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“Fuck, Marek, me too. I—” Misha grunted a second before the muscles in his back rippled. He clenched around my dick and gripped the back of the couch so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the frame crack.
I fucked him through his orgasm, managing three more strokes before all of the pleasure combusted inside of me. I came with a ragged cry, digging my fingers into his hips and spilling my release for the second time that day.
Breathing like I’d run a marathon, I eased out of him carefully and tied the condom off. Somehow I managed to maneuver my shaky legs twenty feet into the kitchen to throw it away, all without smashing my head on any hard objects.
After I returned to the couch, Misha wrapped his fingers around the nape of my neck and pulled me in, slanting his mouth over mine for another one of his soul-shattering kisses.
When he finally let me go so we could both get some air, I swallowed thickly in an attempt to regulate my breathing before I hyperventilated. “You’re fucking amazing. You know that?”
“You’reamazing,” he replied, pressing his forehead to mine while his fingers tightened on my neck, keeping me upright and grounded all at once.
“Shower?” I asked, wiping a spot of cum off of his abs that he’d missed during his whirlwind cleanup.
He glanced down at himself and ran a hand over his stomach, almost self-consciously. “Definitely. Let me order some food first. Tell me what you want.”
Frozen like a deer in headlights, I panicked. What the fuck did he eat? Other than some breakfast food, I’d never seen him eat! I didn’t want to pick something he wouldn’t like or something super weird that would turn him off. What was the least offensive, most universally accepted food in Chicago?
“I don’t know,” I spit out, thinking quickly. “Pizza?”
“Is Margherita acceptable? There’s a wood-fire place not too far from here. Tastes just like it does in Naples.”
Was he kidding? I squinted at him, waiting for him to crack a smile or let me in on the joke. I knew he’d stalked me for a bit, but I didn’t realize how thorough he’d been. Unless it was a coincidence? When he didn’t add anything else, I replied, “That’s my favorite kind actually.”
“A purist, like me.” Misha smiled that time but I didn’t detect any deception in his face. “I can’t wait to see what you think of the real thing.”
“The real thing?” I blinked.
He nodded, not offering anything else.
“As in, going to Naples? You and me? Just gonna jet over there for the day, grab some pizza, and come home?”
“I’d prefer a week or two, but that’s the idea.” His smile vanished in a heartbeat, replaced with a look of alarm. “Only if you want to. I wouldn’t kidnap you and force you to go with me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, no!” I cried in faux terror. “Please don’t kidnap me and take me to Europe against my will. Please, no.” I smiled at his scowl and kissed him, sinking into his lap the longer the kiss went on. He wrapped his arms around me, filling me with a sense of safety that was just as foreign as whatever that earlier feeling had been. Like he…cared. Genuinely. He knew the worst shit about me and he still daydreamed about whisking me off to Naples for pizza.
Forcing myself away from him, away from the swell of nausea that suddenly displaced the quiet contentment, I stumbled off to luxuriate in his ridiculous shower while he ordered the food, reminding myself of all the reasons why I shouldn’t get attached to a guy like him. It was a dream and like all dreams, one day it would be over.
26
MISHA
In the weeks that followed,Marek and I fell into a comfortable routine. With Bogdan and Nikolai watching over him from afar, he’d resumed working during Delirium’s regular operating hours. On nights they were closed, he would usually make dinner, or we’d order out, and then take Nadia for a walk around the neighborhood, sometimes stopping at a cafe for to-go drinks—coffee, for him; tea, for me. It wasn’t glamorous or exciting but it was everything I could have wanted. And it was in those quiet moments that I truly began to question the trajectory of my life.
One of our more regular outings was to a local bookstore. Marek had already finished the biography on Yuri Gagarin and promptly moved on to another Russian—Nikita Khrushchev. Meanwhile, books on Yeltsin and Stalin waited on the shelf. Considering he didn’t have anything on Lenin, widely considered one of the greatest politicians of the twentieth century, I doubted it was a sudden interest in Russian politics. Also absent were any books featuring a monarch and God knew Russia had plenty of notable ones to choose from.
His choices confirmed a previous speculation I’d had when I compared the people from his other books. All of the subjects had difficult lives, usually stemming from some sort of familial poverty. And all of them had become famous, at least famous enough to have biographies written about them.
I didn’t believe Marek wanted fame for one second. Whenever he caught me watching him, he’d either scowl or run a hand along the back of his head and turn away quickly, uncomfortable with any sort of lingering attention.
The answer was much simpler: he wanted to know life could get better, even if you started out with all of the odds stacked against you. It didn’t matter how many times I assured him his life was on a different path, that good things were on the horizon, he didn’t believe me. He was convinced life was nothing more than a series of misfortunes until you finally died.
Anton agreed with him.
One night at Delirium, my driver fixed me with a plaintive stare, his vodka sitting untouched in front of him.
“What?” I huffed. “Out with it already.”
“I never know where you are anymore, boss. I worry,” Anton said. “I go to the penthouse, you’re not there. I come here, you’re not here. You were late to training yesterday. You! Late. Not to mention, you shouldn’t be driving yourself. What if something happens and I’m not with you?”
