kisses me.
There’s no preamble. One moment, he’s telling me it doesn’t matter, and the next, his mouth is on mine. The argument I was building dissolves completely.
He’s kissed me before in my mind, in the dark, with the bathroom light making that gold line under the door. In those versions, it starts slow. Cinematic and measured. A first kiss that has a beginning you can identify.
This has no beginning.
It arrives fully formed: his mouth, his tongue, the taste of vodka, and his hands, one on my jaw, the other on my hip.
My hands find his neck before I’ve decided to move them. My fingers curl into the fabric of his collar and hold on, which is apparently all the permission the rest of me was waiting for.
His hands tighten at my hips, and heliftsme.
My legs wrap around him instinctively, and he’s carrying me effortlessly toward the sitting area along the far wall. The sofas. The soft lamplight.
He has a taste I’m going to be thinking about for the rest of my life.
He sets me down on the leather sofa without breaking the kiss. Then he pulls back far enough to look at me, and his eyes are different. The ice is still there, but running hotter, melting.
His hands slide under my sweater.
He pulls it over my head, and it’s gone. The bra follows with efficiency. Then his mouth is on my breast, and I drop my head back against the cushion and stop thinking in complete sentences.
“Your skin,” he says against me, his lips tracing the curve of one breast and then the other, unhurried. “Extraordinary.”
I open my mouth. What comes out is not words.
“I’ve thought about this.” His mouth moves lower while he works my pants and underwear down my hips. “Since I saw you in that kitchen.”
He pulls back and looks at me.
I’m completely bare, and he’s completely dressed. I pout. “This doesn’t seem fair.”
His eyes gleam. He reaches up and unbuttons his shirt.
Nothing prepares me for the actual geometry of him — or the ink.
It starts at his left shoulder and covers most of his chest, not scattered pieces but a continuous landscape. Dark lines and images that I can’t separate into individual components from here. An Orthodox cross lost in the layering. Text in Cyrillic I can’t read.
I want to look at every single one.
I’m not given the opportunity, because he drops to his knees in front of me, and the thought dissolves.
His mouth finds the inside of my thigh first, inching higher until he reaches my aching core.
“Oh—”
His hands press my hips flat when I try to move.
My hands find his hair, gripping the soft strands tightly.
He makes a groan against me, a low, approving sound that reverberates through my entire body.
“Better,” he says, against my skin, his breath warm and his voice dropped into that register, “than I imagined.” A pause before he moves his tongue, making my spine arch off the cushion.
