Page 35 of Cruel Demands

“I know,” I say. He looks at me. I hate how small my voice sounds. I clear my throat and try again. “I know you should.”

“But you don’t want me to be noble. So you want me to bring you back to my bed and take your virginity while you are drunk, right? That is the kind of man you want as your first?”

“I just don’t want to go,” I say. His eyes close briefly. The room feels too quiet. “I’m not asking you to…” My face burns so hot I almost lose the sentence. “I’m not asking you to finish what we started.”

His eyes open. Finish. His mouth twitches like he’s trying very hard not to smile.

“Do not laugh,” I warn.

“I am not laughing.”

“You’re thinking about it.”

“Yes,” he says. I glare at him. He looks at me for a second longer, and something in his expression eases. “Then what?”

I look at his tie hanging open around his neck, careful not to look too closely at the blood beneath his collar.

“I want you to kiss me again,” I say. His eyes darken. “And I want to sleep with you.”

“In my bed.”

I glance at the bed. The sheets are rumpled from where I was just lying beneath him. One of my shoes is on the floor. The other is missing. My tights and panties are tangled beside the bed. My whole body remembers his weight above me, his knee between mine, his mouth at my throat. I look back at him. “Yes.”

His jaw tightens. “If I stay in this room,” he says, “I will want you. If I kiss you, I will want more. If I touch you, I will remember how close I was to taking what you were not ready to give.”

My mouth goes dry. “I was ready,” I say, but even I hear the uncertainty in it.

His eyes sharpen, not unkindly. “You were willing,” he says. “That is not always the same thing.”

I hate how true it is, and I hate that he could see through me before I could. I wanted to be ready. If I wasn’t ready with a man like him, will I ever be? Have I built it up so much I’ll always be a virgin? I push back the tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. “I feel stupid,” I whisper.

His face changes. “You are not stupid,” he says. His voice is low. Hard. Almost angry. I stare at his chest because his face is too much. “You are young,” he says. “You are drunk. You are far from home. You are trying to prove something to yourself with a man who is not safe enough for that.”

I look up. The words should scare me. They do scare me. But the thing that scares me most is not that he says he is unsafe. It’s that I believe him and still don’t move away.

“If you’re not safe,” I say, “why are you stopping?”

His eyes hold mine. For a moment, he says nothing. Then, quietly, “There are worse ways to be dangerous.”

“Oh,” I say, even though I don’t understand.

Mikhail lets go of my face and steps around me. He picks up my missing shoe from beside the bed. He sets it beside the other one, then walks to the small table near the window and pours water into a glass. The sight is so absurdly domestic that I almost laugh again.

When he brings it to me, I take it without arguing and drink half the glass, even though at this point in the night it feels like I’ve had a gallon of water under his watchful eye.

“This is very weird,” I say. “I don’t usually do this. Going to strangers’ houses. Mansions. Whatever this is.”

“I know.”

“How?”

“You are bad at pretending.”

I lower the glass. “You keep saying that.”

“You keep pretending.”

Fair. Annoying, but fair.