Chapter Text
Mondays were, above all, not days where big things happened. Mondays were usually work-from-home days to start, which meant Alina could spend her morning cuddling her ancient tomcat under the blankets and responding to emails at a less-than-reasonable time. All this way before having to actually talk to a single soul.
So let’s start there.
Alina should not have been called into the office on a Monday. She should not have been made to shower, get dressed, put makeup on and leave the house on a Monday. Above all, she should not have been made to look at Aleksander’s face. On a Monday.
“I think a few charts should be enough to get the idea across. Just ask Alina for—whatever you need. Historygrams, Stem-and-Trunk Graphs… Whatever it is.” Alina should not be listening to Nikolai’s voice butchering every statistical term he’s vaguely familiar with on a Monday.
Aleksander nods, still not looking at her. He hasn’t looked at her once; not since she walked into this meeting with a mushy banana in her hand and her hair in two slightly-less-than-perfect braids.
“I’ll leave you two to it. Text me once it’s done and I’ll book a room for the presentation. Tomorrow. The presentation is tomorrow.” Nikolai, useless, clueless, prince regent of nepo-babies, smiles at them like he’s about to reward himself with a few puffs off his watermelon-flavoured-single-use vape and some hard alcohol for another successful day of Real Leadership. “You have the office to yourselves, so don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Alina takes a quick peek at Aleksander while he’s too distracted following the infuriating retreat of Nikolai’s entitled little back out of conference room Number 3. It’s 8:36 AM and Alina feels like the human equivalent of a dog toy that has been chewed on for too long and she’s pretty sure she looks it too while, all the while, Aleksander—Aleksander looks like Mad Men is back on television.
Aleksander Morozova’s skin is clear and even where Alina’s still holds the remnants of several star-shaped hydrocolloid stickers. Aleksander’s suit is nice and crisp and the visible stitching around the cuffs looks as if it’s been finished off by sewing machines that would downright scoff at the sight of a plastic fast-fashion overlocker; where Alina’s t-shirt and shorts combo gathered her suspicious looks when she tried to buy sparkling wine at the off-license last Friday. Aleksander’s eyes look awake and clear and his eyelashes look naturally long and thick and his hands are perfectly folded around a compostable cup of nitro coffee from a cafe that won’t provide simple syrup to customers no matter how much they beg for it. And Alina—Alina is sleepy and cranky and her hair is surely as ridiculous as she suspects and she wants to go back to bed and hug her cat and hide from the cool sheen of condescension in Aleksander’s eyes and she, now that she thinks about it, she’s isn’t even sure if she put on perfume this morning and that surely would be something too cruel to even—
“Ready?” Aleksander’s eye catches on the loose neck of her t-shirt and she worries for one panicked second about the terrifying possibility of having forgotten to put on a bra this morning.
Alina thinks of her cat and the fancy bag of allergy-friendly litter she needs to restock before the week is out.
Do it for him, and all that.
Aleksander works in sales. Alina isn’t exactly sure if that’s the main reason he doesn’t like her because Ivan works in the same department and he always has nice–if perhaps a little curt– words for Alina. The problem is that, while he’s never been overly rude to her, her emotional radar is so finely tuned to any and all signs of rejection that she just knows. His stiff upper lip any time she walks into the canteen in her vintage dungarees to grab a free snack, the tense pulsing vein at his temple when she tried to ask him about his Christmas plans during an uncomfortably silent elevator ride months ago. No matter what Genya says, she understands it all, even those hooded eyes, the darkness in them whenever she dares to wear graphic t-shirts to the office, his silent judgement.
“He doesn’t hate you. I’m pretty sure that’s just the way his face looks.” Genya says maybe a little tired and a tiny tiny bit annoyed—it is, after all, their fifth identical conversation this month. And isn’t that great? Aleksander’s bad attitude is now indirectly ruining Alina’s perfect relationship with her work wife. “And regardless; baby, who cares? He’s just some man who might or might not like you. Right, doll?”
But she’d said it —perhaps it’d been the way Genya’d said it, off-handed, casual, like being unliked could be just a thing that happened to you, something completely separate from your worth as a person—that made her pause.
Yeah, maybe Genya was right. Aleksander’s opinion did not matter in any real way. He was a man, for starters, and a man who trimmed his beard at that. And a sports fan, most likely. His opinion, in the big scheme of things that did matter, was almost insignificant.
“It’s not like you can change that. Sometimes we can’t make people like us, we just have to accept their dislike and move on, baby.”
Alina is halfway through a journey into the bitterest coffee she’s ever drunk, nails digging into the utterly gross compostable cup in her hands, so all those reasonable normal words sound a little like Genya is—“So what you’re saying is that I can’t make him like me?”
They work for three hours straight yet Alina does not dare, not even once, to ask for a break. During those three endless hours he fires off vaguely specific demands he thinks might be useful like he’s working with ChatGPT instead of a human woman who might or might not need to check The R Reference Index for some of his more complex needs. Aleksander just watches, quiet and focused, as she types code into her sticker-covered work laptop, a few vague nods the only acknowledgment she gets that yeah Alina that’s pretty cool that you can type all that from memory, it does not matter that that is literally your job, you are a smart, capable girl.
“Break?” He says, finally, mercifully, when she tries to type the same line into her dusty screen three times without much success.
One awkward short walk to a cafe right around the office and Alina is sweaty and cranky and overtly conscious of the way the white ribbons she’d tied into her braids this morning make her look like she was very recently rescued from a doomsday Priest’s bunker. He buys them breakfast, even going as far as getting her the raspberry muffing she’d been eyeing since her eyes landed on its glossy, fluffy top. On their way back, eyes glued to the thick girth of his fingers around the shiny credit card he’s holding as he takes small, careful sips of his coffee, Alina’s rat brain yields no better thought than a mundane reminder that she should take small sips too, small bites, small gulps.
Look civilised, look pretty. Don’t stare.
Once they go back to soulless, windowless, sad-infused Conference Room Number 3 and, with a full belly and an already sleep-deprived brain, she’s too sluggish to look away fast enough when Aleksander starts to remove his suit blazer, the crisp white cotton of his t-shirt obscene against the straining tendons at his neck.
“Alina.” He says, a thoughtful wrinkle between his dark eyebrows.
She can feel the ugly splotchy blush blooming on her face, Genya’s words ringing at the back of her mind –Sometimes we can’t make people like us.
“Yeah? I mean— Yes, Aleksander?” She mumbles, trying to cover her blush with the back of a shaky hand, sticky fingers still carrying the faint scent of raspberry and butter.
“Could we swap the X and Y axis here?” He asks, unbuttoning his right cuff.
She’s eagerly nodding before realising that, what he just asked is, actually, supremely stupid.
By 3PM they’ve moved things to the sad porn-like couch by the back wall, the one closer to the hissing, semi-functional AC. On the sofa, side-by-side, Aleksander’s thighs are splayed wide and she’s given up on not touching them at some point during the last torturous round of revisions. This client can’t possibly be important enough to guarantee this level of attention to detail, but, to Aleksander, it does. And to Nikolai. Fucking Nikolai.
His right thigh is warm and solid against her naked one and his eyelashes look even longer up close. Like some fucked up corporate Disney Prince.
“I think you should head home now, Alina. I’m more than happy with what we already have, I can finish tidying this up on my own.”
You don’t look more than happy, she wants to say but wisely choses to bite her lip instead. Up close like this, his spicy, solid smell has made it all the way inside her nostrils now, bleeding up into her brain, making her dizzy for no real, reasonable reason.
You can’t make him like you, Alina. Genya’s voice is there, mixing with his scent, the pinewood and smoke of his skin and the bright elegant corners of Genya’s more-than-reasonable words confusing her further.
“Alina.” He says, her name this physical thing on his tongue, like he’s tasting it. The L and the N in it taking the shape of one of those sour gummies she’s finds too intrusive on the tongue. His mouth parts again after playing with her name, and she’s still staring at it. At him.
That mouth doesn’t like me either. She thinks, like a lunatic.
“Thank you for today.” He says, releasing her from his presence, encouraging her to go on her merry way, to leave him alone. To release him of her presence.
Why don’t you like me? She thinks, still not moving. Still not listening. Still hanging on to this random, unimportant coworker’s –no, this stranger’s presence. Still angling her body to press more firmly against his obscene thighs. Still turning her eyes up to peer at him, to beg for a single crumb of interest, of desire.
“Alina—” And he’s looking down now, into what must be the neediest, most desperate eyes he’s ever seen and she’s so close to him, the thin golden chain around his neck near enough that she could nudge it with the tip of her nose if she actually wanted to.
This is insane. You can’t— You will not do this.
“Aleksander.” She replies, and she knows how she sounds. The high-pitched whine trapped in her throat sounds like she’s about to start begging. How childish.
She’s not about to cry, she’s not.
“I— Maybe we should—” He doesn’t move back. That’s his first mistake, she thinks. That his lips are so close to hers, and his nose is so perfectly wrinkled in confusion, and his eyes— Not even the darkest of starless nights or the most bitter of coffees has ever looked as black as his eyes.
You can’t make anyone like you.
Alina nuzzles closer; first with her nose, tracing the underside of his chin with the very tip of it, red now from the embarrassment of touching skin she has never touched; that she never thought she would touch. But when he doesn’t immediately pull back she nudges forward, a little bolder now; nose touching the underside of his lower lip, still open in what must surely be shock. Alina likes him like this, she decides: shocked still, like an animal facing the barrel of a rifle. Scared shitless.
“Alina—”
She’s tired of her name, she decides right then. Tired of him saying it like he’s seeing her for the first time after knowing her, if only vaguely, for almost a full year.
While he’s still and pliant and unable to do complain much, she grabs him by the open collar of his shirt, fabric cool under her fingertips. Her fingers loop around that chain, the shiny beacon dangling from his tanned neck, pulling him down to her level, if not emotionally —this level of desperation is, in fact, not that easily achieved— at least physically. Out of the corner of her eye she can just rather panicked at the sight of his wide eyes. The hint of desire there.
Yes.
I knew I could have him.
I could make him fall for me.
I could—
His hands are in her hair, at the nape of her neck; but he refuses to leave them still for longer than a few seconds. Broad fingers curl possessively around her right cheek, the pressure of his short nails stings; but she likes that too. It’s only a matter of an instant, maybe two —and that’s only because he stops in the middle of his groping, spending a long endless moment looking into her eyes, gazing at her like her soul is something he could easily read if he tries hard enough– and then his lips are on hers and none of that matters any longer.
He kisses her like he’s starving.
Like every second of his boring life has brought nothing but hunger, like his suffering has found no pause, no reprieve, until her. In different circumstances Alina might have found this funny —Why would a man want anyone so fiercely? What’s up with that? That’s not normal, that’s just weird, strange, he’s so strange— but the current sensation of her beating heart in her throat and the pull of desire tugging at her belly leave no room for funny. There’s an urgency in the way his hands are roaming over her body, in the way his nose is pressed against her cheek, in the offending caress of his beard on her face. At least his tongue is gentle, like he knows she wouldn’t like it rough there, not yet at least.
“Fuck, Alina, do you want this or—”
Shut up. She thinks but doesn’t say and goes up on her shaky knees –not even the squeaking of the horrible black pleather sofa against her knees can ruin this moment– dropping all her weight over his lap. She’s a desperate, pathetic excuse of a girl; immediately using her new position to grind her tits, her clothed cunt and her belly, against his stiff body. Her eagerness might be just the thing to actually ruin the moment, because it makes him stop; shocked, perhaps, at her nerve, how utterly needy she is, this strange girl he barely knows but is now all over him.
And it’s not only her neediness. This whole thing is—It’s so crass: the sofa, the hissing AC, the unlocked door he can surely see from his position under her. His hands, spanning the whole of her lower back, the taste of his skin, of his spit and the unique heat of the inside of his mouth. Crass, obscene and yet he pulls her closer by the waist, grinding her center against his lap, and her sharp canine catches on his lower lip when she gasps at the sudden pleasure, overwhelmed.
“God, you’re so— You’re sitting on my lap, Alina. It feels so—”
He is so dumb, she realises, vaguely, while her thighs clench at the low sound of his wrecked voice.
“Kiss me, please.” She says, sloppy tongue caressing his open mouth, fingers clumsy and eager, scratching the supple skin of his newly-exposed neck.
He pulls on her hair and she’s about to warn him off with a bite for daring to even think about being rough with her when his forehead presses against hers, so sweetly her teeth ache. Like he’s sorry, of all things. She thinks maybe he is, actually sorry for pulling on her hair and making her grind herself harder against the non-existent zipper of his trousers because he suddenly brings his thumb to rest at the corner of her eye, gathering the moisture there. Gently, he wipes it off her face, the offending evidence of how needy and desperate and raw she feels from just a little kissing.
Suddenly, it’s not enough. None of this juvenile kissing and grinding and rubbing each other through their clothes like a couple of virgins after prom night is enough. She wants him naked, or as close to naked as she can get him under the circumstances and she’s too desperate to wait for him to make a move.
“Aleksander—” She hears herself speak as if her voice were far away, somewhere where the air is too thin for her usual voice to come through, a higher breathier version of it taking form instead. “Do you— do you like me–this. Do you like this?”
His eyes are closed but he has the decorum of opening them for her. A slow, drizzling surge of heat travels down her belly at the look in his eyes, the broken raw want she finds there. She thinks for a second that his lower lip might be trembling, just a little, wet from their spit, reddened by the abuse of her teeth and tongue.
“Yes.” It’s all he says, with his voice low and broken, the tip of his nose pressed against her redden cheek.
“With me, you want to–to—Do more, with me, right now?” She’s doing her best to make the words more than a messy gurgle but she’s not so sure of her success. But he seems to get it, because he nods, a big gulp of air visibly traveling down his throat, making is Adam’s Apple bob with the effort.
“Anything you want, Alina. We can do—”
“No.” She says, small fingers tangled tightly on the chain around his neck. Alina pulls on it experimentally, vaguely hoping he’s conceited enough to buy decent jewelry for himself. Under her shaky fingers, the golden chain becomes so tight around his neck that it chokes him, just a little, enough to make him look at her and listen.
“Say it, say that you— That you want this–me, that you want me—”
He’s on her before she can finish her sentence; his mouth hungrier, wilder, nails scraping her face. She feels him harden, his cock a weighty, solid thing nestled in between her parted thighs. She’s so wet she’s afraid she might leak through her shorts and panties, and wouldn’t that be truly embarrassing? Not the begging for reassurance or the wantonness or the childish blush on her cheeks—; no, the wetness, that’s what would actually humiliate her right now.
“I want you I— Would you take this off? The—the t-shirt, take it off for me, Alina.” He says, eager and earnest, his lower lip trembling again, like she suspected before. “I need to see the way you look, your skin, I want to— Would you let me see your tits, Alina? I’ve thought about them, about the way you might let me suck on your pretty tits. Your— Fuck, your belly too. I bet is so soft, ‘sn’t it?”
She has the feeling he’s going to say more and she can’t handle that, not right now. Because the unhurried cadence of his voice belongs in a bedroom somewhere, belongs to an anonymous imaginary girlfriend or a partner or someone who cares, who gets to call him baby or or— whatever it is women call their partners, Alina doesn’t know. But this is too intimate and it makes her want to squirm, to whimper out loud, to spread her legs and open her cunt for him and do all sorts of deeply embarrassing things are completely inappropriate for an office hookup.
Instead, she lets go of his necklace and yanks her t-shirt off in one shift movement. She’s wearing a bra, her morning fears unfounded, but she wishes she weren’t, that would save her a few precious extra seconds of tedious undressing. Alina reaches back, fumbles clumsily around the closing of her bralette while Aleksander just— looks at her covered breasts as if every mystery of the universe has just been revealed to him.
“Can– Can I?” He says, shakily. Eyes too bright and too wide, and Alina nods dumbly, willing to accept anything he asks for at this point.
He unclasps her bra swiftly and instantly latches onto a nipple, first with his eyes, but soon after with that stupidly beautiful mouth of his.
It feels like being licked by a flame. Too much, too soon, too wet. Her toes might make a hole through the soles of her cheap shoes. The pressure flows, down into her tummy, up her throat. His nose is there too, along with his tongue, touching her breast; that damned nose of his, caressing the slope of her breast. Smelling her skin, she thinks, maybe, possibly. It’s hard to tell when he’s still sucking on her nipple, sweet and good and gentle and wicked.
God, he’s weird.
“Aleksander, I want to—”
But he’s not in any rush, it seems. Content to suck on her nipple, the tip becoming sensitive under the gentle flickering of his wide tongue. His hands, the ones previously busy caressing her back, are now on her belly of all places, carefully mapping the soft skin there, the place where her tummy curves outwards. Touching a place where she feels like she might cry if he is allowed to pet so delicately for too long.
“I want your cock.” She says, out loud. She’s never said a thing like that before. Never ever felt desperate enough to beg, but there’s a first time for everything it seems.
Aleksander hums around a nipple and –oh thank god– he releases her. Finally, she thinks, he wants to get his dick wet, he’s a man, he’s going to just go for it and— And he latches onto the other nipple, the one he has yet to taste.
“Aleksander, please, I—”
“I need to get you ready.” He says, like he thinks himself so big, so utterly unmountable that she might break if he doesn’t spend at least twenty-five minutes being stretched for his colossal, massive cock.
She stands up abruptly and Aleksander, to his credit –and Alina’s incensed ego– looks utterly dazzled as if he’s been suddenly and rudely woken up from a trance state.
“Did I do something wr—?”
Alina’s shorts and panties are on the floor before he can finish his sentence. She doesn’t dwell on it, doesn’t even allow him to look at her naked, bare cunt for that long. What is there to see? She thinks to herself, you don’t even like me like that.
Aleksander seems to be in some sort of trance, hooded eyes staring into the wet pearly shining mirage that is her cunt, right there for his gaze to linger on the rosy, swollen flesh, its almost palpable, welcoming heat.
“Fuck.” His voice is wrecked, and as flattering as that is, she wants this now. She wants to get back on his lap and ride his cock and forget about the weird pull in her lower belly, the messy strange sensation his stupid mouth causes by acting like this –her– is the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
He doesn’t like you, Alina.
She straddles him while he’s too busy staring at her, and it takes almost no time to unbutton his trousers and then his cock is there, hot –so hot, is this normal?– and so hard for a second she wonders how he isn’t the one hurrying this along.
“Alina, we need—”
“Are you clean?” She hears herself say, small fist tight around his cock, the tip of her tongue pressed against the wet corner of her mouth.
“Clean—? I’m–” He laughs, one single sound like he finds the question ridiculous. “Yes, Alina, fuck, I’m—” He looks so handsome in that moment, with his forehead furrowed in concentration and a slick sheen of sweat at his temples.
“Okay, I’m– I’m clean too and on birth control so—” The head of his cock is at her entrance, a missing puzzle piece, and her mouth still tastes like him and heat and hunger so she surges forward, nibbles the swollen curve of his lower lip, makes a careful mess of him.
She wants to ruin this man, to destroy that infuriating facade he puts on every morning.
If Alina got her way she would bite him, right there on his lip. She would leave the outline of her sharp teeth for everyone to see. Perhaps, bite his jaw too, his neck, his shoulders; bite him and bite him and bite him until every inch of visible skin carries the mark of her touch.
“You want me?” It comes out needy, pleading, more whine than it is question but he’s just so attuned to her in the moment that he’s nodding before she can even finish asking him.
Good.
His cock is— too big, obscenely so, but she’s in the moment and she wants this and for once in her life she wants to take what she wants and relish it and keep it. So she pushes through the pain even when he really is– Oh, fuck, he’s so big and this is not working—
“Alina, slow down.You’re going to h—” He’s frantic, thick, wonderful fingers digging into her lower back, thumbs pressed over the supple skin of her ass.
Her teeth nip on his neck, right under his jaw, making him buckle up, almost like he can’t control it and she whines again, unable to stop her body’s reactions to the searing pain of his cock forcing her cunt to make room for him inside her.
By the time she reaches what feels like her breaking point he isn’t even all the way in. She can feel it, the extra length at the root of his cock that her body is unable to accommodate and her chin wobbles. The tears gather, stubborn and stupid, at the corners of her eyes; but Aleksander’s hand is there, drying her her tears with the warm back if his hand, the short dark hairs on his hand tickling her cheek in the process.
“You’re doing so good, we can slow down now. Take a deep breath and—”
“I can do more—” Her voice is whiny and small and she wants to take it back immediately but she can’t. Everything is spinning out of control, as if, at some point between kissing him and trying to push past the pain of taking him, she’d vacated her body and some dark horrible demon version of herself has taken over.
“No, shh—” The painful tenderness in his eyes, mixed with that tense throbbing vein at his temple seem to be determined to mock her.
His cock, she thinks dumbly, is throbbing too.
She tries bouncing on him a little, to see how it feels.
It’s still painful but maybe she can do something about it. Ignore it, get into the flow of things, perform a little. She wants this so desperately and she’s so wet, she really is, even with the pain, with the unreal, monstrous pressure inside her. She can do more, she can take more.
Aleksander looks almost frantic now: lips half open, that mark she’d left on his neck swelling right under her gaze, spasming fingers slipping down her wet naked chest. She thinks maybe he’s trying to get to her clit and yeah that— that would be really nice right now. The pulsing little pearl begging for any attention, awoken by the immense pressure of his cock and the not-quite-rough scratching of his blunt nails on her skin.
Turns out, once she actually feels what his hands are attempting to do, that he’s trying to stop her. Again. His fingers are not finding their way to her clit, they are instead going for her undulating hips with the sole intention of stopping everything she’s trying to do. And no, that’s not happening, she won’t let him stop this just because he feels like she shouldn’t be in pain or something equally stupid. It’s sex of course it hurts at little it’s completely normal. His mouth is babbling something she can’t really make out and just as she thinks that this might be it; that it might actually start to feel good and right and just the perfect side of painful he—
He comes.
A choked, muffled sound against her sternum, his wet, clammy forehead pressed against the valley between her breasts, it’s all she gets as a warning.
He just—
He’s breathing so hard she thinks there might be something wrong with him besides the fact that he just—
No, it can’t be.
It’s been like— It’s been maybe minute.
Less than a minute and he—Aleksander, he—just came?
“Fuck.” There’s anguish in his voice as he mouths the word against her wet chest.
Yeah, fuck.