12. Nova
Chapter twelve
Nova
The elevator opens on the fourteenth floor.
We’re back in Pittsburgh, not-talking since the bus. Professionally. Efficiently. Like two people who absolutely did not spend forty minutes in a parking lot yesterday. He walks beside me down the hall.
I check my key card.
1412.
Good. Fine. Normal hotel behavior.
Then he stops at the same door.
I look at his number.
1412.
I look at him.
He looks at me. Then, very slowly, he looks at my key card.
“Travel coordinator approved this,” he says.
“The travel coordinator doesn’t have this kind of imagination.”
His mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Worse. I swipe the key before I can think better of it. The light turns green. I don’t step all the way in.
“I’m going to call down to concierge,” I say.
“Yeah, good idea.”
The man at the front desk is very apologetic. Conference game. Sold out. Every overflow block taken. He’s checked twice. He can offer me a hotel 8 miles away.
I look at the room. At my recorder on the desk. At Jax Mercer leaning against the door with his gear bag at his feet, not saying anything, waiting.
“Thank you,” I say. “I’m fine.”
I hang up.
Ground rules.
I establish them the moment the door closes because that’s what you do when you’re sharing a suite in Pittsburgh with a man you got wrangled into rubbing down for half an hour while his cock strained against the sheet the entire time and you pretended very professionally not to notice.
I noticed.
Then went on to make out with him in a parking lot.
Also professionally.
“I’m taking the bathroom on the left,” I say. “No hockey tape on the counter.”
He sets his gear bag down. Looks at the counter. Looks at me.
“Where else would I put it?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer.”
I gesture at the room. All that surface area available to him. He looks at it. Looks back at me with something in his face that isn’t quite a smile. Then he goes to the couch, opens his tablet, and puts one earbud in.
Done.
I go to the bathroom on the left because apparently we have territories now.
Night one.
He’s on game film. I’m at the desk with my laptop. The suite is big enough that we’re not on top of each other and small enough that I can hear him breathing and I am not going to think about that.
I work. He watches film.
The quiet accumulates. Not the awkward kind. The kind that builds when two people stop performing not-noticing-each-other and just exist in the same space.
I write three paragraphs. Delete one. Keep two. Answer emails. Tag photos.
I tell myself I’m not thinking about the physio room. That lasts about forty seconds.
At eleven he goes for the team ice bath. I hear the door. I work better for twenty minutes.
He comes back in a towel.
Just a towel. Low on his hips. Chest and shoulders still damp. The kind of body that exists at the intersection of genetics and ten years of professional athletics.
I look up because I heard the door and then I look and then my brain delivers the following completely unbidden:
Nine inches. Minimum. At least.
The towel is doing its job. Barely.
He moves to his gear bag. Gets clothes. Goes back to the bathroom.
I look at my laptop. I type something that is not a word. I delete it.
I go to bed and lie in the dark with that information and stare at the ceiling for way longer than necessary.
Morning two.
Coffee on the counter when I wake up. Exactly the right temperature. He’s already back on game film, sweats and a t-shirt, hair doing the morning thing, not managing anything.
I hold the cup. Look at the back of his head.
I have feelings I am not going to write in either notebook.
The coffee is perfect. Neither of us says anything about any of it.
Practice. I do my job. Camera up. Recorder out. Brody. Sebastian and Caleb. Liam.
Then Jax comes out for warmups and I keep the camera on him and then I put it down. Just to look.
Katarina appears beside me with two coffees. Holds one out.
“You didn’t shoot,” she says.
“I know.”
“That’s new.”
She watches the ice. Doesn’t push it. We drink our coffee in silence and I pick the camera back up after a while and she doesn’t mention it again. She doesn’t have to.
Night two. Eleven PM.
He’s on game film. I’m editing photos. An hour of quiet that has been its own kind of dangerous.
I find the photo of him and Aurora from the series win. The thing that released in his face. The real version under the careful.
I close the folder and open my mouth and say something sharp about the play he’s been running — the left side breakdown, the same gap, five times now.
He looks up.
“You’re watching my film.”
“You’re watching it loudly.”
“I have one earbud in.”
“Your face is loud.”
He looks at me. That look. All the way in.
“The left side breaks down on that play every time,” I say. “Same gap.”
“I know.”
“You’ve run it five times.”
“Six.”
“Then you definitely understand it.”
“Are you coaching me right now.”
“I’m observing.”
“From my film.”
“Very large screen.”
He looks at me for a long moment.
The room shifts.
Two nights of acting normal, and apparently this is where that ends.
It’s been shifting all night — quiet, incremental, like something tightening one click at a time. The towel. The coffee. The space between us.
And then there is the other thing.
The thing I know because I have spent two nights lying in the dark next to that knowledge, pretending my brain has not done the math.
Two nights. Not normal. Not even slightly.
He’s still looking at me. Not casual. Not distracted. Focused. The same way he watches a play develop — patient, precise, already ahead of it.
I feel it land. Low. Annoying. Dangerous.
He puts the tablet down. I close the laptop.
“Come here,” he says. Not a question.
I stand up. Cross the eight feet like it’s nothing and also like it’s everything. He doesn’t reach for me until I’m close. That’s worse. That’s intentional.
His hand closes around mine. Warm. Steady. Certain.
He pulls me into his lap like he already knows I’m not going to stop him. His hands settle on my hips and I can feel exactly what two nights in this suite have done to him and that information goes straight through me.
For half a second — just half — V. North sits in my chest like a held breath.
Then his hands move and I stop thinking about anything else.
“Still a terrible idea,” I say.
“Yeah.” Looking at my mouth. “You keep saying that.”
He kisses me.
Not the parking lot. That was dark— fast and deniable. This is eleven PM with all the lights on— his hand wrapping around the back of my neck tilting my head exactly where he wants it.
I make a sound I didn’t plan and my whole system goes down.
I pull at his shirt. He lifts it off. I get my hands on his chest and — there it is.
Everything the practice jersey and the towel were barely containing.
He reaches for mine and takes it off slowly.
His eyes drop and stay and I feel it everywhere.
He stands, picks me up like I weigh nothing. My legs wrap around him and he carries me to the bed and puts me down and steps back and looks. Just looks. Like touching me wasn’t enough.
“You’re staring,” I say. Not completely steady.
“I know.” He puts one knee on the bed. His mouth finds my jaw. My throat. The place just below my ear. Low, right there: “You have no idea what you look like right now.”
I stop breathing.
“I’ve been thinking about this since the physio room,” he says. His hand slides down my side slow. “ I locked it away and I’ve been going back to it ever since.”
“Jax—”
“The way your ass looked in those leggings.” His mouth moves lower. “I’m not apologizing for that.”
His hands find my waistband. “Lift,” he says. I lift.
He looks at me — all of me, slow and deliberate — and I reach for the sheet. He catches my wrist.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just—”
“No.” He puts my hand back on the bed, holds it. “Let me look at you.”
The world narrows down to the wet, rhythmic drag of his mouth against my inner thigh, and then the sharp, shocking pressure of his tongue pushing inside my slit.
My back bows off the mattress, a broken cry tearing from my throat as he goes at me like he’s been holding this back for days.
Not teasing. Not careful. His hands grip hard, holding me open, keeping me exactly where he wants me while his mouth works me until thinking is not an option.
It’s too much, the wet heat of it, the obscene sound of it in the quiet room, the pressure winding so tight in my belly it feels violent.
I break.
My thighs clamp around his shoulders. My vision whites out. He doesn’t stop. He works me through it, drags every aftershock out of me until I’m shaking and gasping and too wrecked to do anything but feel him.
Then he comes back up. Moves over me. His skin is damp. His mouth is wet. His eyes lock on mine and hold.
His lips are swollen, glossy with me, and the sight of it goes straight through my already-oversensitive body. He looks wrecked enough that I know this isn’t just about me coming. It’s about him finally getting what he’s been trying not to want.
“That’s what I needed,” he says, voice rough enough to scrape.
My breath catches.
I fist my hands in his hair and drag him back down because I need his mouth. Need to taste myself on him. Need something I don’t have language for.
He gives it to me. Kissing me deep and dirty, letting me taste exactly what he did to me, and I moan into his mouth hard enough that he answers with a sound that feels like another hand all over me.
He shifts his hips between my thighs. All of him hot and impossibly hard, nudging against my pussy. The first drag of him against me pulls a helpless sound out of my throat.
“Don’t close your eyes,” he says. “Look at me.”
I do.
His hand slides up my stomach, over my breast, thumb rough over my nipple, and his eyes don’t leave mine.
The head of him presses in and the stretch is immediate, sharp enough to make me gasp.
He doesn’t rush it. Doesn’t go easy either.
Just keeps going, inch by thick inch, watching my face the whole time like he wants every second of it.
“That’s it,” he says. “Take it.”
I grip his shoulders harder.
He bottoms out with a rough, wrecked sound. “Fuck,” he says. “There you are.”
I’m split around him, every nerve lit. My hands lock on his arms. My whole body goes tight with the effort of taking him.
“Jax—”
“I know.” He kisses me once, hard. “I know.”
He pulls out slow, thrusts back in, and my breath breaks.
“You’re taking me so fucking good,” he says, voice low. “You hear me?”
I nod.
“That’s it, Nova.”
Then he starts moving. Long pulls. Hard thrusts. Deep enough to make my voice break every time he comes back in. The bed shifts under us, skin slapping wet in the quiet room, his breathing roughening with mine until there’s no rhythm in the world except what he’s doing to me.
“You feel that?” he says.
I can barely answer.
He angles his hips and hits something that makes my entire body jerk.
“There,” he says, like he’s been waiting to find it. “That’s the one.”
He goes back to it again. Again. Every thrust hard enough to make my thoughts scatter, every drag of him out somehow worse than the next push back in.
“Fuck, Nova,” he says, forehead against mine now, breath hot and broken. “You feel so fucking good.”
I moan. “That’s it. Let me have it.”
My nails dig into his shoulders. My legs tighten around him. The pressure builds so fast it scares me.
“I’m close—”
“I know.” His hand slides between us. Finds me. “Come on.”
The first stroke almost kills me. I cry out.
He does it again, still driving into me, giving me exactly enough friction in exactly the right place to make the whole thing tip from unbearable to impossible.
“Come for me,” he says, rough and sure. “That’s it. Give it to me.”
I do.
It tears through me hard enough to make me lose the room for a second. My muscles clamp down around him and then everything goes liquid and bright and too much. Pleasure snaps so sharp it turns to panic halfway through.
I feel the gush before I understand it. Heat. Wet. Too much.
I jolt, humiliated so fast it almost knocks the air out of me.
“Oh my God—”
I try to turn away. Cover myself. Hide.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp. “I’m sorry, I—”
He catches my face. “Don’t,” he says.
I can’t look at him.
“Nova.” Softer. Worse.
He turns my face back anyway. Makes me see him.
“That was the hottest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”
Relief hits so hard it almost hurts. His thumb drags over my cheek once. His hips never really stopped, just slowed, keeping me exactly where he wants me.
“You hear me?” he says. “You soaked me.”
I make a broken sound.
“Don’t hide from me now.” That lands somewhere deeper than the rest of it.
“Again,” he says. “I want it again.”
Then he starts moving for real. Slow at first. Deliberate. Every thrust aimed. Every drag back making me feel how wet everything is, how open I am, how impossible it would be to hide any of this now.
The shame doesn’t disappear. It burns up into something hotter. He feels it happen.
“Good girl,” he says, voice wrecked. “That’s it. Stay there.”
His hand goes back between us. His mouth at my throat now. His body relentless and controlled and too much in the exact way that makes me want more.
I’m shaking. He knows it.
“You can do it,” he says, like he’s not talking dirty now so much as telling me the truth. “Give me one more.”
This one hits even harder.
I gasp his name and come apart under him, another gush, another impossible wave of pleasure that leaves me shaking so hard I can barely breathe.
That does it for him. He buries himself deep and comes with a low, wrecked sound that feels dragged out of him against his will, hips jerking once, twice, then stilling as he empties inside me.
For a second neither of us moves.
Then everything collapses. He lowers us down together, still inside me, both of us breathing too hard, skin slick—overheated and wrecked. He doesn’t pull away. He just pulls me closer. One hand at the back of my neck, the other low on my back. Holding me there like there’s nowhere else to be.
I press my face into his chest. Breathe him in. Sweat. Soap. Sex. Him.
I’m trembling. Not delicately either. Full-body, humiliatingly obvious aftershock.
His hand moves once down my spine. Slow. Thoughtless. Like he’s not even aware he’s doing it. Which is somehow worse. Or better.
Probably worse.
I stare at his chest and try to understand the magnitude of what just happened. Two nights, lying in the dark thinking about this. Two nights of acting normal and the fact that every quiet moment in this suite felt loaded enough to catch fire.
And now I’m here, and his hand isn’t moving.
It would be easier if he moved.
He doesn’t.
I am in so much trouble.