"Can't let someone in? Can't trust anything that comes toward you because everything that has come toward you has required you to run away from it?" His voice is low, gravely. "Can't stop running long enough to consider that some things are worth standing still for?"
"Don't," I say. "Don't do that. Don't take what you heard and use it against me."
"I'm not using it against you." He reaches up and takes the phone from my hand, carefully, and sets it on the shelf beside us with his own, and now his hands are free, and so are mine. "I'm telling you I know. I know what you're carrying. I know how long you've been carrying it. And I'm still here."
"You're here because you don’t trust me."
"I'm here," he says, "because I heard you say my name and I have been in 4D for three days trying to talk myself out of crossing the hall and finding out exactly what my name on your lips sounds like without a single barrier between us. And I have failed. I am done pretending."
His hand comes up and finds my face — just his fingers at my jaw, tilting my chin up slightly, the lightest possible contact — and I stop breathing. "You are the most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to me," he says. "I hope you know that."
"Victor—"
"There it is," he says, quietly. "That right there. My name on your lips just like that. That is why I’m here."
He leans down and kisses me.
Not like in the alley. The alley was a point being made, controlled and deliberate, a powerful man flexing his will and then walking away. This is different. This is a man with desires, and the difference is undeniable. I kiss him back, wrapping my arms around the back of his neck, just as I’ve been wanting to do since that day.
The moment his mouth touched mine, I stopped pretending I didn’t want him. Grasping at his collar with my fingers, slipping one hand beneath his shirt there to touch the skin at the back of his neck. That gets a reaction, and he makes a sound low in his chest. A sound that sends my nervous system into a frenzy.
His hands move from my jaw into my hair and along my waist, pulling me against him harder. I got on my tiptoes, winding the hand beneath his neck down further, my other hand finds the front of his shirt and grips it desperately.
He pulls back enough to look down at me, his eyes in the dim light darker than usual. And I can see him deliberating.
“Alex,” he whispers, voice husky.
“Don’t,” I say, and pull his mouth back down to mine.
He laughs wickedly against my mouth, and then his hands move, finding the curve of my waist. I can feel the warmth of his palm through the fabric of my shirt, and just like when he touched me in the alley, I make that sound that I can’t take back.
His hand grips my waist, and my breath goes uneven, my hand that had been gripping his shirt releasing the fabric in exchange for burying in his hair instead. Encouraged, he picks me up, settling me against his hips, my legs instinctively wrapping around his waist.
He walks backward, carrying me with him until we reach the couch, then turns and sets me down on the soft surface. I sit there, looking up at him, and there is no version of this where I pretend I don’t want him.
He crouches in front of me, putting us at eye level, then takes my face in both hands. His thumbs caressing my cheek as he just looks at me for a moment, with that completely unhurried attention that I’ve somehow never been able to stay ahead of.
“Tell me to stop,” he says, “and I stop. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He leans in and kisses me again. This time, there is no restraint, none of the carefully managed hunger he was always holding onto. I lean into it as his hands move from my face to the hem of my shirt.
“Mogu?” he asks against my mouth.May I?
“Yes,” I say.
His hands slide under the fabric and find my skin, the warmth of them intoxicating as he moves his mouth down my throat, to my collarbone. A hiss escapes, and my hands are in his hair; he mutters against my skin in Russian, low enough that I can’t make it out.
“Victor–” I whine.
“Hands,” he commands against my throat. One word, low and demanding.
“What?”
He pulls back enough to look at me, eyes bright. “Put your hands behind your back,” he says. “And keep them there.”
I stare at him for a moment, his expression completely serious. I put my hands behind my back.
