A few weeks after New Year’s, Ilya pressed a kiss to the side of AJ’s head while she chopped onions in Katya’s kitchen.
“Hello, daughter,” he said simply. Which was something he called his daughters-in-law.
The endearment had her stopping, turning to him. She called him Papa, just as she called Katya Mama. But he’d never called her daughter before.
Looking up at him, she slid the onions into a heating pot and started in on the carrots. “You call me that because I’m carrying your grandchild?”
AJ was getting used to it now, the being pregnant thing. She’d read a few books, joined a few newsletters, shopped for some baby clothes online. Nesting kind of things, which helped. But her favorite time, the best time of all, was lying still at night. Her head on Anton’s shoulder, and the baby growing inside her. She could almost imagine, in those moments, that the baby was snoozing just like its papa. Big, deep breaths and so calm. And in those moments, a great maternal swell would roll over her. AJ would rest her hand on her belly and try to imagine bedtime stories for the baby. That maybe, through some stretch, the baby would dream what she dreamed.
Ilya raised an eyebrow at her. “I call you this because I help raise you.” Which was true. Ilya had been more of a father than her own. “And because my son takes you for wife.”
AJ tried not to frown. In many ways, what Ilya said was true. She and Anton’s lives were completely wrapped up in one another. But in one way, one very important way, he wouldn’t take her as a husband would. She tried not to let it matter.
She also tried not to let it matter that all the times she’d asked about it over the last weeks, he’d refused to discuss it. “I won’t,” was the most she’d ever gotten out of him on the matter and it had been so startling to hear it, she’d barely been able to follow up.
What did ‘won’t’ mean? She’d even gone so far as to google Belarusian customs around sex when pregnant. But that search hadn’t turned much up, except for some porn she’d clicked out of. And she knew that Emin had no problem fucking Glory while she was pregnant. So, it wasn’t that they had some cultural belief about it.
She had the sinking suspicion that it had something to do with his belief that he was bad. He was always so hard on himself. Blaming himself for what Navuka had done to him. And then he’d hated himself so much when he’d marked her the one and only time they’d had sex. Even though she’d liked it. And when she’d tried to explain that to him the other day, he’d looked so pained, so unhappy, that she’d stopped right there.
Katya entered the kitchen from the back room. “Your bears want their Papa,” she said, kissing her husband on the cheek.
Ilya, who didn’t shift very much anymore, had promised Linc that he would shift for him that afternoon and play in the snow. Then his sons had gotten wind of it, and it was made into a whole thing. They all loved it when Ilya brought his bear to the party.
Ilya pretended to grumble as he wandered out to the backyard, but Katya and AJ grinned at one another as they heard a chorus of joyful roars when he shifted.
“Mama,” AJ started, wanting to vocalize something that had been teasing at her.
Katya looked up from the stove. “Da?”
“Did you know I loved him the whole time?”
A warm, sad smile crossed Katya’s face as she wiped her hands on the apron at her waist. “Da, of course.”
“Did you know how he felt?”
Katya’s eyes went to the kitchen window where she could see her boys, rolling and wrestling as bears, tossing Linc, the cub, into the air. She watched as the bear with the white streak and the scars on his back chased the cub across the lawn. “Da. I knew. And I felt grateful. And sad.”
“Sad?” AJ felt a sinking in her stomach.
“His love for you was like little boat in sea of pain. He had so much hurt from Navuka. And I think he drown if not for loving you, child.”
AJ’s eyes filled with tears. The thought had never occurred to her before, that he would have felt the exact same way that she did.
“But I also felt,” Katya continued, “that he never lets himself have you. And that is no way to live.” She shrugged, gave a happy little sigh, and reached one elegant hand out to rest on AJ’s belly. “But there are miracles in the world, no?”
AJ nodded, brushing her tears away as she heard the front door slam and the sounds of Dora, Ivy, and Glory taking off their shoes and coming in. Not long after, the boys shifted back into their human forms and came in as well.
The house was crawling with excitement and arguing and happy volume. Someone had the TV turned to some gameshow and Ilya put on an old Belarusian record. Dinner was close to being ready when Emin started handing out beers, but presented tall glasses of iced, organic grape juice to both AJ and Glory.
Anton hadn’t come back in with the rest of them. AJ was sure he’d needed to stay shifted for a bit longer. It didn’t bother her. She’d told him once and she’d meant it. She knew who he was and he didn’t need to change for her.
But that didn’t stop her heart from leaping when he did show up from the back deck. He hopped into one sock and then the other and immediately found her in the kitchen, pressing himself against her and sliding his arms around her waist.
Anton’s brothers all paused, for just a moment, to watch him canoodle with his girl in the kitchen. He kissed along her neck, whispered something in her ear that had her laughing outright. It did something to them, to see their brother with AJ. It tugged at a knot they hadn’t known was there. One that had been there so long they thought it was just the way the world was.
They looked right together. But then AJ pulled away from him just long enough to slide the rest of her chopped vegetables into a pot and all three brothers saw it at once. Pain on Anton’s face. His eyes followed her with such a hunger, such aching, unfulfilled desire, that it tugged that knot tight again.
“Christos,” Maxim growled into the beer he tipped up into his mouth.
Emin scowled while Danil shook his head. “If I ever get a minute alone with the people who did this to Anton, I swear to God.”
“It is criminal,” Emin agreed. “To take away a man’s ability to show his woman how he feels.”
“It is all criminal,” Maxim glowered. “Everything they did to him.”
Danil scratched at his stubble and glanced over at Dora who was sprawled out on the floor with Linc, assembling some complicated army of action figures and stuffed animals. He couldn’t imagine not being able to take her home and lose himself in her. Did not compute. “Do you think he is right? That he would hurt her if he let go and took her?”
“There must be reason he puts himself through hell,” Maxim said darkly.
“But he has been wrong before,” Emin said. “He is blinded by his view of himself. He thinks he is bad.”
“AJ thinks he is good,” Maxim said. “And so do we.”
“He is in the between,” Ilya said, stepping up to join his sons. “Just like rest of us. Navuka did not make him monster. They make him forget he is man.”
***
AJ was quiet as they walked back through the woods toward her house after dinner that night. She was often quiet, something that Anton deeply appreciated about her. But this was different. He could see wheels turning in her head and it worried him. He knew this stalemate about lovemaking wasn’t going to last forever. And he wondered what would happen if he told her the truth, the way he told his brothers. Would she fear him? Or worse, would she fear his place in the baby’s life? It was unthinkable. The thought that the monster inside him would strip him of his child. His woman.
No, it was better to ride the edge for as long as he could. Maybe, if he made her love him enough, someday she’d be able to understand. He just had to get them both to someday.
She kicked off her boots when they got inside, leaning on his shoulder the way she always did. She was quiet as she brushed her teeth, braided her hair before bed. Quiet as she slipped her clothes into the hamper and slid into one of the silky nightgowns she’d started wearing. She had done it at first to tempt him, he knew. But she wore them now because they were soft, and as warm as her skin.
“You have heartburn?” he asked her, wondering why she was more quiet than usual. Sometimes the baby gave her indigestion.
“No,” she said quietly, absently resting a hand on her belly. Anton liked when she did this. When she wasn’t thinking about it, her hand would find its way to her belly as if she were stroking the baby’s back. He could tell she was going to be an affectionate mother.
He went out to the kitchen, filled her a glass of water. She liked to have one by the bed at night. When he came back, he had to pause in the doorway, press the heel of his hand against his chest. She sat on the edge of the bed, her back to him, rubbing lotion between her hands. The warm, gold lamplight shadowed her.
Christos. She had no idea how much he meant it when he called her bahinia.
She rose from the bed and crossed to him, a faraway look in her eyes as she sipped from the glass of water he’d brought her.
“Your mother said something to me tonight that got me thinking.”
“Hmm.” He took the glass of water from her and set it aside, indulged himself in kissing along the very collarbone he’d once ravaged. He made amends to that part of her for the hundredth time. Letting his tongue trail softly.
“She said she always knew that you loved me.”
Anton froze. For as often as they spoke of desire and need for one another, they never spoke of love. It was silly to be scared of the words. They showed love for one another in a million different ways. But still, it was there, the skip in his heart.
He raised his head to look at her and was glad she’d pulled her hair back. He could see both of her midnight eyes, heavy lidded and serious. She raised one hand to his cheek, slid the other hand into his hair.
“She said that when you were a boy, your love for me was like a boat in a sea of pain. That for a long time, it was the only thing that kept you from drowning.”
Anton’s heart raced, so fast he was certain she could hear it. He swallowed thickly. He needed to calm down. If he kept this up, his beast would wake up. So he turned his face from hers, sipped from the glass of water, and sat on the bed, pulling off one sock and then the other. He calmed himself with the task of yanking his shirt off, pulling his pants off.
AJ automatically gathered them up, put them in the hamper the way she liked. “I don’t know if that’s actually the way you felt,” she continued. “That’s just the way Katya described it. But the thing is, Anton. That’s the way I felt.”
“What?” he asked, still sitting on the edge of the bed. He looked up at her as she crossed back to him. He wasn’t prepared for the moment she went to her knees in front of him, pressed her cheek to his knee as she looked up into his eyes. Her nightgown was a trick of the light, soft gray, but almost translucent in the shadows. He swallowed hard again.
“The day you saved me from the mountain lion was just a month after my mother died. You know that. I wish you could have met her.”
“Me too.”
She nodded, her eyes both looking into him and into her past at the same time. Her cheek pressed into his knee and one of her hands traced an absent circle on his leg.
“I was drowning, Anton. Drowning in sadness. For years. I didn’t know if I could make it.”
He growled, low in his throat. It pained him to think of her so sad. He wanted to go back in time, kick his scruples out the fucking window and hold her as close as they’d both wanted.
“Except for you. My love for you was my boat. Seeing you, being near you, it kept me afloat. Through the hardest part of my life. You saved me.”
He dragged a hand over his face. God. She was killing him. How could she say that to him? How could he hear those words and not make love to her?
Reaching down, he took her by the shoulders and stood her up. Gently, he nudged her toward the bed. He reached for the lamp and clicked it off.
“Okay, goodnight, bahinia.”
He’d sleep on the couch if he had to.
She clicked the light back on.
“What?” She looked insulted and confused. “I tell you I love you and you turn off the light and say ‘goodnight’?”
He ripped a hand through his hair and stood, pacing the room like a madman. He needed to get under control right now. But he couldn’t leave her thinking he didn’t love her.
“I do not do it to be mean,” he told her.
“Then why the hell did you do it?” she demanded, rising to her knees on the bed.
He scraped a hand over his face and leaned into the wall for just a second. “Because you cannot say that to me. And look at me like this. And wear that. And your smell. Your taste. Christos!” The words bit out of him and he knew he wasn’t making any sense.
“See!” She jabbed a finger through the air. “You want to make love to me. But you don’t!” She reached out and caught him by the arm as he paced past her. “I tell you I love you and it makes you want to fuck me, right?”
“Of course!” he exploded. “It is everything I want, bahinia.”
She let go of his arm, a triumphant expression ripping across her face. Still kneeling on the bed, she reached down to the hem of her nightgown and whipped it off. Let the fabric pool on the floor.
He backed away from her, one step and then the next. But she wasn’t having it. She literally leapt into his arms, her legs going around his waist and her arms around his neck. Her wet, hot pussy smashed into his bare stomach as he caught her.
“Then do it, Anton. Just fucking do it. Lay me down and fuck me the way you want to.”
His eyes were heavy and his breath came out in sharp pants. He strode to the bed and pried her off of him.
“I can’t,” he half shouted. His whole world was about to come unraveled. He expected her to cling to him, but she went easily to the bed. And when he pulled away, he was dismayed when she pulled her knees up to her chest and put one hand over her horrified mouth.
She looked like a puzzle piece had just fallen into place for her. Oh God. Did she know? Had he given it away somehow? Would she send him away?
“I get it now,” she whispered. “I’m such an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t see it. Oh God.” She covered her eyes. “You’re gonna leave me again.”
“What?” The words shocked him, terrified him. Shrank his chest. He yanked her hands from her eyes. “What do you say?”
She nodded, her face stunned, but certain. “You won’t sleep with me again, because the last time that you fucked me and left, the guilt almost killed you. You couldn’t live with yourself. So this time you won’t fuck me before you leave.” She squeezed her arms around her knees and stared at nothing.
Anton was immobilized with horror that she could even think that.
“You’ll half fuck me for however long and then when you leave me it won’t weigh as heavy on your conscience as when you’d fucked me.”
Jesus God. He stumbled back from her. “Autumn, if you think I am monster, at least have it be right kind.”
“So you deny it?” Her eyes sparked.
“Of course I deny! That is insane.”
She opened her mouth to argue but he strode back to her, took her chin in his hand. “I never leave you, bahinia. Ever.”
“Anton, this is insane. Right here.” She shoved him back. “What we’re doing. We can’t communicate with each other. You don’t tell me anything. I have to guess everything. What am I? Your baby mama? Your girlfriend? What? We fool around and go to doctor’s appointments together. But we don’t know what the hell is going on between us. We’re fucking with each other. And what’s worse, we’re fucking with this person in here.” She pointed viciously to her belly. “Everything I know about you is because I fought for that information for ten years. Every scrap. You don’t give me anything freely. We can’t do this thing halfway!”
“Halfway? Halfway?” He was pacing again. “I would give my life for you.”
“Good Lord.” She lowered her head to her knees for just a second. “Anton, I say I love you. You say goodnight. I ask you to make love to me, you say that you won’t or that you can’t. You look at me like loving me is painful.” She rose up now, naked and reaching for him. “I love the undying, Shakespearian thing you’ve got for me, Anton. But I need some good old, everyday love, too. The normal kind. The boring kind that’s easy. Where I know you’ll come home to me every day instead of torturing yourself for six weeks, God knows where, over God knows what!” She was breathing hard, her hair falling out of the braid. Her hands still reaching for him.
“Fine!” He shouted back, his hands lifting in an angry, helpless shrug. “Okay, then we get married.”
“We. Get. Married?” She fell back on the bed, an insane, frustrated laugh tearing out of her.
“What?” He leaned over her. “This answers your problems, no? You want to know I don’t leave. You want everyday love. I marry you.”
“Anton, how can you possibly think that we’re ready to get married if you can’t even tell me why you won’t fuck me?”
Her words sent chills down his spine. Because she was right.
He reached out and clicked out the light again. Plunging them into darkness. Feeling for her, he gently shoved her under the covers and slid in next to her. He needed her to go to sleep and stop asking all these questions that didn’t have answers. Making all these demands that he couldn’t give.
“I cannot make love to you. I won’t.” His words were heavy and quiet and even he could hear the pain and sadness in them. “I cannot explain more than that. It is just - my hands are tied.”
He nestled her into his side. “Now go to sleep, bahinia.”
Her body was tense and vibrating. He should have seen it coming. But even if he had, he didn’t know if he could have stopped it.
She whipped the covers back, and the blanket, fresh out of the dryer, sparked in the dark with static electricity. He tensed, ready to fend her off, but she reached for the headboard and, naked, straddled his face.
This is what she needed? Well, good. This he could give her. Anton gratefully raised his mouth to her but she pulled back her hips and slammed his head back down with one hand.
“Autumn,” he growled and the rumble of his voice in his chest grated uncomfortably against the beast inside him. He could feel the monster turn over, raise its sleepy, awful head.
He tried to put his mouth on her again but she pulled back again. The room was pitch black and he could barely even see her outline. Her voice came, clear in the dark.
“I want you to push me down on the bed and fuck me from behind, Anton.”
The beast sniffed the air. “What?”
“I want you to slam inside me and make me take you. Even if I’m tight.”
He took a shaky breath, his eyes starting to adjust to the dark. She stared down at him as if she owned him. As if she really was a goddess and he was meant to serve her.
“I – uh - Christos.” He tried to lift his mouth to her again but again she held him at bay.
“I want you so deep I can feel you in my chest. I want your come inside me.”
The beast snapped its leash. With a roar, Anton shoved her off of him. He needed to get the fuck away from her before he hurt her. He needed to shift and sprint and spend the night shivering in the cold, anything to make this need subside.
He launched himself out of the bed, scrambling for the light. But she lunged after him, trying to keep him from clicking the lamp. Her hand arrowed out, and in the dark, she mis-aimed.
The crack of her palm across his cheek was like a gunshot in the dark room. It shocked and stunned them both.
Anton pressed one hand over the place she’d just smacked him.
AJ kneeled on the bed, her hands over her mouth, a look of absolute horror and contrition on her face. “Oh my God,” she let out a sob. “I’m so, so sorry, Anton. I didn’t mean to. I would never hit you in anger. Oh, Anton. I’m sorry. I’m-”
“Stop.” He lowered his hand from his face, breathing hard. Something was exploding in his chest and it wasn’t the monster. It was hope.
“Do not apologize, bahinia,” he said, his voice low and serious and rising with feeling. “That was very good idea.”
“What?” AJ whispered, her hand still over her mouth in horror. “Hitting you was a good idea?”
Anton put one knee on the bed. Fought for a way to explain. “How does your hand feel? Tell truth.”
AJ looked down at the hand that had hit him as if she barely recognized it. “I don’t know. Warm. Tingly.”
He nodded, the hope blooming even harder in his chest. “That is how my cheek feels. Not pain. Not for more than one second.”
“You’re - you’re saying you liked that?” AJ asked, her eyes wide, struggling to keep up with him, to not hate herself for smacking his precious face.
“No,” he stood, fought for the English. “I say that I think I need that.”
“Oh,” her voice was small as she stared up at him from the bed.
“How do I not see this before?” he asked himself. Raking his hands through his hair, over his face, he let out a bark of laughter.
Her smack on his face had immediately silenced the monster inside him. The monster that Anton had so much trouble controlling had bowed instantly to AJ. The beast knew its master. “I already know you own me, bahinia.” He ripped off his underwear, stalked toward the bed, his cock straining so hard for her that it smacked up against his stomach. “I just do not realize you can tame me.”
He crawled over the bed, caging her in with his body. She was breathless, her eyes lit with anticipation, with lust, a healthy dose of nerves.
He dragged her along the bed, so that she lay full out, and the comforter sparked with the mini lightning of static electricity all around them.
“No condom,” he ground out the words through clenched teeth as he loomed over her, his control twisting thinner and thinner. She had quelled the beast. She was the answer. All he had to do was love her. And God, how much he wanted to love her. “I take you bare.”
“Yes,” she agreed and wrapped her legs around his waist. He reared back, torn between touching her everywhere and seeing her everywhere. The first time they’d had sex they’d been cramped and hindered in the front seat of the truck. This time, he wanted her spread over the bed. He wanted every inch of her.
He pulled one of her legs from around his waist and placed her ankle over his shoulder. He was poised at her entrance, one of his fingers lovingly tracing her slit, opening her for him, spreading her wetness.
“Autumn,” he growled, forcing his eyes to focus on her face. Forcing himself to say one last thing before he took her the way he never thought he’d be able to again.
She looked up at him, licking her tongue across her smudgy lips, her hands thrown haphazardly above her head as if she were surrendering to him and not the other way around.
“If I say tame me. You do it. Da? No questions.”
She hesitated, her eyes dilating as she weighed his answer. He was asking her to smack him again. Could she do it? Would she?
He leaned forward over her, taking her leg with him. It opened her up and stretched her and pressed his cock against her pussy, but he didn’t go inside.
“Promise me,” he growled. “You tame me.”
“Yes,” she whispered, helpless to deny him. How could she? She would give him anything. Everything. “Yes.”
And with that, not taking his eyes off of hers, he pressed forward. Slow, but unstopping, he fed her every inch.
AJ’s eyes instantly went blind. She wasn’t sure if she’d slammed them closed or if it just felt so good her body could only handle so much at one time. But she’d never felt anything like this. Not even the first time they’d done it.
Nothing was as good as Anton inside her, unconflicted. He was giving her everything. Holding nothing back.
And how could he? She’d never been more beautiful to him than when she arched her back against the bed, her eyes wide and unseeing. Her lips were a gorgeous, gasping smudge on her face as her breath came out in stuttered puffs.
Her pussy was so wet that he could feel her on his thighs, on his stomach, and it made him growl, push into her even deeper. She was so tight that he worried for a moment about really giving it to her, but then she was moving her hips on her own, fucking him from below.
That about did it. Rearing back onto his haunches, Anton planted a kiss on the arch of her foot next to his ear, grabbed her ass in both hands and slammed into her. His mind might have been telling him to take it easy, but his body easily took over. He set up a brutal rhythm, fast, unrelenting.
AJ screamed his name and every time he pulled out, her pussy clamped down on him, as if she were trying to keep him as close as she could.
“Oh, God!” she screamed, grinding her clit against him as he leaned down over her and planted his hot mouth on her neck. He rolled her skin with his teeth as he plowed into her and when he tore his face away, his eyes were completely black, dilated and gone.
“Tame me,” he growled roughly. “Now.”
Without hesitating, because she would do anything for him, anything to give him that breathless freedom he’d had in his eyes when he’d first crawled over her, AJ swung the flat of her hand toward him. It was a messy smack that caught his cheek and mouth and had his head whipping to one side.
But when he looked back down at her, he was smiling a feral, satisfied grin and she felt his cock swell inside her.
“Good girl,” he growled, pulling out of her.
Before she could protest the loss, he’d rolled her over, onto all fours, and was pressing into her from behind.
“This is what you ask for, no?” he said, his breath hot at her ear as he fell over top of her like an animal. “You say ‘I want you to push me down on bed and fuck me from behind, Anton’. You say this to me.”
“Yes,” she moaned, beyond turned on, her body trembling with the weight of him, with the glory of him buried inside her.
“You say to make you take me. Even if you are tight. No?”
“Yes.” Her voice was a breathy, desperate plea and he knew she wasn’t going to last long.
He shifted, putting his knees on the outside of hers and closing her legs, his cock still buried inside her. It made her impossibly tighter around him. So tight he had to fight his way in and out of her. His breath hissed out of him.
“Oh God. Anton,” she moaned, her arms quivering so that she fell forward onto her elbows, buried her face in the crook of her arm. “I’m gonna- I’m gonna-”
“I know, bahinia,” he growled, reaching underneath her and teasing at her tight, throbbing little clit. “I know. Let go. Give it to me. Come all over it.”
And she did. Her entire body tightened and strained as he rutted in and out of her. She squeezed him like a vice and his vision went blurry. His arms gave out, too, and he gave her his weight as he fell forward, fucking her into the bed, her ass still in the air for him.
He buried his face in her hair as the static sparked and stung their sweaty, naked skin. Their bodies exploded and melted and meshed together. He gave her everything. Emptied every bit of love that he had inside of her.