Page 37 of Empire
“You’re staring again,” he says, voice rough with sleep.
I hum. “Can you blame me? The man I love is sleeping next to me, how can I not stare?”
His lashes lift properly then, and there he is. Dark eyes, sharp mouth, that familiar look of irritation stretched over the fact that he’s already soft for me because I’m touching him.
“You sound disgustingly sweet this morning,” he grumbles.
I lean in and kiss the corner of his mouth. “You love knowing you’re the only one I’m sweet for.”
His hand comes up slowly, fingers sliding into the hair at the back of my neck, and he kisses me properly. No anger in it, no panic, no shadow of fathers or meetings or the things waiting outside of these walls.
Just morning heat and familiarity. The kind of kiss that belongs to people who wake up together because they’re allowed and not because they’ve stolen the hours and are already counting how many remain.
That’s the kind of stupidity this place invites.
We stay in bed longer than we should. Long enough that the sun climbs higher and the room warms around us. Long enough that he starts getting hard against me, flips me over, and shows me why we’re both dominant in this affair.
Afterward, he’s lying half on top of me, scowling because I’m smoking in bed, but drawing lazy patterns on my chest, anyway. I let the ash fall into an empty glass on the bedside table because there’s nobody here to complain about my manners.
“You’re impossible,” he says after a while.
“Hmm, still here, though.”
He snorts softly. “You say that as if persistence is a virtue.”
“It is when I get what I want.”
“And what exactly do you want,amore mio?”
Usually, I would answer with something filthy or deflect. A line designed to make him roll his eyes and kiss me anyway. But there’s too much daylight in this room and too much truth lying naked between us for that kind of bullshit to stick.
“You, Salvatore,” I say, looking him in those maddening dark eyes. “I only want you.”
He stills—not dramatically, but the line he’s drawing on my chest stops, and he stares at me with so much love and sadness in his eyes that my breath stutters.
“You already have me,” he whispers.
No,I think.Not really; not in the way the world would recognize because men are not supposed to want other men. I don’t have you in any way that can survive daylight, our fathers, and the rotten architecture of our names.
But for one beautiful, stupid hour in this bed, I let myself pretend he means it in the simple way.
I stub the cigarette out and throw the covers back. “Come on.”
He blinks at the sudden movement. “What? Where?”
“Kitchen.”
He watches me get out of bed, and I can feel his gaze drag over my back, my hips, and the bruises he keeps leaving. “That isn’t an answer, Ruslan.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting,” I say, picking up my briefs and sliding them on. “Get your ass up.”
He scowls, and I have no idea how he makes it look elegant as fuck. “Bossy prick.”
“You like that, too.”
He mutters something in Italian that I only catch half of and choose to take it as affection anyway.
The kitchen is sunlit, plain, and perfect in a way none of the grander rooms in either of our worlds is.
