19. Decontamination
Chapter nineteen
Decontamination
Sterling
The shower in this loft is the one thing the developer did not cheap out on, a wide tiled box with a bench along one wall and a rain head that makes an actual noise, and the glass has fogged solid by the time we get in.
The heat hits my shoulders and every muscle I have been holding since eleven this morning lets go at once, and I make a sound I am not proud of.
And then I look down and the water coming off me is grey.
It runs off my chest and down my arms and pools around the drain, grey and gritty, carrying the day off me in a slow spiral. The window frame and the smoke and the stairwell and the thirteen-year-old kid whose name I am not going to say out loud in this room, or ever.
I stand there under it and I cannot move.
I want to move. I want to touch her, kiss her, feel her body wrapped around mine.
But I just can’t.
Mandy takes the soap and facecloth out of my hand.
She does not say anything. She starts at my shoulders, both palms flat, working down, and she is not gentle about it.
She scrubs. She gets the grit out of the hollow of my throat and off the back of my neck and along the tops of my arms, and she does it with a kind of focused, furious care, like the dirt is the enemy and she intends to win, and I stand there under the water and let a woman half my size wash the worst day of my year off my body.
When she gets to my hands she takes them one at a time. She works the soap into the creases of my knuckles. She’s patient, thorough, and the water running off my fingers goes from grey to almost clear, and she does not stop until it does.
“Turn around,” she says.
I turn around.
She washes my back. She finds the knot under my right shoulder blade that has been there since March and she leans into it with the heel of her hand until it gives, and I put my forearm against the tile and my forehead against my forearm and I breathe.
Then her hands go into my hair on the back of my head where she can reach and I tilt my head all the way back.
She works her fingers into it and scrubs at my scalp, that is the one that gets me. The grit comes out of it in a fine dark rain down the back of my neck, and she does it twice before I turn again and face her.
She has water running off her chin, her hair is dark with it and plastered along her jaw, and she has been crying at some point in the last ninety seconds and the shower has covered for her, and she looks up at me with her chin set like she is prepared to argue about something.
I take the soap out of her hand.
“My turn,” I say.
She goes still. And then she lifts her arms and lets me.
I take my time. I have been taking care of people for a living for six years and I have never in my life done it like this, slow, with nothing on the other end of it, no clock, no radio, nobody’s worst day but ours.
I wash her shoulders. I follow the line of her collarbone with my thumb and get the smear of my own day off her skin and watch it go down the drain, and something in my chest unclenches when it does.
I wash her arms and the insides of her wrists.
I bend and kiss each clean spot before I spin her to face the wall.
I pour a generous line of shampoo into my hands and massage it into her scalp, slow and gentle, my fingers digging deep but not enough to hurt. She makes a sound, low in her throat, that could be a purr or a warning.
Her hair is longer than I thought, darkening to a rich cherry brown as the water soaks it through.
I lose myself in the repetition. Suds, rinse, repeat.
She leans into my touch, her hands reaching back to my waist, fingers squeezing, pulling me closer.
The pressure is light but it sets off a chain reaction in my nervous system.
Mandy turns to face me, her eyes scanning the top part of my body and I watch her brows furrow. I know what she is looking at. I have a decent inventory of bruises blooming across my chest, over my ribs and on my shoulder. The hot water makes them angrier looking.
She does not ask about them. She just leans in, looks at it, and then puts her mouth on the deep pink skin, and something goes through me that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with being seen.
“Sterling,” she says into my chest.
“Yeah.”
“If you don’t kiss me right now I’m going to say something we’ll both regret.”
I tip her chin up and I kiss her.
It is not like the Livingroom. On the couch was six years arriving all at once, a pressure release, both of us grabbing.
This is slower and considerably worse for my mental integrity.
She opens her mouth to mine, her hands come up my back and everything I have been carefully not thinking since the moment she said don’t ever stop comes up through the floor of me at once.
I get my hands into her wet hair and hold her head where I want it. She makes that sound again. Her fingers press and scratch at my lower back, deliberate.
I lean over her. My mouth on her throat.
My name coming out of her in a register I have never heard from her and am now going to need to hear again.
The water running between us, hot, endless, loud enough to cover everything except the sounds she is making, which I can hear perfectly, which I will be able to hear at four in the morning three weeks from now while I am supposed to be sleeping.
My hand up over her stomach, her ribs, her breast. Her nipple is already tight, the skin flushed and sensitive. I cup her, thumb brushing over the tip, and she sucks in a breath that turns into a moan.
She’s wet, but not just from the water. I slide two fingers inside, slow at first, and she whimpers, hips grinding against my palm. Her head falls back, water streaming down her face and neck. Her hands grip my upper arms, nails digging in for purchase.
“Sterling—”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t stop.”
I don’t. I curl my fingers and press my thumb against her clit, and she shudders, her whole body tightening around me. I watch her face the whole time, eyes closed, mouth open, the lines of stress and fear melted away by the heat and need.
She comes, hard, her body clamps down like a vice, spasming around my fingers. The sound she makes is a half-laugh, half-sob. She trembles for a long time, water and sweat and everything in between mixing on her skin.
She pulls me in and kisses me, her hands roaming down my chest, my stomach, then lower. She wraps her fingers around my cock, stroking me with the same deliberate intensity she brings to her art. I’m so hard it hurts, every nerve in my body tuned to the feeling of her touch.
Then, without warning, she drops to her knees on the tile, her hands gripping my thighs as she takes my cock in one smooth swallow.
The heat, the suction, the way her tongue moves—it’s almost too much.
I grip the edge of the glass door to steady myself, but she doesn’t let up, working me with ruthless precision.
“Fuuuck.”
Her mouth is a wet, scorching heaven, her lips a tight seal as she bobs her head, taking me to the back of her throat like it’s nothing. I know I can’t last.
“Wait…” My voice is low, raw. “If you don’t stop….” I’m white knuckling the glass door fighting against my instinct to grab her head. “I’m going to come down your throat.”
I warn her, but she just looks up at me and moans, eyes wide and defiant. She keeps going, cheeks hollowing around me and it undoes me. I come with a groan, hips bucking forward, and she swallows it all.
I haul her up and her mouth finds mine, warm and insistent, the taste of cedar and salt and something sharp beneath it.
I kiss her back, less careful this time.
My hands find the curve of her ass, then the small of her back, then the backs of her thighs as I lift her off the ground and press her against the tile.
She hooks her legs around me, her heels digging into my thighs. Her arms come up around my neck, dragging her nails through the damp mess of my hair. For a second, the only sound in the world is the drumming of the water and the soft, breathless noise she makes when I bite her lower lip.
“Don’t stop,” she says.
I don’t. I push into her slowly, feeling every inch of resistance give way, feeling her stretch around me as she exhales a long, shaking breath into the hollow of my throat.
When I’m fully inside her, we both go still for a moment.
Her fingers tighten in my hair. The water drums against the glass.
Then she tilts her hips, urging me forward, and I start to move.
It’s slow at first. Long, deliberate strokes, pulling back until I’m nearly out of her and then pressing forward again, feeling her grip tighten each time I bottom out.
She makes a sound low in her throat, not quite a moan, more like something she’s trying to hold back. I do it again and she stops trying.
Her hips meet mine, matching the rhythm, and I brace one hand against the tile wall above her shoulder. The other I keep at her waist, thumb pressed into the soft skin just above her hip. I can feel her pulse there, or maybe that’s mine. Hard to tell.
“There,” she says, and I adjust the angle slightly, and she says it again, quieter, more to herself than to me.
The water’s going cold. Neither of us mentions it.
I pick up the pace and she arches into me, her head falling back against the tile, throat exposed. I press my mouth to it, feel her swallow. Her nails drag down the back of my neck and I hiss through my teeth and move harder and she pulls me closer instead of away.
“Look at me,” she says.
I lift my head. Her eyes are open, dark, fixed on mine. There’s something unguarded in her face that I don’t think she means to show me. I hold her gaze anyway. She doesn’t look away.
Her breath comes faster. Her thighs tighten around me.
“Oh God. Sterling Please. Don’t stop,” she says again, and her voice has gone rough at the edges.
I don’t stop even when she starts scream-sobbing and clinging to me. I only slow down and fuck her through her climax. The rhythmic pulsing of her around my cock tips me over the edge and I come, hard. So hard my knees almost give out, and I have to lean into her harder to stop from collapsing.
She goes quiet after, just breathing, her head nestled against my shoulder and the curve of my neck. The water’s still running. I can feel her pulse against my chest, fast and then slower.
I don’t say anything. Neither does she. Because she is asleep.
I take a moment and stifle a laugh because, I have never, not once in all my time of hoe saving, put a woman to sleep. I reach over and turn the water off with one hand before stepping out of the shower.
The fact that I am semi hard and still buried in her is not lost on me when I grab the towels and toss one over her back and shoulders before setting her down on the edge of the bathroom sink. I look at my reflection in the mirror, see her in my arms and know that this changed something in me.
I carry her to bed.
I put her down on my side of it, which I do not point out and she does not mention, and she is asleep before I get the light off, curled on her side with one hand under her cheek and the other flung out into the space where I am about to be.
I stand there in the dark for a second longer than I need to.
Somewhere out there is a report I have to write and a family I have to think about and a chief who is going to ask me on Monday how I’m doing in a tone that means he already knows.
None of it is gone. That is not how any of this works. You do not get to wash it off.
But my hands are clean, and there is somebody in my bed who put them under the water and held onto them until they were, and I have run out of ways to call that anything other than what it is.
I get in beside her. She turns into me in her sleep without waking, the way I want her to every night for the rest of my life, and I put my arm over her and my face in her wet hair.
Six years.
I could have said something six years ago.