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Dimitri Belikov didn’t have very many guilty pleasures.
As a dhampir guardian, his life revolves around protecting the Moroi and training others to protect the Moroi. It didn’t really allow for him to be selfish and take a small moment for himself. He felt guilty when he spent time reading a chapter or two of his favorite westerns, checking up on his mother and sisters back in Baia, or even letting loose at a bar because, in these moments he took for himself, he could fail at his duty to protect his charge.
And much of his recent life had been spent watching Vasilisa Dragomir, he thought it was completely normal to start watching Rose Hathaway as well.
But then he kept watching her. And watching her.
Dimitri watched how her hair, black ringlets with a hint of chestnut, bounced around her face as she danced at the bar. When he saw her at trainings, she kept it back either in a flouncy ponytail or – seemingly favoring this hairstyle lately, as if she knew he was entranced by her gorgeous locks – in a tight bun at the back of her head or at the nape of her neck. Her hair was such an extension of her personality – fun, bouncy, outgoing, and attention-drawing – and Dimitri found himself more and more falling behind her in runs or sticking to the sidelines of the dance floor or checking the weather for wind because he wanted to just stare at the way her curls swished back and forth and spread her perfume in a circle, so it hovered around her like the rings orbiting Saturn.
That time when he got to carry her home from memorial, after watching her dance the night away as the dhampir community mourned their colleagues and friends from the massacre at St. Jude’s, Dimitri had to fight himself to watch the path in front of him and not her hair – still so gorgeous and full of life, even in her slumber – within close proximity to his face.
Through watching her hair, Dimitri started to notice other things about Rose – and then started watching those, too.
He started watching her eyes – big pools of chocolate mixed well with expression – and Dimitri had to constantly check himself as he kept finding reasons to look at or into her eyes. During trainings, when he was supposed to switch with the other guardians between both sides of the pit to watch all the novices, he found himself using more and more excuses to stay on her side. When the novices sparred, he would angle himself on the outskirts to get as many direct looks into those brown orbs as possible and was entranced as he watched the fire and fierceness, usually seen in the depths of her beautiful pools, bubble up to the surface. When he got back to his room at night, surrounded by the color of her eyes, he couldn’t focus on anything but the way those eyes looked as she battled her classmates and lost time to wondering how they might look in a different sort of situation.
From her eyes, Dimitri’s gaze drifted downward to start watching her nose. Although noses weren’t traditionally captivating, Rose’s nose was smooth and shapely, complimenting her cheekbones and framing her eyes in a compelling and mesmerizing way. He watched during workouts as her nostrils opened and closed to take in more air, and he thought of the way the lights of the human club bounced off its bridge and tip and how it highlighted her bone structure in a way that reminded him of a Botticelli (or was it Remembrandt?) painting he’d once seen hanging on a wall in a banquet hall at an event his previous charge, Alexei, was attending. He loved watching Rose’s nose crinkle at things she didn’t like or when she was confused about something, and – though a tad bigger compared to the noses of the other dhampir or Moroi women he’d come across in his comparatively short life thus far, Dimitri thought its size complimented her and fit in with her other expressive features and her expressive personality.
And then, from her nose, Dimitri started watching her mouth. And once he began watching her mouth, his thoughts – already spilling over the edge of propriety – took a nosedive into lust. If he’d previously thought her hair, eyes, and nose were expressive, Dimitri Belikov was absolutely floored by the amount of emotion she could pack into even a slight twist of her lips.
Pink, bow-shaped, and extremely soft-looking, Rose’s lips became his hands-down favorite thing to watch. She talked a lot – much to the annoyance of her friends, Alberta Petrov, and her mother Janine – but Dimitri loved watching her lips, sometimes wet after her tongue cut a quick path across them before she spoke and sometimes swollen after nervously nibbling on them with her teeth, twist and move to form words. Although he was sometimes irritated by the things she said – though a very insightful person who seemed to take no end of pleasure in corroding his entire worldview (maybe for the better, if he was being honest), she was also a very headstrong person who needled and verbally pushed people into falling in line – Dimitri loved watching her lips prepare to form the words. He mapped out every dip and valley of the kissable skin with his eyes and watched jealously as she drank from glasses or ate food of forks wishing he could feel for himself how they moved across his own.
And when he finally – finally – got to kiss her, digging his hands into the hair he loved so much and occasionally opening his eyes to glance into her expressive ones only to be drawn back into her embrace by the absolute strength of her love and lust for him, Dimitri began watching her with the fervor of a devoted parishioner seeing divinity for the first time.
And while he became more drawn to her, seeking out her features for a moment of comfort – moments of which he found himself needing more and more as the people who controlled their lives so much already sought to control their lives, and deaths, absolutely – Dimitri started watching as she worked to carve out her path in life and her place in this warped society into which they were born.
In those eyes he loved to watch, Dimitri watched as they hardened right before she found the strength to fight back – either verbally or physically – as if steeling her resolve before she did something others might find offensive or obstructive, or as they overflowed with emotion and the destruction of her childlike innocence after experiencing the death of a trusted ally, a big brother, for the first time in her life. He watched her nose crinkle and smooth as she made sense of Mason’s deeper feelings for her and her own realizations of how selfish she might have been in the past and how much she refused to futher hurt the people she cared about. Dimitri watched as she used her lips to throw off the expectations of everyone around her, the expectations of both those who saw her as “Janine Hathaway’s daughter” and those who saw her as a goof and a fuck-up and talented-but-not-serious about becoming a guardian. He watched she ran her hands – so beautiful and deadly – through her mesmerizing head of hair as she struggled to find – and build – her expectations for herself and set standards for herself, rather than try to rise to the standard everyone set for her by virtue of her birth and her place in society as a female dhampir and a teenager in high school on the precipice of adulthood.
Her lips, those beautiful twin bows through which her tongue had darted out and pierced him like Cupid’s arrow, became weapons that destroyed both her own and other dhampir’s faith in their society to do best by them.
Dimitri could only watch as she sought balance between being Vasilisa’s friend and her future guardian and watched as she fought the system holding their entire lives hostage. Fascination turned into devotion, which turned into love.
And he could do nothing but allow himself to fall deeper into the abyss.
By the time he realized watching Rose had turned into his favorite guilty pleasure of all his guilty pleasures — where he found peace and happiness simply reveling in her beauty and vivaciousness and quintessential zest for life — Dimitri knew with absolute certainty there was no going back. He’d given up a lot of his own pleasures for the sake of protecting the Moroi – for the sake of doing his duty as he was taught to do. But in this unequal world of theirs, where guardians were expected to give up everything, including their own lives, in service of the ungrateful Moroi, Dimitri was starting to realize he needed something of his own that brought him joy.
He knew it was wrong. He knew the consequences of paying more attention to Rose than to Vasilisa, and he knew if anyone found out he would be sent away – either reassigned to another province or jailed for treason against the Moroi. So, he forced himself to reorient – to reprioritize – so he could keep watching her.
She was his secret, the one person for whom he would burn down the world if only to keep worshipping her vitality and her freedom. Because even if it proved to be his eventual downfall, Rose Hathaway was a guilty pleasure Dimitri would never give up.