New York, New York #7
“I thought it was broken.”
Noah shook his head. “I doubt it will fully come back unless we start acting again. But I think probably when we have sex—”
His hands stopped moving, and he cleared his throat. “If we have sex,” he amended, and AJ felt another surge of intense lust, this time coupled with his embarrassment.
She lifted her gaze and felt the ambient sound in the room go down half a decibel. She watched his Adam’s apple throb as he read her.
“Hand me a towel?” she asked.
Her skin tingled as he dropped his hands and pulled himself to his feet. As he crossed the bathroom, AJ rose out of the water using the sides of the tub for support.
The bathroom air was cool by comparison, and AJ felt her nipples harden. Feet still submerged, she watched Noah grab a towel off the rack and walk back to her.
Even with the added height of the tub, he was considerably taller.
His eyes grew large as he took in the glaze on her skin.
Then he opened the towel and wrapped it around her tight.
He didn’t let go, and for a moment they both stood mesmerized by the tendons on the back of his hand, holding the towel in place.
When he lifted his eyes to hers, they were burning.
“Are we doing this?” he asked calmly. AJ felt a tug; after last night, he wanted to prove he could control himself.
And another swell of heat, this time her own. “Yes.”
Noah let go of the towel and took her face in both his hands. AJ shivered as she felt the rush of his emotions: a bounding feeling, a boundless one. This was something new. This was hope.
AJ held her breath as his thumbs traced her cheekbones, his fingertips combing into her hair. His eyes were black, unguarded, his need so palpable AJ felt almost weak from it. As his hand swept the column of her spine, the towel hit the water with a billowy puff.
The air between them was giving now. Their next inhalation would belong to them both. AJ was still breathing it in as Noah’s lips tenderly brushed across hers.
And then he was kissing her as if he’d never stopped, as if the year and a half that had passed since they’d kissed at SNL had been a thirty-second delay, and everything that had transpired between then and now had been an illusion.
AJ was up on her tiptoes in an instant, pressing herself into the warm expanse of his chest, feeling the hard bulge in his pants as his enormous hands slid lower to cup her backside, pulling her into him. AJ gasped.
He helped her from the tub and led her from the bathroom to the bed, pushing her down with one hand, reaching for the light with the other.
AJ was glad for the darkness. She felt his legs, now bare, swing onto the mattress, felt his mouth hot on her breast. He groaned, his body shaking with anticipation.
AJ carded her fingers through his hair, pulling him up to her.
She brought his lips to hers. She closed her eyes.
The force of him; the way he ground into her, the way his thighs felt pressing between her own.
It wasn’t their first time doing this, but it was their first time that didn’t feel like their last time, and AJ didn’t want to savor it, she didn’t want to wait.
She reached for him under the covers, helping him inside of her, and yes, this. Noah moaned as he filled her.
Then he began to move, his lips on hers, and now AJ understood why they had waited to kiss.
Because this was what kissing was supposed to be, ease and urgency, conflagration and communion, and through it, their joining was transcending flesh and bone.
This was luminosity, and in a flash, the radiance of it exposed the rest of AJ’s experience as a wasteland.
Now she was feeling things she didn’t want to feel, bitter things, like how it hadn’t been thirty seconds since they’d done this, but six years; six years of forcing herself through endless encounters that could never be right because they weren’t with him.
Noah sensed the shift in her immediately. Above her, he stilled.
“Age?”
Fuck.
They were connected, and he was examining her, and there was no way to hide. So long a drought had left its mark. He could sense the wasteland now; he knew how dead she was inside.
“Sorry.” AJ turned her head away as hot tears ran down her cheeks, into her ears, into her hair.
Noah reached for her face, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly. “You can say it.”
The grief that she’d pushed down for so long was overwhelming every other sense.
“It was so many nights—” she sobbed. So many nights not with him, each as empty and long as the last. And the days. How many days could have been like this one?
“I know,” he said softly. “I know.”
AJ could hardly speak, her breaths were coming so fast. “This can’t be real.”
“It is,” said Noah urgently. “Look at me.”
AJ shook her head. She felt strangled by sorrow. “I’m all fucked-up.”
Noah’s forehead pressed into her temple. “So am I,” he said. “Please. Look at me.”
But she couldn’t. Her eyes jammed shut as uncontrollable anguish opened inside her, a fissure cracking every arid surface. This pain was all she was. It was all she would ever be. It was going to consume her, then it was going to void her entirely.
But Noah would not let her go. Through the breach, he stayed present, witnessing it all. Gradually, her cries began to ebb. She felt his lips brush her tears. AJ took one uneven breath, and then another. Noah shifted slightly; somehow, he was still hard inside her.
“Look at me,” he said quietly. There was something raw in the quality of his voice that reached her. Slowly, AJ met his gaze.
In the light of the moonlit window, his brow furrowed, a jagged edge to his cheek. His lips were swollen and sensual, but in his eyes AJ saw the haunted look she’d glimpsed onstage at Blue Con. His thumb swept her cheekbone, grasping her face.
“I’m here,” he said.
And he was. At last, AJ could sense him. Noah. AJ could hardly get her bearings. The lake of ash had been churned up, as if by a tornado. There was no order now, the plan lay in disarray. The dome was gone, its inhabitants loose in the miasma. He didn’t know which way was up.
She had done this. She gazed up at him in remorse.
He bent forward and kissed her gently, telling her it was okay.
“I’ve been living this way for so long, I don’t know anything else. I can’t promise this will work. But I’ll give it my best shot,” he said. “This is real. It was from the start.”
He pressed his lips to hers, and AJ felt a feeling as big as the sky.
It had been there from the very first day they had connected, so much a part of him AJ had taken it for his essential self.
She could feel it bright now, as if a current had been switched on.
This feeling was woven into everything he was. This feeling was what made him.
And he told her, “I love you.”
AJ pulled back and looked into his eyes. They were wet with emotion.
“I love you,” he repeated. He drew breath, tears rolling down his cheeks. “I always have.”
AJ was crying now too. She touched his face. “I love you so fucking much.”
They both laughed at the visceral relief of getting to say it. It had been on the tip of AJ’s tongue every time she’d looked at him for the last thirteen years. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
Then, he kissed her, this time in hunger, and AJ was watching him do it, watching his shoulders curve above her, watching the moonlight on his clavicle.
He thrust once into her, and AJ felt a tremor of pleasure that arched her back.
His lips caressed her neck as he thrust again, this time deeper, and both of them gasped.
AJ leaned forward so that their noses were touching.
“Noah.”
“I’m here,” he whispered.
AJ took the expanse of his shoulders in her hands.
As she arched against him again, she caught a draft of his energy, violent and deep as the ocean.
There was no end to what he wanted from her, no way to slake his need.
The longer he had suppressed it, the more powerful it had grown, and it was free now, and he could not put it back.
AJ wanted all of it. Here was the rain, here was the flood. She kissed him hard until he gasped.
He eased her back down, one of his arms curving under her back, the other taking her hand in his.
Then he began to move inside her, masterfully, then wantonly, and AJ’s cells cried out It’s you as her body fused with his.
His breath was labored now, his features transmuting into something so beautiful it was almost inhuman. AJ trembled.
“Noah—”
He kissed her, and she convulsed around him. He groaned from deep in his throat.
“I’m here.”
Their eyes met, and there he was, the boy with whom she’d danced a thousand dances, and here she was, the girl who had loved him so purely. For just a brief moment, they were back in each other’s arms, whole and intact and perfect. Then pleasure sent them into oblivion.
After, they lay peaceful by the light of the sconces, AJ’s head on his chest. She loved the sound of his heart. Its rhythm was slow now, calm. Gradually, Noah’s hand grasped her shoulder blade.
“Question for you,” he said.
“Shoot,” said AJ, not lifting her head.
Noah cleared his throat. “What are you doing this summer?”
AJ stilled. “I was thinking about making a few lanyards.”
“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” said Noah. Then, “Can you do that from here?”
A warm light flooded AJ. She nodded into his chest. She was too happy to speak.
The next day, they drove into the city to collect some of her belongings. Noah was eager to see her space, so they left the car parked in a loading zone and went up to her apartment together.
As AJ threw a pile of T-shirts into a duffel, Noah perused the spare, sunny one-bedroom with a critical eye. When AJ emerged with her bag, she found him assessing the kitchen cabinets.
“This is a bachelor pad,” he announced, holding up her single mug.