Chapter 15 The Weight Of Water
The Weight Of Water
~OCTAVIA~
“The ice never forgets a fall. Neither does a body that’s been denied what it was built to crave.”
Iwas on Luka’s lap before the bedroom door even clicked shut behind us.
The room itself was a blur—high ceilings, exposed beams the color of dark honey, a king-sized bed that looked like it had never been touched by anything more chaotic than a perfectly folded duvet.
Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a snow-dusted Vermont hillside I’d never seen before.
None of it registered. Not the faint scent of fresh linen clinging to the sheets, not the low hum of the heating system, not the way the moonlight sliced through half-drawn blinds and painted silver bars across the hardwood.
All I registered was Luka beneath me: thighs like warm steel, chest rising and falling against my breasts, the thick, insistent ridge of his cock trapped behind denim and pressing right where my body had decided it needed him most. My knees dug into the mattress on either side of his hips.
My dress had ridden up to my waist. The soaked lace of my thong dragged across the rough fabric of his jeans with every tiny, involuntary roll of my pelvis, and the friction was obscene—too rough, too perfect, not enough, never enough.
My heat had officially stopped asking permission.
It roared through my veins like a triple axel gone wrong: that same stomach-dropping lurch, that same split-second of weightlessness before gravity remembered its job.
Except this time the landing wasn’t pain.
This time the landing was need. Raw. Relentless.
Hornier than any heat I’d ever survived, and I’d survived plenty.
My skin felt two sizes too small. My nipples ached against the thin fabric of my dress.
Between my thighs, slick had already soaked through the lace and was painting a wet stripe across the front of Luka’s jeans like a claim I hadn’t consciously decided to stake.
I wondered, distantly, if it was him—the way his rain-soaked-stone scent wrapped around me like an old blanket I’d cried into for five years. Or if it was the knowledge that four Alphas were now legally, biologically, mine for the next forty-eight hours.
Four different signatures circling me like planets around a sun that had just gone supernova.
The idea of it—of being able to reach out and take whichever one I wanted, whenever I wanted, no remorse, no breaks, no performance review waiting on the other side—made my inner walls clench around nothing and my breath hitch so hard Luka’s hands tightened on my waist.
“Easy,” he murmured, voice gravel-rough. He tried to press a chilled water bottle to my lips again. The plastic was beaded with condensation. “You’re burning up. Drink.”
I turned my face away like the bottle had personally insulted my ancestors.
“I don’t want water.”
“You need it.”
“I need you inside me.” The words left my mouth before my brain could vote. My voice had gone husky, low, the Omega register that used to make his pupils blow wide in the past. “I need you stretching me open until I forget every single day I spent without this. I need—”
He cut me off with his mouth.
Not gentle. Not the careful, exploratory kiss of a man testing boundaries.
This was five years of silence compressed into one savage collision—teeth clicking, tongues sliding, the faint metallic taste of the tequila we’d shared earlier still clinging to him.
I moaned into it, hands fisting his shirt, hips rolling in a slow, filthy figure-eight that dragged my clit along the hard line of his cock and made stars burst behind my eyelids.
He tasted like every bad decision I’d ever loved making.
Rain on granite after a storm. Clove smoke curling from an expensive candle.
Dark chocolate left to melt on the tongue until it turned bitter-sweet.
Beneath it all, the unmistakable thread of aroused Alpha—salt and musk and something darker that made my preheat-drunk brain catalog it the way I used to catalog blade edges: inside, outside, forward, backward, clean, dirty, mine.
I broke the kiss only because oxygen was a coward.
My lips felt swollen, glossy. When I looked down, his throat was already blooming with the first of what I planned to make a full constellation.
One hickey right over his pulse—purple-red, messy edges where my teeth had dragged.
Another just beneath his jaw, smaller, sharper.
I bit my bottom lip, tasting the faint copper of where I’d bitten too hard earlier, and wondered where to mark next.
Collarbone? The thick tendon that ran into his shoulder?
The place where his neck met his ear, the spot that used to make him growl my name like a prayer?
Luka’s green eyes were heavy-lidded, lashes spiked from the shower we hadn’t taken yet. His chuckle was low, wrecked.
“You gonna keep going until I look like I lost a fight with a curling iron?”
“Maybe.” I traced the darkest mark with one fingernail, watching the skin flush darker under my touch. “Where should I bite next?”
He laughed again—genuine, surprised, the sound vibrating through his chest and straight into my core.
“Shower first.”
I pouted. Full, theatrical, the same expression I used to give judges when they dared deduct for a wobbly landing.
“We’re gonna get sweaty anyway.”
“I’m aware.” His grin was slow, dangerous, the one that used to make my knees forget how to hold an arabesque.
“But I know you. You always shower after the club. Always. Even when your feet are bleeding through your heels, and you’re half-dead on your feet.
You still drag yourself into the bathroom, wash the night off, and crawl into bed smelling like hotel soap and victory. ”
My heart did something traitorous—squeezed, fluttered, remembered every single time he’d been right about me. I grabbed his cheeks with both hands, squishing lightly until his mouth puckered like a fish. Leaned in until our noses brushed and our breath mingled.
“You remember the strangest things, Petrov.”
“Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?” His voice had gone soft around the edges, the way it only ever did for me.
“Maybe.” I huffed, then kissed him—gentler this time. Just lips. Just the barest press.
A thank-you wrapped in affection I wasn’t ready to name. He chuckled into my mouth, kissing me back with the same careful reverence, and for one heartbeat the heat receded enough for me to feel the weight of five lost years sitting between us like an unlanded throw.
Then the haze surged back.
I forgot what he’d wanted me to do. Forgot the water. Forgot everything except the way his cock twitched beneath me when I rolled my hips again.
He scooped me up like I weighed nothing.
One fluid motion—goaltender strength, the same power that had once stopped 100-mile-an-hour slap shots now cradling an Omega in preheat like she was made of spun glass and bad decisions.
My legs wrapped his waist automatically.
My arms looped his neck. I was still in the ridiculous black dress, still dripping slick down my thighs, still biting another hickey into the thick muscle of his shoulder while he carried me across the room like a man multitasking between saving the game and winning the girl.
“What are you doing?” I mumbled against his skin, teeth still grazing.
“Why don’t we enjoy a shower together, hmm?”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him I just wanted to fuck—hard, fast, right here on the bed that smelled like clean cotton and possibility.
But the idea of him naked under running water, after five years of only seeing him in grainy game footage and fever-dream memories…
that was dangerous. Tempting. The kind of temptation that made my core clench and my breath catch.
“Fine,” I grumbled, sucking one last bruise into the curve where shoulder met neck. “But I’m leaving more of these.”
“Poor me, looking like a walking tree carrying a very possessive squirrel,” he mutters humbly, but his arms tightened around me and I felt the smile in his voice.
The bathroom was all slate and glass and soft lighting that clicked on automatically.
He set me on the vanity, cold marble kissing the backs of my thighs.
Then he stripped me—dress up and over my head in one smooth motion, bra unhooked with two fingers, thong peeled away with a wet sound that should have embarrassed me and only made me wetter.
He looked at the soaked lace like it had personally offended him.
I kicked off my heels. Watched him shove his own clothes away—black shirt, jeans, boxer briefs—until he stood naked and glorious and hard. His cock was flushed dark, veined, the head already glistening. I reached for it.
He caught my wrist again.
“Shower.”
I whined.
He turned the water on.
I stepped under before it warmed.
Cold.
Bliss.
The spray hit my overheated skin like a triple Lutz landing clean—shock, relief, the sudden clarity of edges biting ice. Goosebumps raced across my breasts. My nipples tightened to aching points. I tipped my face into the stream and moaned like the water was fucking me instead of him.
Luka stepped in behind me.
Chest to my back. Cock sliding along the cleft of my ass. Hands bracketing my hips like he was afraid I’d disappear.
We kissed under the spray—messy, open-mouthed, tongues twisting, teeth nipping. My arms wound around his neck; my legs hooked his waist again. He lifted me effortlessly, palms spreading my ass, fingers digging into the flesh he’d always worshipped like it was the only medal he’d ever wanted.
The second shower head kicked on. Warmer now. Not hot—just blessedly temperate. Steam rose. My body sighed.
Between kisses I managed, “You okay with it cold earlier?”
“Anything for my Diamond.”
I pouted against his mouth.
“Warm it up a little. I’m thinking straight for maybe forty seconds total tonight.”
He chuckled—low, fond—reached past me, adjusted the dial. Steam thickened.
Better.
My fingers slid into his wet hair—longer than I remembered, dark navy strands plastered to his skull. I tugged. He growled. I tugged harder, rolling my hips so the head of his cock dragged through my folds without entering. Slick mixed with water, making everything slippery, obscene.
We kissed until time lost meaning.
I don’t remember turning the water off.
Don’t remember the towel that somehow ended up around us both.
Don’t remember the walk to the bed.
One heartbeat we were steam and tongues and wandering hands; the next I was on my back on cool sheets, hair fanning wet across the pillow, and Luka was hovering above me ripping open a condom packet with his teeth like a man who’d waited five years for permission.
I grinned up at him—feral, needy, the same grin I used to flash at the boards right before a throw quad I knew would land perfect.
“Why the fuck would you need that?”
Smirk. Slow. Dangerous.
“You on birth control?”
I arched beneath him, breasts brushing his chest.
“What if I wasn’t?”
He leaned down. Caught my bottom lip between his teeth. Gentle tug.
“Then I’d definitely be wearing one. I already know I can’t pull out when it comes to you.”
My inner walls fluttered at the raw honesty in his voice.
“Oh?” I dragged my nails lightly down his chest—over the ridges of abs carved by years of butterfly drops and T-push recoveries, through the dark trail of hair that disappeared beneath the condom he was rolling on with practiced efficiency. “But everyone else gets the condom rule?”
“Everyone else gets the condom rule.” He stroked himself once, twice, spreading the slick that had already leaked through the latex. “No one else has ever been worth going bare. No one else has ever been you.”
I hooked my legs around his waist and pulled.
“So I’m special, huh?”
“Fuck yeah.” His gaze raked me—slow, possessive, reverent.
From the wet curls clinging to my temples, down the flushed column of my throat, across breasts that rose and fell with every shallow breath, to the glistening folds he was teasing with the head of his cock.
“Now are you gonna let me fuck you? Because you’re definitely warmed up. ”
I giggled—high, breathless, slightly hysterical with need.
“Fuck yeah. I’ve missed your fucking cock.”
He groaned like I’d body-checked him into the boards.
Then he dropped down and kissed me—long, hard, devastating. One hand braced beside my head; the other gripped the base of his shaft, stroking once, twice, spreading the slick that had leaked through the condom.
He dragged the head through my folds.
I whimpered.
Soaked. Glistening. Puffy. Every pass of his cockhead over my clit made my hips jerk.
“Fuck, you’re drenched,” he muttered. “Look at this pretty cunt trying to suck me in.”
“Stop teasing.”
“Not teasing.” He notched himself at my entrance. “Savoring.”
Then he pushed.
Slow.
Steady.
Stretching.
My head fell back on a long, broken moan.
God.
So full.
So right.
He sank deeper. Deeper. Until his pelvis kissed mine and we both froze—breathing hard, trembling.
“Fuck,” he gritted. “So good. So fucking tight. Still perfect.”
I wrapped my arms around his neck. Pulled him down until our foreheads touched.
Against his lips—quiet, almost shy—I whispered, “I missed you.”
He cursed. Low. Rough. Then kissed me again—longer, harder, hungrier. I felt his cock throb inside me. Twitch. Swell.
He broke the kiss. Forehead still pressed to mine.
“You say shit like that and I’m gonna feel worse than I already do for fucking up once.”
I smiled—small, wicked.
“You gonna fumble your Diamond again?”
He dropped his face to my neck. Bit the soft flesh where shoulder met throat—not hard enough to mark, just enough to make pleasure spike straight to my core.
My pussy quaked around him.
“Fucking never,” he growled against my skin.
I laughed—breathless.
“Yeah right. I don’t believe you.”
He lifted his head. Eyes dark. Serious.
“What’ll make you believe me?”
I turned my face. Kissed the left side of his neck—right over the pulse.
“My lips tattooed here would suffice.”
Smirk.
“Not sure the Olympics allow visible tattoos.”
“Liar.” I giggled. “You gonna remember I asked?”
“Fuck yeah.”
“You sure?”
He thrust once—hard, deep, deliberate.
I whimpered. Back arching.
He kissed me brutally.
“You’re desperate for this cock. No way you’re letting me walk away, are you?”
“No,” I gasped. “Fuck—move. Please.”
Smirk widened. Dangerous.
“You’re gonna be an obedient, submissive little Omega just for me, right?”
I pouted.
“Only a little.”
He chuckled—low, velvet.
“Good girl.”
The praise hit like lightning. My spine quivered. My cunt clamped.
He leaned toward my ear.
“Let’s get moving.”