The sound of the portfolio hitting the stone floor was like a starting pistol.
In the echoing vastness of the arsenal, it was a tiny, significant detonation. It wasn't just paper meeting stone; it was a line being crossed, a flag being dropped. My acquiescence. His victory.
For a long, suspended moment, nothing happened. His dark eyes held mine, reading the surrender in them, measuring its depth. The halogen lamp buzzed softly, a lone star in our private universe of shadows. Then, a slow, devastating smile touched his lips—not of triumph, but of profound recognition. As if I had finally spoken a language he'd been waiting a lifetime to hear.
He didn't move to pick up the pages. They were irrelevant now. The blueprint had been accepted. Now, we would build.
"Come here," he said, his voice a low command that vibrated in the hollow of my chest.
I took one step, then another, closing the gap between us. The air seemed to thicken, charged with a static potential. I stopped just before him, close enough to feel the heat radiating from his body, to see the faint scar bisecting his left eyebrow, to count the dark lashes framing his obsidian gaze.
He raised a hand, his fingers hovering near my cheek. "No retreat," he murmured, a final warning, or a plea.
"No retreat," I breathed back, the words tasting of destiny and folly.
His touch, when it came, was not what I expected. It wasn't the possessive grasp from his manuscript. It was almost reverent. His fingertips traced the line of my jaw, the curve of my ear, the frantic pulse at the base of my throat. It was a cartographer mapping undiscovered country. Each touch sent a shockwave through my nervous system, erasing doubt, burning away fear, leaving only a raw, singing awareness.
"In the story," he whispered, his eyes locked on the path his fingers were taking, "he studies her. He understands that fear and desire share the same nervous system. That to invoke one is to tease the other." His thumb brushed my lower lip. "Is that what this is, Lea? Fear? Or desire?"
"Both," I admitted, the truth torn from me. "I don't know where one ends."
"Good." The word was a satisfied exhale. "That's the frontier. That's where the truth lives."
Then his other hand came up, tangling in the hair at my nape, and he finally, decisively, pulled my mouth to his.
The kiss was not gentle.
It was a conquest. A claim staked. His lips were firm, demanding, parting mine with an authority that brooked no resistance. There was no tentative exploration, no polite question. It was a statement: You are mine now. The taste of him—dark coffee, a hint of red wine, something essentially, fundamentally male—flooded my senses. The scratch of his stubble was a delicious abrasion against my skin. The hand in my hair held me fast, not hurting, but eliminating any possibility of escape, not that I wanted any.
For a heartbeat, I froze, overwhelmed by the sensory assault, by the sheer, audacious reality of it. Then, a dam broke inside me. A surge of something long-dormant, wild and reckless, roared to the surface.
I kissed him back.
It was a surrender. A total, unconditional capitulation. My hands, which had been hanging limp at my sides, flew up to clutch at the worn wool of his sweater. I rose on my toes to meet the pressure of his mouth, my lips moving against his, answering demand with a fiercer demand of my own. A low, guttural sound escaped his throat, a vibration I felt deep in my core. The kiss deepened, turned carnal, a fierce dialogue of tongues and teeth and shared breath. The world—the cold arsenal, the silent city outside, my careful, quiet life—dissolved into meaningless noise. There was only this: the heat of him, the intoxicating mastery of his mouth, the dizzying feeling of being utterly consumed.
When we finally broke apart, gasping for air, we were still fused from chest to thigh. My body was arched into his, every nerve ending screaming. His forehead rested against mine, his breath coming in ragged gusts that warmed my lips.
"Bogami," he swore softly, a Croatian oath that sounded like a prayer.
Then he smiled, a wild, wicked thing. "The text was insufficient. The reality is… incendiary."
He bent again, but this time his mouth went to my neck, exactly as he had written. The sensation was a thousand times more potent than my imagination could ever conjure. The hot, wet pressure of his lips, the graze of his teeth, the soothing lap of his tongue over the same spot. My knees buckled. A ragged moan tore from my throat, echoing faintly in the stone chamber.
"He kisses her here," he murmured against my skin, his voice thick, "and feels the lie of her pulse. It says fear, but the rhythm… the rhythm is a drumbeat for a different dance."
His hands slid down my back, over the silk of my blouse, coming to rest on the curve of my hips. He pulled me tighter against him, and I felt the hard, insistent evidence of his arousal. The contact sparked a fresh, liquid heat between my own thighs.
"Act it out with me," he breathed against my lips, stealing another quick, biting kiss. "The scene. For authenticity."
The words from the manuscript, now a live directive in his dark, rasping voice. This was the threshold. The point of no return. I could still pull back, cite madness, invoke sanity.
I looked into his eyes, saw the hunger there, mirrored by my own. I saw the challenge. The promise of a story I would not just read, but live.
I should have run.
The thought was a ghost, insubstantial.
Instead, I let him lead me.
He took my hand, his grip firm and sure, and turned toward the massive drafting table under the lamp. It was littered with pages, pencils, a half-empty bottle of ink. With a sweep of his arm, he cleared it. Pens clattered to the floor. A sheaf of handwritten notes fluttered down like wounded birds, joining the typed manuscript already on the ground.
The world had narrowed to this pool of light, this slab of wood, this man.
He turned me to face the desk, his body a solid, warm wall at my back. His hands settled on my shoulders.
"In the story," he said, his voice now taking on a hypnotic, narrative quality, as if he were both director and character, "she is surrounded by the artifacts of her intellect. The tools of her quiet, ordered life." His fingers found the buttons of my blouse. One by one, he slipped them open. The silk fell open, cool air washing over my heated skin. He pushed the fabric off my shoulders, letting it slither down my arms to catch at my elbows, baring me to the waist. "He strips that away. Not with violence, but with deliberate, devastating patience."
I shivered, my arms pinned slightly by the blouse, feeling intensely vulnerable, exposed under the stark light. I could see our reflection, distorted and ghostly, in the dark glass of a nearby window: a pale woman with wild hair, half-undressed, and the dark form of a man behind her.
His hands slid around my waist, palms flat against my stomach, pulling me back against him. His mouth went to my ear. "Her skin, in the lamplight, is like marble coming to life. He can feel her heart beating against his palms. A frantic bird in a cage of ribs."
His hands moved up, cupping my breasts, his thumbs circling the already-tight peaks. A sharp cry escaped me, the pleasure so acute it bordered on pain. He hushed me softly, his lips on my temple. "He wants her mind to quiet. To stop analyzing, stop fearing. He wants only the animal truth. The body's scripture."
He bent me forward then, just as he had written. Gently, but inexorably. My palms met the smooth, cool wood of the drafting table. The edge pressed into my lower abdomen. The remaining fabric of my jeans felt rough, confining. My hair tumbled forward, a curtain shutting out everything but the grain of the wood beneath my hands and the reality of him behind me.
I heard the rasp of his zipper. A final, terrifying, thrilling sound.
His hand fisted in my hair again, gathering it, pulling just enough to arch my spine, to present the length of my neck and back to him. I was utterly positioned, utterly open.
"This is the moment," he whispered, his voice taut with a tension that matched my own. "Where fiction bleeds into fact. Where the character's surrender becomes the woman's choice. Tell me it's your choice, Lea."
He was giving me a final out. A chance to stop the machinery he had set in motion. But the machinery was inside me now, a engine of need he had built with his words and his kisses.
"It's my choice," I gasped, the words muffled against the wood.
His answer was a low growl of approval. His free hand gripped my hip, his fingers digging in possessively.
Then he was there, pressing against me, blunt, hot, insistent. He pushed forward, and I cried out—a sound of shock, of fleeting pain, of overwhelming fullness as he sheathed himself in me in one slow, devastating stroke.
The sensation was catastrophic. It shattered the last remnants of my observer self. I was no longer reading a scene; I was being written. The stretch, the heat, the profound intimacy of the act, here in this clinical, artistic space, was more intense than any fantasy. He held himself still, buried deep, letting us both adjust to the seismic shift.
"Tako je ljepo," he moaned into my hair. "You are… exquisite. Tight and hot and real."
Then he began to move.
It was not the frantic, desperate rhythm I might have imagined. It was deliberate. Measured. A study in sensation. Each withdrawal was a sweet agony of loss; each deep, rolling thrust was a reclamation. The angle was perfect, each movement sending jolts of pleasure so sharp they stole my breath. The sound of our bodies meeting, skin against skin, was obscenely loud in the silence, punctuated by my ragged moans and his guttural Croatian curses.
He kept his hand in my hair, using it not to hurt, but to guide, to maintain the arch of my body, to ensure every thrust reached its deepest, most devastating mark. His other hand slid around from my hip, finding the throbbing center of my need, his fingers clever and unerring.
"This is the authenticity," he rasped, his rhythm beginning to fracture, to become more urgent. "The gasp that isn't typed. The shudder that can't be described. The taste of sweat on skin. The moment the controlled experiment becomes a wildfire."
I was hurtling toward a precipice. The dual stimulation—the deep, filling thrusts and the deft circles of his fingers—was building a coil of tension tighter and tighter in my belly. The desk was rocking slightly with the force of us. My vision blurred, starry explosions appearing behind my clenched eyelids. I was mindless, a creature of pure, screaming sensation.
"Come for me," he commanded, his voice ragged. "Let me feel it. Let me write it later from memory."
The command, the sheer arrogant poetry of it, was the final trigger. The coil snapped. A wave of pleasure, incandescent and all-consuming, crashed through me. I shattered against the desk, a raw, endless cry torn from my throat, my body convulsing around his, milking him as the waves of ecstasy rolled through me.
My climax pulled him over the edge. With a final, deep drive and a shout that was more a roar, he found his release. I felt the hot pulse of him inside me, the ultimate, intimate claim. He collapsed over my back, his body heavy and spent, his face buried in the junction of my neck and shoulder, his breath scorching my skin.
For long minutes, there was only the sound of our ragged breathing slowing, syncing. The hum of the lamp. The distant sigh of the night wind outside.
Slowly, carefully, he withdrew, his hands coming up to steady me as a wave of weakness made my legs tremble. He turned me around, gathering me against him. My blouse was still tangled around my elbows. I didn't care. I pressed my face into his sweater, breathing in the scent of us—sex, sweat, cedar.
He tilted my chin up. His eyes were softer now, the fierce intensity banked to a glowing ember. He looked… astonished. "Well," he said, his voice hoarse. "The peer review was… positively rapturous."
A laugh bubbled up in my throat, hysterical and relieved. I swatted weakly at his chest. "You're impossible."
"And you," he said, kissing me softly, a stark contrast to the voraciousness of before, "are a revelation. My hypothesis was catastrophically incomplete. The data set just expanded exponentially."
He helped me dress with a strange, tender practicality, buttoning my blouse with meticulous care. He righted the stool and sat me down, then fetched a bottle of water from a small fridge tucked in a corner. I drank greedily, the reality of what we'd just done beginning to settle around me, not as regret, but as a colossal, life-altering fact.
My eyes fell on the scattered pages on the floor—his manuscript, his notes. The fiction and the reality, now inextricably intertwined.
"What happens now?" I asked, my voice small.
He crouched before me, taking my hands in his. "Now," he said, "we negotiate the next chapter."
"There's a next chapter?"
"There's always a next chapter." He stood, pulling me to my feet. "Come on. I'll drive you home. The bura is picking up again."
He was right. As we stepped out of the arsenal into the alley, a fresh, knife-edged wind whipped down the channel between the ancient buildings. It was the bura's first warning breath. It tugged at my hair, now hopelessly tangled, and cut through my silk blouse. I shivered.
Karlo wrapped his arm around me, pulling me into the shelter of his body as we walked to where his black car was parked in the shadows. "It approves," he said, nodding at the gathering wind.
"The wind?"
"The story," he said, opening the passenger door for me. "It needs conflict. Atmosphere. Passion. The bura provides."
The drive back to my shop was silent, but it was a comfortable, charged silence. My body hummed with the aftermath of him. Every shift in the seat, every glance he sent my way, reignited a small spark. He walked me to the bookshop door, his hand resting on the small of my back.
At the door, I turned. "The manuscript," I said. "The one on the floor."
"I'll retrieve it. But it's obsolete," he said. "The next draft will be… revised. Based on tonight's fieldwork."
He kissed me again, a slow, thorough kiss that promised everything and asked for everything in return. "Sleep, Lea. Dream in plot points. I'll see you soon."
He waited until I was inside, until I had locked the door and flicked on the light. Through the glass, I saw him stand for a moment, looking up at my darkened apartment windows, before turning and disappearing into the wind-swept night.
Upstairs, I didn't turn on the lights. I went to the window. In the distance, on the cliff, a single light burned in the Vidakovic house. A beacon. A challenge.
I touched my lips, still swollen from his kisses. I ran a hand over my neck, remembering the scrape of his teeth. My body ached in the most profound and delicious way.
I had done it. I had stepped into the story. I had made the fiction real.
As I crawled into my cold bed, my skin still smelling of him, a new thought emerged, cold and clear amidst the warm haze of satiation: If we could act out a scene of passion so perfectly, what other scenes from his dark, twisting novel were waiting in the wings? The bura moaned around the eaves, a ghostly chorus. It didn't sound like approval anymore. It sounded like a warning.
But it was too late. I was in the narrative now. And I was desperate to see what happened next.