20. Jax
Chapter twenty
Jax
Me:
come over
Nova:
20 mins
Twenty minutes.
I put the phone face down on the passenger seat and look out the windshield at my house.
My dick kicks. I’ve been picturing her since practice — on her knees, mouth hot, those jeans tight over her ass — and now I have to wait twenty more minutes.
I get out of the car.
Brick yowls at me when I come through the door. Acknowledged. Fed.
I look around the kitchen.
It’s fine. It’s clean. There’s nothing to do.
I do something anyway. Move two glasses from the counter to the dishwasher. Wipe down a counter that didn’t need wiping. Pick up a hoodie I left on the back of a chair three days ago and toss it in the laundry room. Run to wipe down the toilet.
Do a quick change out of my practice shirt. Check myself in the mirror. The clean shirt looks like I’m trying. Take it off. Put the practice one back on. Look in the mirror. The practice one looks like I’m not trying at all.
I stare at myself for a second.
“Get a grip, Jax.”
I put the clean shirt back on.
Tighten my jaw because there’s a thing happening in my jeans that needs to settle the fuck down before she gets here or this is going to be a short evening.
I think about Hendricks and Cole. The folder. Their stats from last season. Caleb’s hip. The Reapers’ top line. Anything that isn’t her on top of me with her hair down.
It works enough. Barely.
She knocks at twenty-three minutes.
Not twenty. I noticed.
I open the door.
She’s in the same jeans she had on at the rink earlier — the ones I’ve been thinking about since three — and a different shirt, hair up, no makeup, a tote bag on her shoulder that’s heavier than it looks.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
She steps past me into the house. Brick is already on his way over because Brick is a traitor.
“He missed me,” she says.
“He missed dinner. He’s working you.”
“Don’t ruin this for me.”
She drops the tote on the couch. A laptop. A notebook. A folder with something in it. She’s brought work.
I don’t comment.
Christ, that ass in those jeans.
“You eat?” I say.
“Granola bar at four.”
“That’s not eating.”
“It’s adjacent to eating.”
I make pasta. Nothing fancy — water, salt, the box, the jar. She sits at the counter with her laptop open and starts editing something I can’t see. Asks me a question about a player’s stats halfway through and I answer it without asking what it’s for.
The back of her neck is right there. Hair up. The little space between her hairline and the collar of her shirt. I can feel it in my teeth.
I stir the pasta, and think about the Reapers’ top line. It works enough.
We eat at the counter. She closes the laptop to eat. Opens it again the second her plate is empty.
“What are you working on?”
“Military families piece. The one I mentioned. Some nonprofit thing.”
“Going well?”
“It will be when I stop reading the same paragraph six times.”
“You hungry for anything else?”
“I’m good.”
“Coffee?”
“It’s nine PM, Jax.”
“Decaf.”
“You don’t have decaf.”
“I have decaf.”
She looks up at me.
“You bought decaf.”
“I bought decaf.”
She doesn’t say anything to that. Goes back to her laptop. The tips of her ears are pink.
I make her a decaf and stand at the other side of the counter and watch her not look at me and think about what it would take to get her to look up.
Not much, probably.
I’m not going to…not yet.
Phone goes off on the counter.
Aiden.
Then Aurora.
Then the team chat — twelve notifications in about six seconds, which means somebody said something inadvisable about the Conference Final matchup and the rest of the chat is now arguing about it.
I silence all of it without looking.
Nova clocks it.
Doesn’t say anything.
I see her see me see her see it.
We both let it go.
She closes the laptop a few minutes later. Pushes it away. Picks up the decaf she said she didn’t want and drinks it.
“Hendricks and Cole picked the Reapers in five,” she says.
“They did.”
“You got a folder on it yet?”
“Started this morning.”
“That’s healthy.”
“You said that already.”
“I’m reinforcing it.”
She drinks her coffee. I drink mine. Brick rotates onto her lap because Brick has made his choice and is committing to it.
I look at her.
I am looking at her too much. I know I’m looking at her too much. I can’t fucking help it.
She catches me.
Doesn’t look away.
“What.”
“Nothing.”
“Mm.”
She goes back to her coffee.
I go back to mine.
The kitchen does the kitchen thing — the hum of the fridge, Brick’s purring, the rest of suburbia outside the window doing its Wednesday-night thing — and we sit there for a while and don’t say anything because we don’t have to.
I am dying.
I am sitting at my own kitchen counter at nine forty-five on a Wednesday night thinking about how tight she felt around me while she pets my cat and edits a piece about military families, and I have been hard on and off since she walked through the door, but this is fine. This is fine. This is fine.
She sets her empty cup down.
Looks at me.
I look at her.
Neither of us moves for a second.
Then she gets off the stool.
I get off mine.
We don’t say anything.
She heads down the hall.
I follow.
Thank Christ.
The lamp in my bedroom is the one she likes — the low one, the one that doesn’t reach the corners.
We barely make it to the bed.
She’s on me before I get my shirt off, hands fisted in the hem and pulling and I have to break the kiss to let her get it over my head and the second it’s gone she’s back on my mouth and I get a hand under her shirt and feel skin and that’s it for me. My brain checks out.
I kiss her hard enough to make her grunt against my mouth — that low sound she makes when something’s catching her off guard, the one I learned in Pittsburgh and have been chasing since — and I pull her shirt up and she lifts her arms and it’s gone.
Bra. Lace. Front clasp. I get it open one-handed and her tits are in my hands and her mouth is on mine and I am not going to survive this.
I’m hard enough through my jeans to hurt. She’s grinding against the front of them like she knows it. She knows it.
I get her on her back. Mouth still on hers.
I drag my hand down her side to her hip and back up to her ribs and across her stomach and down again because I cannot pick a spot to stay, every part of her is the part I want to be touching, and her hands are everywhere too — my back, my shoulders, into my hair, dragging me down — and I bite down on the side of her neck because I want to and because I know she’ll see it tomorrow and because right now I don’t care.
“Jax —”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
She’s breathing in short ragged pulls under me and I’m pretty sure I’m doing the same. Her hand finds the front of my jeans. Through the fabric. Squeezes.
“Fuck,” I say into her neck.
“Yeah?”
“Fuck, Nova.”
I’m pulsing against her hand. She’s not letting up. Her other hand is in my hair pulling me down and I’m trying to get my mouth back on hers and the sound she’s making when I roll my hips against her is going to live in my head for the rest of my life.
I get a hand to the button of her jeans.
Pop it.
Get the zipper.
Hook my fingers in the waistband and start pulling them down —
Her hand finds my shoulder.
Stops me.
Just barely.
A pull, not a push. Like she almost let it happen.
I stop.
I stop everything. Mouth on her jaw. Hand frozen at the top of her zipper. I don’t move.
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m on my period.”
Flat. No apology. Just the information.
I lift my head. Get my forearm next to her shoulder so I’m braced over her and I can see her face.
“Got it. Copy that.”
Her face does something.
Doesn’t do anything for a second. Then it does something — not a smile, not a frown, just the specific stillness of a person who was braced for one thing and didn’t get it.
“That’s it?” she says.
“That’s what.”
“That. Copy that.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not — you’re good.”
“I’m good.”
She looks at me for another second. I don’t look away.
I don’t make a thing of it. I don’t make her explain.
I lean down and kiss her — same kiss as before, same heat, my body informing me very clearly that nothing about my situation has changed except the menu — and after another second she kisses me back.
I have been thinking about screwing her brains out all day.
That plan changed.
It’s fine.
Shit changes.
She’s still here. Still looking at me like that. Still breathing hard under me. I’m not far off from catching a case of blueballs, but I adjust.
Different math problem now.
We end up tangled.
My weight half on her, her hands back in my hair, the kiss going somewhere it shouldn’t be going for a man who just took penetration off the table, and I’m not stopping it because she’s not stopping it and her hips have started doing the thing her hips do when she’s getting close to something and my body is in a state I am going to have to handle later by myself.
She’s grinding against my thigh.
I let her.
That’s what I’m doing right now. Letting her get hers. Letting my body process the input it’s getting without doing anything about the output. It’s a math problem. I’ll solve it later.
Her breathing changes.
Her hand leaves my hair. Goes between us. Reaches for my jeans.
I catch her wrist before she gets there.
“No.”
She stops. Looks up at me.
“Jax.”
“No.”
“You’re —”
“I know what I am.”
“I can —”
“I know what you can. I’m not asking.”
She’s looking at me like she’s trying to read something she hasn’t seen before.
“What kind of selfish prick do you think I am.” Quieter now. “I ain’t Griffin.”
She goes very still.
“When I have you again, I want all of you in it.”
She doesn’t say anything.
I let go of her wrist. Put my hand on her face. Tilt her chin up.
“Now kiss me.”
She does.
Not soft, or careful.
She kisses me like she’s mad at me for being decent about it, and I take every bit of it. Her hands in my hair, her hips still restless against my thigh, her breath breaking against my mouth every time I give her something to move against.
I don’t take more.
I don’t need to.
I keep one hand on her face and the other at her hip and let her use me until the fight goes out of her body in pieces. Until the kiss turns slower. Until her grip in my hair loosens and her breathing changes and she sinks into me instead of trying to outrun herself.
By the time she settles against my chest, she’s soft and quiet and spent in a way that feels more intimate than anything I could have taken from her.
She’s almost out. Her hair across my collarbone and her hand on my ribs and the lamp still on because neither of us has the energy to turn it off.
I’m hard, wide awake.
Not going anywhere.
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a weird man.”
“Yeah.”
Quiet for a while. I think she’s gone.
“Good weird though.”
“Yeah.”
“...Yeah.”
She’s out.
I lie there. Don’t move. Don’t need to.
She almost let me keep going when she meant no.
Not tonight.