Page 31 of Sexting the Pakhan

Look at you.

You’re so wet.

That does it.

A broken breath tears out of me, and before I can stop myself my hand slides down between my thighs again. My fingers brush the slick mess there and I nearly jolt from the oversensitivity, butit only takes a second for the ache to change. It isn’t the sharp, desperate need from before. It’s deeper now. Heavier. A slow, fresh throb building on top of what I just did.

“Fuck,” I whisper into the pillow. I’m not even pretending I’m being good anymore.

I touch myself gently this time, circling, shivering, and all I can see is Ruslan watching me do it. Hungrily, yes, but controlled even in that. Like he’d sit back and make me show him exactly how I touch myself before he ever let me touch him. Like he’d watch every twitch of my face, every breath, every little sound I try to swallow, and memorize what undoes me.

Heat floods my face and my chest.

In my head I’m kneeling between his spread thighs now, my hands on his hard legs, my cheek tipped against one of them while I look up and he looks down at me with that awful, devastating calm.

Then I’m in his lap again.

Then I’m on my back with him between my knees.

Then I’m bent over the circulation desk after hours, his hand over my mouth, his body pinning me down while he growls in my ear that I should have stopped looking at him like that if I didn’t want this.

I gasp and press my face harder into the pillow. This is so far past reasonable it’s not even visible anymore. And it’s making me dripping wet all over again.

I rub a little faster, helpless now, the fantasy running wild with me. Ruslan pushing my skirt up in a dark library corner. Ruslan backing me against a shelf, his hand between my thighs while hetells me to be quiet. Ruslan sitting in one of the reading chairs with me stretched over his lap, splitting me open slowly while I cling to his shoulders and lose my mind.

I turn on my side. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

I open my phone and type the wordnymphomaniacinto the search bar. Am I going crazy? Has it finally gotten to me? Am I going crazy for being a sex-starved twenty-three-year-old virgin?

Sanity returns to me and I turn my face into the pillow, screaming into it. I never should have let Karina talk me into this. And honestly? All I want to do is text the stranger again. It’s like he’s opened a flood gate for me, and there’s no closing it now.

I come to a decision. The next time I see Ruslan, I’m going to have some kind of conversation with him. Maybe even finally gather the courage to ask him out.

Only real dick can solve my problem.

5

RUSLAN

Tuesday afternoon,and I’m standing in the public library because one of my books has moved.

Not a book I own. Not officially. But it is mine in the ways that matter.

The book is supposed to sit on the fifth shelf in Russian history, between two titles no one touches unless they’re writing a dissertation or trying very hard to look busy. Every Thursday, if there’s a message, one of my men leaves it there. If there isn’t, the book stays where it is.

This morning, it was gone.

At ten forty, one of Stepan’s boys checked the shelf and found an empty space.

At noon, the book came back on the third shelf.

Wrong place. Wrong day. That isn’t a mistake.

Someone knows the drop.

So now I’m here, holding the book in my hand, checking the spine, the dust jacket, the pages near the binding. Nothing falls out. No note. No mark. No obvious signal.

Whoever moved it either panicked or wanted me to know that my ruse is up.