Theodora
Zach tells me to dress warm, and he drives us twenty minutes down dark, winding country roads. We park in the frosty mud at the side of a road, and Zach takes my hand to lead me down a poorly lit hiking path, then through a shadowy copse of evergreens, using a torch to light the way.
“Why does this look like the place people go to get murdered?” I ask in a hushed voice, pulling myself closer to Zach’s arm, which I’m holding in the crook of mine.
He turns his head and replies with his lips brushing my hair. “As if I would ever let anything happen to you on my watch.”
When we finally emerge from the trees, we find ourselves on the edge of what seems to be a sort of precipice. Below us, the lights of a city glow like a dense constellation of yellow stars. A sweeping, breathtaking sight.
We settle on the bench, our shoulders pressed together for warmth. Zach pulls out a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Drinks in hand, we sit back and watch the shining city stretching at our feet. Now and again, fireworks shoot up and explode into the sky with a sudden burst of light.
“I didn’t want you to miss out on the fireworks,” Zach says. “But I thought you might prefer to watch them in peace and quiet.”
My heart clenches in my chest. Part of me regrets having told him so much throughout this holiday—the part of me that feels exposed and vulnerable and afraid. But another part of me knows I couldn’t have trusted anyone better with all this precious, sad knowledge—the part of me that knows, deep down, that Zach loves me more and better than anybody else in the world.
I rest my head on his shoulder.
“Likely story, Blackwood. You just wanted to make sure we’re as far as possible from the rest of civilization when the countdown ends so nobody could steal my first kiss of the year.”
“I’m a reasonable man,” Zach says. “I would prefer it to be me, but if you wish to give your first kiss of the year to somebody else, by all means, Theodora darling, do. But you know your destiny for the year will be tied to whomever you choose, so choose carefully.”
“If I kiss you, then will it mean I’m stuck with you for the rest of the year?”
“Would you rather be stuck with anybody else?”
No, I want to say. I want to be stuck with you for the rest of the year—for the rest of my life. Because being around you is like standing in sunlight and because I don’t believe any harm could ever come to me when I’m by your side. Because parting ways with you is going to feel like having the heart torn out of my chest, and every rending heart-string is going to be a death of its own.
“I suppose not,” I breathe.
We drink in silence for a moment, watching fireworks coruscating in the air beneath the canopy of white stars. The alcohol warms me up from the inside, strong enough to give my mind a pleasant buzzing sensation but not strong enough to make my head spin.
“Are you going to make resolutions for next year?” Zach asks.
“Only one. To win the prize at the end of the Apostles programme and finally prove my intellectual superiority over you.”
“You’re already doing better in literature than I am.”
“That’s not a guarantee of anything. You’re going to manage to catch up somehow.”
“I appreciate your confidence in me, my darling nemesis.” He presses his lips to the top of my head in a fleeting touch, almost as if he didn’t realise what he was doing. “What if my New Year’s resolution is also to win the Apostles prize and assert my intellectual superiority over you?”
“Then I suppose we’ll do what we’ve always done: pitch our wills against one another’s and let fate decide on the victor.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” His voice is low and thoughtful. “What an honour it has been, Theodora Dorokhova, to be your adversary. If I had made you myself in a laboratory, I couldn’t have created a more perfect opponent.”
The earnestness of this sudden declaration reminds me of the first time I saw him, the way he reminded me of the icons of saints in Smolny Cathedral.
Maybe it’s this association that makes me suddenly blurt out, “I lied to you. I never kissed Luca.”
He turns so suddenly that my head almost falls off his shoulder. In the distant glow of fireworks, I see his eyebrows shoot up.
“You never kissed Luca?”
“No. I lied. I was being… alright, I was being petty.”
He’s silent for a moment, slowly shaking his head. “Did you ask him to lie about it?”
“No—of course not. I don’t trust him. I don’t like him at all, in fact.”
“He corroborated your lie, though.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. I thought he might.”
“It doesn’t surprise me either.” A smirk dawns on Zach’s mouth, slow and with an edge of wickedness like the glint of the knife’s blade. “Oh well, he still deserves what he got.”
“What did he get?”
“What was coming to him.” Suddenly, Zach sets his glass down and turns to face me completely. He takes my cheeks in his hands, pulling me to him and peering into my eyes. “Does that mean that was your first kiss—that time in the library?”
“Yes,” I breathe, my heartbeat quickening.
“And did you like it?”
“I loved it.”
His hands slide down my cheeks to my neck. His palms are surprisingly warm given how cold the night is. “Did you want me? Back when I kissed you?”
“I always want you. I just can’t have you.”
“Why?” His mouth hovers close to mine, the warm mist of our breaths mingling. “What walls or locks or guards are keeping you prisoner right now? Who would even know?”
“I would know,” I whisper.
“Theodora. If you can look into my eyes and tell me you don’t want me, that you would rather I never touch you again, then say it. Say it, and I’ll respect your decision. The only thing I care about is what you want.”
I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. My mind, shattered in fragments, is a confusion of clashing thoughts and memories.
My father’s hard face as he asks me, Do you know what a whore is, Theodora?
Camille, in Year 10, rushing out of the classroom where I caught her with a boy, shameful and unrepentant all at once.
Zachary, the night of the Halloween party, telling me he loved me before ever telling me he loved me.
Every night I’ve ever spent in my bed with my eyes closed and Zachary in my mind and my fingers moving between my legs, the sudden flood of pleasure and shame.
Zachary’s fingers on my pulse as he asked me if I was a robot in the library, and his mouth hot and hungry on mine.
The constant aching in my chest, the crushing loneliness, the black despair that settles on me whenever I think about leaving Spearcrest and moving to Russia.
For the first time in a long time, tears burn in my eyes, startling me back to reality. Real tears, rare as black opals. I close the sliver of distance between Zachary and press my lips to his.
to the new year, and by the time the sky explodes with fireworks, we’re already kissing anyway. Deep, hungry, aching kisses, like we might die if we stop—like we might die if we keep going.
Zach pulls me onto his lap, and I lace my arms around his neck, and I kiss him from above, like a goddess and her mortal. His mouth is unbearably soft, and a ragged sigh escapes from his throat when I give in to the temptation of biting into the cushion of his lower lip.
His hands slip under my layers of clothing, his fingers finding and gripping my waist, thumbs brushing over the ridges of my ribcage. I arch into him, rolling my hips against the hardness of him, exulting in the proof of his desire, the proof that he wants me as much as I want him.
He might have bid me to take all my clothes off, and I might have done it. I might have let him take me right there and then, underneath the fireworks and indifferent stars.
Except that it starts snowing. Negligible snowflakes at first, fluttering hesitantly to melt against our skin, then more insistently, until we are forced to part with sighs of frustration.
We drive back through a thick downpour of heavy snowflakes and run into Zach’s house, laughing and breathless.
We stomp our boots to free them of snow and kick them off, leaving them right there on the atrium floor. Zach pulls my coat off my shoulders and lets it drop on the floor, pulling me away when I try to pick it up. He catches my mouth in a kiss as he wrestles his own coat off, and then we run up the central staircase, my hand in his.
He doesn’t lead me to my room. Instead, he leads me down another corridor, our steps swallowed by the antique carpet below our feet until we reach a door, which Zach wrenches open and pulls me through.
I don’t even have time to take a look at his bedroom before he slams his door shut and hauls me up into his arms. I meet him kiss for hungry kiss, wondering why I’ve deprived myself for so long.
Zach sets me down on his bed, and we finally pull apart as he props himself up on his elbows to gaze down at me. His eyelids are heavy, his brown eyes dark with desire. He’s not smiling—his face has that expression I know so well.
Earnest. Ardent. Devoted.
Like a saint before a god.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I whisper, struck by the intensity of his gaze.
“How could I not?” he breathes. “How could I not, Theodora? When my every dream has been of this? Of you? Of having my beautiful nemesis right here in my bed?”
He catches my lips in a kiss, then kisses his way across my cheek to my ear.
“Do you know the dreams I’ve had in this very bed, Theodora?” His voice is a husky murmur. “Dreams of the things I longed to do with you—to you? Dreams of your mouth and your body and the thousand different ways I might bring you pleasure?”
I squirm underneath him. “Zach—stop.”
His mouth moves from my ear to my throat. He covers my neck with wet, lingering kisses and stops against the hollow of my throat. He looks up, a feverish look in his eyes.
“Did you dream of me too?” His voice is a murmur.
I lick my lips and nod.
He takes the hem of my sweater, and I sit up to let him take it off. We sit facing each other, forehead to forehead. His fingers find the tiny pearl buttons of my silk blouse, pulling them loose. He slips the delicate garment down my shoulders, and I let it fall away.
I lie back and unbutton my trousers, raising my hips to let Zachary pull them off. My underwear is a simple green set, but Zachary gazes down at me as if I’m beautiful enough to take his breath away.
And in his gaze, I feel beautiful.
I always try so hard to be beautiful, but I’ve never really felt it, not the way I do as Zachary’s brown eyes travel the length of my body.
I brush my fingertips over my chest, giving Zachary a soft smile.
“Do you like my bra?” I ask him, half mockingly, half to break the intensity of the moment.
“Sage green,” he murmurs. “It’s the colour I think of when I think of you.” He leans down, kisses one bra strap, then the other. “Now, it’s forever going to be the colour of my pleasure.”
I laugh, but my laughter dies in my throat when Zachary’s mouth drifts down the line of pale flesh between my breasts.
“It’s a beautiful bra,” he adds in answer to my earlier question, “but it’s going to have to come off.”
He takes it off me, and when I try to cover myself with my arms, he kisses my mouth, my cheek, my temple. “You’re safe with me,” he murmurs. “My beautiful Theodora. Let me look at you.”
I always expected sex would make me nervous, but that’s not it. It’s the pure intimacy of the moment that shakes me to my core, that makes every nerve in my body tense up, that makes my heart pound uncontrollably in my chest.
Letting Zachary look at me means seeing the adoration in his eyes, the way his gaze softens, the way his eyes are dark with desire. When he kisses me, it’s not hard and hungry—it’s unhurried and tender.
He kisses my breasts like sunlight touching the petals of a rose. Wetness trickles through me as if my entire body is melting, the ache between my legs throbbing like a pulse. Zachary takes one nipple into his mouth, then the other, sucking on them both until they tighten under his tongue and my hips buck, rising of their own volition off the bed.
I want to tell him that I’m ready—that I’m ready now—but Zach isn’t in a hurry.
He licks my nipples and traces a line of kisses down my chest, across my belly. He caresses my ribcage, my waist, my hips. He kisses the skin over my hipbones, and he kisses me through my panties so delicately I’m forced to arch into him, seeking the friction I desperately need to find my release.
When Zach finally tugs on the waistband of my panties, rolling them down my legs, I let out a sigh of relief. Now, I want to say. Now.
I’ve been waiting for this for so long—I had no idea how much I wanted this until now. I had no idea how much I need Zach’s kisses, his mouth on my breasts, on my body—how much I need to feel him inside me.
Zach, though, doesn’t answer my urgency. He lifts my legs to kiss the crook of my knees, to kiss his way up my thighs, small, gentle, slow kisses, first one leg then the other. Each kiss is an electric shock of desire, a reminder of the release I so desperately need.
“Hurry,” I mutter, and frustration sends me rushing up against Zachary, mouth open on a demand, but he catches my face in his hands and kisses my open mouth.
“Do you know how long I’ve waited for this, how long I’ve yearned for this?” He pulls away, his eyes boring into mine, daring me to look away. “I have no intention of hurrying—quite the opposite. You’ve tortured me with waiting, and now I’m going to take my sweet time. I’m going to admire and kiss every part of that gorgeous body of yours; I’m going to taste all those secret places you’ve never let anyone touch. I’m going to get on my knees and worship you, Theodora, with my hands and my mouth and every part of my body.” He pushes me back onto his bed and looks down at me with liquid fire in his eyes. “Now open your legs for me, my cruel goddess.”
