I can see exactly how well it hasn't worked, and I find I have run out of restraint, out of the sanity that lets her go back to her life where I manage her as a simple liability from a careful distance. And with that loss comes the impulse to touch her that I can no longer resist as I move my hand from the wall to her waist.
The contact is deliberate. My palm settles against the curve of her waist, and I feel the warmth of her through the fabric of her jacket, and I feel also the precise moment she registers the touch — the slight tension, the breath she pulls in too fast, the way her body decides before her mind does. And then the sound escapes her. Small. Involuntary. A sharp, soft intake of breath that she cannot take back and that she is immediately, evidently furious about, and it travels through me like something lit.
I feel her breath catch before I hear it — the slight tension through my palm where I'm touching her, the way her body registers the contact before her mind has finished deciding what to do about it. Then she makes the sound. Small, involuntary, a sharp inhale that she cannot take back, and it does something to my self-control that I am going to have to deal with in a moment.
I look at her face.
She's flushed. She's looking at me with those green eyes, and she is furious, but she doesn’t make a move to push my hand away. Her palms are flat on the brick behind her and she is holding herself perfectly, deliberately still the way a person holds still when moving will give away the rest of what they've been protecting, and it is too late for that — it was too late for that the moment the sound left her lips — but she is trying anyway because she is the most stubborn woman I have ever had the particular pleasure of standing next to in a November alley.
"There it is," I say, quietly.
"Don't," she says.
"Don't what?"
She doesn't answer. Her jaw is tight and her eyes are bright and the pulse at her throat is doing something that I am finding extremely distracting, and my thumb presses slightly into the curve of her waist and her breath goes completely uneven and I watch it happen and I want, with a specificity I haven't felt in a long time, to take her apart completely and put her back together the way I choose.
I don't. Instead, I dip my head and press my mouth to her neck.
Not gently. I don't do things gently when I want them, and I want this, and she should know I want it — she should know exactly what she's doing to the person who is supposed to be managing her as a liability and is currently kissing her pulse point in a service alley like a man who has lost the thread of hisown priorities. I press my mouth to her skin and feel her pulse jump under my lips, and she makes another sound, breathier than the first, and her hands are gripping the brick wall behind her hard enough that I can see her knuckles from here.
She doesn't push me away.
I drag my mouth slowly up the side of her neck and feel her shiver and file that too — the shiver, the sound, the way she tips her chin up slightly like her body has made a decision her brain hasn't authorized. She is frozen and burning, and she wants me to keep going, and she is furious about wanting it, and I find all three of those things equally compelling.
"Victor—" She says my name, and it comes out wrong, it comes out soft, and that is the thing that does it. Her voice, stripped of every bit of cold she’s been using to keep me at a distance, makes a sudden heat radiate in my chest, a heat that soon spreads through every fiber in my body.
“Bozhe moy,” I mumble, barely a whisper of a growl beneath my breath. Not intended for her to hear.
I pull back enough to look at her face, and then I kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth that I am going to be thinking about for a considerable amount of time, and then she kisses me back.
She kisses me back like she's been angry about wanting to and has finally stopped fighting it, which is exactly what's happening, and her hands come off the wall and I feel them at the front of my jacket and she is kissing me with her whole self the way she does everything — completely, without half measures, all the stubbornness and the headstrong boldness of her redirected into this, and it is better than I calculated, which is a thing I don't often have cause to say.
I could ruin her completely.
The thought arrives with absolute clarity while my hand is at her waist and her mouth is against mine, and she is pressed between me and the brick wall of an alley behind a café in November. I could take this as far as it goes right now, and she would let me, not because she's weak — she is the opposite of weak — but because this thing between us has been building since the storage room, and she has been managing it alone for six days, and she is tired of managing it. I could.
I don't.
I end the kiss. Clean, complete, no gradual withdrawal — I pull back and step back and put distance between us and look at her.
She is flushed from her chest to her hairline. Her hands are still slightly raised between us, where they were on my jacket. Her lips are parted, and she is breathing like she ran here, and her eyes, when they focus on my face, are the most unguarded I have ever seen them.
Something pulls tight in my chest that I don't examine.
"You shouldn't let me see you like that," I say. My voice is not entirely level. I notice this and address it and continue. "It makes it very difficult to resist ruining you completely."
She stares at me. Her mouth opens. Closes.
"Go back inside," I say. "Your shift ended twelve minutes ago."
"You—" She stops. Whatever she was going to say doesn't make it out. She is looking at me like she can't decide whether to finish the sentence or hit me, and either option would be more satisfying than the stunned silence, and I find I want to make her finish sentences for a long time.
"Go inside, Alex," I say again. Quietly.
I turn and walk to the end of the alley.
