Page 16 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
She said it quickly. Eyes up. The pulse in her throat going faster than she wanted me to see.
I crossed to the bed and sat down beside her. Slow. I left a hand's width of mattress between us so she could feel the choice in my body and not the weight of it. I shook my head.
"No. Can I hug you?"
She smiled. She did not wait. She came in under my arm before I had finished offering it. She put both arms around my ribs and pressed her face to my shoulder, and the warmth of her hit me through the shirt like a hand pressed flat to the center of my chest. I closed my arms around her. I set my jaw on the crown of her head and did not say what was sitting in my throat.
I have wanted you in this room from the first morning I knew your name. I did not believe I would get to have it.
"Good morning."
She said it into my shoulder.
"Good morning. What is in the bowl?"
"Lily said it was your favorite. She helped me cook it."
I let my arms loosen just enough to look down at her without letting go.
"You cooked this for me?"
"Obviously."
She said it the way she says a thing she has already decided is not up for debate. The blush was sitting high on her cheekbones. I lifted my hand and let the pad of my thumb run along her bottom lip, slow, once, edge to edge. I felt her breath catch under it. I felt her not move.
"I want to kiss you so badly I am going to embarrass myself."
"Nope. Eat first."
She tipped her chin at the tray without taking her eyes off me. The corner of her mouth pulled. She did not move my hand off her face. She just set the rule and waited for me to take it.
I took it.
I reached across her for the bowl. I sat back against the headboard with the tray balanced on my thigh and the cloth across my lap and I lifted the spoon. The broth was clear and dark and there were the dried mushrooms in it, sliced thin, swelling in the heat, and the pearl barley turned soft, and a fine green snow of dill floated on the top of it. Yelena's. The exact one. The one out of the leather book Yelena keeps on the shelf above her stove, the book with my mother's handwriting in the margin on three of the pages. The book Lily has been allowed to open twice in her whole life under this roof.
The first spoonful hit the back of my throat and went down into a place under my ribs I had stopped letting people put their hands on a long time ago. I held the spoon at my mouth for onebeat past the swallow. I did not look at Chloe. I did not trust my face yet.
She came up here. She walked into Yelena's kitchen and she asked. She stood at the stove and let an old woman put a wooden spoon in her hand and tell her when the barley was right. She did this for me.
"Is it good?"
"Best in a long time."
I meant it plainly. I let her hear that I meant it plainly.
"You are just saying that to please me."
"I do not need words to please you, Chloe. I can show you how if you let me."
She slapped my chest. Flat-palmed, right above the dip at the base of my throat. The sound was small and clean and the slap was not a slap. It was relief looking for a place to land and not finding any other place to put itself. I gave her the two-note laugh, low, the one that comes out of my chest before my head has decided to give permission for it. My mother's laugh. The one Mikhail uses across a table when he wants me to remember who we come from.
She watched me eat two more spoons. Her hand stayed on her own knee. The bowl was hot through the cloth on my thigh and she was warm against my side and the room was quiet in the way a room is quiet when something true is happening in it and neither person in the room has decided yet to name the thing.
Then she set her shoulders. She turned her face up toward mine. The look she gave me was the new one. The one she has been growing into for a month. The one that does not duck.
"Can you call off the man you have following me?"
The spoon paused halfway to my mouth.
