Page 66 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
The first night was a wildfire, the two of us going up in flames against my own better judgment. The count room was control, me proving to myself I could have her and keep the wall up. Every time I’ve touched her I’ve held something back, kept one hand on the door, made sure I could walk away after and call it nothing.
I am done holding back. There is no wall left to defend. They took it down for me tonight in a burning salt works, and now there’s just this. Just her mouth under mine, her hands fisting in my shirt, the unbearable holy fact that she is warm, breathing, here.
I kiss her slow. One bullet, last night, between me and never doing this again. I kiss her like that. My hands learn her overthe cotton, her shoulders, the dip of her waist, the curve of her hip. She makes a sound into my mouth, presses up into me, and I feel my whole body answer, the want rising hard, immediate, the way it always does with her. But under the want, holding it, is something I’ve never let myself feel in this bed before. Reverence. The simple devotional terror of almost having lost the chance.
I get the shirt off her. I take my time about it, which I have never once done, because every other time I tore at her like the world was ending. The world already ended tonight, and she’s still here, so now there’s all the time there is. I draw the cotton up over her head and drop it. I look at her, really look, the way you look at a thing you were sure you’d lost.
God, she’s beautiful. Full, soft, real in the gray light, the full weight of her breasts, her nipples tightening as the cool air and my eyes find them. Lower, the small new swell of her belly that wasn’t there the first night, the curve of our child rounding her out. I put my hand over it before I make any other move.
Under my palm, nothing moves yet. Brown says weeks before it will. I’ll wait. I’ve recently become a man with things to wait for. Flat, careful, my whole rough palm spread over the place where the thing Morozov died trying to take from me is growing, safe, alive. My hand looks enormous against her. I have killed men with this hand tonight. I rest it on the small swell of her like it’s the most fragile thing in the world, because it is.
“Sevastian,” she breathes. Her hand comes over mine, holding it there, and when I look up her eyes are wet.
I go to my knees.
I don’t decide to. My body just does it, the way hers does things her mind hasn’t approved. I go down in front of her. I press my mouth to the swell of her belly, to the warm skin there, and I say the first of the things I have never said to anyone, low, in the old language, the language my grandmother prays in.Moya.Mine.Moya zhizn.My life. I say it against her skin where the child can’t hear it and she barely can. Her fingers slide into my hair and hold on. Her legs go unsteady under her, and I take her weight.
Then I take her to the bed, because I want her off her feet, want her safe and held, under me where nothing in the world can reach her.
I lay her down in the gray light and just look at her a moment, the whole of her. The thing rising in me is so large I can hardly breathe around it. Twelve hours ago I did not know if she was alive. Eleven hours ago a man had a barrel to her head.
Now her heel slides slow up the back of my calf under the sheet, lazy, proprietary, the single most ordinary thing a woman can do in a bed, and the ordinariness of it nearly takes me apart. We get to have ordinary. Nobody told me ordinary was the prize.
Now she is here on my bed, looking up at me with those sharp eyes gone soft, and the gap between those two facts is so enormous I can hardly breathe across it. I have spent a lifetime around death and never once been undone by it.
This undoes me, and it’s the living that does it, not the dying. The fact of her, still here, still mine, when the world spent all night trying to take her.
I worship her then, the way I have never let myself worship anything. My mouth at her throat, where I can feel her pulsegoing, the steady living hammer of her heart, and that, of everything, is what finishes me. Her heartbeat. The plain animal fact of it, going strong under my lips, when it could so easily have stopped tonight against a barrel in the smoke. I stay there with my mouth over her pulse longer than makes sense, just feeling her be alive, until she shifts under me and pulls me up to her mouth again, impatient, greedy, herself.
“You’re being careful with me,” she says against my lips, half a complaint. “I’m not going to break.”
“I almost watched you break tonight.” My voice comes out wrecked. “Let me have it slow. Let me have one slow time where I get to keep you.”
“Then keep me,” she says, like it was always that simple, and God help me, tonight it is.
Something in her gives way at that. She stops pushing for the wildfire and lets me have the slow. She arches up into my hands, takes everything I give her, asks for more with her body, the way she always has, confident and unembarrassed about what she wants. I learn her with my mouth and my hands, every soft place, the curve of her breasts, the new fullness of her, the heat of her between her thighs that has me groaning against her skin.
When I finally touch her there she’s already wet, already lifting into my hand. She gasps my name, digs her heels into the bed, and the sound of her wanting me is better than any sound I have ever heard. I take my time getting my mouth on her, kisses down the new curve of her belly, the crease of her thigh, until she’s pulling my hair and swearing at me in the vocabulary of a woman who worked club floors for years.
Then I lower my mouth and taste her, slow, thorough, learning what the count room was too greedy to learn, exactly what makes her thighs shake, exactly which rhythm breaks my name into pieces in her mouth. She comes against my tongue with her heel pressed into my spine, and I hold her through every aftershock, greedy for those too.
I take her apart slow with my fingers and my mouth until she’s shaking, until she comes with my name in her mouth, her hand fisted in my hair. Only then, when she’s loose, gasping, pulling at my shoulders, do I rise over her and push inside, careful even now, watching her face, sinking into the tight wet heat of her by degrees until I’m buried to the root.
We’re both groaning. She’s wrapped around me, ankles crossed at my back, holding me in. Nothing in my life holds me the way she holds me. I move because not moving stops being possible, long slow strokes, all the way out to the edge, all the way back home, her breath catching on every return, her hands spread over the stars on my collarbones like she’s reading them.
There’s nothing in the world but the slick heat of her, the small sounds she feeds me, the swell of her pressed between us, everything I almost lost moving under my hands because it wants to.
And I stay there. Just there. Seated deep in her, our child between us, her heart going against my chest. I look down at her in the gray light, and every wall I have ever built comes down to rubble at once.
I move in her slow. Not the brutal pace of the first night, not control, just deep, unhurried, complete, the two of us breathing into each other, her hands mapping my back, mine framing her face, her hips rising to meet me every time. I say the rest of thethings I’ve never said, some in English, some in Russian, broken, against her mouth, her throat, her hair.
That she is the only thing. That I was dead before her and didn’t know it. Somewhere in it she takes my face in both hands and makes me look at her. “You came,” she says, fierce, like a verdict. “You came and you didn’t freeze.” She doesn’t know what those words are worth. Or she knows exactly.
With her, it’s usually exactly.Krasivaya moya.My lovely one. That I will burn the world before I let it touch her again. She doesn’t understand all of it. It doesn’t matter. She understands the part that counts, which is the way I’m holding her like she’s the last warm thing in a cold universe, which is exactly what she is.
She comes again with me deep inside her, clenching around me, her nails down my back, my name breaking apart in her mouth. Her whole body works around me in long rolling pulls, wringing me, and there’s no holding out against that, no wall ever built that holds against that. I follow her over with my face buried in her neck, her pulse going against my lips, her real name coming out of me soft, the same name I used to say cold and flat to keep her at a distance, gentle now, stripped of every edge.Cynthia.
And then, for the first time in my entire life, I do not pull back.
