Every defense is removed. The vulnerability is so acute that my instinct is to close my thighs and rebuild every wall he just dismantled.
I don't. I watch him look at me, and what I see in his face is not possession. Not tonight. Tonight it is reverence carried in the hands of a man who does not traffic in reverence, and that is what keeps my knees apart.
He settles between my thighs and his mouth presses against the inside of my knee. He kisses a path upward, his stubble scraping against skin that grows more sensitive with every inch he climbs. The inside of my thigh. Higher. The crease where my leg meets my hip, and his breath is against the most intimate part of me, and I am shaking.
"Look at me," he says, and his voice has gone raw, stripped to something that sounds nothing like the man who gives clipped orders over comms.
I look. His eyes hold mine as his mouth closes over me, and the first stroke of his tongue is slow and devastatingly precise, parting me, finding the swollen bundle of nerves with an accuracy that makes my back arch off the bed.
My hand goes to his hair. My fingers grip, and I feel the vibration of his groan against my flesh, a low rumble that adds another layer of sensation. He works me with his tongue in unhurried strokes, flat and wet, then circling the sensitivepeak with the tip, then drawing it between his lips and sucking gently, and each variation sends a different current through my body, building the charge in increments that he is calibrating as precisely as any operation.
My thighs tremble against his shoulders. The sounds I am making are embarrassing, broken fragments of breath and his name and pleas I will never repeat, and Roman drinks them in.
His hands grip my hips, holding me still when I try to chase the pressure, and the gentle restraint is as maddening as anything he has done with force. He slows when I get close, easing back to soft, feathering licks that keep me on the edge without letting me fall, and the denial is so precisely timed that I understand he is taking me apart with the same methodical patience he applies to everything.
"Roman, please." The words scrape out of my throat.
He gives me what I asked for. Two fingers slide inside me, curving forward to the place that makes my vision blur, and his mouth returns to my clit with renewed focus, sucking in rhythm with the thrust of his fingers, and the dual pressure is the thing that breaks me.
The orgasm rolls through me in deep, clenching waves, pulling his fingers deeper, and the sounds coming from my mouth are raw and loud and I can't stop them, and I feel him groan against me as my body tightens around his hand. He stays with me through it, his tongue softening as the spasms ease, his fingers stilling inside me, and the aftershocks pulse through my muscles for long seconds while I remember how to breathe.
He presses his mouth against my inner thigh, and the kiss is gentle and his lips are wet with me, and the intimacy of that registers in a place beyond the physical.
I pull him up. My hands go to his belt, his zipper, and I push his trousers and boxers down together because I am done with patience. He kicks them off, and the hard length of his cockpresses against my thigh, thick and hot, and I wrap my hand around him.
His hips jerk. A rough exhale leaves his chest, and the tension in his arms tells me he is fighting not to thrust into my grip. I stroke him, base to tip, feeling the heat of him in my palm, and the slickness at the head tells me he has been holding himself in check for longer than his composure let on.
"Vix." My name comes out fractured. "If you keep doing that, this ends before I'm inside you."
I release him and pull him closer by the hips, guiding him between my thighs. He braces himself above me on one forearm, and his free hand reaches between us, positions himself at my entrance, and pauses. The head of his cock is pressing against me, barely inside, the stretch a promise of what comes next.
His eyes lock on mine, and the question in them is not about permission. It is about whether I am here. Present. Choosing.
I answer by lifting my hips and taking the first inch of him, and his groan is guttural, dragged from somewhere deep in his chest. He sinks into me slowly, watching my face the whole time, and this is the intimacy that exceeds the physical.
I see him. He sees me. We see each other without the operational distance and the analytical filters and the decade of grief that turned us into strangers wearing the faces of people who once knew each other completely. His hips settle against mine, and the fullness of him inside me is a pressure I feel in my chest as much as between my thighs, an ache that sits exactly on the line between pleasure and too much.
"God." The word leaves him on an exhale, and his forehead drops against mine. "You feel," he starts, and doesn't finish. He doesn't need to. I can feel what I feel like to him in the tremor running through his arms, the rigid control in his hips, every muscle locked against the impulse to move.
I roll my hips. The friction of him inside me, the drag of his cock against my swollen inner walls, draws a moan from both of us. He answers with a slow thrust that pulls nearly all the way out and pushes back in deep, and the depth of it forces the air from my lungs.
The rhythm he sets is unhurried, long strokes that let me feel every inch of him, and each one sends a pulse of heat through my core that radiates outward through my thighs, my belly, the base of my spine.
His fingers thread through mine and pin my hand against the pillow beside my head, and the gentleness of the restraint, the way he holds me in place with tenderness instead of force, makes my eyes sting. I blink hard and the sensation sharpens rather than fades.
"I love you," he says against my mouth, and the words are quiet and certain and carry something that has survived a decade of silence and distance and a man who chose my safety over my heart and called it sacrifice when it was control. "I have loved you since Istanbul. I will love you until they put me in the ground, and this time I'll be there when it happens."
My legs wrap around his hips, changing the angle, and the shift seats him deeper. He groans, and his hips lose their measured rhythm for a moment, snapping forward with a force that borders on the man he is in every other bed we've shared, and the flash of his real intensity sends a spike of pleasure so sharp that my nails dig crescents into the back of his hand.
He catches himself, slows, and the restraint shows in the tendons of his neck, his breath ragged against my mouth.
"Stop managing me," I whisper. "Give me the real version."
His rhythm changes. Still deep, but the strokes come faster, harder, his hips driving with a purpose that pushes me up the bed, and the sound of his body meeting mine is obscene and real and grounding. His free hand slides between us, his thumbcircling my clit with a pressure that matches the pace of his thrusts, and the dual sensation drives me toward the edge with a speed that leaves no room for thought.
The second orgasm builds from a different place than the first, deeper, gathered from the fullness of him inside me and the friction of his thumb and the look on his face as he watches me unravel. My inner muscles tighten around him, and I feel his cock pulse in response, and the feedback loop pushes us both with a momentum I can't slow and don't want to.
"Roman." His name is the only word left. My body locks, my back bowing off the mattress, and the orgasm tears through me in waves that clench and release and clench again until I can't tell where one ends and the next begins.
