After the need to survive and rip people to shreds with his bare hands, out came a more mundane but equally taunting notion — it had been a good, hard moment of him fighting back and forth the fact that women were not all there was for him, and that maybe, just maybe, that having a man hold him was nice, as fuck. As nice as a cigar between his fingers, how their hands would flex around his throat and their muscles and you, god, you were his favorite.

Of course, he can’t erase over half a century of internalized shit and his father's voice, unbothered, cutting like a knife, bitten sullen words that spoke of him not being man enough everytime he grasped your hips and pulled you in his lap, and everytime he himself would not accept it, buried in denial and in between your arms.

It was days like these, though, sundays of bliss, pure, sticky, american bliss — where that voice, the one thing he couldn't brutalize his way out of, grew so quiet that it was barely there, like a hum in the back of his head, and he believed all of the bad, horrible, awful things he did, had never had a consequence in the first place, because here he was, in fucking paradise.

His free hand in your hair, legs spread on the couch as he watched these re-runs of all the important football matches he missed in the forty years he spent in soviet hell, without the ice-cold bottle of beer numbing his fingertips, the pretty sounds you made muffled by the sound of the television. "Livin' the fucking dream, ain't it? Yeah, what man wouldn't be with you?" His voice and bark held it's usual bite if only softer, just because it was you.