Chapter 17 #2
Mara pressed her hands over her face. She was laughing and shaking and her eyes were stinging and she felt unmoored, completely outside the boundaries of anything she'd experienced before.
She'd spent her entire adult life in control of her body, training it, disciplining it, demanding precision and obedience.
And now that body had responded in a way she'd never known it could, had released with a force that was primal and uncontrollable and utterly outside the jurisdiction of discipline or composure.
Forty-eight years old. Forty-eight years old and she was discovering things about her own body that she hadn't known existed, and the woman who was showing her was twenty-eight and grinning against her neck with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known all along what Mara was capable of.
"I didn't even know I could do that," Mara whispered.
"I had a feeling." Lex kissed her jaw. "You hold everything so tight. When you finally let go, the release is going to be proportional."
Lex shifted beside her, and Mara felt the tension in Lex's body, the controlled restraint that told her Lex was aroused to the point of pain. Lex had given without taking, every time now, and the generosity of it, the patience, made Mara's chest ache with a tenderness that frightened her.
“I want to please you, Lex. It’s just..” Mara’s voice trailed off.
Mara's pulse spiked. Desire and anxiety tangled together in her chest. It had been so long.
Years of turning away before she got this far, and any memory she had was distant and uncertain, and she was suddenly afraid of being terrible at sex, of disappointing this woman who had just made her feel things she'd never imagined.
" I haven't done it in a very long time. I'm not sure I remember how.”
"Stop." Lex's hand found her jaw, tilting her face up. Her dark eyes were warm and steady and free of judgment. "Stop overthinking. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to perform. All you have to do is open your mouth and I'll do the rest."
The simplicity of it cut through Mara's anxiety like a blade.
Not because it minimized the act but because it stripped away the performance anxiety, the pressure to be skilled or experienced, and replaced it with a single elemental truth: presence.
Be here. Open your mouth. Let me feel good with you.
She nodded. Her heart was racing but the fear was receding, replaced by curiosity and desire and a fierce, surprising need to make this woman feel what Mara had felt last night and this morning. To give back. To be more than the one who received.
Lex moved up the bed, her body sliding over Mara's, and positioned herself above Mara's face, her knees on either side of Mara's head.
She lowered herself slowly, and Mara looked up at her, at the strong thighs and the flat stomach and the dark hair between her legs and the tattoo that curved along her hip, and her mouth watered and her fear dissolved and instinct took over.
She opened her mouth and tasted Lex for the first time, and the flavor was warm and heady.
Lex hissed above her, her hands bracing against the headboard, and began to move.
Rolling her hips in slow, deliberate waves, grinding down against Mara's mouth with a rhythm that was both demanding and controlled.
"That's it," Lex breathed. Her voice was raw, her guard stripped bare, and the sound of Lex losing control was the most erotic thing Mara had ever heard. "Your mouth is perfect. Don't stop."
Mara didn't stop. She let her tongue follow Lex's movement, let Lex set the pace, let her own instincts guide her.
She pressed her tongue flat and then circled and then pressed again, and each adjustment drew a different sound from Lex, a gasp or a moan or a sharp intake of breath that told Mara she was doing it right.
"Fuck." Lex's hips moved faster. Her thighs trembled against Mara's ears and her fingers gripped the headboard so hard her knuckles went white. "Mara. I'm going to come. Don't stop. Please don't stop."
Mara didn't stop. She gripped Lex's thighs and held on and kept her mouth moving and felt Lex's body tighten above her like a bowstring drawn to its limit.
Lex came hard. Her whole body seized, her back arching, a raw, broken sound tearing from her throat as the orgasm ripped through her.
She ground down against Mara's mouth and Mara tasted her release, warm and salt-sweet, and kept her mouth gentle through the aftershocks, easing Lex down with soft, slow strokes until the trembling subsided.
Lex collapsed beside her on the bed, boneless and gasping, her dark hair splayed across the pillow, her body still shaking with aftershocks.
They lay there in the tangle of soaked sheets, both breathing hard, both flushed and trembling and spent.
Goldie, who had slept through the entire thing from the other bed, raised her head and yawned and settled back down with the serene indifference of a creature unburdened by human complications.
The morning light had shifted from gold to white, the sun climbing higher beyond the curtains, and the room was thick with sex, sweat, the warm clean scent of Lex's skin.
Lex's arm came around Mara's waist and pulled her close.
Mara turned into the embrace, pressing her face against Lex's chest, feeling the rapid thud of Lex's heart gradually slowing beneath her cheek.
Lex's hand found her hair and stroked it, slow and gentle, and the tenderness of the gesture undid the last knot in Mara's chest, the one she'd been holding together with force of will.
The weight of it anchored her to the present, and the steady beat of Lex's heart beneath her ear was the most comforting sound she'd heard in twenty years.
Maybe ever. She'd spent her entire adult life being the strong one, the steady one, the person who held everyone else together and never asked to be held.
And here was Lex, who was strong enough to lead on the ice and strong enough to lead in bed and strong enough, astonishingly, to hold Mara Ellison without asking her to be anything other than exactly who she was.
“Hey,” Lex said. Her fingers were tracing idle patterns on Mara's shoulder blade.
"Mm."
“I liked it when you told me you wanted my fingers inside you. When you asked me to fuck you in your bedroom voice.”
"I don't have a bedroom voice."
"You absolutely have a bedroom voice. It's your coaching voice but lower and slower and it does things to me that would get you a technical foul in any other sport."
"Hockey doesn't have technical fouls."
"See, there it is. You just corrected me about hockey rules while naked. That's the most Mara Ellison thing that has ever happened."
Mara bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. She failed. The laugh escaped against Lex's chest, warm and muffled and entirely undignified, and Lex's arm tightened around her with a satisfied squeeze.
"We have a game today," Mara murmured.
Lex's chest vibrated with a quiet laugh. "We have a game today."
"I should probably get up." She made no effort to move. Her hand lay flat against Lex's sternum.
"Probably."
Neither of them moved. Lex's arm tightened around her waist, and Mara closed her eyes and listened to the heartbeat against her ear and the muffled sounds of Boston waking up beyond the window, and she let herself have this.
Just for a few more minutes. The warmth.
The weight. The soft morning light painting the hotel room gold.
The smell of sex and sheets and Lex's skin, already becoming the most familiar scent in the world.
The staggering, terrifying feeling of being exactly where she belonged.
She didn't know what came next. She didn't know how to navigate a secret relationship with her own player in the middle of a playoff push, or how to reconcile the woman lying in this bed with the coach who stood behind the boards. She didn't know any of it.
But she knew she didn't want this feeling to end. And for now, in the golden Boston morning with Lex's heartbeat under her cheek, that was enough.