“Christ,” he groans, “has no one ever fucked you properly before?”
She moans, and he knows.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he says, as her body starts to tremble, a scald of vicious heat unraveling inside her, “show me how much you can take.”
“It hurts,” she pleads, but it’s both protest and entreaty.Hurt me more.
“I know,” he says. The praise jars with his grip in her hair, wrappingaround the back of her neck. “I know, but you’re doing so well.” He tugs, and her chest arches off the bed. Changed angle, she sees white, but still, there’s more she wants—
Aleksandr grabs her throat. Relief washes over her.
It’s immense, this perfect annihilation. She doesn’t want the burden of deciding when to breathe. She wants to fall, and not know if she’ll be caught; she wants to be fucked out of her mind, and she wants to blame it on last night’s alcohol still in her system, this desire for him—him—to push her there—him, not anyone else—
Resistance seizes back into her struggling breath. Lili lets out a sob of frustration.
Aleksandr feels it.
“Let go, Lili,” he orders. He squeezes her throat until her vision falters; and there, in her periphery, a choking sense of incoherence and intensity.
She’s allowed to feel this sometimes, she thinks.
She’s allowed to feel something like freedom.
There’s an ache inside her that he hits again and again. It unfurls emotion, tangled skeins, heavy waters. Dark things too deep to dredge, but she wants them exorcised; she needs themgone, their weight—invisible, monumental, pressing down on her, so fiercely ignored—torn away. She wants them strangled, her own breath taken, pushed to the edge where everything leaves her, falls away, just leaves heralone—
The chill of silence. Little air left in her lungs, and her vision goes black.
A resounding nothingness envelops her. As she disappears, she’s distantly aware of the shift of her body with movement, force, impact, the rush of liquid heat in her belly, that he’s still fucking her, that this perhaps brushes up against too far, but the blessed silence grows, and she lets her eyes close.
“You have a few gray hairs, you know,” she says.
Aleksandr hums something noncommittal. He continues reading the newspaper, his hand still stroking a pattern on her hip through the sheets. The scent of coffee mingles with newsprint.
Stay, he’d murmured afterwards, as if she was capable of moving. The sound of her own breath, coming back. Her hands in tight fists, twistedin ruined sheets. Trying to settle back into a sense of herself, reluctantly. The clink of a cup—waft of coffee—on the nightstand as he’d settled back beside her.
Lili reaches up now, brushing her fingers over the strands at his temple. “Right here,” she says, determined to prove her point.
He sighs, setting down the newspaper. He looks at her, her head resting on his thigh. “I work in finance. It’s a stressful job.”
He’s irritated. She can see him trying to hide it, and she tries not to smile.
Lili continues to brush her fingers over his temples. She feels sore and well used, but also easy and open. Like the hardness she keeps up in her daily life can melt away for a bit. Outside the loft, real life will rush back into place; she wants to linger in this ease a little longer.
“I like it.”
He snaps his newspaper back up. “I’ll deal with it later,” he mutters.
She sits up fast, grinning. “Do you dye your hair?”
“I’m not partaking in this conversation,” he says, getting out of bed. Determined, Lili wraps the sheet around herself, following him into the bathroom.
“I can help!”
“Absolutely not.”
“I used to dye my hair with pink streaks, you know—wasn’t great, since my hair is black—”
“Of course, you did.”
