and possibly i like the thrill
After India, Jack took to visiting Irina occasionally, always in the middle of the night. He rarely found her sleeping. She rarely slept. After he sent the guards away, they talked of very little - Sydney, mostly, although Jack was wary of giving Irina more information about their daughter than she already had, as if sharing the details of Sydney's adolescence with Irina would taint them. That, or Jack deliberately withheld them in order to pour salt on her wounds. Irina wasn't sure which.
It took three weeks of visits, rapidly increasing in frequency, before Irina wondered why Kendall - or, for that matter, Sydney - had said nothing about Jack's increased willingness to communicate with her without resorting to death threats. It was another week before she noticed that he wore the same tie tack every visit, and only during those night visits.
"You're jamming the cameras," she said to him one night, not bothering with pleasantries.
"Yes," he replied. She arched a brow at him in amused curiosity. They could spend the entire night locked in a combative silence, Irina knew, neither of them willing to cede any ground in the minor power struggle they had reached.
"Why are you jamming the cameras?" She would rather save herself for... more important things.
It was his turn to stare at her silently. After a lengthy pause, he finally answered, "Because I have no wish to share the more intimate parts of my life with the entire agency." As soon as he spoke, he looked as if he wished he could take the words back. Irina picked up on his uncertainty immediately.
"Intimate, Jack?" She rose from her position on the floor and crossed to the glass wall between them. Laying her palm flat against it, she deliberately avoided meeting his eyes, instead focusing on the emptiness under her hand. "Is this intimate to you?"
His hand made a convulsive movement at his side, as if he had forgotten for a moment that he could no longer reach out and touch her freely. It pleased Irina, and aroused her, too, to know that she could still affect him so strongly - as strongly as he affected her. She felt the knowledge curl deep in her belly, setting her pulse to pounding between her legs. He was there visiting her because he couldn't help himself. And - she cursed herself even as she flushed with desire - neither could she.
"Intimate." She drew the word out slowly, looking up to see Jack's eyes darken at the sound of her voice. Trailing her fingers over the glass, she continued, "This is the closest I've been to being... intimate... with someone for twenty years." Small apology for her disappearance, but it was all she would give. It was hardly as if she hadn't taken lovers - willingly and unwillingly, for protection or information or simply for pleasure, Irina had had a number of men in her bed since she left Jack. But whether it was that he was Sydney's father or merely a simple fact of Jack Bristow, she and Jack had something different.
They still did.
She played with the hem of her tank top, drawing Jack's attention to the flashes of skin that showed as she twisted the fabric. "Can you come in, Jack?" Not Will you?, not Do you want to?, merely a request for information.
He shook his head. "I don't have a key." He didn't say that they wouldn't trust him around her. He didn't say whether he would enter her cage if he could.
"Pity," she sighed. "I've missed you." She looked at him intently. He had changed little in the twenty years she had been gone. His hair was shorter and greyer, and his face was more heavily lined and even less mobile. But she had spent hours studying the body language of his arousal, first in pretense and later in earnest, and she could still read him easily.
She didn't wait for Jack to respond; she didn't know whether she wanted to hear what he would say. Instead she watched him watch her as she slid her hand down the front of her body and undid the button on her pants.
Laura would never have done this. But Irina was proud of her body in a way she hadn't been twenty and thirty years before, proud of the scars of motherhood that shared space with the scars of espionage, and she wanted, suddenly, to make Jack lose control again. It had been too long.
"I remember," she said, her fingertips tracing light circles on the sensitive skin above her waistband, just like her husband used to tease her with. "I remember the way you felt against my skin." She had touched herself and thought of Jack before - not often, never when she was in Russia and might betray a weakness. Having Jack there but, thanks to the glass barrier between them, still strangely absent gave her a tingle of anticipation. As much as this was another move in the game between them, it was affecting her as powerfully as it was him.
"Jack," she said, for the pleasure of hearing his name in her mouth as much as watching his reaction to it. His eyes flickered to hers as she slowly drew open her zipper. Could he hear the whisper of the metal through the glass? No matter. He had heard it many times before as his wife had undressed for bed. The dark shadows in his eyes had been the same then as they were now.
She flattened one hand against the glass, both for support and to remind Jack of the delicate strength in the stroke of her fingers and palm. The other disappeared into her pants. Much as she wanted to watch him chart every touch she placed on every inch of her skin, she knew the flickers of movement would excite Jack more than any overt display. She didn't have the patience for foreplay anyway.
Laura used to be nearly silent in bed: at first, Irina had worried that she would cry out in the wrong language, and later, when she had worried instead that she would forget her mother tongue, it had been too late to change her habits. Standing in front of Jack, Irina let herself ignore those years of control.
As her thumb brushed her clitoris, she thought about his mouth and whimpered. As she slid two fingers inside herself, she remembered his face at the moment of his climax and groaned. As she reached a rhythm, though, she looked straight at him, delighting in the gradual slipping away of his mask. He couldn't control himself, watching her; anger and lust battled for dominance in his broad features, but he would not look away.
She was panting, her hair hanging in her face, when he finally broke and reached towards her hand. He couldn't touch her, of course, but the desperation on his face threw her over the edge before his fingers even collided with the glass.
She came with a shudder and a long, drawn-out moan. Slumping against the glass, her back to him, she breathed deeply for a moment. When she turned around, he was gone.
She fastened her pants, walked slowly across the room, and sank down onto her cot. He wouldn't return at night again. But as she licked her fingers clean, she knew: he would return to her.