He closes his eyes briefly at that, and when they open again, there’s too much in them for me to look at cleanly. So, I don’t. I look at his mouth instead, bruised from earlier, still a little swollen, and brush my thumb across the split there before I can stop myself.
His hand catches mine and turns it, pressing a kiss to the inside of my wrist so quickly it almost feels unconscious.
My knees nearly give out.
That specific tenderness from him, that quick, thoughtless reverence, is so tied to before that it knocks loose another memory in me before I can defend against it.
My wrist in his hand in the dark, his mouth there. The whisper ofPrinceagainst my pulse. The smell of smoke, vodka, and him. The way he used to look at me when the rest of the world dropped away, and he forgot to hate me for half a night.
His forehead drops to mine. His hand is still at the nape of my neck, thumb moving once, absently and devastatingly tender.
“My king,” he says, voice wrecked and all wrong for my pulse. “I’ve missed you.”
The words are simple; the damage they do is not. My entire body responds before dignity gets a vote. He notices instantly, and a dark, pleased little look flashes through his eyes before he softens it into something almost reverent, and that somehow makes it worse.
I laugh once, but the sound catches on the edge of tears. “That’s not fair.”
His eyes search mine. The old pale blue is darker tonight, blown wide and aching, so open that, for one terrifying second, I can see every missing year reflected in them.
“Nothing about us ever was,” he says.
Then he kisses me again.
This one is slower. Now the urgency is layered with recognition, and recognition is sometimes more devastating than desperation. I let my mouth move over his like I’m relearning something holy by touch.
He takes his time too, as if he’s testing every angle, every pressure, searching for old familiarity and finding enough of it to shake him. Our breaths mingle. Our hands map each other with the kind of aching care that belongs to men who lost years and know it.
We cross the room in fragments of contact.
A kiss against my mouth. Another on my cheekbone. When the backs of my knees hit the edge of the bed, we both stop at once. Nikolaj pulls back so we can look each other in the eye.
“Nikolaj,” I whisper, and his eyes close for one brief second, as if hearing that out loud physically hurts him.
When they open again, he pushes me down on the bed, slides both hands up to frame my face, and holds me as if I might break. That, more than the kisses, more than the nickname, more than the room and the invitation and the five long months, nearly undoes me.
“My king,” he says again, and this time the title is less teasing and more reverent than anything I ever would’ve expected from a man like him.
I lean forward and kiss him first for once. He makes that same rough sound into my mouth, like surprise and relief collided at speed, and his hands tighten on my face.
The kiss turns messy quickly, because of course it does. We don’t know how to want gently. We never did. Even now, with all this care running under it, there’s still desperation in the seams.
My heart is hammering hard enough to hurt. His too, when my hand slips to the center of his chest and feels it there.
When we part again, we stay close enough that our lips still brush when either of us speaks.
“I hated you for obeying me,” he says.
I let out a breath that might’ve been a laugh if it didn’t hurt so much. “I hated myself for it.”
His thumb strokes once under my eye, catching nothing yet and everything almost there. “You should’ve come anyway.”
“You asked me not to.”
“I know.”
The words land with all the misery they deserve.
I hook one finger under his jaw and make him meet my eyes fully. “Then stop punishing yourself for getting what you asked for.”
