She sways like she expects him to kiss her, and turns her face into his hair when he instead goes for her throat. His mouth is warm and welcome, gentle in a way that she can barely understand. But it affirms for her that he, too, knows that there is a difference between this tentative exploration and the sealing of something more intimate between their mouths. A tacit understanding between them.
Some tension melts out of her shoulders, and she lets her hand slide around to the back of his neck, holding him tight to her as his mouth charts a course to the bony prominence of her clavicle and his hands rise like they mean to meet him in the middle.
Warmth trickles down her spine, curling wetly in her belly, making her light and malleable. A little sigh works its way out of her throat, a soft and fluttering noise that matches her minute squirming as her hips seek friction, something sturdy to rut up against, to give her the kind of counter-pressure to alleviate the ache he's stirring.
She is slipping under, she realizes. Losing herself in wanting is a good way to wind up doing something incredibly stupid, overlooking how he might use and hurt her, and yet — her other hand plants firmly beside his shoulder to hold herself up over him, a silent declaration of commitment to their course.
"More," she urges, breathless, and she is too dizzy to think twice of giving orders to the king of Ravka about how to satisfy her. "Your mouth."
Last night, balanced on that pedestal, Nikolai knows he had felt that word rattling in his bones. Wanting, formlessly, overwhelmingly. He has held all these feelings for her in check for so long; they rush to the surface, heat his skin, the marks she'd left there, so immediately when she demands more.
For a brief, jolting moment, he thinks of kissing her.
But no, Alina is asking something else of him.
His thumbs circling the peak of her breast, applying steady pressure as his heel braces at the foot of the bed. Seeks just enough leverage that he might arch back to the downward shift of her hips. It's a terrible, pleasant friction, not enough for any kind of release.
It lays him bare to her, in a way. Makes plain the effect she's had, how hard he is already. If he is self-conscious over it, there is no sign at all. The shape of his answering smile is clear, easy to feel against her skin. Nikolai presses a last kiss to the hollow of her throat where Alina's pulse beats, before one hand drops back to her belly, tips of his fingers spread across her sternum. She is so close, and he is reluctant to create even a sliver of space between them, but it's a necessity.
She'd asked, after all, for his mouth. With Alina held above him by one palm, Nikolai does as she asked: applies his mouth, the scrape of teeth, over the swell of her breast. All the while, his opposite hand maintains the same slow, circling pressure.
A whimper slips out of her as she clutches him tighter to her, holding the back of his head like she might steer him. Alina is startled by her own sensitivity—how she seems hyperaware of every movement, yet his touch melts against her skin and seems everywhere. Even the softest of touches has her stomach fluttering, her breaths coming more ragged, uneven.
And when he shifts his hips, it is not to rut blindly against her, but to give her something to rock against. She spreads her knees wider and resettles her hips over his when she feels him press against her, so that the length of his erection presses like a ridge into the whole of her cunt, and all her shifting and squirming becomes a shared pleasure, reverberating back into him.
All those soft little sighs and whines come with the twitch of her fingers tighter in his hair, the gentle buck of her hips, until finally she brings one hand down to guide his free hand to her hip, urging him to grip her tighter, as if she could without words invite him to explore as he pleases.
This is not the first time Nikolai Lantsov has shared a bed with another. It is not the first time that person has been a woman.
All of his life, he has been exceedingly careful. Not just for his reputation, what an evening guest is allowed to see of him, but of the possibility of a pregnancy. Of carelessness spinning off another line in the Lantsov family. Nikolai had never wanted to put another person in the position of navigating that situation.
He does not wish to put Alina in that situation.
But there is a blinding moment, as she sinks down more firmly against him and he can feel the heat of her over him and Nikolai briefly, desperately, wishes he had less good sense.
He values her too much. Too much to be reckless with her.
Even if there is some humor in taking this approach to his wife and queen. (Is that what they are to each other? How much do his vows matter when Alina has only barely begun to trust him, nevermind the prospect of her own?)
Having his mouth so completely occupied would put him at some disadvantage elsewhere. But he has had so much practice expressing himself otherwise that it is almost instinct to project his thoughts into her head.
One day, when you ask me to, I'm going to spread you out across a bed. Hopefully a better one than this, has the cadence of a promise, even as he bites a gentle line across her chest, relocates his mouth from one nipple to the other so slowly that it barely disturbs the clutch of her fingers in his hair. And after I've finished putting my mouth to more fulfilling use than I am now, you can have me, just like this, without anything between us.
At her hip, his fingers begin the process of navigating the fall of her skirts, tugging them up by slow increments to bare her thigh. Press his thumb to the same place here on her skin where she had dripped a pool of wax on him there on on him.
Her eyes blink open when his voice fills her head, but not her ears. A surprise, but not an unwelcome one. She had all but forgotten the possibility. Hearing him like this puts her at greater ease, in fact, reminds her of how it had felt to be utterly in control, literally untouchable.
She is the opposite of that now, letting him unravel her like this. And she has resisted slipping into that hazy state of surrender that Aleksander had dragged her into. Held him at just the right remove. Not anymore.
"The two of us in the Grand Palace," she murmurs, like she's taking the image he has already begun to build and started painting out from the edges, adding details. When the war is done and Ravka is safe enough for them to sleep easier, to hold one another without fear. That's where she imagines them, now. "And it won't just be in our bed. When I get to have you, it will be everywhere. I will be full of you always, moi tsar."
She folds her fingers into his waistband, a wringing grip that wrestles openly with herself and with him, with the fact that she is keenly aware that they shouldn't be rushing into this headlong with such characteristic recklessness. It's hard to slow down now, though.
"I want to feel you," she confesses, breathless now. Keeping one hand knotted in his hair, she drops her other to her skirt, hiking it up the rest of the way above her waist so that she can open a path along her thigh for his hand, inviting it. "Please. We don't have to—" Hiccuping on the words is a sign that she shouldn't be doing this, certainly. But she soldiers ahead. "Not inside. Not now. Just ..."
Even now, the title doesn't settle as it should. It is not second nature; the ear still anticipates tsarevich.
But to hear Alina—
Nikolai has a memory in his head of Alina turning to him in her coronation finery, lit by the sun through high windows. It provides an easy backdrop for what she describes now: the thought that there will be a time when he walks into that room to find himself welcome. That he will hike up the miles and miles of skirts, lift her onto her dressing table. That afterwards they may hold court together, side by side, with his spend slick between her thighs rather than staining the sleeve of her kefta.
And by contrast, what her voice hitches over after draws his attention. Brings his head up from where he had been applying teeth and tongue to the peak of her nipple. His thumb shifts to hold his place, reapply firm pressure back and forth across damp skin while he looks at her.
"Moya tsaritsa," is a low, aching groan of a thing, steadying as his hands lift to cup her face. "No, we don't have to. Not today."
Reassuring, so there can be no doubt. Nikolai means it, every time he offers himself up to her, every time he reminds her of her own wants. No, there is nothing she has to do now.
He knows that his own face is flushed. That Alina is raking his hair into messy curls. That the wax marks must stand out stark on his chest. (His wound too, but it is far too late to hide that from her view.) He knows that he wants what she is alluding to, so badly that it forces him to pause to examine the proposition. He is only marginally steadier than she, but steady enough to weigh what she's saying, to hold it in his mind as he runs his thumbs along her cheeks.
"Are you going to be wet for me, Alina?" he asks softly. Drops a hand from her face to her thigh, the pale, soft skin high at the bend of her leg. "Were you wet for me last night?"
When she says "Yes," there is something wet and wobbly to the admission. Easily mistaken for a wrung-out misery, the kind wrought from humiliation. But Alina moves her hand over his, pulling aside her undergarments so that he can take his own measure of her wetness and see that her enthusiasm is as boundless as his.
She wonders, distantly, if this is something they've done before, but in the way the sky blue of his eyes has turned sea-stormy, and in the flush of his cheeks, she already knows the answer. For whatever reason, she had taken his crown and his name and his country, but not his cock.
She can't imagine what it is, here and now. All she has wanted is someone steady, someone to share the weight, someone she can trust. If she has any reason to hold herself back from Nikolai, it is the impossibility of his perfection, a brighter kind than Aleksander's, unmarred. It is the waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"I dreamt of this," she admits. Her hands lift to his chest, following again the path she had blazed with the candle the night before. They both sit up fully now, tangled up in one another. She works her way down his abdomen, fast then slow, trying to convince herself that she can be satisfied with just this. "Of having you in the Duchess' gallery. Of waking in your arms and inviting you to my rooms, after."
She wants to kiss him. Her lips ache with the need. Instead, she nudges her nose at the angle of his cheekbone.
Alina's voice, the way she offers up the word Yes in answer to him—
What else can he do but follow her direction? The slight movement of her hand, laying herself bare to him, with his fingers so close, there is nothing else to do but touch her there. The drape of her skirt casts Alina all in shadow, affords her some modesty even as Nikolai draws two fingers through the damp heat of her. Finds her cunt just as promised, and feels his entire body heat in answer.
"What would we have done in your rooms?" Nikolai asks her, a breath of a question against her cheek. "Something like this?"
As he presses two fingers into her, a slow slide of pressure. His hand is so gentle where he cradles her face, listening to her breath, for the sounds he is so desperate to draw out of her.
She yields to him with little resistance, her arousal opening her up to him before his fingers ever need to. Still the blunt probing draws a little gasp out of her, and it's like sparks shooting up her spine, waking up every inch of her. Her eyes roll up before they shut, savoring the sense, but also arching into the lightness of it.
"Saints," she sputters. Her hands come to rest on his shoulders just to steady herself, nails digging in at the twice-wounded spot where her burns compete with the strange dark veins sprawling outward from an old injury. But he's asked her a question. She tries to find words through the fog of her pleasure, but it's like trying to keep above the water when she never learned to swim.
"Against the door." She lets herself imagine it now, too. His cock instead of his fingers stretching her open, filling her. His fingers are thick enough, hot enough, that it's easily done. "Over the edge of the bed. And later, too, while we're half asleep, holding each other."
She'd been left wanting, and there were a lot of hours to fill. A lot of empty spaces inside of her. It wasn't all she'd imagined, between finding him in that gallery and coming to find him this morning. Had they been alone, properly alone, she might have taken his cock in her mouth, not just her hand. She'd thought of how her lips would stretch over it, how he'd taste.
There are reasons, good reasons, reasons she now cannot hold onto except to remember that they have time, that they aren't crossing all these items off the list now. All the same, as his fingers thrust up inside of her, as she finally moans without any real restraint, it is while imagining they might do just that.
Alina recites these possibilities and Nikolai commits them to memory for some future point. He cannot say when, guided as he is by Alina and her desires, by his own tempering understanding of the tenuous boundaries between them. But he will remember that she had thought of them, had wanted them from him.
From him.
That last, that is what Nikolai lingers on.
Will her nails leave marks on him too? The wax hadn't lifted away the wound, and neither will the half-moons her nails score into him, but it feels good. Better to wear her marks than anything else.
"I like to hear you," is a departure from what they could, what they might, what they should be do in the future. The thrust of his fingers is a methodical thing, Nikolai's attention so utterly fixed on her. His thumb presses down, not circling, only pressure where she must surely want something else. "Alina, tell me. Is this what you like?"
As he puts this question to her, his hand leaves her cheek. Flattens across her back, urging her closer so he might put his mouth back to her collarbone, back to her breast. He can't kiss her; this is the nearest he can get, his mouth on her skin as he meets the shift of her hips.
The room is full of wet sounds, underscoring his words, that he might not just mean her little sighs, but the slick sounds of her cunt squeezing around his fingers. Her face feels hot, and she tries to escape his gaze — made easier when he trails his mouth back down her breastbone.
"It's good," she encourages, but even as she says this, the squirming continues, a restless effort to get more friction from his thumb. Like if she could fuck herself on his fingers, she could get that little something else that feels just out of reach.
"It's ... Oh." She sighs, lips parted, eyes fluttering shut once more as his mouth finds the curve of her breast, as his teeth scrape over her skin again. Her split attention makes all of his work feel more intense. It feels like she's babbling, but he said he'd liked to hear her, so she searches for a way to articulate it. "It's like you're everywhere."
She's going to drown in him.
"Just—" She whines. Another arch of her hips, trying to find a different angle, a little more. Enough to finish. And there, the steady push of his fingers up into her and the way she rocks to meet him has his thumb rocking like a fulcrum against her, and a tremor rumbles through her body, makes her muscles twitch, makes her cunt tighten around him. She cries out, tightening her arms around his neck just to hold on. "Yes. Oh. Saints, yes, Nikolai. Like that."
In this moment, Nikolai wants to make her wait. Not as a flex of power, or control, or anything other than she is so beautiful in this moment and he wants to stay here with her.
"You're beautiful," he tells her again; the words might find better purchase with her attention split in so many directions. A litany of other things threaten to follow, but Nikolai thinks better of it, holds his tongue. His teeth scrape along her chest, following the flush of her skin, putting his mouth back to the peak of her nipple.
I want to do this again before we sleep, is a murmur between their minds, his thumb following the squirm of her body, the way all of her weight bears down into the thrust of his fingers. A pleasant sort of fantasy, one he feels has little chance of occurring on this particular day. Still, he tells her, And then again, when we wake.
Over the center of her back, his fingers flex against the arch of her spine and he lifts his head to ask her, "Are you close?"
What a beautiful dream. To stay tangled in one another, lost to the outside world and drowning in this. Like they've carved out their own little corner of the universe, here, where Aleksander and all of Ravka's woes cannot touch them. Where just for a little while, they are unburdened, and the only weight they have to carry is each other's bodies.
She nods in earnest, over and over again against the top of his head, unable to make words, even though she tries to hold her breath and swallow a moan so that what comes out next might be even a syllable. Instead, it's a hiccup, a soft noise that is choked off as her chest tightens and tightens with the rest of her.
He must be able to feel it. The way her muscles wring tight—trying to hold him in, trying to push him out. There is something luxurious in imagining the simple ability to have each other at their leisure, the idle falling into each other. That's what does her in.
It doesn't feel violent. She doesn't fight it like she does when she's been with Aleksander. He does not sink his teeth into her and rip something free. It doesn't feel like shattering. Her release is a cool wave that a breeze stirs on a lake, something that rolls through her like a pulse, tugging at the strings of all her muscles in all her limbs, that leaves her sighing her relief when those strings snap.
Would he have liked to hear her try to say it aloud?
Certainly. Nikolai is so, so pleased by the sounds Alina makes, the way her words break apart when he applies his teeth just so or crooks his fingers just there.
But it is good too, when he feels the way she comes apart.
His head tips back; she is too compelling. She is incandescent. And there is some aspect of serenity in the way she relaxes, tips into the sensation. Nikolai stretches up to kiss along the line of her jaw as she sighs, breathes out soft sounds as her body clenches around his fingers.
"Breathe," he murmurs against the hinge of her jaw. He is still touching her, fingers drawing through the damp heat of her, seeing if he can pull a twitch or gasp from her even as he encourages her in to lean against him.
As if under some spell, his words put air in her lungs. She tips her head for him, gives him more space at her jaw even if what she really wants is to turn her face towards him, to steal his lips with hers.
The bleary haze of her release settles over her, makes her limbs and head heavy and sluggish. But as he explores her folds, she jolts, surrendering a little whimper that pushes her against him even as her hips twitch back, gaining space from the too-intense sensation.
"Nikolai," she chastens in a rabbit-quick, soft whine—like he's some bully tugging at her hair. She levels her her grip on his shoulders, steadier now.
It's all she needs say. He draws his hand away, settles his fingers at her bare thigh.
"Sorry," is a murmur too, so light as his lips move from her jaw to the newly bared stretch of her neck. "You feel so good."
His arm stays looped securely around her waist. When he leans back, he brings her with him. Nikolai would like to roll her onto her side, tuck her tight against him. But even though Alina isn't exactly pinning him at this point, when they stretch out across the bed, she remains held against his chest.
Last night, he'd wanted so badly to put his arms around her. Now, so rearranged, Nikolai can loop both arms over her, hold her securely. His thumb rubs back and forth at her shoulder as they lay together, breathing in slow sync.
"Don't be sorry," she says as he settles back to the bed, as he draws her against him. It feels good to lean into his embrace, and she lets herself for a few moments, though her skin is still feverishly sticky. She remains there while her breath starts to even out. "Thank you."
But she looks up at him after a few moments, idle considerations that in Alina's eyes look like trouble. She can still feel his erection against her belly. It would pass, she knew, but —
"Will you let me try something?" As sweetly as she asks, she's already reaching under her skirt to tug off her underwear, awkwardly shuffling her knees to keep them together enough to wriggle them down her legs.
A few long moments in which Nikolai closes his eyes. It is not enough time for anything approaching sleep, but it is enough to settle the thud of pulse at his throat, to appreciate Alina's bare skin against his chest.
As she speaks, his eyes open. Aware of the squirm of movement Alina is already engaged in, lifting his head just in time to see the disappearance of her underthings.
"Not today, we said," he reminds her, searching her expression. Remembering the hitch in her voice, the way she'd tripped over the words, these are wards enough against any temptation to bend the tacit understanding they'd established.
"I remember what we said." She huffs this defense out with a little smile sprawling across her lips. "And I'm asking if you'll let me try something."
She doesn't specify further, now. Only meets his gaze with that mischievous glow in hers that seems determined to test the limits of what he would let her get away with, of how much he's willing to give her. A look that delights in driving him a little out of his mind.
Something is such a broad term. There are exclusions, certainly, understandings they have come to together. But the way Alina looks at him now, Nikolai has some suspicion that this is no minor thing she is considering.
His hand sweeps up her back, over the wings of her shoulder blades, down her arm. A grounding sort of touch, for him as much as for her. The withdrawal of his hand had let her skirts fall again, but she is bare beneath them and Nikolai—
Nikolai wants her. He has carried his affection long enough for it to take root, to bloom green and new but no less secure for that newness, in his chest.
What would he deny her? Nothing, apparently. Nothing today.
"Alright," he tells her. "Though I suspect this is about to put me into greater debt with you."
She had anticipated this answer, evidenced by how quickly she sets about opening his trousers, easing them down his hips enough that she can tug his cock free, take him in her fist. And there's that little flutter of her smile again as her forehead presses to his.
"I thought all that talk of debts was just a way of ensuring we'd be back here," she murmurs. "This is for me. You don't owe me anything."
She lets go of him, but it's a short-lived reprieve before she presses the wetness of her cunt against the length of him. True to her word, she doesn't take him inside. Instead, she rubs herself against him, soaking him with her arousal, making each gliding stroke easier.
Her breath catches and her shoulders twitch when she bumps up against the head of his cock, the way it nudges against just the right part of her, the same spot where she'd been so sensitive before and is only just barely able to tolerate the touch now. The movement stay slow, careful not to get overeager and risk moving too fast or too far and letting him slip inside.
"How does this feel?" she asks him, her voice already rough enough to convey her own answer. A little something falters in her expression as she insists, "Be honest."
There is a flicker of a smile to answer her: Caught.
Yes, all the teasing invocation of debt was to him was a way to link them, draw them back together. Yes, he has a vested interest in making certain there is always something favor to return to her.
Would she keep him? Will she keep him? Nikolai wants to feel certain of an affirmative, clings on to what he can when he doesn't.
Regardless, there is still a moment, when she lets go and raises up over him that Nikolai is rattled towards movement. He says her name, tilting towards uncertainty and alarm, shoulders coming up off the bed before—
"Be careful," nearly overlaps her question, a wrecked groan of a plea. His hands are gripping her so tightly, ten points of pressure where his fingers splay out across her back.
Be honest because Nikolai is not a liar but he is good at dressing up a truth and turning it into some opaque, obscure thing. But Alina makes her demands and Nikolai can do nothing but scrape together an answer for her.
"It's—" he begins, breaking on good, which feels painfully inadequate. "Perfect."
Where perfect is honest, yes, but is wrenched out of him, almost pleading. It is perfect but it isn't enough. It is perfect because it is a reminder of what they have both decided to forgo. Beneath her, holding so painfully still of his own accord, he cannot kiss and cannot rock up into her and thinks his heart might give out under the effort of the combination.
The strangled nature of his reply is its own answer, nearly a better reward than the words themselves. She plants her hands on his chest, fingers barely curled up the slope of his shoulders, ready to shove him back down as needed to assert herself, to keep him from stopping her in a frantic panic.
"Trust me," she chides him.
Despite the authority she musters to say this, the movements of her hips are self conscious. Unevenly paced, a little jerky with inexperience. She is learning how to use new muscles, and for now she lacks grace or rhythm.
"You're so warm." Maybe it's the bloodflow of his arousal, or maybe it's just her own knowledge that it's his cock and not just his fingers that she's rutting against, that it feels as good for him as it does for her, but it feels better. Hotter.
It may even be the precarious nature, how delicate each movement has to be, how they tip on the precipice of something dangerous to them both. Her slickness makes each movement easy, a wetness that clings to his cock and eases the friction, making slippery the rock of her hips, opening the way to one wrong move. "Can you feel how wet you've made me?"
The shift of Alina's weight to pin him back down to the bed is good too, wrenches a gasp of breath out of him as she moves over him. Nikolai likes that. If their position felt less tenuous, he might provoke more of it. But he has the sense that any minor movement of his hips would instigate something neither of them are ready for.
And she trusts him. Or has begun to trust him. He won't jeopardize that.
"Can you come again?" he murmurs, hands finding his way to her thighs. Holding on there, too tightly. Not an answer to her question, but something that feels vital. Something he wants, more than his own release.
Of course he's worried about her. Alina laughs, just one huffed breath that hitches on its way out, a hazy smile curling at the edges of her mouth.
It is a good thing, she thinks, that Nikolai lets her have her way with him: if the tables were ever turned, he would ferret out every reaction he could, learn the shape of her every sigh. He would wring her dry and leave her boneless. She might like that too much.
This is safer.
"I think so," she says, the rock of her hips steadying a little over time. His hold on her thighs is good, solid, keeps her level.
But it's more than that. It's tight enough that she can hope she'll find his fingerprints in the banya later, and trace the constellations of his grip. It feels good, and so does the way that the firm length of his cock glazes over her wet cunt, the way the head bumps against her most sensitive spot, spurring her to molten moans and gasps like candle smoke.
"Can you?" She asks, forcing herself to meet his gaze, heavy though her eyelids are. That is, after all, at least half her goal here. A way for them to share this without crossing the unnamed threshold that they tiptoe up to.
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Some tension melts out of her shoulders, and she lets her hand slide around to the back of his neck, holding him tight to her as his mouth charts a course to the bony prominence of her clavicle and his hands rise like they mean to meet him in the middle.
Warmth trickles down her spine, curling wetly in her belly, making her light and malleable. A little sigh works its way out of her throat, a soft and fluttering noise that matches her minute squirming as her hips seek friction, something sturdy to rut up against, to give her the kind of counter-pressure to alleviate the ache he's stirring.
She is slipping under, she realizes. Losing herself in wanting is a good way to wind up doing something incredibly stupid, overlooking how he might use and hurt her, and yet — her other hand plants firmly beside his shoulder to hold herself up over him, a silent declaration of commitment to their course.
"More," she urges, breathless, and she is too dizzy to think twice of giving orders to the king of Ravka about how to satisfy her. "Your mouth."
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Last night, balanced on that pedestal, Nikolai knows he had felt that word rattling in his bones. Wanting, formlessly, overwhelmingly. He has held all these feelings for her in check for so long; they rush to the surface, heat his skin, the marks she'd left there, so immediately when she demands more.
For a brief, jolting moment, he thinks of kissing her.
But no, Alina is asking something else of him.
His thumbs circling the peak of her breast, applying steady pressure as his heel braces at the foot of the bed. Seeks just enough leverage that he might arch back to the downward shift of her hips. It's a terrible, pleasant friction, not enough for any kind of release.
It lays him bare to her, in a way. Makes plain the effect she's had, how hard he is already. If he is self-conscious over it, there is no sign at all. The shape of his answering smile is clear, easy to feel against her skin. Nikolai presses a last kiss to the hollow of her throat where Alina's pulse beats, before one hand drops back to her belly, tips of his fingers spread across her sternum. She is so close, and he is reluctant to create even a sliver of space between them, but it's a necessity.
She'd asked, after all, for his mouth. With Alina held above him by one palm, Nikolai does as she asked: applies his mouth, the scrape of teeth, over the swell of her breast. All the while, his opposite hand maintains the same slow, circling pressure.
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And when he shifts his hips, it is not to rut blindly against her, but to give her something to rock against. She spreads her knees wider and resettles her hips over his when she feels him press against her, so that the length of his erection presses like a ridge into the whole of her cunt, and all her shifting and squirming becomes a shared pleasure, reverberating back into him.
All those soft little sighs and whines come with the twitch of her fingers tighter in his hair, the gentle buck of her hips, until finally she brings one hand down to guide his free hand to her hip, urging him to grip her tighter, as if she could without words invite him to explore as he pleases.
cw unplanned pregnancy contemplations
All of his life, he has been exceedingly careful. Not just for his reputation, what an evening guest is allowed to see of him, but of the possibility of a pregnancy. Of carelessness spinning off another line in the Lantsov family. Nikolai had never wanted to put another person in the position of navigating that situation.
He does not wish to put Alina in that situation.
But there is a blinding moment, as she sinks down more firmly against him and he can feel the heat of her over him and Nikolai briefly, desperately, wishes he had less good sense.
He values her too much. Too much to be reckless with her.
Even if there is some humor in taking this approach to his wife and queen. (Is that what they are to each other? How much do his vows matter when Alina has only barely begun to trust him, nevermind the prospect of her own?)
Having his mouth so completely occupied would put him at some disadvantage elsewhere. But he has had so much practice expressing himself otherwise that it is almost instinct to project his thoughts into her head.
One day, when you ask me to, I'm going to spread you out across a bed. Hopefully a better one than this, has the cadence of a promise, even as he bites a gentle line across her chest, relocates his mouth from one nipple to the other so slowly that it barely disturbs the clutch of her fingers in his hair. And after I've finished putting my mouth to more fulfilling use than I am now, you can have me, just like this, without anything between us.
At her hip, his fingers begin the process of navigating the fall of her skirts, tugging them up by slow increments to bare her thigh. Press his thumb to the same place here on her skin where she had dripped a pool of wax on him there on on him.
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She is the opposite of that now, letting him unravel her like this. And she has resisted slipping into that hazy state of surrender that Aleksander had dragged her into. Held him at just the right remove. Not anymore.
"The two of us in the Grand Palace," she murmurs, like she's taking the image he has already begun to build and started painting out from the edges, adding details. When the war is done and Ravka is safe enough for them to sleep easier, to hold one another without fear. That's where she imagines them, now. "And it won't just be in our bed. When I get to have you, it will be everywhere. I will be full of you always, moi tsar."
She folds her fingers into his waistband, a wringing grip that wrestles openly with herself and with him, with the fact that she is keenly aware that they shouldn't be rushing into this headlong with such characteristic recklessness. It's hard to slow down now, though.
"I want to feel you," she confesses, breathless now. Keeping one hand knotted in his hair, she drops her other to her skirt, hiking it up the rest of the way above her waist so that she can open a path along her thigh for his hand, inviting it. "Please. We don't have to—" Hiccuping on the words is a sign that she shouldn't be doing this, certainly. But she soldiers ahead. "Not inside. Not now. Just ..."
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But to hear Alina—
Nikolai has a memory in his head of Alina turning to him in her coronation finery, lit by the sun through high windows. It provides an easy backdrop for what she describes now: the thought that there will be a time when he walks into that room to find himself welcome. That he will hike up the miles and miles of skirts, lift her onto her dressing table. That afterwards they may hold court together, side by side, with his spend slick between her thighs rather than staining the sleeve of her kefta.
And by contrast, what her voice hitches over after draws his attention. Brings his head up from where he had been applying teeth and tongue to the peak of her nipple. His thumb shifts to hold his place, reapply firm pressure back and forth across damp skin while he looks at her.
"Moya tsaritsa," is a low, aching groan of a thing, steadying as his hands lift to cup her face. "No, we don't have to. Not today."
Reassuring, so there can be no doubt. Nikolai means it, every time he offers himself up to her, every time he reminds her of her own wants. No, there is nothing she has to do now.
He knows that his own face is flushed. That Alina is raking his hair into messy curls. That the wax marks must stand out stark on his chest. (His wound too, but it is far too late to hide that from her view.) He knows that he wants what she is alluding to, so badly that it forces him to pause to examine the proposition. He is only marginally steadier than she, but steady enough to weigh what she's saying, to hold it in his mind as he runs his thumbs along her cheeks.
"Are you going to be wet for me, Alina?" he asks softly. Drops a hand from her face to her thigh, the pale, soft skin high at the bend of her leg. "Were you wet for me last night?"
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She wonders, distantly, if this is something they've done before, but in the way the sky blue of his eyes has turned sea-stormy, and in the flush of his cheeks, she already knows the answer. For whatever reason, she had taken his crown and his name and his country, but not his cock.
She can't imagine what it is, here and now. All she has wanted is someone steady, someone to share the weight, someone she can trust. If she has any reason to hold herself back from Nikolai, it is the impossibility of his perfection, a brighter kind than Aleksander's, unmarred. It is the waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"I dreamt of this," she admits. Her hands lift to his chest, following again the path she had blazed with the candle the night before. They both sit up fully now, tangled up in one another. She works her way down his abdomen, fast then slow, trying to convince herself that she can be satisfied with just this. "Of having you in the Duchess' gallery. Of waking in your arms and inviting you to my rooms, after."
She wants to kiss him. Her lips ache with the need. Instead, she nudges her nose at the angle of his cheekbone.
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What else can he do but follow her direction? The slight movement of her hand, laying herself bare to him, with his fingers so close, there is nothing else to do but touch her there. The drape of her skirt casts Alina all in shadow, affords her some modesty even as Nikolai draws two fingers through the damp heat of her. Finds her cunt just as promised, and feels his entire body heat in answer.
"What would we have done in your rooms?" Nikolai asks her, a breath of a question against her cheek. "Something like this?"
As he presses two fingers into her, a slow slide of pressure. His hand is so gentle where he cradles her face, listening to her breath, for the sounds he is so desperate to draw out of her.
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"Saints," she sputters. Her hands come to rest on his shoulders just to steady herself, nails digging in at the twice-wounded spot where her burns compete with the strange dark veins sprawling outward from an old injury. But he's asked her a question. She tries to find words through the fog of her pleasure, but it's like trying to keep above the water when she never learned to swim.
"Against the door." She lets herself imagine it now, too. His cock instead of his fingers stretching her open, filling her. His fingers are thick enough, hot enough, that it's easily done. "Over the edge of the bed. And later, too, while we're half asleep, holding each other."
She'd been left wanting, and there were a lot of hours to fill. A lot of empty spaces inside of her. It wasn't all she'd imagined, between finding him in that gallery and coming to find him this morning. Had they been alone, properly alone, she might have taken his cock in her mouth, not just her hand. She'd thought of how her lips would stretch over it, how he'd taste.
There are reasons, good reasons, reasons she now cannot hold onto except to remember that they have time, that they aren't crossing all these items off the list now. All the same, as his fingers thrust up inside of her, as she finally moans without any real restraint, it is while imagining they might do just that.
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From him.
That last, that is what Nikolai lingers on.
Will her nails leave marks on him too? The wax hadn't lifted away the wound, and neither will the half-moons her nails score into him, but it feels good. Better to wear her marks than anything else.
"I like to hear you," is a departure from what they could, what they might, what they should be do in the future. The thrust of his fingers is a methodical thing, Nikolai's attention so utterly fixed on her. His thumb presses down, not circling, only pressure where she must surely want something else. "Alina, tell me. Is this what you like?"
As he puts this question to her, his hand leaves her cheek. Flattens across her back, urging her closer so he might put his mouth back to her collarbone, back to her breast. He can't kiss her; this is the nearest he can get, his mouth on her skin as he meets the shift of her hips.
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"It's good," she encourages, but even as she says this, the squirming continues, a restless effort to get more friction from his thumb. Like if she could fuck herself on his fingers, she could get that little something else that feels just out of reach.
"It's ... Oh." She sighs, lips parted, eyes fluttering shut once more as his mouth finds the curve of her breast, as his teeth scrape over her skin again. Her split attention makes all of his work feel more intense. It feels like she's babbling, but he said he'd liked to hear her, so she searches for a way to articulate it. "It's like you're everywhere."
She's going to drown in him.
"Just—" She whines. Another arch of her hips, trying to find a different angle, a little more. Enough to finish. And there, the steady push of his fingers up into her and the way she rocks to meet him has his thumb rocking like a fulcrum against her, and a tremor rumbles through her body, makes her muscles twitch, makes her cunt tighten around him. She cries out, tightening her arms around his neck just to hold on. "Yes. Oh. Saints, yes, Nikolai. Like that."
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In this moment, Nikolai wants to make her wait. Not as a flex of power, or control, or anything other than she is so beautiful in this moment and he wants to stay here with her.
"You're beautiful," he tells her again; the words might find better purchase with her attention split in so many directions. A litany of other things threaten to follow, but Nikolai thinks better of it, holds his tongue. His teeth scrape along her chest, following the flush of her skin, putting his mouth back to the peak of her nipple.
I want to do this again before we sleep, is a murmur between their minds, his thumb following the squirm of her body, the way all of her weight bears down into the thrust of his fingers. A pleasant sort of fantasy, one he feels has little chance of occurring on this particular day. Still, he tells her, And then again, when we wake.
Over the center of her back, his fingers flex against the arch of her spine and he lifts his head to ask her, "Are you close?"
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She nods in earnest, over and over again against the top of his head, unable to make words, even though she tries to hold her breath and swallow a moan so that what comes out next might be even a syllable. Instead, it's a hiccup, a soft noise that is choked off as her chest tightens and tightens with the rest of her.
He must be able to feel it. The way her muscles wring tight—trying to hold him in, trying to push him out. There is something luxurious in imagining the simple ability to have each other at their leisure, the idle falling into each other. That's what does her in.
It doesn't feel violent. She doesn't fight it like she does when she's been with Aleksander. He does not sink his teeth into her and rip something free. It doesn't feel like shattering. Her release is a cool wave that a breeze stirs on a lake, something that rolls through her like a pulse, tugging at the strings of all her muscles in all her limbs, that leaves her sighing her relief when those strings snap.
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Certainly. Nikolai is so, so pleased by the sounds Alina makes, the way her words break apart when he applies his teeth just so or crooks his fingers just there.
But it is good too, when he feels the way she comes apart.
His head tips back; she is too compelling. She is incandescent. And there is some aspect of serenity in the way she relaxes, tips into the sensation. Nikolai stretches up to kiss along the line of her jaw as she sighs, breathes out soft sounds as her body clenches around his fingers.
"Breathe," he murmurs against the hinge of her jaw. He is still touching her, fingers drawing through the damp heat of her, seeing if he can pull a twitch or gasp from her even as he encourages her in to lean against him.
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The bleary haze of her release settles over her, makes her limbs and head heavy and sluggish. But as he explores her folds, she jolts, surrendering a little whimper that pushes her against him even as her hips twitch back, gaining space from the too-intense sensation.
"Nikolai," she chastens in a rabbit-quick, soft whine—like he's some bully tugging at her hair. She levels her her grip on his shoulders, steadier now.
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"Sorry," is a murmur too, so light as his lips move from her jaw to the newly bared stretch of her neck. "You feel so good."
His arm stays looped securely around her waist. When he leans back, he brings her with him. Nikolai would like to roll her onto her side, tuck her tight against him. But even though Alina isn't exactly pinning him at this point, when they stretch out across the bed, she remains held against his chest.
Last night, he'd wanted so badly to put his arms around her. Now, so rearranged, Nikolai can loop both arms over her, hold her securely. His thumb rubs back and forth at her shoulder as they lay together, breathing in slow sync.
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But she looks up at him after a few moments, idle considerations that in Alina's eyes look like trouble. She can still feel his erection against her belly. It would pass, she knew, but —
"Will you let me try something?" As sweetly as she asks, she's already reaching under her skirt to tug off her underwear, awkwardly shuffling her knees to keep them together enough to wriggle them down her legs.
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As she speaks, his eyes open. Aware of the squirm of movement Alina is already engaged in, lifting his head just in time to see the disappearance of her underthings.
"Not today, we said," he reminds her, searching her expression. Remembering the hitch in her voice, the way she'd tripped over the words, these are wards enough against any temptation to bend the tacit understanding they'd established.
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She doesn't specify further, now. Only meets his gaze with that mischievous glow in hers that seems determined to test the limits of what he would let her get away with, of how much he's willing to give her. A look that delights in driving him a little out of his mind.
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His hand sweeps up her back, over the wings of her shoulder blades, down her arm. A grounding sort of touch, for him as much as for her. The withdrawal of his hand had let her skirts fall again, but she is bare beneath them and Nikolai—
Nikolai wants her. He has carried his affection long enough for it to take root, to bloom green and new but no less secure for that newness, in his chest.
What would he deny her? Nothing, apparently. Nothing today.
"Alright," he tells her. "Though I suspect this is about to put me into greater debt with you."
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"I thought all that talk of debts was just a way of ensuring we'd be back here," she murmurs. "This is for me. You don't owe me anything."
She lets go of him, but it's a short-lived reprieve before she presses the wetness of her cunt against the length of him. True to her word, she doesn't take him inside. Instead, she rubs herself against him, soaking him with her arousal, making each gliding stroke easier.
Her breath catches and her shoulders twitch when she bumps up against the head of his cock, the way it nudges against just the right part of her, the same spot where she'd been so sensitive before and is only just barely able to tolerate the touch now. The movement stay slow, careful not to get overeager and risk moving too fast or too far and letting him slip inside.
"How does this feel?" she asks him, her voice already rough enough to convey her own answer. A little something falters in her expression as she insists, "Be honest."
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Yes, all the teasing invocation of debt was to him was a way to link them, draw them back together. Yes, he has a vested interest in making certain there is always something favor to return to her.
Would she keep him? Will she keep him? Nikolai wants to feel certain of an affirmative, clings on to what he can when he doesn't.
Regardless, there is still a moment, when she lets go and raises up over him that Nikolai is rattled towards movement. He says her name, tilting towards uncertainty and alarm, shoulders coming up off the bed before—
"Be careful," nearly overlaps her question, a wrecked groan of a plea. His hands are gripping her so tightly, ten points of pressure where his fingers splay out across her back.
Be honest because Nikolai is not a liar but he is good at dressing up a truth and turning it into some opaque, obscure thing. But Alina makes her demands and Nikolai can do nothing but scrape together an answer for her.
"It's—" he begins, breaking on good, which feels painfully inadequate. "Perfect."
Where perfect is honest, yes, but is wrenched out of him, almost pleading. It is perfect but it isn't enough. It is perfect because it is a reminder of what they have both decided to forgo. Beneath her, holding so painfully still of his own accord, he cannot kiss and cannot rock up into her and thinks his heart might give out under the effort of the combination.
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"Trust me," she chides him.
Despite the authority she musters to say this, the movements of her hips are self conscious. Unevenly paced, a little jerky with inexperience. She is learning how to use new muscles, and for now she lacks grace or rhythm.
"You're so warm." Maybe it's the bloodflow of his arousal, or maybe it's just her own knowledge that it's his cock and not just his fingers that she's rutting against, that it feels as good for him as it does for her, but it feels better. Hotter.
It may even be the precarious nature, how delicate each movement has to be, how they tip on the precipice of something dangerous to them both. Her slickness makes each movement easy, a wetness that clings to his cock and eases the friction, making slippery the rock of her hips, opening the way to one wrong move. "Can you feel how wet you've made me?"
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He has. He does.
The shift of Alina's weight to pin him back down to the bed is good too, wrenches a gasp of breath out of him as she moves over him. Nikolai likes that. If their position felt less tenuous, he might provoke more of it. But he has the sense that any minor movement of his hips would instigate something neither of them are ready for.
And she trusts him. Or has begun to trust him. He won't jeopardize that.
"Can you come again?" he murmurs, hands finding his way to her thighs. Holding on there, too tightly. Not an answer to her question, but something that feels vital. Something he wants, more than his own release.
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It is a good thing, she thinks, that Nikolai lets her have her way with him: if the tables were ever turned, he would ferret out every reaction he could, learn the shape of her every sigh. He would wring her dry and leave her boneless. She might like that too much.
This is safer.
"I think so," she says, the rock of her hips steadying a little over time. His hold on her thighs is good, solid, keeps her level.
But it's more than that. It's tight enough that she can hope she'll find his fingerprints in the banya later, and trace the constellations of his grip. It feels good, and so does the way that the firm length of his cock glazes over her wet cunt, the way the head bumps against her most sensitive spot, spurring her to molten moans and gasps like candle smoke.
"Can you?" She asks, forcing herself to meet his gaze, heavy though her eyelids are. That is, after all, at least half her goal here. A way for them to share this without crossing the unnamed threshold that they tiptoe up to.
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(cw: refs to dubcon)
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