Page 39 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

He undresses me like he’s making sure of what came back from the woods, checking every part thoroughly. Sweater over my head, bra gone, his mouth following his hands on my collarbone, breasts. He lays me back onto the bed to snatch my pants away and kisses the cold-flushed skin of my stomach, and when I shiver, it isn’t from the forest anymore.

It’s his tongue. Lower. Lower. There.

He pushes my thighs wide and out of his way until they hook over his shoulders. That tongue plunges deep, and it’s delicious and confusing, because it’s not hard, so I can’t work myself against it, but the sensation intoxicates me all the same. My heels dig into his back anyway as I roll my hips toward his face. Just as his tongue slides up against my clit, a finger penetrates me, and my mind whites out.

Curses pour from my lips and my fingers dig into his hair and I ride his finger and his face so hard that I worry I might hurt him. But I can’t stop. I’ll never stop. Not until⁠—

“Oh, fuck!” I shout as I come, body tightening, blood boiling, bliss taking over.

Then he’s over me, inside me in one slow press that empties my head of Yakuza and forests and everything else with a name. Everything but him.

“There,” he says, against my throat, barely moving, making me feel every inch of it. Of him. “This is where you run to. Not from.”

I take his face in my hands, meeting his gaze. The word takes my final breath. “Yes.”

It’s slow and close and deep, and I want it all. His hand under my hips angling me until every stroke drags a sound out of me. The taste of me on his lips. When I come again, it rolls through me like thunder, and he snarls like a beast when he follows me down. His face in my hair and my name in that voice until it stops sounding like a name and starts sounding like a prayer until he gasps just as hard as I am.

After, when the room has gone soft and dark, the strangest thing in this strange house happens.

He spoons me.

Every man I’ve ever shared a bed with has been an all-night negotiation for blanket and distance, even if only in my head. It was always me lying rigid, doing the math on when I could take back my square footage or leave. Whichever got me alone faster.

But Maxim pulls me into him with one heavy arm, his hand settling warm at my hip, and my body, the traitor, just settles. His breathing goes long and even alongside my own. His body feels like safety and comfort, not like an enemy made of heat and sweat. Not a space invader.

I must be broken. Leave it to me to sleep well somewhere I can’t leave.

16

MAXIM

Lev closes my office door, turns his phone face-down on the desk, and pours two glasses of Armenian brandy. “The ports. It’s started.”

“Tell me.”

“There was a customs hold on two of our containers at Newark. Paperwork queried that has never been queried in nine years. The next day, the crane crew on Berth Fourteen worked at half speed. We had to call a mechanic to come fix it. Suddenly, the shop steward developed a toothache and could not be reached. Two days later, he bought a vacation cabin in the Swiss Alps.”

“Bribed. And bribed well.”

“This morning, an insurance surveyor walks our pier in Elizabeth, taking photographs of bollards.” He drinks.

“Any one of them is nothing. Together they are a picture.”

“A test, I think.” A long swig. “Four years, Maxim. He wants to know who you are now.” Lev turns his glass a quarter turn.

“He knows who I am.”

“I’ve handled the small ends. But the probing will continue and escalate, because Alexei has never let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Let him probe. It’s all he’s got. He will wear himself out.”

“And when the small tests run out, he will try a larger one. A container that goes missing. A truck that has an accident. Something with a cost attached, to see what you charge him for it.” Lev studies the brandy.

“It’ll cost him more than he expects.”

“Or,” Lev says, and sets the glass down, and squares his shoulders. “There is the old way, Maxim. The cleaner way. Anya is still single.”

“No.”