“Wait, wait,” she said.
Slowly he pulled halfway out and pushed himself back in.
“Wait . . .”
Alexander pulled all the way out and pushed himself all the way in, and Tatiana, astounded, nearly screamed, but she was too afraid he would stop if he thought she was in pain. She heard him groan, and less slowly he pulled all the way out and pushed himself all the way in. Moaning, she gripped his arms.
“Oh, Shura.” She was unable to breathe.
“I know. Just hold on to me.”
Less slowly. Less gently.
Tatiana was feverish from the pain, from the flame.
“Am I hurting you?”
Tatiana paused, dizzy and lost. “No.”
“I’m going as slow as I can.”
“Oh, Shura.” Breath, breath, where is my breath . . .
Short panting pause. “Tania . . . God, I’m done for, aren’t I?” Alexander whispered hotly. “Done for, forever.”
Less, less gently.
Speechlessly Tatiana clung to him, her mouth open in a mute scream.
“You want me to stop?”
“No.”
Alexander stopped. “Wait,” he said, shaking his head against her cheek. “Hang on tight,” he whispered. He was still for another moment.
Through his parted lips he breathed, “Oh, Tania . . .” and suddenly he thrust in and out of her so hard and so fast that Tatiana thought she was going to pass out, crying in tumult and pain and gripping his head buried in her neck.
A breathless moment.
And another.
And another.
The heart was wild, and the throat was parched, and the lips were wet, and breath was slowly coming back, and sound, and sensation, and smell.
And her eyes were open.
Blink.
Alexander pulsed to a gradual stop, took a deep relieved breath, and lay on top of her for a few panting minutes.
Her hands continued to grip him.
A bittersweet tingle remained where he had just been. Tatiana felt regret; she wanted him inside her again; it had felt so excessive and absolute.
Lifting himself off her, Alexander blew on her wet forehead and chest. “Are you all right? I hurt you?” he whispered, tenderly kissing her freckles. “Tania, honey, tell me you’re all right.”
She couldn’t answer him. His lips on her face were too warm.
“I’m fine,” Tatiana finally replied, smiling shyly, holding him to her. “Are you all right?”
Alexander lay down by her side. “I’m fantastic,” he said, his fingers running down the length of her body from her face to her shins and slowly back up again. “I have never been better.” His shining smile was so full of happiness that Tatiana wanted to cry. She pressed her face against his face. They didn’t speak.
His hand stopped moving and rested on Tatiana’s hip. “You were surprisingly more quiet than I had anticipated,” he said.
“Mmm, I was trying not to faint,” Tatiana said, making him laugh.
“I thought you might be.”
She turned on her side to him. “Shura, was it . . . ?”
Alexander kissed her eyes. “Tania,” he whispered, “to be inside you, to come inside you . . . it was magic. You know it was.”
“What did you think it was going to be like?” she asked, nudging him.
“This was better than anything my pathetic imagination could conjure up.”
“Have you been imagining this?”
“You could say that.” He held her to him. “Forget me. Tell me—what did you expect?” He grinned, kissed her, and laughed with delight. “No, I’m going to burst,” he said. “Tell me everything.” Huskily he added, “Have you been imagining this?”
“No,” she said, nudging him again. Certainly not this. Her fingers floated down from Alexander’s throat to his stomach. All she wanted was permission to touch him again. “Why are you looking at me like that? What do you want to know?”
“What were you expecting?”
Tatiana thought about it. “I really don’t know.”
“Come on, you must have been expecting something.”
“Mmm. Not this.”
“What then?”
Tatiana was quite embarrassed and wished Alexander wouldn’t look at her with such mouthwatering adoration. “I had a brother, Shura,” she said. “I knew what you all looked like. Sort of quiet . . . and down . . . and very . . . hmm . . .” Tatiana searched for a proper word. “Unalarming.”
Alexander burst out laughing.
“But I’ve never seen one . . .”
“That was alarming?”
“Hmm.” Why was he laughing like that?
“What else?”
Tatiana paused. “I guess I thought this unalarming thing would . . . I don’t know . . . quietly sort of . . .” She coughed once. “Let’s just say the movement was also quite a surprise to me.”
Alexander grabbed her, kissing her happily. “You’re the funniest girl. What am I going to do with you?”
Tatiana lay quietly facing him, the aching inside her thoroughly unsubsided. She was fascinated with his body. Her fingers lightly stroked his stomach. “So what now?” She paused. “Are we . . . done?”
“Do you want to be done?”
“No,” she said at once.
“Tatiana,” Alexander said, his voice filled with emotion, “I love you.”
She closed her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Don’t give me that,” he said, lifting her face to him. “I have never heard you say it to me.”
That couldn’t be true, thought Tatiana. I’ve felt it every minute of every day since we met. Spilling over—”I love you, Alexander.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, gazing at her. “Tell me again.”
“I love you.” She hugged him. “I love you breathlessly, my amazing man.” With affection she smiled into his face. “But you know, I have never heard you say it to me either.”
“Yes, you did, Tatiana,” said Alexander. “You heard me say it to you.”
A moment passed.
She didn’t speak, or breathe, or blink.
“You know how I know?” he whispered.
“How?” she mouthed inaudibly.
“Because you got up off that sled . . .”
Another mute moment passed.
The second time they made love, it hurt less.
The third time Tatiana experienced a floating, incandescent moment of such pain-infused exquisite pleasure that it caught even her by surprise. She cried out.
Crying out, she moaned, “God, don’t stop. Please . . .”
“No?” Alexander said, and stopped.
“What are you doing?” she said, opening her eyes, parting her lips, looking up at him. “I said don’t stop.”
“I want to hear you moan again,” he murmured. “I want to hear you moan for me not to stop.”
“Please . . .” she whispered, milling her hips against him, her hands around his neck.
“No, Shura, no? Or yes, Shura, yes?”
“Yes, Shura, yes.” Tatiana closed her eyes, “I beg you . . . don’t stop.”
Alexander moved in and out of her deeper and slower. She cried out.
“Like this?”
She couldn’t speak.
“Or . . .”
Faster and faster. She cried out.
“Like this?”
She couldn’t speak.
“Tania . . . is it so good?”
“It’s so good.”
“How do you want it?”
“Any which way.” Her tense hands clenched around him.
“Moan for me, Tania,” Alexander whispered, changing his rhythm and his speed. “Go ahead . . . moan for me.”
Alexander didn’t have to ask twice.
“Don’t stop, Shura . . .” she said helplessly.
“I won’t stop, Tania.”
He didn’t stop, and there it was—finally Tatiana
felt her entire body stiffen and explode in a convulsive burn, then a lava melt. It was some time before she was able to stop moaning and quivering against Alexander. “What was that?” she uttered at last, still panting.
“That was my Tania discovering what is so fantastic about making love. That was . . . relief,” he whispered, pressing his cheek to her cheek.
Tatiana clasped him to her, turning her face away and murmuring through her happy tears, “Oh, my God, Alexander . . .”
* * *
“How long have we been here?”
“I don’t know. Minutes?”
“Where’s your ‘precise’ watch?”
“Didn’t bring it. Wanted time to stop moving forward,” said Alexander, blinking and closing his eyes.
“Tania? You’re not sleeping?”
“No. My eyes are closed. I’m very relaxed.”
“Tania, will you tell me the truth if I ask for it?”
“Of course.” She smiled. Her eyes were still closed.
“Have you ever touched a man before? Touched a man.”
Tatiana opened her eyes and laughed quietly. “Shura, what are you talking about? Besides my brother when we were younger, I’ve never even seen a man before.”
Tatiana was nestled in his arms, her fingers touching his chin, his neck, his Adam’s apple. She pressed her index finger to the vividly pulsing artery near his throat. She moved up a little and kissed the artery and then left her mouth on it, feeling it beat against her lips. Why is he so endearing? she thought. And why does he smell so good?
“What about those hordes of young beasts you told me about, chasing you in Luga? None of them?”
“None of them what?”
“Did you touch any of them?” asked Alexander.
She shook her head. “Shura, why are you so funny? No.”
“Maybe through clothes?”
“What?” She didn’t take her mouth away from his neck. “Of course not.” She paused. “What are you trying to get out of me?”
“What kind of things you got up to before me.”
Teasingly, Tatiana said, “Was there life before Alexander?”
“You tell me.”
“All right, what else do you want to know?”
“Who has seen your naked body? Other than your family. Other than when you were seven, doing your naked cartwheels.”
Is this what he wanted? The complete truth? She had been so afraid to tell him. Would he want to hear it? “Shura, the first time any man saw me even partly naked was you in Luga.”
“Is that true?” He moved away a little to see her eyes.
She nodded, returning to rubbing her mouth against his neck. “It’s true.”
“Has anyone touched you?”
“Touched me?”
“Felt your breasts, felt—” His fingers searched for her.
“Shura, please. Of course not.”
Through his artery she felt his heart quicken its beat into her mouth. Tatiana smiled. She would tell it all to him right now, if that’s what he wanted from her. “Do you remember the woods in Luga?”
“How can I forget?” he said huskily. “It was the sweetest kiss of my life.”
Her lips in his neck, Tatiana whispered, “Alexander . . . it was the first kiss of mine.”
He shook his head and then turned on his side, peering into her face in skeptical emotional disbelief, as if what she had been giving him were less than the total truth. Tatiana turned on her side to him. “What?” she asked, smiling. “You’re embarrassing me. What now?”
“Don’t tell me that—”
“All right, I won’t tell you.”
“Will you tell me, please?”
“I told you.”
His stupefied eyes unblinking, Alexander said shallowly, “When I kissed you in Luga . . .”
“Yes?”
“Tell me.”
“Shura . . .” She pressed her body flush against his. “What do you want? You want the truth from me or something else?”
“I don’t believe you.” He shook his head. “I just don’t believe you.”
“All right,” Tatiana said, lying on her back and putting her hands under her head.
Alexander bent over her. “I think you’re just telling me that because you think it’s what I want to hear,” he said, running his fingers over her breasts and stomach. His hands on her were unremitting. They never stopped moving.
“Is it what you want to hear?”
Alexander didn’t reply at first. “I don’t know. No. Yes, God help me,” he said with difficulty. “But I want the truth more.”
Tatiana patted him cheerfully on the back. “You have the truth.” And smiled. “In my whole life I have never been touched by anyone but you.”
But Alexander wasn’t smiling. His bronze eyes melting right in front of her, he asked haltingly, “How can that be?”
“I don’t know how it can be,” she said. “It just is.”
“What did you do, walk straight from your mother’s womb into my arms?”
Tatiana laughed. “Very nearly.” She gazed into his face. “Alexander, I love you,” she said. “Do you understand? I never wanted to kiss anyone before you. I wanted you to kiss me so much in Luga I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to tell you. I stayed up half the night trying to figure out a way to get you to kiss me. Finally in the woods, I wasn’t going to give up. If I can’t get my Alexander to kiss me in the woods, I thought, I have no hope of ever being kissed by anyone.” Her hands were on him.
His face was over hers. “What are you doing to me?” he whispered intensely. “You need to stop right now. What are you doing to me?”
“What are you doing to me?” Her fingertips pressed into his back.
When Alexander made love to her, his lips did not leave hers, and in his impassioned climax, which she barely heard through her shattering own, Tatiana was almost sure he groaned as if he were stopping himself from crying. He whispered into her mouth, “I just don’t know how I’m going to survive you, Tatiana.”
“Honey,” Alexander murmured, his body over her, as she lay underneath him. “Open your eyes. Are you all right?”
Tatiana didn’t speak. She was listening to the loving cadence of his voice.
“Tania . . .” he whispered, his shimmering fingers circling her face, her throat, the top of her chest. “You have newborn skin,” he said quietly. “Do you know that?”
“Well, no,” she murmured.
“You have newborn skin and the sweetest breath, and your hair is silk upon your head.” Kneeling over her, Alexander tenderly sucked her nipple. “You are divine through and through.”
Listening, comforted, she held his head in her hands. He stopped talking and lifted his face to her. There were tears in his eyes.
“Please forgive me, Tatiana,” said Alexander, “for hurting your perfect heart with my cold and indifferent face. My own heart was always overflowing with you, and it was never indifferent. You didn’t deserve any of what you’ve been given, of what you’ve had to bear. None of it. Not from your sister, not from Leningrad, and certainly not from me. You don’t even know what it took me not to look at you one last time before I closed the tarpaulin on that truck. I knew that if I did, it would all be over. I would not have been able to hide my face from you or from Dasha. I wouldn’t have been able to keep my promise to you for your sister. It wasn’t that I didn’t look at you. I couldn’t look at you. I gave you so much when we were alone. I hoped it would be enough to carry you forward.”
“It was, Shura,” said Tatiana, with tears in her own eyes. “I’m here. And it will be enough in the future.” She pressed his head to her chest. “I’m sorry I ever doubted you. But now my heart is light.”
Alexander kissed her between her breasts.
“You have fixed me.” And Tatiana smiled.
Murmuring and whispering, Tatiana lay happily under Alexander, having been once again loved and relieved, and relieved . . . ?
??Oh, and I thought I loved you before.”
His lips pressed into her temple. “This does add a whole new dimension, doesn’t it?” His hands did not leave her body. Nothing of him left her body. He was holding her from underneath, still moving inside her.
Turning her face up to him, a smile coming to her lips, a smile of youth and ecstasy, Tatiana said, “Alexander, you are my first love. Did you know that?”
He squeezed her bottom, pressed himself into her, licked the salt off her face, and nodded. “That I know.”
“Oh?”
“Tatia, I knew it even before you yourself knew it.” He grinned. “Before you finally found the word to describe to yourself what you were feeling, I knew it from the start. How else could you have been so shy and guileless?”
“Guileless?”
“Yes.”
“Was I that obvious?”
“Yes.” Alexander smiled. “Your inability to look at me in public, yet your total devotion to my face when we were together—like now,” he said, kissing her. “Your embarrassment at the smallest things—I couldn’t even keep my hand on you in the tram without you blushing . . . your fingers on me when I was telling you about America . . . your smile, your smile, Tania, when you ran to me from Kirov.” Alexander shook his head at the memory. “What a prison you have set up for me with your first love.”
She put her arms tighter around him and said teasingly, “Oh, so the first love part you believe, but the first kiss part you have a problem with? What kind of girl do you think I am?”
“The nicest girl,” he whispered.
“Are you ready for more?”
“Tania . . .” Alexander shook his head in smiling disbelief. “What’s gotten into you?”
She laughed, her hands caressing his stomach. “Shura . . . am I wanting too much?”
“No. But you are going to kill me.”
Tatiana craved something, but she just couldn’t find a way out of her timidity to ask him. Quietly, thoughtfully, she stroked his stomach and then cleared her throat. “Honey? Can I lie on top of you?”
“Of course.” Alexander smiled, opening his arms. “Come and lie on top of me.”
She lay down on him and softly, wetly kissed his lips. “Shura . . .” she whispered, “do you like that?”