24. Jax #2
Her hand cups my balls.
Squeezes once.
She takes me deeper and I feel the back of her throat and she gags — once, just once — and I try to ease her off and she shakes her head and goes back down and I feel my hand fist in her wet hair without my permission and she presses into it.
The accounting voice goes.
The folder, the read I made on the breakaway, the bus ride, the protocol, Vegas, the Strip, the chance to close this out in two days — gone. All of it. Wiped.
I am on a teak bench in a steam shower in Vegas.
She is on her knees on the marble in front of me.
That’s it.
That’s the entire content of my mind.
She works me harder and I am pulsing against her tongue and her eyes come up and meet mine and I can’t do anything with the way she’s looking at me. I can’t manage it. I can’t put it anywhere except where it lands.
“Nova — I’m gonna —”
She squeezes the base.
Hard.
And keeps going.
I come down her throat with my hand in her wet hair and the water in my eyes and a sound coming out of me that is not a word, has never been a word, will not become a word — just sound, raw, scraped out of somewhere I don’t normally let people see.
She takes all of it.
Doesn’t pull off.
Hand still working the base, mouth still on me, until I am wrung out and shaking and the only thing holding me upright is the bench under me and her hands on my thighs.
She lets me slip out of her mouth.
Sits back on her heels on the marble.
Looks up.
Wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist.
“Hi,” she says.
I can’t speak.
I get my hands under her arms.
Pull her up.
Pull her into my lap on the bench.
She straddles me.
Wet skin against wet skin, the water still running over both of us, her arms going around my neck and my arms going around her back and I kiss her — hard, with her own taste in my mouth, and don’t care, want it, want the proof that what just happened actually happened.
“Jax.”
“Mhm.”
“Are you with me.”
“I’m with you.”
“You sure.”
“I’m sure. I just —”
“Take a second.”
I take a second.
The water keeps running. She has her face against my throat and her arms around my neck and I have one hand on the small of her back and the other in her wet hair and I am — what is the word — I am whatever the word is for what happens after a person breaks something open in you on a teak bench in a steam shower in Vegas.
“My turn,” I say into her hair.
“Take it.”
I lift her off me. Stand her up between my knees. The water hits her back and runs down to where I want my mouth and I lean forward on the bench and put my mouth on her hip first — because I’m thinking, I’m choosing — and she puts her hand in my hair and I work my way across her stomach and lower.
I look up.
“Bench.”
“What.”
“Sit on the bench.”
She switches with me. Sits on the warm teak. The water is running down her chest and between her breasts and she leans back against the wet marble and parts her knees and looks down at me and I am on the marble floor on my knees in front of her now and I do not care about the marble.
I get her thigh over my shoulder.
“Jax —”
“I know.”
I get my mouth on her.
She arches off the bench and her hand fists in my hair and her hips come forward and I work her — slow, the way she likes, the rhythm her body keeps trying to take from me — and her breath is in my hair and the water is running down both of us and she is making sounds I have never heard her make before, open, unmuffled, no roof to keep them down because this is a Vegas hotel bathroom and the door is closed and she is not holding back.
“Jax — Jax — “
“Mhm.”
“I’m —”
“I got you.”
I slide two fingers inside her and curl them and she comes off the bench so hard her thigh tightens on my shoulder and her hand pulls my hair and she comes against my mouth with a sound that is mine, just mine, that nobody else in her life has ever heard, and I work her through it until she is pushing my forehead with her hand and laughing breathlessly and saying my name like it’s the only word she remembers.
I come up.
Lift her off the bench.
Carry her — one arm under her thighs, the other around her back — out of the shower and across the marble floor while she’s still wet and dripping and laughing into my neck.
I don’t bother with towels.
We’re going to ruin the sheets. Vegas can bill the team.
I lay her down on the bed and the bedspread immediately goes dark under her wet hair and I climb up after her and she wraps her legs around me and I bottom out and she makes a sound into my shoulder and I have a thought — clear, complete, not in the body-not-feelings register — that says I have never been here before.
Not the bed. Not the city.
Here.
This.
I move slow.
She is meeting me. Her hand is on the back of my head and her mouth is on my throat and I am saying things into her hair I’ve never said before, that I’d never say in daylight, that I’m only saying now because the voice I use for everything else is gone, and what’s left is whatever this is.
“Stay.”
“I’m here.”
“Say it again.”
“I’m here.”
“Nova.”
“I know.”
Her hands are everywhere — my back, my shoulders, the back of my neck — and I have my forehead against hers and her breath is in my mouth and we are not in a hurry. We are not racing anything.
We are just here.
Doing this.
I am thirty-two years old, and I have never made love to anyone in my life.
That is what this is.
There is nothing else to call it.
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m —”
“Me too.”
I come inside her with my forehead pressed against hers and her ankles crossed at the small of my back and her hands on my face and her mouth saying my name once, soft, into my mouth.
I stay there.
I don’t move.
She doesn’t move.
The shower is still running in the bathroom across the suite.
We stay.
Later — I don’t know how much later — I roll us so she’s on my chest. Her wet hair against my collarbone. Her hand on my ribs. Her leg over mine.
The Strip is moving outside the window.
I run my hand up and down her back. Slow. Once. Twice.
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“What just happened.”
“I don’t know.”
She laughs against my chest. Quietly. Just a breath.
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
“That’s not your usual answer.”
“No.”
She is quiet for a second.
“Is it bad that you don’t know?”
I think about it.
“No,” I say. “It’s not bad.”
She puts her hand flat on my chest. Over my heart. Doesn’t say anything.
I don’t say anything either.
After a minute I say, “I should turn the water off.”
“In a minute.”
“Yeah.”
“In a minute.”
We stay like that for a long minute. Then I get up.
Walk across the suite naked because there is nobody here to see me and even if there were I do not currently care.
Turn the water off. Stand in the bathroom doorway and look at the shower — water dripping off the marble, the bench dark with water, her wet handprint on the glass where she pushed it open to step out.
I look at it for longer than necessary.
Go back to bed.
She rolls into me before I’m all the way down. Her wet hair on my chest. Her hand back over my heart. Her leg over mine.
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a weird man.”
“Yeah.”
“Good weird though.”
“Yeah.”
“...Yeah.”
She falls asleep with her hand over my heart and her breath even against my ribs.
I don’t sleep.
I lie there in a Vegas hotel bed with a woman on my chest who I am — the word is right there, I am not using the word, the word has a place and this is not the night for the word — and I think about the night I stopped because she needed me to.
She was in it tonight.
I was in it more than I have ever been in anything in my life and I do not know what to do with that and there is no folder for this. There is no read. There is no accounting.
There is just her on my chest.
Breathing.
Asleep.
I put my hand on the back of her head.
I look at the ceiling.
We have one chance to close this out, I have one job for the next four days and it is to hold the wall, and right now I am lying here with this woman on my chest and the wall is not the thing I am thinking about.
I’ll think about the wall tomorrow.
Should be thinking about it now.
That’s the job. Hold the wall first. Everything else after.
But tonight, I’m here.
She’s here.
And that should probably scare me more than it does.