For one second the old wall tries to come up. I watch it try. I watch him put it down himself, by hand, the hardest work I’ve ever seen a man do while sitting still.
He answers by closing the distance.
This kiss is nothing like the others. There’s no audience to sell it to. No power in it. No count-room dare, no pretense that it’s bodies and not hearts. It’s slow. It’s deep. It shakes. I climb across the seat into his lap without one ounce of negotiation left anywhere in me. His hand comes up to cradle the side of my face like I’m something that could break in his grip, and I make a sound into his mouth that’s half want, half grief, because I havenever once been kissed like I matter. I didn’t know how badly I needed to be.
Nobody’s hands shake holding a sure thing. His do, the smallest tremor where his palm frames my face, and that tremor does more to me than any sure touch ever has.
The back seat isn’t enough, so we get out. He lays me back against the hood of the car, still warm from the drive, the metal at my spine, the whole black sky over me, him above me blotting out half the stars. We take each other apart slowly under the open black sky.
He undresses me like he’s unwrapping something fragile. Nothing tears this time. The count-room hunger has gone patient, his hands moving over me unhurried, learning me again, like everything before was a rough draft and this is the real thing at last. He gets my jeans down my legs, folds them, actually folds them, onto the hood, then hooks two fingers in my underwear and draws it down so slowly I forget how lungs work.
The cold hits me everywhere. His hands follow it, palms dragging heat up my calves, my thighs, my hips, until I’m bare under the whole night sky while he’s still mostly dressed, which should feel unfair and instead feels like being the only thing on the menu. He kisses down my throat, my collarbone, the swell of each breast, taking his time, like he’s got the whole night and intends to spend every minute of it on me.
When his mouth finds my nipple I arch up off the hood with a gasp that comes out of me raw, and he doesn’t smirk the way he did in the count room. He makes a low rough sound against my skin, like the wanting is hurting him too. “I’ve got you,” he murmurs, to my throat, my hip, the inside of my bad knee, which he kisses slow, twice, deliberately, like it’s owed.
I get his shirt off and put my mouth on the inked stars at his collarbones, on the cathedral down his sternum, on the scar at his side I’ve stopped pretending I don’t wonder about. He shudders under my lips. Maybe nobody’s touched him gently in years. Maybe nobody touches a man like this expecting to find something soft underneath.
I’m finding it, and it’s killing both of us. I keep going down. Belt, zipper, the heat of him heavy in my hand when I free his cock, and the sound he makes when I stroke him, slow, deliberate, the way he polishes the things he loves, is one I plan on keeping forever. For once I’m the one with the patience. He hits the end of his fast.
“Look at me,” he says when he finally settles between my thighs. So I do. He lines himself up, pushes into me slow, one endless inch at a time, stretching me open around him, watching my face the whole way in like the watching is the point, and it’s so far past the count room that my eyes sting.
He bottoms out, stops, deep, all of him, his breath gone ragged, his forehead coming down to mine, and for one long beat neither of us moves, because moving would end this part, the being-full part, the his part.
There’s nowhere to hide out here. Every prop I’ve ever used is gone, the dark club, the dirty money, the role, and what’s left is me, him, the stars, the unbearable fact of how much this means to both of us. When I open my eyes the whole Milky Way is dumped across the black above his shoulders, more sky than I’ve ever had over any bed, and he blots out the middle of it like he was put there for scale.
He moves in me slow, deep, ruinous, his forehead dropped against mine, our breath mixing in the cold night air. Every timeit builds too fast he gentles it back down, holding us both at the edge, drawing it out like a man paying a debt with interest, and when I whimper at the pace he smiles against my mouth.
Actually smiles. The rarest thing he owns, spent here, on me, in the dark where no one else will ever see it. The heat between us isn’t the frantic thing from before. It’s bigger, quieter, so much more dangerous, the heat of two people who have run all the way out of lies. When I come apart it’s everywhere at once, my whole body pulling tight around his cock, my hands fisted in his hair, his name breaking in my mouth, and the wave keeps rolling because he keeps moving through it, slow, merciless, wringing every last shudder out of me before he lets himself go.
He follows with a groan torn out of somewhere deep, spilling hot inside me, his face buried in my throat, his whole shaking weight pressing me down into the warm metal.
And in the middle of it, his guard all the way down, he says my name.
Not Cindy.Cynthia.He’s said it before, but never like this. Before it was an order, or a fact, or a taunt thrown across a table full of cash, always with that flat cold edge on it. This time it falls out of him soft, unguarded, almost helpless, my real name said like it belongs to someone he loves instead of someone he owns.
It goes through me like nothing else tonight. The gentleness in it is the thing that finally breaks me all the way open, more than his hands, more than his mouth, more than any of it. I can take him rough. I have no idea what to do with him tender.
After, we end up tangled in the back seat, half-dressed, both doors open to the night. His arm lies warm and solid across me, my head on the inked cathedral over his heart. The desert ticksand breathes around the car. Something far off yips once and gets no answer. He traces one line down my spine, slow, like he’s signing something. For a few minutes I’m happier than I’ve been since I was nineteen, lying in the worst possible arms under a billion stars. I let myself, just for those few minutes, believe this is real and I get to keep it.
That’s when I feel him start to leave.
He doesn’t move. That’s the terrible part. His body stays exactly where it is, his arm still over me. But I feel the warmth go out of him the way it went out of him in the car, the way I’ve felt it go three times now, except this time is worse, because this time we meant it. I lie there with my cheek on his chest and feel the walls going back up course by course inside the man underneath me, the tenderness recoiling like it touched a hot burner. By the time he speaks, his voice has gone flat and far away again.
“We should get back.”
I sit up. I look at him. His face has closed completely, the raw undefended thing from twenty minutes ago locked behind the pakhan, and he won’t quite meet my eyes. I understand with a sick lurch that I’m watching him try to take it back, not the act, the meaning. He’s reaching for the cold like it’s the only solid thing in arm’s reach. I have no idea what I did. I only know the one thing this man can’t survive is for that to have mattered. It mattered. And now he’s afraid of me in a way Morozov could never manage.
“Sevastian.”
“Get dressed, Cynthia.” And the cold’s all the way back in it. Just like that. The same name that came out of him soft a minute ago, gone flat again, shutting me out. “It’s late.”
So I get dressed. In the dark, in the back of his car, in the desert that started all of this, I put my clothes back on next to a man who just held me like I was the only good thing left in his world and is now sitting a careful foot away pretending he didn’t.
Roma comes back. He doesn’t look at either of us, and we drive home in a silence with knives in it. The dash lights make a stranger of the side of his face. Forty minutes of dark roll past the windows with nobody reaching across three feet of leather that might as well be the whole Mojave now.
I should be angry. Part of me is. He cracked me open like an egg out there, said my name so softly it wrecked me, then went behind glass and left me out in the cold with my heart in my hands. Any sane woman would be furious. I am, a little.
But mostly what I feel, watching the dark desert slide past the window, is a terrible aching tenderness for him, which is the worst possible thing to feel, because it means he’s already won and neither of us meant for that to happen. You can guard against a man who’s cruel to you. I have no defense at all against a man who’s only cruel to himself.
