Page 56 of Dressed to Kill
"Please," I said finally, past pride. "Aleksi. Please."
He drew his fingers free, and I whined at the loss. He lined himself up, the blunt head of his cock pressing against me, and pushed in slowly. The stretch was everything. Too much. Not enough. I bore down and took him deeper.
"Fuck," he gritted out. "Fin. You're so—"
"Aye, I know. Move. Fuck me like ye mean it."
He moved. Carefully at first, still half-frightened of his own strength. I wrapped my legs round him and took the choice off him.
"Harder. I told ye, I'm no—" He drove in hard and the rest left me making a sound I'd no dignity left to be ashamed of. "Aye. Like that. Like ye mean it."
"I mean it." He pulled nearly all the way out and slammed back in, deeper, the angle lighting me up from the inside. "I mean it, Fin."
"Harder," I begged. "Wreck me. I want to feel it tomorrow."
He fucked me harder, his rhythm breaking into something animal. The bed frame hit the wall with every thrust. His hand found my bad one on the pillow, the maimed one, laced our fingers and held on.
"Every fucking—" His rhythm broke and caught. The tip of his cock dragged over that spot inside and I keened. "Don't you ever ask me again if I'd put myself between you and them. Don't you—"
"I won't." I had tears on my face by then and couldn't remember how they got there. "I won't ask again. Just dinnae stop. Please dinnae stop."
He fucked me through it, slow, deep, ruinous, both of us past clever, past the brat, past the tamer, past the push and the pull, down to the thing underneath that neither of us had a word for yet. My free hand found my cock between us. He knocked it away and took me in his fist instead, rough, out of rhythm, perfect.
"That's my job," he said against my throat. "I'm the only one who gets to make you come now."
I came with his name in my mouth, his fingers crushed in mine, spilling hot over his hand. The clench of it dragged him over with me. The sound he made when I tightened round him was the broken one. The safehouse one. The one I'd live on for the rest of my days.
Afterwards, he stayed there, heavy, shaking, breathing me in.
Then he gathered me against his chest, the bad hand cradled safe between us, his heart going hard under my ear, and for one long minute neither of us was anything but this. Not a vor. Not an asset. Two men in a dark room who'd decided, against all sense, on each other.
"Told ye," I said eventually, hoarse. "Nothing wrong wi' the rest of me."
"Don't push it."
"Bit late." I closed my eyes. "Bit late for that, Aleksi Laskin."
He left for theshower. I lay in the wreck of the bed and let myself have it, the warmth, the wanting, until the work called.
I got up before I could talk myself round and found my pants. The flat was quiet. Nikolai had left a note that he'd gone out to do something or other. In the dining room, the light was coming up grey through the big windows, and there it all was on the sideboard where I'd left it the morning before everything lined up the way my granddad had drilled into me before I could read. Awl. Wax. Two pricking irons. The good thread. The half-built notebook cover I'd been making out of an offcut.
I'd walked past it every day since I'd been back on my feet, coming around the long way to the kitchen so I wouldn't have to pass close. I'd told myself I wasn't ready. The truth was I was a coward about the one thing I'd never been a coward about. This morning I'd woken up wanting to live. You don't get to want that and keep walking the long way round.
Aleksi'd had Gregori source them off a list I'd written one bored afternoon, the best of everything, no questions, and I'd been a brat about the brand of wax just to see if he'd get it right.
He'd got it right.
I sat and set the offcut in the clam, leather pinched upright between the jaws so both hands were free to work. I threaded the needle on the good hand. Two needles, two ends, the saddle stitch my granddad swore was the only honest stitch a man could make.
Start with what ye can see, lad.
I could see fine. It was the feeling that was the trouble.
The saddle stitch wants both hands pulling against each other. The right hand sends the needle through, left hand catches and draws. The two hands hold the tension between them like a rope in a tug, even, tight, stitch after stitch. The evenness lives in the left as much as the right. The left holds the line. The grain comesup under the thread into the left and tells you when to ease, when to pull.
I sent the first needle through. Good. Clean. The iron had marked the holes before, and the awl found the first one true.
I caught it on the left and went to draw, but the hand closed wrong.
