"Now."
I set the brush down. I took the loupe out and set it next to the brush, and I looked up.
He was three steps from the table, swaying on his feet. His coat was still on, the buttons done up wrong, tie loose, eyes red-rimmed. He'd been drinking since lunch at the latest. I frowned. This wasn't the version of him I'd put the shirt on for.
I should have stood up and gone to change.
Instead, I said: "Make me."
He moved fast for a man that drunk.
He came across the table and fisted my shirt, the other hand on the back of my neck. I was half out of the chair with my thighs against the table edge before I'd fully registered that he'd moved at all. His face was inches from mine. Vodka and stale cologne and cigarettes were on his breath. His pupils were blown and his lips were parted.
"I told you," he said, "what would happen."
He'd told me nothing of the sort, but I wasn't about to argue with a drunk man holding my collar.
He gripped the placket in both fists and tore.
The first button popped clean and pinged off the table somewhere behind us. The second went with the buttonhole, the cotton splitting before the thread did. The shirt ripped down my sternum, soft worn cotton coming apart under his hands with a sound like paper, and then his knuckles were dragging down my bare chest as the shirt opened to my navel. The cool air of the apartment hit my skin a second after his hands did. His palms stopped flat against my ribs, fingers spread wide enough to span them, and he held me there.
He was looking at his own hands on me.
His thumbs were resting in the dip below my pectorals, exactly where they'd land if he'd been going to push me down onto the table. His lips had parted, and a flush had come up his throat the way it had at the safehouse when I'd touched his palm.
We were both breathing hard.
This was the moment, then. I'd planned for it. Just not for this version of him.
He leaned in slowly.
His lips landed on mine, and the breath went out of me in one rough exhale I didn't have time to catch.
Aleksi's mouth was not careful. It was hot and open and slow and tasted of vodka, and he groaned into my mouth, low and broken, like the sound had been waiting in him. He kissed me like he was checking something. Like he was testing whether I was going to hold or break. His lips moved over mine, dragged, and came back. The hand at the back of my neck was shaking. His other hand was still flat against my ribs, fingers spread, and I could feel the heat of him through my whole chest.
I held still and let him kiss me long enough that I was sure he'd remember it in the morning whether he wanted to or not.
He pulled back an inch. Just enough to look at me.
His pupils were blown wide and his lips were wet from mine. The flush had spread down the front of his throat into the open collar of his shirt, and he looked dazed, like he'd been hit.
"You taste like the leather," he said.
It was the most honest thing he had said to me in the four days I had known him, and he sounded like he hadn't meant to say it out loud.
"Yer pished."
A long pause. His thumb was still on my pulse.
"Yes."
"Aye. So this isnae happening again tonight."
He stayed where he was, breathing against my lips.
"Aleksi." He was right there, close enough that I could see the lines around his mouth, the broken capillary at the side of his nose, the place under his eye where the skin had thinned with age. "Look at me. Yer pished and ye dinnae know what yer doing. So this isnae happening tonight. Aye?"
"Why not?" His voice was thick and slow, the consonants slurring at the edges. "Yer not the boss of me."
