Page 77 of Sexting the Pakhan

Ruslan bending me over the bathroom counter after I tease him about how many identical black shirts he owns, his hand over my mouth because I’m too loud and there are men downstairs.

Me riding him in the gray morning light, nervous until his hands settle on my hips and he tells me, in that low voice, “That’s it. Take what you want.”

Him on a call in Russian while I sit beside him on the couch, trying to read, until his hand slides under the blanket and between my legs without his voice changing once.

Me slapping his shoulder afterward and whispering, “You are a menace.”

Him saying, “You were very quiet,” like he deserves praise.

Me telling him he’s impossible.

Him proving it again in the shower.

But it isn’t only sex. That’s what scares me. If it were only sex, I could file it under temporary insanity. Trauma. Attraction. But I’ve started to realize it’s more than that.

In the morning, he wakes me up with his fingers, and I ready myself for our fifteenth sex session. Yep, I was counting. Then his phone vibrates on the table.

He looks at the screen, and everything in him changes.

Not visibly, maybe. Not to someone who doesn’t know how still he can become. But I know now. I know the difference between Ruslan relaxed and Ruslan pretending to be relaxed. I know the way his jaw sets before he speaks. I know the way his hand stops halfway to the phone, like his body has already decided what his mind hasn’t heard yet.

He answers. “Yes.”

One word. Then silence.

I sit up slowly, pulling the sheet to my chest.

The room is cold outside the bed. The windows are pale with dawn, the sea restless beyond them. For a few seconds, the only sounds are the waves below the cliffs and Ruslan’s breathing, controlled enough that it scares me.

He turns away from me. That scares me more.

I can’t understand the voice on the other end, but I hear it faintly, urgent and low. Ruslan doesn’t interrupt. He listens, one hand braced on the edge of the table, head slightly lowered.

Then he says, “Where?”

Another pause.

His fingers tighten against the wood. “Alive?”

My stomach drops. I don’t move.

He listens again. Whatever answer he gets, it does not please him.

“No,” he says. “No one touches him until I get there.”

A longer silence.

Then, colder: “I said no one.”

The call ends.

For a moment, he stays exactly where he is, phone still in his hand, back to me. The soft thing between us—the bed, thesheets, the warmth, the strange half life we’ve been living for the past few days—seems to pull away all at once.

He’s not the man who kissed the inside of my wrist last night when he thought I was asleep. He’s not the man who listened to me talk about my father’s old boat and my mother’s terrible singing and the tiny apartment I’m probably losing. He’s not even the man who touched me in the dark like he had forgotten every violent thing he knew how to do.

He’s the other one now. The one men call when there’s blood. He’s a Pakhan.

“Ruslan?” I say.