"Yours."
I lifted my hands to his chest. I pushed gently at the lapels of his jacket until he let me slide it off his shoulders. I went to his cuffs first, because the cuffs came off cleanest.
I worked the small black links free, one and then the other, and set them on the nightstand. He let me. He watched my hands. I went to the front of his shirt next and started at the top button, slow, the way he had done the zipper. I could feel his breath under my knuckles.
"Look at me," I said, quiet, copying him.
He lifted his eyes from my hands to my face. They were dark.
I undid the last button. I pushed the shirt off his shoulders and ran my palms down his chest and over the long line of his ribs. The scar on his side. The cross on the chain. The plain gold ring on his hand.
I went to his belt last. I undid it. I undid the button at his waistband. I drew the zipper down with the same patient slowness he had used on me, and I felt him breathe out, low, controlled.
"Chloe," he said. Just that. Just my name. Soft and a little frayed at the edges.
"I know."
He lifted me. He carried me the few steps to the bed and laid me down on the white sheet. He stood at the edge for one long beat, looking at me. The lamp light caught the line of his shoulder and the long sweep of his ribs and the gold band on his hand.
"Look at you," he said, very low.
I held my hand out to him. He took it. He stepped out of the rest of his clothes and came to me on the bed.
He slipped his fingers under the strap of the camisole and slid it down off my shoulder, then the other. He drew the silk over the rise of my belly and off. The shorts went the same way.
He kissed me on the mouth, slow and deep, and then on the inside of the wrist, the inside of the elbow, the place just under my ribs where the curve began, then the curve itself. He whispered something there I did not catch.
Then he kept going.
He settled lower on the bed. He kissed the inside of my thigh on both sides, and the soft place where thigh met hip, and the place under my hip bone, and then he put his mouth on me and took his time.
I lost the room. There was nothing in the world except his mouth, careful, learning. He was not in a hurry. He had decided he was not going to be in a hurry. He kept one hand spread wide over my hip and the other came up and laced into mine, and he kept me there.
I slid my free hand into his hair, gentle, the way I never did anything with him gentle. I did not pull. I held him at the temple, felt the soft scrape of his close-cut hair against my palm, and let myself say his name out loud in the quiet room.
"Daniil."
He hummed an answer against me. I felt it more than I heard it.
"Daniil, I..."
"I am right here," he said, low, against the inside of my thigh, and then his mouth was back on me.
He took me up by degrees. The wave built clean. A long quiet swell that started low and warm and gathered, and gathered more, and his hand stayed laced in mine on the sheet and his other thumb stroked the bone of my hip.
"Stay with me," he said, quiet.
"I'm here."
"Stay with me, Chloe."
I came for him slow. Clean. I came with his name in my mouth and his hand still tight in mine, and the wave went through me long and quiet. He did not lift away. He stayed with me until the last of it had moved through, and then he kissed the place once, soft, sealing it.
He kissed his way back up. He did not skip an inch. He kissed the rise at my belly and stopped there a long beat and pressed his forehead to it for one breath. "You are mine," he said into my skin. "Both of you." Then up. The soft underside of my breast. The place over my heart. The hollow at the base of my throat. My collarbone. The line of my jaw. The corner of my mouth.
I pulled him down to me. He came down willingly. He kissed me, deep, and I could taste myself on him faintly, which made something low in me clench all over again.
He came up over me. He braced one forearm by my head. His other hand found mine on the pillow and laced our fingersthere. Both rings, his and mine, lay flush against each other, gold against gold, pressed into the cool white of the pillowcase above my head.