27. Nova
Chapter twenty-seven
Nova
The editor calls three times. I don’t answer. I go to his house instead.
Brick is at the door when I get there. Looks at me like he’s been timing it. He follows me in, weaving between my legs, tail curling around my calf.
“Hey. Missed you too.”
He leads me to the couch.
I have a spot.
I sit in it.
Aurora and Aiden are still there from the celebration. Aurora with her shoes off and her feet tucked under her, Aiden with his arm around her looking like a man who just won the Conference Final and is approximately thirty seconds from falling asleep sitting up.
“She’s staying,” Aurora says when I walk in.
“I’m staying,” I confirm.
“Good.” She doesn’t move. “I wasn’t leaving until you got here.”
Aiden looks at the ceiling. “She’s been saying that for forty minutes.”
“I meant it for forty minutes.”
Jax comes out of the kitchen with a coffee and puts it on the counter next to me at the right temperature without saying anything about it. I take it. Brick relocates to my lap. Aurora looks at all of this and says nothing because she doesn’t have to — her face is doing every bit of it for her.
I drink my coffee.
Aiden falls asleep sitting up within ten minutes.
We don’t acknowledge it. Aurora talks about the baby, about the city, about Brody crying in the locker room.
Jax says three words total and they’re all correct.
I sit on his couch with his cat and his coffee and listen to his sister talk and think — when did this become the most comfortable room I’ve ever been in.
I don’t say that out loud.
They leave an hour later.
Aurora yawning so dramatically that Aiden physically picks up her shoes, hands them to her, and steers her toward the door with the patience of a man who has done this many times before.
“Text me,” she says to me over her shoulder.
“It’s midnight.”
“Tomorrow then. Early.”
“Aurora.”
“Fine. Before noon.” Aiden gets her through the door. She leans back in one more time. “I’m so happy for you.” Then she’s gone.
The door closes.
Just Jax and me and Brick and the quiet.
I look around the room. His coffee cup on the counter. My camera bag by the door where it always lands. The plant on the windowsill I bought three weeks ago that he keeps accidentally overwatering — still alive somehow, which feels like a metaphor I’m not going to examine too closely.
Brick arranges himself between us on the couch like he’s moderating a summit.
“Your sister cried,” I say.
“She cries at everything.”
“At me specifically.”
“She’s been waiting for this since the grocery store.” He looks at me. “So have I.”
I look at my coffee.
Okay then.
We sit for a while.
Not talking. Not performing not-talking. Just in it — the city still humming outside, the Cyclones still celebrating something enormous, and us in here in the quiet of a night when something enormous went right.
“I’ve been waiting to leave since I got here,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Not Canyon Bay.” I look at my coffee. “Everywhere. Since I was eight. I’ve been waiting for the thing that makes me pack.
The thing that tells me it’s time. I got so good at seeing it coming that I started seeing it before it was there.
Every place I’ve ever been I’ve already had one foot out the door before I unpacked. ”
He doesn’t say anything.
Doesn’t move.
“And?” he says.
I look at him.
“I don’t want to pack.”
The room goes quiet.
He looks at me.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it? Okay?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something. That was — I just said a thing.”
“I know.” The corner of his mouth. “I heard you.”
“Jax.”
“Nova.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You don’t want to pack,” he says. “I don’t want you to pack. That’s not complicated.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
It isn’t complicated.
That’s the terrifying part. I’ve been making everything complicated for months — the job and the secret and the guilt and the running — and he just made it simple in one sentence and I don’t even know what to do with a man who does that.
So I stop trying to figure it out.
I reach for him instead.
Slide my hand along his jaw. His skin warm under my palm. His eyes already on me. Steady. There.
I kiss him.
Not a question. Not a beginning. Not the version of a kiss that waits to see what he does back. I kiss him the way I’ve been kissing him in my head since the grocery store — fully, slowly, with my whole self in it because I am here and he is here and there is nothing left to manage.
His hand comes up to my face. Both hands. Cups my jaw like he’s holding something he doesn’t want to drop.
He kisses me back.
I don’t have to wonder if he means it.
I know he does.
That’s new.
That’s the entire new thing.
I climb into his lap.
He helps me — one hand on the small of my back, the other still at my face, settling me there like he’s been waiting a long time to feel my weight on his thighs and is going to take a second with it now that it’s happening.
I am in his lap on his couch in his house with his hand at the base of my spine and his mouth open under mine and I am here. Fully here. Not running through the exit math. Not building the wall back up. Not making a single joke in my head that puts six inches between us.
Just here.
I press my forehead to his.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
“I’m staying.”
“I know.”
“I mean tonight too.”
The corner of his mouth. “Yeah. I got that.”
I kiss him again because his half-smile is a problem and I want to do something about it. His hands move — one up my back into my hair, one down to my hip, slow, learning the shape of me again like he’s never going to be in a hurry with me again.
He’s not.
That’s also new.
I pull back to look at him.
He looks back. Doesn’t perform anything. Doesn’t try to be smooth or charming or careful.
Just lets me look.
He’s flushed a little at the throat, his eyes dark, his hands on my body, and for once there’s nothing between what he feels and what he lets me see.
Scarred knuckles at the small of my back.
The man who tapes his blocker thirteen times, who hasn’t missed a save in three games, who walks into rooms like he’s already decided he can handle whatever’s waiting there — and he’s sitting on his couch letting me see him undone.
I’m in trouble.
That’s not new. What’s new is I’m not trying to climb out of it.
I push him back into the couch instead — flat palm to his chest, the way he’s done to me a dozen times — and watch his eyebrows go up half an inch at the role reversal. He goes. Lets me. That’s the part that gets me every time: a man that solid, that hard to move, and he just... lets me move him.
“Nova.”
“Don’t talk yet.”
His mouth shuts. Something in his eyes goes molten.
I work his belt open with both hands. He’s already breathing harder, already straining the front of his boxers, and when I take my time with the button he makes a low sound in his throat — the controlled man losing the thread, one inch at a time.
He lifts his hips when I reach for the waistband.
Doesn’t rush me. Just gives me room and grips the couch like that’s the only thing keeping his hands off me.
I free him — hard, thick, already leaking — and wrap my hand around the base, feel the heavy pulse of him against my palm, and look up.
He’s looking at me.
“Tell me,” I say.
“Tell you what.”
“How you like it”
“Christ, Nova.”
“I want to hear it,” I say. “All of it.”.”
He breathes out. Once. Then his hand comes down to my hair — fingers spreading, the weight of his palm against my scalp.
“You’re killing me,” he says.
I lean in and run my tongue from the base of him to the tip. Slow. Swirl once around the head, tasting the bead of moisture there.
His abs contract.
“Fuck.”
I take him into my mouth.
Hot. Heavy. The thickness of him stretching my lips, the velvet skin against my tongue. I sink down slowly and feel him hit the back of my throat and I hum around him and his hand fists in my hair without his permission.
“Nova — fuck —”
I pull back to the tip. Pop off. Squeeze the base in my fist.
“Tell me,” I say again.
His eyes are closed.
“Your mouth,” he says. Voice rough. “Your mouth is — fuck — your mouth feels —”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not going to last if you keep doing that.”
“Good.”
I take him deep again.
This time I don’t go slow. I find a rhythm — mouth and hand working in counterpoint, my tongue pressing flat against the underside on every pass, my fist twisting at the base as I come up. His hips start to move and I let them. His hand in my hair tightens.
“Christ — Nova — yeah — like that —”
His sentences are still whole. I want them broken.
I cup his balls with my free hand. Roll them gently. Squeeze once.
His hand fists harder in my hair.
“Baby — slow down —”
I don’t slow down.
I take him deeper than I usually take him.
Feel him hit the back of my throat. Feel myself almost gag and breathe through it and keep going.
His hand presses against my scalp — not forcing me, but the pressure is there, asking, and I give him the answer he wants by pushing into it.
Going deeper. Letting him be in my throat.
I gag once. Quietly. Eyes water.
I don’t pull off.
“Jesus. Nova. Look at you. Look at you taking that—”
I look up at him while he’s in my throat.
Something happens to his face.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
I pull back. Off. Hand still working him. Tongue flicking the slit while I catch my breath.
“It feels incredible, baby.” His voice is rough. Specific. Honest. “The way you take my cock. The way you—”
I take him back in.
“Christ — Nova —”
His sentences are getting shorter.
I work him faster. Harder. My hand twisting at the base, my mouth hollowing on every pass, his hips moving against my face now — small, controlled, the last edge of his discipline holding on. I taste him changing on my tongue. Salt and heat and the pulse of him building.
“Nova — baby — I’m—”
He’s trying to warn me.
I don’t pull off.
I take him deeper.
“Nova — fuck — I’m gonna—”
The sentences are gone now.
It’s just my name.
Then it’s not even that.