14. Nova
Chapter fourteen
Nova
His text arrives at seven A.M.:
That was fair.
Three words.
I read them standing at my counter in yesterday’s t-shirt with coffee I haven’t tasted yet and everything in me just — stops. Not dramatically. Worse than that. Quietly. Like my whole morning runs into a wall and doesn’t know how to keep going.
I sit on the kitchen floor. I’m aware that’s not a normal response to a text message. I read it again anyway.
That was fair.
I wrote something honest about him and sent it into the world and he wants me to know he noticed. Not just that I wrote it. The fact that I tried to make it right.
That’s what gets me. Not the compliment, exactly. Not even the relief. The grace of it. The fact that he read what I wrote, understood what I was trying to do and met me there instead of making me drag the meaning out of him in pieces.
Just three words. No caveat. No weirdness. No making me work to figure out what he meant. And for some reason that’s what knocks me flat. I place my mug on the floor beside me before I spill it.
Brody leaves a voice memo. I listen to the whole damn thing. Somewhere in the middle his voice cracks for half a second and I put the phone down on the floor next to me and just look at the ceiling.
These people. This team.
I came here to cover a Cup run. Somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like work and started feeling like mine, which is a deeply unprofessional development.
Now Brody’s voice cracks for half a second in the middle of a voice memo and I’m sitting on my kitchen floor staring at the ceiling like that did something to me.
It did.
Liam texts:
This shit’s good. Best sports writing I’ve read this season.
I read it six times. Liam is not a praise guy. He is barely a punctuation guy. So that one lands. Then Katarina texts Aurora and Aurora texts me:
He kept refreshing the page. Don't say anything. I’m not supposed to tell you that.
Refreshing the page. That one I’m not ready for.
Jax Mercer — who manages everything, who processes bad games by running them on a loop until they make sense, who went completely still when I found that knot in his shoulder like nobody had ever looked for it before — sat somewhere and kept hitting refresh to watch his own story land.
Not the version I gave the world the first time.
The true one. The fixed one. The one I should have written to begin with.
I open my personal notebook. Look at the blank page. Close it again.
Some things don’t need to be spelled out.
My editor calls and I call her right back because that’s what professionals do.
“The piece is everywhere.” She says numbers. I stop processing after the first one because it doesn’t matter — what matters is that I wrote something real and it’s out there now and I can’t take it back and, for once, I don’t want to.
That’s new. I usually always feel the need to take things back.
I open my laptop. Try to write the next thing. My brain goes exactly one place and stays there.
He didn’t have to say anything. He said it anyway.
My doorbell rings.
I look at the nest feed alert on my phone.
Jax. Carrier in his hand. Brick’s eyes through the door slats giving me the specific look of a cat who has been transported against his will.
I buzz the door open.
He comes in and takes in my apartment — the notebooks everywhere, the camera bag by the door, the bowl I keep out the back door for Dina. He doesn’t comment on any of it. He just looks and nods slightly like he’s confirming something to himself.
“Sorry.” He gestures to the crate. “Josie’s mom went into surgery this morning. She’s at the hospital.”
“So you brought me your cat.”
“I came to check on you.”
That shuts me up.
He looks at the carrier.
Then back at me.
“ I had to bring him,” he adds.
Brick makes a low, offended sound from inside the carrier, like he would like the record to show he had no part in this decision.
I look at Jax.
He looks back.
“I was only going to stay a minute,” he says.
“Obviously.”
I find that unbearably endearing, which is unfortunate because I am already low on defenses today.
But I’m not saying any of that out loud.
“It’s okay. You can put him over there.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
He sets the carrier down. Opens the door. Brick walks out, surveys the apartment, and walks the perimeter like a damn building inspector. Sits down on my couch in the spot I sit in and looks directly at me.
“He’s deciding,” Jax says.
“Deciding what.”
“Whether the place meets standards.”
Brick blinks once.
“Apparently it does.”
I look at Jax. He’s standing in my kitchen with his cat on my couch and his hands in his pockets like that’s a normal Tuesday afternoon.
“Coffee?”
“Yeah.”
I pop in a fresh pod and make his coffee. He sits on my couch. I bring both our cups over and sit next to him. We’re quiet for a minute and it’s the good kind — the kind that doesn’t need filling.
“Just three words,” I say.
“What? It was fair.”
“You didn’t have to—”
“I know.”
I look at him. He looks back. I’ve been in so many rooms with so many different people and I have always known how to read them and this man is the first one in a long time I can’t fully get ahead of. He keeps doing things I don’t expect. He keeps meaning them.
He reaches over and takes the coffee cup out of my hand. Sets it on the table.
“Nova.”
“Yeah.”
Brick’s dead asleep on the back of the couch. Dina is at the bowl outside.
I should tell him.
The thought has genuinely terrible timing.
The coffee is untouched on the table between us. Jax is sitting close enough that I can feel the heat of him through his sleeve. Brick is making direct eye contact from the back of the couch like a tiny judgmental priest.
This is not the moment.
Nobody confesses professional sins with a cat watching and Jax Mercer looking at her mouth.
So I don’t.
Not yet.
We’re just sitting here on my couch, and I know he isn’t going to push.
That’s probably the best thing about him.
Also, inconveniently, the worst.
He just sits there, solid and contained, looking at me like he has all the time in the world. My skin prickles. Heat climbs my neck, slow and undeniable.
So, apparently I’m the one who’s going to have to do something about this.
I lean in.
He goes still. His hand comes up slow and finds the side of my face, thumb brushing once along my cheek like he’s checking whether I’m sure.
I am.
I pull back just enough to look at him.
“Nova.”
“ I know,” is all I got to say.
Because I do know.
I know exactly what I’m walking into.
I kiss him again and this time he kisses me back for real, hand sliding into my hair, mouth opening under mine, and that’s it. That’s the end of pretending this is manageable.
In Pittsburgh I was still fighting it. Still making jokes in my head. Still keeping one foot out the door even when both feet were very much inside the room.
This time I’m here. Fully here. No jokes. No exit.
He kisses me like he has all the time in the world. That’s what undoes me first. Not urgency. Not hunger. The patience of it. The way he keeps giving me room to stop and somehow makes me want to do the opposite.
I move against him. His breath changes. That alone almost does me in.
He says my name once, low, and it goes straight through me.
He gets my t-shirt off. It’s gone — somewhere on the floor — and I’m in just abra with his cat asleep on the back of the couch and his mouth on my collarbone and I am no longer pretending this is manageable.
I want him in my mouth.
I don’t tell him. I just slide off his lap onto my knees on the floor between his.
His eyes follow me down.
“Nova.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to—”
A second. Hand on his thigh. Looking up.
“Yeah, I do.”
He breathes out once. His hand comes to my hair. Warm and heavy, fingers spread against my scalp.
I undo his belt — the leather hissing through the loops — and pop the button on his jeans. He lifts his hips slightly to help me, the same cooperative gesture from Pittsburgh, and that gesture itself does something to me. The way he’s never made me work to do this.
I free him.
Hard, thick, the head flushed and already wet. I wrap my hand around the base and feel his pulse against my palm and look up.
He’s looking at me with an expression I haven’t seen on his face before. Open. Wrecked already and I haven’t even started.
I lean in and run my tongue from his base to the tip. Slow. Swirling around the head, tasting him.
His abs contract sharply against my forearm.
“Jesus.” His hand tightens in my hair. Not a demand. Just reaction — him losing the careful quality he carries everywhere.
I love how he talks me through it. Firm and specific and honest in the way he’s honest about everything — no performance, just true.
“That’s it, baby.” Voice rough. “Your mouth is so fucking hot.”
I take him deeper. Relax my throat. Let him fill me. I’m wet for him — soaked through my underwear, my thighs pressed tight together because the ache of it is sharp and I can’t help it. My free hand drifts down between my own legs.
He sees.
“Christ — Nova — are you—”
I look up at him while he’s in my mouth. Slide my hand into my own underwear. His pupils blow.
“Yeah?” he breathes. “You getting yourself off while you suck my cock?”
I moan around him. The vibration goes through him and his hips jerk and he says my name in a voice I’ve never heard.
“Look at you.” His head falls back. “Look at you.”
I take him deeper. My throat works around him. I hollow my cheeks and listen to the rhythm break apart in his chest, my own fingers between my legs moving in time with my mouth.
“Your throat feels like heaven.” Fingers flexing in my hair. His hips moving in small controlled lifts off the couch. “Slow down — no — don’t. Don’t stop. Just like that. Fuck, you’re good at this.”
I pull off until just the tip is between my lips, flick my tongue against the slit, taste the salty bead of moisture there, then take him to the hilt again. My nose presses into the coarse hair at his base and I swallow around him.
“Nova — shit —”