He kisses my forehead.
I straighten away from him. “I feel helpless around you. You would touch me, and I would like it, but I can’t have it.”
“I don’t have to touch you,” he says.
“Don’t, then,” I say.
He takes his hand from my shoulders and curls his fingers around the corners of the book, cradling it once more. “I’ll love you from here.”
We return to our stations, then. Two people sitting on the floor at the foot of a bed. One in chains.
He’s silent.
“Tell me more,” I say.
“About what?”
I don’t know. His voice is like old leather, pleasing and soft and strong. I just want to hear his voice, really, but I don’t want to say that. “All of it.”
“You loved it when I’d hold your wrists above your head,” he says.
I jerk to attention. “No, not like that. I wouldn’t like that, I think.”
“You would. You’d love it when I’d pin your wrists to the wall or to the cool, soft bed and hold you immobile. Make you my thing in every brutal, beautiful way.”
My face grows red. Is he right?
“I’d put my tongue into your ear. I’d lick the inside of your ear. You loved it. You said it felt like sliding through the universe. Like you were sliding in space. And then you would beg for my cock.”
I swallow. “I don’t believe you.” Except I do—the suggestion of it glitters like dark gems in my mind.
“We had a game where I would tie you up naked—”
“These games again.”
“You liked to give up your choice to me. It made you feel everything more intensely.”
My pulse races. I should stop him from this talk.
“I would tie you up naked on the bed, and you’d close your eyes, and I’d kiss you on different parts of your body. You wouldn’t know where to expect the next kiss.”
“That’s not the game you told me before.”
“It’s a different one. You’d try to feel where I was just about to kiss you before my lips touched your skin. You had to feel me in the empty space between my lips and your skin.”
I look away.
“When you felt me near, you’d open your eyes and look right at me. You had to catch me before I kissed you.”
I shouldn’t feel fascinated by it.
“A game of negative space. We had many ideas about empty space, negative space, you and I. It was a thing for us, as they put it here. We’d sometimes spar with one of us blindfolded, using a stick for a knife. That was about negative space, too. Feeling the other beyond your skin. You were as much a master of negative space in battle as you were in fucking.”
I cringe at the savage word, so blunt and hungry. Fucking. I sip from my glass, just for something to do.
“When you were tied, you’d feel it more. You’d say that the air would tremble above the place where I was about to kiss. You were a master at that game, but sometimes I’d win, and I’d sneak in a kiss. I could always sneak under your defenses, lisichka.” He slides his hands around the back of my neck, up to my hair. He grasps my hair in his fist. “But you owned my heart.”
His words blur as I focus on the way he grips my hair, keeping my face turned to his. Ropes to the head, like a rider directing a horse.
“You’re making it up,” I say breathlessly.
He draws his face to my ear. My heart pounds. He whispers, warm and low, “You liked this.”
Warmth blooms inside me. That sort of wanting belongs to another life.
Again he whispers, so close to my ear, it feels like a tongue. “Pomnish?” “Do you remember?” His words go through me like electricity, warm and good. He tightens his hold on my hair. I feel like I’m moving further from Jesus.
Suddenly I don’t care. I want him to hold my hair more tightly. I want him to whisper something more. My heart hammers as I wait for him to show me that he has me.
He pulls away and looks into my eyes.
My gaze drops to his neck. His neck would be warm against my lips. I shake the thought from my head. I’m dangerously far from Jesus now. I can barely remember the light that came from his eyes. It feels like nothing more than a cartoon in my mind now. “I can’t.”
He lets go. I feel the loss of it deeply. He takes the glass from my hands. I allow it. I feel cold now—nothing in my hand. Viktor out of my space. Cold. Lost. I hate it. I hate being cold.
But then he turns back, and the look in his eye warms me.
“Viktor,” I say.
He puts his hands over my eyes. “Where am I?” he whispers.
I smile. “What do you mean, where are you? You’re right here.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “Stay still, okay?”
I find I can’t stop smiling. I have the strange sense that I’m waiting for something…something good, magical. I don’t know why I should think it.
A tickle on my cheek.
Shivers slide over me as some deep, buried part of me thrills to attention. This is the game he described where he draws his lips near to my skin and I have to feel him before he has a chance to kiss me. He’s playing the game.