“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
His hands came up to my face—both of them, slow, giving me every opportunity—and he held my face, his hands strong but his touch gentle.
“But what doesn’t?” he inquired, his voice devilishly low.
I blinked up at him, not expecting his question. He knew. The heat in his otherwise expressionless eyes was my surest proof.
“Hmmm?” he prompted. “The way your heart beats faster when I touch you?”
I opened my mouth to deny but then he kissed me. Nothing like the corridor. Nothing like the hotel suite’s careful, slowed-down deliberateness. This was the kiss of the argument’s aftermath—heated and direct, all the evening’s managed distance condensing into a single point of contact that made the managed distance feel absurd in retrospect.
I kissed him back, my fingers lacing through his hair as his hands found my waist and pressed my lower body to his.
He was not gentle in the way the hotel suite had been gentle. But he was careful. He kissed me like he had been starved of it for so long.
“Still angry?” he asked, when we finally broke apart for air. His voice was low and close, his mouth at the curve of my neck.
“Yes,” I said. The word came out less steady than I intended.
I felt him almost smile against my skin. Not mockery. Something that was amused and warm and unexpectedly human.
I had told myself—in the few minutes I’d had to tell myself anything before the evening had consumed all available cognitive resources—that this would feel like surrender. That the asymmetry of our situation, the power he held that I didn’t, the circumstances that had produced this marriage and this room and this night, would make the intimacy between us feel like anextension of all of that. Like one more thing happening to me while I managed my response to it.
But as he undid the zip at the back of my dress and led me to the bed with his eyes locked on mine, it didn’t feel like that.
He knelt between my legs as he said, “We could stop if you don’t want to.”
I half-rolled my eyes.
“You’re going to make me angrier if you don’t stop talking.”
He took off his shirt then, kissing me as he totally undressed me. The kiss escalated even quicker than before. There was no foreplay.
My back arched off the bed when he slid into me. He grabbed my breasts, squeezing and kneading as he started moving inside me. Mikhail didn’t start slow. He charged into me like a man claiming his long-awaited meal.
“Mikhail!... Yeah… oh!” I moaned as he pulled me lower by my shoulders, making him go even deeper.
The sound of our skin colliding and my moans which soon became breathless were the only sounds in the room as he screwed my brains off. And then I felt ecstasy begin to build inside me with every thrust.
I came with a loud cry that he eventually silenced with a wet kiss.
“Fuck! Elena,” he practically groaned as he reached his own peak.
At some point the ceiling was above me and his weight was beside me. The room was quiet in a way it hadn’t been before, and I was lying in the dark of it with my heart doing something unsteady and my body trying to remember the basic operations of breathing.
“You called my name,” he uttered.
“Well, I didn’t know your name the last time.”
“I know. That’s not it,” he said. “You never call my name.”
I tried to chuckle but it came out as a sigh.
“I like the way you do it.”
“Uh, do what?”
“Call my name.”
