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1
Manya
The sun had been up for several hours when I first felt its warmth against the exposed skin of my back. The sunrays pressed down into the sore muscles like fingers of comforting fire. Of course, that was not what my brain registered.
I was still caught up in the memory-laden dreams of the night before: scenes of my body being bent backwards over the bed, with my legs twisted in all manner of positions I hadn’t even known were possible. The warmth of the sun wasn’t the sun at all, but the radiating sting left after his palm caught beneath the curve of my ass. The sheets brushing against my thighs were his fingers, so gentle in comparison, prying my thighs apart as his head dipped between them. . .
The moan that left me was equal parts content and excitement. My thighs rubbing the sheet between them as I rolled onto my side. Slowly, Dmitry’s hands became less and less tangible, their heat fainter, until all I could feel was the pervading light beating against my face and body. I tightened my eyelids as if doing so enough would return me to that dream.
It didn’t, of course.
Trying to fight it off only seemed to return me to reality more quickly. I sighed and threw my arm out to the side of me. I was expecting a heavy heat beneath my hands, corded muscle, and a grunt of acknowledgment. . .
What I was met with instead was cold sheets. My eyes cracked open slowly to survey the king-sized bed where I laid, apparently, alone. That was most certainly not how I’d fallen asleep the night before.
Not that I remembered falling asleep exactly.
The night was a blur of Dmitry’s body: over, under, and inside of my own.
Even when I had felt unable to rouse myself for another round, he had been there with coaxing fingers and a voice like molten gravel in my ear, enticing me back. It had become a pattern in the three days since the events downtown. Every day had been spent with him whispering furiously over the phone in the other room or barking orders to the byki that showed up at the apartment. But intermittently, he’d have his hands on my body and his face pushed into my neck as he promised all the things that he intended to do to me that night.
Every night had been filled with his promises and then some.
I’d yet to have woken up on my own though, not since we’d started sharing a room. One by one, my things had been brought in, so discreetly I might not have noticed. First it was my toothbrush, appearing next to his in the bathroom. Then, my clothes had appeared in his closet. It didn’t seem to be a single inch of his room that wasn’t occupied by something or other of mine.
I didn’t know how I felt about that. It wasn’t as if we had discussed it. It wasn’t like we had discussed much of anything actually, and I didn’t know whether I was as okay with the way things were developing as I was pretending to be. It was kind of like Stockholm Syndrome . . . only Dmitry hadn’t stolen me, and I could swear that he was going through the same emotions as I was.
Familiarity bred contempt—but in our case it only forced us closer together.
At least physically.Thatwas the only development that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did not have an issue with. I stretched out on the bed again, smiling to myself at the way my muscles coiled back afterwards. In the last handful of days, I had worked muscles I didn’t even know I had—andthatwas exciting.
My hand hit the corner of the bed, quickly drew back from the stickiness felt there. I bolted upright to inspect what I’d touched.
The red, coagulated substance stood out sharply against the white sheets. The splotches of blood, which I’d somehow missed before, decorated that side of the bed like dark red cherry blossoms. I was half tempted to check myself over to see if I had any unnoticed sex injuries. . .
But looking at the positioning of those blood spots made me realize that they were from Dmitry, not me. Again, for the second time in as many days, the wound on his arm had opened. A part of me wanted to be flattered that he valued being with me that much that he’d endure the pain that it put him through. . .
But I’d seen his old scars, up close and personal. His body was littered with them: little silver crescents crisscrossing in patterns that my eye couldn’t even begin to pick apart. I knew every scar came with a story . . . I just didn’t know any of them.
I was still very much living with a stranger. It just happened to be a stranger that I was immensely attracted to. A stranger who could wrap his fingers around my throat and squeeze just tightly enough to induce a euphoric haze of longing. A stranger who seemed to know my body better than I did myself, but a stranger, nonetheless.
I grimaced at the thought. Climbing off the bed, I gathered my silk robe from the nightstand and shrugged into it. The fabric was like a balm against my heated skin as I hugged it to me, cinching it about the waist and reveling in how much it distinctly smelled like the man who had gifted it to me.
The sheets I stripped more quickly, bundling them into my arms and ignoring the faint coppery smell that came with them. More than copper, they smelled like sex, heavy and fragrant. I carried them from the bedroom and down the stairs, towards where I thought I had seen the laundry room a few days before. It wasn’t like there were signs leading me to it.
Actually, there wasn’t much of anything inside the condo. It was private and out of the way and obviously very, very expensive. From the gated security system that housed the home to the marble that lined the floors and the pillars, everything about this place screamed money, and a lot of it.
The problem was that it wasallthat it screamed.
There weren’t any personal touches, not in any room of the house. The artwork was generic, and the furniture lacked character. Hell, even his bedding was just expensively bland. It was all nice, but lacking personality. A far cry from the man that resided there.
He was brash, impatient, and rude. But he was also inherently charming, bold, and disarmingly funny. If I were to have met him before seeing the house, I would have imagined him surrounded by dark wood and bold and abstract artwork.
Maybe I was letting my imagination get away from me. I didn’t know him . . . and the fact that he kept cropping up in my thoughts was a reason to pause more. I knew it, but I still kicked open the plain door set off from the kitchen, sighing in relief at the sight of the washing machine and dryer within.
I needed to chill.
I needed to make myself some breakfast and some coffee, then sit down and think about Dmitry. In depth. Think about the situation I was in and what options I had, and—
