"What did you just call me?" I said.
"I called you unhelpful."
"That is not what you said. The word was longer than that."
"Russian is an efficient language. One word can mean many things."
"What things?"
"Unhelpful. Also, beautiful. Context dependent."
"Did you just call me beautiful while insulting me?"
"Yes."
I kissed him and pushed him backward onto the bed and he pulled me down on top of him and we were skin to skin and laughing and hard and the combination of all of those things at once was the best feeling in the world. This was what it was supposed to feel like. Not desperate. Not stolen. Just two people who wanted each other in the daylight.
He rolled us over and climbed on top of me and the view nearly stopped my heart. Mik above me, hair falling across his forehead, the scar through his eyebrow, his grey eyes dark with want. He put his hands on my chest and pressed me flat against the mattress and the authority of the gesture sent heat coursing straight through me.
"I want to try something," he said.
"Anything. Everything. All of the above."
He kissed down my body with the methodical focus of a man conducting research, and Mik's research was always thorough. My neck, my chest, the spot below my ribs that made me squirm. He spent time on the scar at my collarbone, which he'd become fascinated with, tongue tracing the ridge of it while his hand moved lower.
When he took me in his mouth I arched off the bed and grabbed the sheets and made a sound that was not dignifiedand did not care. Mik's mouth was careful and deliberate and devastating, and I could feel him learning in real time, adjusting to what made me louder and what made me grip the sheets harder, applying his analytical brain to the project of dismantling me.
"God, Mik, your mouth." I was babbling. I was aware of this. "You're so good at this, how are you so good at this."
He pulled off long enough to say, "I am a fast learner," and the dry delivery in that context sent me into a laugh that turned into a groan when he went back down.
He brought me to the edge and then stopped, which was either strategic genius or psychological warfare, and crawled back up my body and kissed me deep and I could taste myself on his tongue and the intimacy of it made my head spin.
"I want you inside me," he said. Quiet. Direct. Mik.
The words hit me like a physical blow. This was new. Last time, he'd been underneath me and vulnerable and it had been about trust. This time, he was asking for it. Choosing it. That was different. That was a man who had figured out what he wanted and was no longer afraid to say it.
I reached for the nightstand. Got what we needed. He was on his back and I prepped him carefully, slowly, watching his face the entire time. His expression when I pushed a finger inside him was something I would carry with me for the rest of my life. Not pain. Not discomfort. A kind of surrender. A relaxing of every muscle he'd spent his life keeping tense.
"More," he said.
I gave him more. Two fingers, working him open, and when I found the spot that made his hips lift off the bed he said something in Russian that sounded urgent and beautiful and completely untranslatable.
"Ready?"
He reached for me and guided me into position himself, impatient now, and when I pushed inside him we both groaned and held still. The feel of him around me was tight and hot and overwhelming and I pressed my forehead to his and breathed.
He moved first. His hips rocking up against me, finding the rhythm, and I matched it and we were moving together the way we did everything, instinctive and synchronized, two people who had learned each other's frequencies so thoroughly that even this felt like something we'd always known how to do.
It was at this point, while buried inside the man I loved and approximately thirty seconds from an orgasm that was going to rearrange my internal organs, that I attempted to tell him something romantic in Russian.
I had been practicing on a language app for two weeks. The phrase was supposed to be "you are the most beautiful man I have ever seen."
Mik stopped moving. His eyes went wide. His mouth opened. And then he started laughing so hard that I had to pull out because the convulsions of his body were making it physically impossible to remain where I was.
"What?" I said. "What did I say?"
He was gone. Full-body, tears-streaming, gasping-for-air laughter. He rolled onto his side and curled up and the sounds coming out of him were sounds I had never heard from Mikhail Volkov. Uncontrolled. Unguarded. The laughter of a man who had not laughed like this in so long that his body had forgotten the mechanics.