14. Nova #3
By the time he’s fully inside me I’m breathing into the cushion, his hips flush against me, his hand flat over my stomach like he can feel exactly where he is.
“Fuck,” he says.
Then he moves.
One slow drag out. One deep thrust back in.
My whole body answers him.
There is no graceful way to take him like this. No way to pretend I’m composed. No clever line my mouth can find fast enough to save me.
There’s just him behind me — one hand on my hip, one hand working my clit, his mouth at my shoulder — and me saying his name like it’s the only word I have left.
His grip tightens. His pace builds. Every thrust deeper than the last, every drag back somehow worse, and I am completely gone — no armor, no distance, no version of myself that keeps things manageable.
Just this. Just him. Just the specific wreckage of being known by someone who pays attention.
“Give me one more,” he says against the back of my neck.
I do.
It tears through me and I say his name broken and he holds me through every second of it.
He follows. Buries himself deep. A low wrecked sound dragged out of him against his will, hips jerking once, twice, then stilling.
For a second neither of us moves.
He lowers us down together, still inside me, both of us breathing too hard. He doesn’t pull away. He rolls us onto our sides instead, one arm hooked under me, the other pulling me back against his chest until there’s no space left to put between us.
I press my face into the couch cushion that smells like my apartment and my life and, now, faintly like him.
His hand finds my hair— threads through it slow, working out a tangle he put there himself, in no hurry to stop.
This is the part that gets me. Not that he’s an amazing lay.
Not even the fact that it was him. This.
The quiet after, and the fact that he’s still here for it.
“You have no idea what you do to me,” he says, low against my ear. Not a line. Just him saying a true thing quietly because that’s who he is.
I feel it go all the way through me.
“Canyon Bay,” I say eventually.
“Hm.”
“Eight months. My record.”
His hand keeps moving in my hair. Slow. Like he’s got time.
“Military kid. New base every two years.” I stare at the ceiling. “I got very good at being funny before anyone could decide they didn’t want me around. Beat them to it. Make them laugh first and then at least you know where you stand.”
He doesn’t say anything. Just listens. The whole-body kind of listening.
“Canyon Bay is the longest I’ve stayed anywhere since I was eight years old.”
“How’s it feel.”
My mind goes immediately to Dina on my back steps every night. Eight months of showing up for something that won’t let me in and doing it anyway because apparently I don’t know how to stop.
“Terrifying,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. Just that. Like he understands from the inside of it. Like maybe he knows what it costs to keep showing up for something that doesn’t always show up back.
I don’t say anything else. I don’t have to.
He stays for chicken and pasta.
We eat at my counter because we’re apparently people who do that now. He eats and says it’s good and means it and I tell him about Okinawa, Germany, the three Southern bases that blurred together.
“Did you ever go back?” he says.
“To which one.”
“Any of them.”
“No.”
He nods. Doesn’t push it. He understands about not going back to things.
We do the dishes without discussing it. He washes. I dry. Easy and natural and a little scary in the specific way of things that fit too well.
Halfway through the dishes Jax stops.
“Where’s Brick?”
I look at the couch. Empty.
We check the bedroom. The bathroom. Behind the curtains. Under the bed. The closet.
Then we hear him. Cat. Outside. The specific complaining yowl of a cat who has been somewhere he didn’t intend to end up for longer than he intended to be there.
Jax opens the back door. Brick is on the step.
He walks past us into the apartment without acknowledging either of us. Goes back to the couch. Sits down. Looks at the wall.
Outside, the bowl is empty. Dina is gone.
“Brick.”
Brick says nothing.
Jax looks at me. I look at Jax. Neither of us says anything.
He goes back to the dishes. I go back to drying. Brick stays on the couch and does not acknowledge any of us for the rest of the night.
He leaves at seven.
Jacket. Keys. Carrier in his other hand — Brick goes in without protest, which is itself information. Jax stops at the door. Turns around.
That look.
“It was more than fair,” he says.
My phone lights up on the counter. I glance at it. Tampa area code. Griffin.
Something moves through me that I don’t have a name for yet.
I look back at him. He’s already seen my face. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. He holds my eyes for a second — steady, reading me the way he reads everything — and then he nods once.
Puts his hand on the door.
Gone.
I look at the phone.
Griffin:
Heard you’ve been busy, Nova. Covering the Cyclones or playing with them? Tell Kat I said hi. She always makes shitty decisions.
I don’t answer it.
I don’t move either.