28. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
I left the bathroom door open on purpose.
The shower was already running, steam starting to curl through the room, when I heard his footsteps in the hallway. I stepped under the spray and let the hot water sluice over me, washing away the first layer of flour that had caked onto my skin.
“Sabrina?” His voice came from the doorway.
“In here.”
“I noticed. The door’s open.”
“I noticed that too.”
A pause. “Can I join you?”
I wiped water from my eyes and looked at him through the glass door of the shower. He was still covered in flour, white powder streaked through his dark hair and dusted across his shoulders. He looked ridiculous and hopeful and impossibly attractive all at once.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “The open door was an invitation.”
He was undressed and stepping into the shower before I finished the sentence.
I let my eyes take the scenic route on the way down and didn’t apologize for it: the wet shove of his hair off his forehead, water sheeting down his chest, the hard cut of muscle at his hips angling down toward the obvious, and lower, the very obvious fact that he’d been thinking about this as long as I had.
My thighs pressed together under the spray.
Weeks of biting this back, and I was done biting it back.
“Eager,” I observed.
“I’ve been thinking about this since you threw flour at my chest.”
“That was foreplay?”
“Everything you do is foreplay. You could be reading a phone book and I’d find it attractive.”
“Nobody reads phone books anymore.”
“You could be scrolling through a phone book app, then. Very slowly. With that little furrow between your eyebrows you get when you’re concentrating.”
“I don’t furrow.”
“You absolutely furrow. It’s adorable.”
The shower was big enough for both of us, which was good because Killian took up a lot of space. He stepped under the spray and let the water run over him, flour turning to paste and then washing away in rivulets.
“You look like a melting snowman,” I said.
“You look like a very sexy ghost.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You’re pale and ethereal and covered in white powder. Ghost adjacent, at minimum.”
I grabbed the shampoo and squirted some into my palm. “Turn around. I’ll do your hair.”
He turned obediently, and I worked the shampoo through his hair, scrubbing at the flour that had gotten embedded in the strands. His head dropped back into my hands, and he made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a purr.
“That feels incredible.”
“It’s just shampoo.”
“It’s your hands. They could do anything and it would feel incredible.”
I scratched my nails lightly across his scalp, and his whole body shuddered.
“Careful,” he said, his voice rougher now. “We’re supposed to be getting clean.”
“Who said anything about getting clean?”
I rinsed the shampoo from his hair and then pressed myself against his back, my arms wrapping around his waist. I could feel him react immediately, his body tensing, his breath catching.
“Sabrina.”
“Hmm?”
“If you keep doing that, we’re going to be in this shower for a very long time.”
“Sounds like a problem.”
“It’s not a problem. It’s just a statement of fact.” He turned in my arms and looked down at me, water streaming over both of us. “I’ve wanted my mouth on you since you walked out of that kitchen. Let me.”
“I already feel good.”
“Let me get on my knees and make you scream loud enough that the neighbors file a complaint.”
He kissed me then, slow and deep, his hands coming up to cradle my face. The water was hot on my back, but his mouth was hotter, and I melted into him without thinking.
“I love you,” he said against my lips. “Have I mentioned that recently?”
“You might have brought it up once or twice.”
“Good. I plan to keep mentioning it until you’re sick of hearing it.”
“I’ll never be sick of hearing it.”
“Then I’ll just keep saying it forever.”
His hands slid down my body, mapping familiar territory with new reverence. He touched me everywhere, gentle and unhurried. We had all the time in the world now, and we both knew it.
“Even covered in flour,” he murmured, his mouth following the path his hands had taken. “Especially covered in flour. I should start flour fights more often.”
“You started nothing. I started the flour fight.”
“I provoked you with my excessive spreadsheet love. It was premeditated flour warfare on my part.”
I laughed, and he looked up at me with delight.
“I love that sound,” he said. “I love making you laugh.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m in love. Same thing.”
He dropped to his knees on the shower floor, and my laugh turned into a gasp as his mouth found me. The water cascaded over his shoulders while his tongue worked magic, and I braced myself against the tile wall and tried to remember how to breathe.
“Killian.”
“Shh. Let me.”
His hands gripped my hips, steadying me as my legs started to tremble. He knew exactly what I needed, exactly how to touch me, and he played my body with the same focused precision he brought to everything that mattered to him.
“That’s it,” he said against my thigh. “Feel how wet you are for me? Grind on my tongue. Don’t be polite about it.”
“Less talking,” I gasped. “More of whatever you were just doing.”
“Bossy. I like it.”
I grabbed his hair and pulled, and he laughed against me, and the vibration of it shot straight through me and made my hips jerk into his mouth. He redoubled his efforts, and I stopped being able to form words at all.
It built slow and then folded me in half all at once, and I came against his mouth loud enough to echo off the tile, past caring who heard. Killian held me through it, hands gentle on my hips, mouth soft now, easing me down.
“There she is,” he said, rising to his feet and pulling me into his arms. “That never gets less unbelievable. Watching you come undone for me.”
“You’re biased.”
“Deeply. Permanently. Without apology.”
He was hard against my stomach, and I reached down to wrap my hand around him. His breath hissed out between his teeth.
“Your turn,” I said.
“That isn’t a debt.”
“I want to.” I stroked him slowly, watching his face, enjoying the way his control frayed at the edges. “Unless you’d rather wait?”
“I would very much not rather wait.”
“Good.” But I didn’t want my hand and neither did he, and we both knew it. I turned and braced my palms on the cold tile, looked back at him over my shoulder through the steam, and watched his restraint die where he stood. “Killian. I’m not going to break. Stop deciding for me and get inside me.”
He was on me in a heartbeat, one arm banding across my hips to angle me, his other hand flattening between my shoulder blades. “You’re going to be the death of me,” he said against the back of my neck, and then he pushed in, slow and deep and devastating, and the sound I made fogged the glass.
“That’s it,” he breathed, hips rolling, one hand sliding around to where I needed it.
“You asked me to stop being careful and I heard you. This what you wanted? Me buried in you against the tile, telling you exactly how good your cunt feels while you fall apart?” He wasn’t careful.
He talked me through every second of it, filthy and relentless, promising all the ways he’d spend the rest of his life doing exactly this, until I came so hard my legs quit and he had to hold me up on his cock to work me through it, following me over with my name breaking apart in his mouth.
We stood under the cooling water a while, just breathing together, wrung out and grinning like idiots.
“We should actually get clean now,” I said eventually. “Before the water goes completely cold.”
“Valid point.”
But instead of letting me wash myself, he took the soap from my hands.
“Let me.”
He washed me with absurd tenderness, treating me as the most precious, breakable thing in the house.
He soaped my shoulders and my arms and my back, his hands sliding over my skin with reverent attention.
When he got to my stomach, he paused, his palm resting over the gentle curve where our baby was growing.
“Hi in there,” he said softly. “Your mom and I are being disgustingly domestic. You’ll get used to it.”
“Don’t traumatize the baby.”
“The baby can’t hear me yet. I checked.”
“You researched fetal hearing development?”
“I researched everything. There’s a spreadsheet.”
“Of course there is.”
He finished washing me and then turned me around to work on my hair. The shampoo smelled like vanilla and something floral, and his fingers on my scalp were strong and sure and absolutely devastating.
“This is very good,” I admitted, my eyes closed, my head tipped back into his hands.
“I know. I’ve been practicing.”
“Practicing shampooing?”
“Practicing taking care of you. I want to be good at it.”
The sincerity in his voice made my throat tight. This man, who could barely remember to eat lunch when he was working, who had spent years disappearing into his lab and leaving me to manage everything alone, was learning how to wash my hair because he wanted to take care of me.
He rinsed the shampoo out carefully, making sure to get all the suds, and then conditioned my hair with the same attention. By the time he was done, the water had gone genuinely cold, and we were both shivering.
“Okay, out,” I said. “Before we freeze to death.”
He turned off the water and grabbed a towel from the rack. But instead of handing it to me, he dried me himself, patting gently at my skin, wrapping my hair in a separate towel.
“I can do that myself, you know.”
“I know. But I want to.”
When I was dry, he picked me up without warning.
“Killian! I can walk.”
“I know you can walk. Let me anyway.”
He walked me down the hall and set me on the bed with the same terrible care he did everything now, then climbed in beside me and pulled the covers over both of us, his body curving around mine.
His hand found my stomach again, tracing the barely-there curve with gentle fingers.
“I still don’t understand how I ended up with you,” he said quietly.
I smacked his shoulder. “Don’t fish.”
“I’m not fishing. I’m marveling. There’s a difference.”
“I married you because you’re brilliant and kind and you make me laugh.”
“You also married me because I’m good in the shower.”
“That wasn’t a factor in my decision making.”
“It should have been. I’m very talented.”
I kissed him quiet, and he melted into it immediately, his hand still resting on my stomach.
“I love you,” he said when we finally pulled apart. “Both of you. All three of you, actually, if we’re counting Ivy.”
“We should probably count Ivy.”
“Then all three of you. My whole family. My whole world.”
I tucked my head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, and felt, for the first time in a long time, like everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.
“Go to sleep,” I said. “We have the rest of our lives to be disgustingly domestic.”
“Every day of them?”
“Every single one.”
He pressed his lips to my hair and pulled me closer, and we fell asleep tangled together, warm and clean and home.