Page 58 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
"Did I treat you well before?" he said.
"You treated me like you owned me," I said. "I liked it."
The corner of his mouth lifted. Not the polite lift. The smaller older one I used to know, the one that lived a little lower in his face and pulled a little less far. The lift that said he had heard me.
"Am I your boyfriend?" he said.
"Not exactly," I said. "Close to it."
His hands tightened at my waist by a small amount. He did not look away.
"How close?" he said.
"This close," I said.
I kissed him.
His mouth opened under mine the way a door opens when the right hand finds the right knob in the dark. Soft at first. He let me set the pace. I had been waiting ninety days to put my mouth on him with my own permission and he had been waiting in a body he did not remember to be kissed by the right one, and when our mouths met the kitchen did the small respectful thing of going away around us.
I tilted my head. I caught his bottom lip between mine and let it go. He breathed in once against my mouth, the smallest catch, and the low sound he made then was a sound I had not heard since the bathroom of my apartment a small life ago. I had carried that sound in my chest like a coin in a pocket for threemonths and here it was again, the same one, a small low hum at the back of his throat that he had not asked his body for.
His hand at my waist slid up my ribs. His thumb found the underside of my breast through the cotton and did not press. He set the weight of his hand there and let it rest, the way a man sets a hand on a thing he is being permitted to hold. The cotton was thin enough that I felt the heat of his palm clear through. I felt his thumb learn the shape of the underside.
I broke the kiss. I moved my mouth to the side of his neck.
His pulse was fast there under the soft skin behind his ear. I set my mouth on it. I caught the edge of his jaw with the side of my teeth, not hard, a small remembered move from a former life of his, and he breathed out against the side of my face in a way that was not breath at all.
"Fuck," he said, low at my ear.
It was the first half of his older voice through. The contraction was gone out of it. The Pete in him had not said the word.
His hands moved. Both palms slid down to the backs of my thighs.
"Hop," he said.
I hopped.
My legs went around his hips and locked behind him and he stood up off the stool with me against him in one clean motion as if his body remembered the weight of me and the right way to carry it. There was no pretense now about who was taking who anywhere. I locked my arms around his neck.
He carried me out of the kitchen.
The hall was dark. He did not look down for the steps when he reached the staircase. He went up them with me in his arms the way a man goes up stairs in a body he has been going up stairs in for years, even when his head did not remember which body that was. I turned my face into the side of his neck on theway up and I breathed him in. The compound soap. The clean wet at the ends of his hair. And underneath those, the thing I had been hungry for in the dark of my own bed for three months, the thing I had not been able to name and would not need to name again now that I had it against my face.
He shouldered the door of his bedroom open with his hip.
I knew the room. I had been in it a handful of times in the last few days. The big bed under the long window, the lamp on the nightstand on low, the small chair by the dresser where he hung a clean shirt. He carried me three steps in and he set me down at the foot of the bed on my feet. He stood back from me a half step.
He looked at me. The older eyes were near the surface now. The Pete softness had moved over and made room. He held my gaze a long second and I held his.
"Tell me to stop," he said. "You tell me now."
"Don't stop," I said.
The line went through him. I saw it go. His shoulders settled the half inch they had been holding above where they wanted to be.
He undressed me first.
He did it slow. The same slow I had learned in the bathroom of my apartment in a life he did not remember, the kind of slow that was not careful in the polite way but careful in the bratva way, the slow of a man who took the small details as personally as the large ones. He found the hem of the t-shirt at my hips and gathered it up between his fingers. He lifted it. I raised my arms. The cotton went up over my ribs and over my shoulders and over my head and he set it on the chair by the dresser the way he set things he meant to be careful with.
