Alexei
The first thing I noticed was her scent. I caught it in the air before I’d even fully turned around: zhimolost—what the Americans call honeysuckle. My grandmother used to grow it in her garden. And some strawberry-scented soap and, beneath it all, the smell of a woman: warm and sexual and calming on a level beyond all the other senses. I wasn’t used to smelling that. All the women I’d been with, in the last few years, had doused themselves in too much perfume and hairspray. But this woman...I could have just inhaled her scent for hours.
I looked at her and she was...soft. Perfectly soft, in the way only a woman can be. She was so close, as I turned, that some of her hair brushed against my chest. It was the color of walnuts and its ringlets made it seem even softer and more sensuous. It fell past her shoulders, brushing the pale skin left bare by her tank top. I wanted to bury my fingers knuckle deep in it and feel the silk of it against my skin.
Her face was all flowing lines and sweeping curves, from the arched brows and big, hazel eyes to the elegant nose and broad, full lips. I wanted to sweep my palms over the soft skin of her cheeks, my thumbs sliding over the satiny skin, and lean down and explore those lips.
It wasn’t an attraction. It was something far more than that.
I knew, in that second, that I’d glimpsed the perfect face. I could see ten thousand more and I’d never see one like hers again. I wanted her in a way I’d never wanted a woman before. I wanted to kiss her and lose myself completely in her softness.
And then I realized my coffee cup had tipped forward when we almost collided and that I was about to spill scalding coffee all down her front. I tilted it back, instead, dumping a good portion of it onto my shoes. We both looked down.
But she was shorter than me. That meant I was looking down at her body, at the twin swells of her pale breasts as they pushed out the front of her tank top. They were the most gorgeous breasts I’d ever seen, full and yet pert, bouncing just a little as she moved. Her whole outfit was black, throwing her pale skin into sharp relief and making her body into one perfect, smooth silhouette. Her waist was slender but her hips and ass flared in a way that made me want to growl aloud. Her legs were long and the lines of them drew my eyes all the way down her thighs to her shapely calves and then back up. The mood in my head shifted in an instant. I’d been getting all fucking poetic about her beauty and softness. Now, I wanted to scoop up that gloriously soft body and do very bad things to it.
I wanted to fill my hands with her breasts and squeeze them together into one sweet valley and lick my way up it. I wanted to press her down over one of the tables and jerk her leggings down over her creamy-white ass, rip away her panties and—
She looked up, right at the second I looked up, and we locked eyes. Everyone I meet, in my line of work, has the same eyes: tired and suspicious, bitterly cold. Hers were so innocent, so untouched by all the horrors of the world. It was like finding one perfect flower in the rubble of a building. I almost felt guilty at what I’d been imagining. Almost. On another level, her innocence just made me want to do it more.
She started to move back and my reaction was instinctual. I grabbed her wrist because I couldn’t let something so incredible get away.