Page 20 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
He went still.
I knew his stillnesses by now. There was the one that came at the end of a conversation. There was the one that came when someone said something he did not like. And there was this one. The one that came before motion, not after. The one that meant he had heard me and his whole body was deciding what to do about it.
His eyes did not leave my face. The shift in them was small. The pupils, the line of his mouth, the place at his jaw where the muscle worked once.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"Are you sure about what you are offering me?"
Yes. I have never been more certain of anything I have said out loud in this apartment.
I did not say that out loud. I stepped the inch closer. I put my wet hand on the side of his jaw, where the stubble was already coming in for the night, and I lifted up onto my toes and I kissed him. Open mouth this time. Brief. Unmistakable. I let him taste the sorbet still on me and I let him feel that I had decided.
"I am, Daniil," I said against his mouth. "You said I was yours. Prove it."
"Are you drunk?" His voice had gone low and slow and a little rough at the edge.
"Are you coming with me, or am I about to change my mind?"
He moved.
He lifted me. Not in the gentlemanly way he had lifted me out of the back of his car after dinner one night, careful, mindful of the dress. This was the lift of a man whose patience had snapped clean. One arm under my thighs, one arm across my back, and I was off the floor and against his chest and he was already walking. My arms went around his neck without my brain catching up to them.
"The bathroom is the second door," I said, breath coming faster.
"I know where your bathroom is," he said, the words barely shaped, half a breath he was using to steady himself.
He set me down on the cold tile and reached past me and turned the dial of the shower on. He turned it hot. He turned the lights down at the dimmer by the door without looking. He knew where the dimmer was too. He had been in this bathroom before. He had not been in it like this before.
The water started up. The steam came in slow drifts, low along the floor first, then higher, finding the mirror, finding the lights, softening the edges of the room. The sound of water on tile filled the small space.
He turned back to me.
"Come here."
I came. He worked the bottom hem of my wet shirt up between his hands. Slow. He paused with the fabric at the bottom of my ribs, his thumbs against the skin there, and he looked at my face. Asking with his eyes if I wanted to stop him. I did not look away. He lifted it the rest of the way and over my head and let it fall wet onto the floor.
He did each thing like that. He unzipped the side of my jeans and waited a beat with his hand at my hip. He went to his knees on the bath mat to peel the wet denim down my legs, and even on his knees he kept his eyes on my face every time he was about to move to a new piece. I had thought I would be embarrassed,standing in front of him like this. I was not. I was held. I was watched.
When it was my turn I had to use both hands on the buttons of his shirt and they shook a little. He covered my hands with one of his and steadied them.
"Take your time."
I took my time. I got the buttons. I pushed the wet shirt off his shoulders and I saw, for the first time, all of him in one piece instead of in the pieces I had been collecting. The arms I knew, with the dark ink running down them. A pale ridge of a scar along the side of his ribs I had not known about. The dark line of hair on his stomach that went down past where his belt was, and which I had imagined more than once and gotten wrong.
I put my hand flat on the center of his chest, the way I had in the hallway, and this time there was no shirt under my palm. Skin. Warm. The drum of him under it.
"Okay?" he said, low, watching me.
"Yes."
He got the rest of his clothes off. He stepped into the spray and held his hand back out for me.
The water was almost too hot for a second and then it was right. He pulled me in under it and the steam went around us and his hands came up to my face and pushed my wet hair back from my forehead like it was the thing he had been wanting to do for an hour. He kissed me under the water. Long. Deep. Hungrier than the kiss in his bed had been, the one I had thought was the hungriest a kiss could be. Then he gentled it. Then he went deep again, slower this time, like he was learning the shape of what he was doing.
His hands moved. Down my back. The first time he touched me bare, an open palm sliding down the wet line of my spine and around to the small of my back to bring me closer to him. I madea sound into his mouth I had not planned to make. He made one back, lower, against my lips.
I let my hands learn him. The slope of his shoulders. The hard plane of his back. The scar on his ribs under my fingertips, an old smooth ridge, and I did not ask. I touched the small white scar at his temple with my thumb, the one I had memorized weeks ago, and I touched the small white one on the knuckle of his left index finger when his hand came up to cradle my jaw. He let me. He watched me do it.
