37. Jax
Chapter thirty-seven
Jax
Iwake up with her hand on my chest.
Not the way a hand lands in sleep — flat, fingers spread, palm warm — like she put it there on purpose at some point in the night and meant it to stay.
I lie there for a minute and watch the ceiling go light, feel her breathing against my ribs, and think about that.
The deliberateness of it. Even asleep, she chose this.
Her ceiling. Her pillow. Her hand.
I’m in her bed.
That’s not nothing.
She stirs eventually, not awake, just shifting. Her hand moves on my chest, fingers spreading wider for a second like she’s checking I’m still there, and then she makes a sound and settles again. Her hair is across my shoulder. Her breath is warm against my collarbone.
I don’t move.
I have been in this bed for approximately four hours and I am not remotely interested in leaving it.
Last night was — last night was a lot. The game. The win. The ghost rising in overtime and me knowing exactly where it lived. Griffin’s voice saying that syllable. The penalty box. The four minutes after, when the whole building seemed to hold its breath and I had to hold the wall anyway.
Nova in the press box with her camera down, already looking at me across the whole arena. Her hands in my jersey.
Her voice on the walk home, asking about Brick like she was trying to understand every part of me that had learned how to stay.
My kitchen at three AM. Then her place in the dark. Dina crossing the threshold like she’d been waiting eight months for someone to open the door.
I line all of it up in my head the way I run tape. Methodical. Thorough.
Then I stop.
Because she’s warm against my side, the ceiling’s gone gold, and there’s no tape to run.
There’s just this.
Just her.
Just the morning.
She wakes up the way she does everything — all at once, fully there.
Her head comes up. Eyes find me. Something in her face settles.
“Hi,” she says. Voice still rough.
“Hey.”
She looks at the ceiling. Then back at me. She’s working something out — I can see it, the small motion of her thinking — and then she stops working it out and just puts her head back on my chest.
“We won,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“The Cup.”
“Yeah.”
She’s quiet for a second.
“Your ghost.”
“Gone,” I say.
She’s quiet for another second.
Then: “Hi.”
“You already said that.”
“I know.” The corner of her mouth against my chest. “I’m saying it again.”
I put my hand in her hair. She lets me.
We lie there.
The light keeps changing. Gold going to white going to the specific clear quality of a Florida morning that has no interest in being subtle about anything. Her breathing evens out again — not asleep, just present. Her hand moves on my chest. Slow. Like she’s tracing something.
“What are you doing,” I say.
“Memorizing,” she says.
I don’t say anything.
She keeps going. The line of my collarbone. Down to my ribs. Back up. Slow and deliberate and completely unhurried.
“Nova.”
“Hm.”
“You’re going to be the death of me.”
“You’re fine.”
“I’m really not.”
She laughs. Low. Into my chest. The sound of it does something to me I am choosing not to examine right now.
Her hand stills.
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
Not wrecked the way she said it last night. Not in the middle of something, heat-loud and desperate. Just steady. Morning-certain. Like she woke up knowing it and decided to put it down somewhere instead of carrying it.
I stop breathing for a second.
Then I pull her up. Not fast. Not dramatic. Just my arm under her shoulder, rolling her toward me until we’re face to face on the pillow. Her hair everywhere. Her eyes on mine. The morning light doing what it does to her skin.
I get my hand on her jaw, my thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone the way I’ve wanted to do since four this morning, when she was asleep beside me and I was running the accounting in the dark and everything kept coming out the same.
“I love you too,” I say.
Close. Quiet. Just for her.
Something moves through her face — not surprise, nothing like surprise, she knew — but something. The held-breath quality of a thing finally landing where it was always going to land.
She puts her hand flat on my chest. Over my heart. Same place she put it in her sleep.
“Yeah,” she says softly. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” Her mouth curves. “Okay.”
I pull her in.
We find the rhythm the way we always find it in the morning — slow and certain, without discussion, the kind that doesn’t need steering. Her back against my chest. My hand low on her stomach.
Her breathing changes first. Then mine.
When I move against her, she presses back into me like she has nowhere else to be — and she doesn’t, and I don’t — neither of us in any hurry about any of it.
I kiss her shoulder. The back of her neck. The soft skin just below her ear that makes her make the sound she makes — low, barely there, just for me — and her hand tightens over my thigh.
Small. Deep. Unhurried.
We stay like that. Her voice saying my name in the exact way it does when everything is stripped down to nothing. My mouth at her hair. Her body soft against mine. The light changing slow above us.
At some point she turns to face me. She gets her hands in my hair and pulls me to her, and we finish it face to face — her eyes open, mine open — both of us just here. In it. All the way in.
Afterward, I pull her against me. Her breathing slows, and she lets out a big sigh. The kind that means she dropped something.
I hold her tighter.
We fall asleep.
A deep yowl from the kitchen breaks the quiet.
Low. Specific. The kind of sound a body makes when something is happening on its own schedule.
Nova goes still before I do.
“Jax.”
I hear it too.
Another sound comes from the kitchen. Smaller this time.
I get up first. Nova is right behind me.
I stop in the doorway.
Dina is on the kitchen mat in the morning light, curled on her side, breathing hard. Her eyes lift to mine once. Not panicked. Not asking. Just aware.
Pressed against her belly is one tiny kitten.
Wet. Moving. Already loud as hell for something that barely exists yet.
Nova’s hand finds my arm. “Oh my God.”
Dina makes another sound, low and rough, and tucks her body tighter around the kitten like she knows exactly what she’s doing.
She probably does.
I stand there in the doorway of Nova’s kitchen, naked except for my boxers, staring at the feral cat who refused to come inside for eight months giving birth on the kitchen mat like this was always where she meant to do it.
There is nothing remarkable about it.
Except it is the most remarkable thing I have ever seen before nine AM.
“What do we do?” Nova whispers.
“Nothing,” I say quietly. “I think.”
“You think?”
“I’m not exactly a cat midwife.”
That gets a tiny, terrified laugh out of her.
So we stay back. We sit on the kitchen floor a few feet away and watch the morning change shape.
One kitten becomes two. Then three. Then four.
Nova doesn’t say much. Neither do I. Every once in a while her hand finds mine, or mine finds the back of her neck, and we stay quiet because Dina is doing the hard part and somehow she let us be here for it.
By the time the fourth kitten is pressed against her belly, the sun has moved across the floor.
Four kittens.
Dina nursing them in the morning light on the kitchen mat.
Already certain. Already home.
Like she has been doing this for years in the place she spent eight months refusing to enter.
Eventually, Nova leans into my side on the kitchen floor. Neither of us says anything for a long time.
I look at the room. Her kitchen. Her mat. Dina curled on it like she has always lived here. Four kittens pressed against her belly, three of them looking enough like the cat I adopted because he walked up to my leg in a shelter and sat down and decided.
I know the feeling.
Then we look at each other.
Then we both look at Brick on the counter.
Three of them look enough like Brick to make the room feel personally accused.
Brick looks back at us.
“Brick.”
He blinks once.
“You absolute menace.”
He closes his eyes.
As if saying you’re welcome.
Nova makes a sound beside me. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a cry. Something in between — warm and wet and completely undone — and I put my arm around her shoulders and she leans into me and we sit there on the kitchen floor watching Dina be home like she always was.
Nova’s phone buzzes on the counter.
She doesn’t move for a second. Just looks at it. Then she gets up, crosses the kitchen, and picks it up. Reads it. Reads it again.
Her face does something quiet.
“Katarina,” she says.
“Yeah?”
She turns the phone so I can see it.
Saw it. He had it coming. I’m done with him for a while. Maybe a long while. Don’t need to talk anymore about it. Love you. K.
I read it. Read it again.
“She means every word,” Nova says.
“I know.”
She sets the phone face down on the counter. Looks at the kittens in the morning light. Looks at Brick. Looks at me.
“I love her,” she says.
“I know that too.”
She leans back against the counter. Just looks at the room for a minute — the kittens, the Cup, Brick with his tail wrapped around his feet like he’s been waiting for this his whole life, the plant on the windowsill still alive despite everything.
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“What do we do with four kittens.”
“Find them homes.”
“Brody,” she says immediately.
“Brody,” I agree.
“Aiden and Aurora.”
“Yeah.”
“Liam and Katarina.”
I look at her.
She looks at me.
“Katarina would love it,” she says.
“Yeah. She would.”
She smiles.
Small. Real.
The morning version — no performance, no armor, just her face softening because something finally feels right.
I get up and cross the kitchen. Put my hands on her face and just look at her for a second.
Morning light catches in her hair. My hoodie hangs loose around her shoulders. Both cats are in her kitchen, the Cup is on the counter, and everything that happened last night is still here with us somehow — not heavy, just present.
Real.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
“Still terrifying?”
“Little bit,” I say.
She laughs.
I pull her in.
Nova is asleep against my shoulder again.
Dina and the kittens sleep in the morning light. Brick stays on the counter beside the Cup, tail wrapped around his feet like he has a job to do.
The room is quiet in the specific way of something that has just become permanent.
Her hand open over my heart, even asleep.
Still there.
Still here.
I’m not going anywhere.
Ever.