I expect a joke. A dry comment. Some attempt to cover the moment with sarcasm.
Instead, she pushes herself up and kisses me.
Slowly this time.
Not the frantic heat of last night. Not anger, not relief, not all the things we tore through in the dark. This is softer and more dangerous because of it. Her mouth lingers on mine. Her hand slides into my hair. I roll us carefully, easing her onto her back, and she opens for me without hesitation.
I kiss her again and again, letting it build at its own pace. My hand moves down her side, over the curve of her waist, her hip, her thigh. She shivers when I touch her, already warm, already wanting, and the quiet sound she makes into my mouth feels more intimate than anything we did last night.
“Katerina,” I say against her lips.
She answers by pulling me closer.
I kiss down her throat, over her collarbone, lower, and she arches under me with no self-consciousness left. That’s what gets me. Not just that she wants me. That she’s not fighting it now. Not making it harder than it already is.
Her fingers drag down my back. “Roman.”
The way she says my name this morning is different too. Less like surrender. More like trust.
I lift my head and look at her.
She’s watching me with too much in her face. Too much tenderness. Too much feeling. It’s there for one bare second before she tries to pull it back, and I know exactly what almost came out of her mouth.
She knows I know. Her breath catches.
I kiss her hard before she can retreat into herself, before she can turn it into silence and shame and all the things she’s trained herself to live inside. My mouth takes hers with enough force to make her gasp, and then I’m over her fully, my weight between her thighs, my hand sliding down to part her.
She’s already wet.
I groan against her mouth.
She laughs softly into the kiss.
I slide into her slowly, and this time there’s no hesitation, no pause, no question in her body. She takes me with a deep, shaking breath and wraps both legs around my waist, and I feel the exact moment she stops holding anything back.
It hits me harder than it should.
I start moving, slow at first, because I want to feel all of it. Her hands on my shoulders. Her mouth open under mine. The little helpless sounds she keeps trying and failing to hide. Morning light across her hair. Her body warm from sleep and opening for me like it remembers me too well.
She clings tighter with every stroke.
The pace builds on its own. It always does with us. The softness burns into need too fast, and then I’m driving into her harder, kissing her when I can, losing the rhythm whenever her nails dig into my back, or she says my name like that again.
She’s close before I am.
I can feel it in the way her body tightens around me, in the broken breaths, in the way she turns her face into my neck and says something I almost hear and then doesn’t finish.
I know what it was.
Or maybe I only know what I want it to be.
Either way, I take her mouth again and kiss her hard enough to stop the words, because I’m not sure either of us survives them cleanly if she says them now.
She comes with a muffled cry against my lips, clutching at me, trembling under me, and the feel of her breaking like that’s enough to push me right to the edge.
I bury myself deep and lose the last of my control. My forehead drops to hers, my hand gripping her hip hard enough to leave a mark, and when I come it feels less like release than surrender.
For a long moment after, neither of us moves.