And the horrifying thing, the thing I'm going to lie awake thinking about until my brain burns itself out, is that when he said it, my first thought wasn'tno.
My first thought was:he wants to keep me that badly?
Like the wanting itself is the thing I can't resist. Like a girl who spent twenty-three years being disposable has such a deep, desperate hunger to be wanted that a man can stand in front of her with blood still under his fingernails and sayI want to puta baby in youand the part of her that should be screaming is quiet, and the part that should be quiet is screamingyes.
I know you hum songs from the eighties in the shower.
He heard that. Standing somewhere in this apartment while I stood under scalding water and hummed songs my mother used to play on the kitchen radio before she died, he heard me, and he filed it away, and he held it in his mouth tonight like a jewel he'd been saving for the right moment.
The next three days are different.
Not in the obvious ways. He still cooks. He still comes home in the evening and takes off his jacket and rolls his sleeves and moves through the kitchen with that quiet efficiency. He still feeds me, though now it's always the fork beside the plate, always my own hand lifting the food to my own mouth, and I think that's deliberate too. Everything is deliberate with him. He's giving me autonomy in small, measured doses, the way a doctor increases a medication. Gradually. Carefully. Watching for a reaction.
But the air has changed.
There's a charge in it now, a current that wasn't there before or that was always there and I was too busy being terrified to feel. When he looks at me across the island, his eyes stay a beat too long. When he walks past me in the hallway, the space between our bodies feels electric, humming with the potential energy of something that hasn't happened yet but is going to.
He still goes down on me every night. But that's different too.
Before the breeding conversation, his mouth on me felt like a claim. Like a man planting a flag. Like the sex equivalent of the jacket on my shoulders and clothes that smell like him: another layer of him being applied to my body, another coat of paint on the walls of the cage.
Now it feels like worship.
He's slower. He takes longer. He doesn't dive in with that devastating efficiency that used to shatter me in minutes. Instead, he starts at my ankles, his mouth traveling up the inside of my calf, the hollow behind my knee, the sensitive skin of my inner thigh, kissing a path toward the center of me so slowly that by the time he arrives I'm arching off the bed and gripping the sheets and saying his name in desperation.
He spends more time with his fingers, and I realize he was always learning me. Learning what makes me gasp versus what makes me moan versus what makes me grab his hair and pull and forget every reason I am trying to resist him.
On the third night after the conversation, he does something new.
He makes me come with his mouth, the way he always does, but when the aftershocks are still trembling through me and my body is boneless and liquid and my brain is that blissful, empty static that only he has ever produced in me, he doesn't leave. He stays between my legs, his chin resting on my thigh, his eyes looking up at me through the mess of dark hair that's fallen across his forehead, and he says:
"Ask me to stay."
It's a request, and there's something in his voice that I haven't heard before, something raw and unvarnished, like the lacquer has been stripped off and what's underneath is just a man.
A man who wants to be wanted.
The recognition hits me so hard that I lose my breath. Because I know that feeling. I know it the way I know my own heartbeat, the way I know the particular shade of lonely that comes from being in a room with someone who doesn't see you. The wantingto be wanted. The terrible, aching need to have someone look at you and say,yes, you, I choose you, stay.
"Stay," I say.
He closes his eyes. Just for a second. And when he opens them, the thing I see in them makes my chest crack open.
He climbs up my body slowly. His hands on either side of me, his weight settling over me but not on me, holding himself above me with those arms, and his face is inches from mine and I can smell myself on his mouth and his cologne on his skin and underneath both of those things, the warm, clean scent that is just him, just Dominik, the scent that I breathe in when I bury my face in his sweater at night and pretend I'm not doing exactly what he designed me to do.
He looks at me.
We've never been face to face like this. We've been predator and prey, captor and captive, mouth and body, but never this. Never two people looking at each other in the dark with the city burning quietly outside the windows and the question between them notwill youbutare you ready.
"I'm going to kiss you," he says.
My heart slams.
Eleven days of his mouth between my legs and he has never once kissed me on the lips. Never once pressed his mouth to mine in the most basic, the most human, the most intimate gesture two people can share. He's had his tongue inside me but he hasn't kissed me, and the absence of it has been louder than its presence would have been.
"I'm going to kiss you," he says again, "and then I'm going to ask you a question, and you're going to answer honestly."
"Okay," I whisper.