I pull out my phone, send Solange a quick text about dinner plans next week. Her response comes back almost immediately:Perfect. I have updates on the Austin launch I want to run by you anyway. Also—you and Jax still disgustingly happy?
I smile at the screen, type back:Disgustingly happy. You'll have to get used to it.
Her reply:Never. But I'm glad you found it. You deserve disgustingly happy.
That's the thing about Solange—she's been with me through everything, from Gabriel's death to The Glasshouse's attempts on my life to watching me fall in love with a man who confessed to watching me obsessively. She knows the full truth, has seen me at my worst, and still shows up with fierce loyalty and the kind of friendship that doesn't require performance.
I set my phone down, return my attention to Jax, who's watching me with an expression I've learned to recognize. Want mixed with tenderness, heat tempered by patience, the knowledge that we have time now—no crisis is forcing our hand, no external threat is dictating our choices.
"What?" I ask, even though I already know.
"Just appreciating you." He closes the distance between us. "The way you look in the morning light, the fact that you're here building this life with me, the reality that we survived long enough to have some boring Sunday mornings drinking coffee and planning dinner with friends."
"Boring Sunday mornings are underrated," I tell him, rising on my toes to kiss him properly. "I spent five years with Gabriel wishing for boring. Now I have it and I'm never taking it for granted."
His hands find my hips, pull me flush against him, and I can feel his body responding to proximity in ways that suggest coffee isn't the only thing he's hungry for this morning. "We could make the morning slightly less boring," he suggests, and there's heat in his voice that makes me shiver with anticipation.
"We could," I agree, already anticipating what comes next.
He takes my hand, leads me toward the bedroom with purposeful strides. We step into the bedroom, and he closes the door with a soft click that feels like the final page turning.
For a moment we simply stand there in the hush of early light, fingers laced, breathing each other in. Jax lifts my hand to his mouth and presses a slow, deliberate kiss to the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse that races for him alone. The brush of his lips is feather-light, but it sparks heat straight to my core.
“I never get tired of this part,” he murmurs against my skin, his voice rough with the same wonder that still catches me off guard after eighteen months. “Coming home to you. Touching you like it’s the first time and the thousandth all at once.”
I answer by sliding my palms up his chest, feeling the strong, steady thud of his heart beneath cotton and muscle. He lets me undress him the way I love: slow, reverent, mapping every inch I uncover. Shirt first, peeled away so I can trace the faint silvered scars across his ribs, souvenirs from a life he once lived and left behind. I kiss each one, soft presses of lips that say I see you, I choose you.
He shudders under my mouth, a low, broken sound in his throat, and then his hands are on me. Fingers skim the hem of my sweater, lifting it inch by inch, calluses dragging deliciously over my ribs until the fabric is gone and I’m bare beneath his gaze. He cups my breasts like they’re something sacred, thumbs circling my nipples until they tighten into aching peaks. When he bends to take one into his mouth, the wet heat and gentle scrape of teeth tears a moan from me that he swallows with a kiss.
We fall sideways onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and whispered laughter, mouths never parting. He kisses me like he’s memorizing the taste of forever: slow, deep strokes of tongue that leave me trembling. I arch into him, thighs parting so he can settle between them, the hard length of him pressingagainst my belly through thin layers of cotton we still haven’t shed.
“Off,” I breathe against his lips, tugging at his waistband. “Need to feel all of you.”
He rises up on his knees just long enough to strip the rest away, and then he’s gloriously naked above me, sunlight striping gold across muscle and the faint marks my nails have left on him over the months. I reach for him, wrap my fingers around the thick heat of his cock, stroke once, slow and firm, watching his head fall back on a ragged groan.
“Lana,” he growls, hips jerking into my grip.
I guide him down, but he resists, catches my wrist gently. “Not yet. I want to taste you first. I want to feel you come apart on my tongue before I’m inside you.”
He slides down my body like a man worshipping, kissing a molten path over my breasts, my stomach, the sensitive hollow where hip meets thigh. When he finally spreads me open with his thumbs and licks a slow, deliberate line from entrance to clit, I cry out, back bowing off the mattress. He doesn’t rush. He savors: long, languid strokes, then tight circles around my clit that make my thighs shake.
Two fingertips settle over my clits as he works his tongue in my cunt, fingers pressing in slow, deliberate circles that make my hips jerk off the mattress. The pressure is perfect, maddening, exactly the way he’s learned I need after all these months of mapping every gasp, every shiver, every broken plea that falls from my lips. The continuous dual rhythm has me climbing fast, breath hitching on every moan.
“Jax, please—” It’s half-sob, half-prayer.
He hums against me, the vibration sending sparks up my spine, and returns his mouth to my clit, sucking gently betweenhis lips. That’s all it takes. Pleasure crashes over me in long, rolling waves; I come with his name tearing from my throat, hips rocking against his mouth as he draws every aftershock out until I’m boneless and gasping.
Only then does he crawl back up my body, kissing me so I taste myself on his tongue. He braces above me, eyes locked on mine, and I feel the blunt head of him nudge my entrance.
“Look at me,” he whispers, voice trembling with restraint. “I want to see you when I come home.”
I cup his face, thumbs stroking the sharp line of his cheekbones. “We’re already home, Jax. You’re my home, and I’m yours.”
He pushes inside on a slow, exquisite glide that stretches and fills me perfectly. We both exhale shakily when he’s seated to the hilt, foreheads pressed together, sharing breath.
Then we move.
It’s unhurried at first, deep rolls of his hips that drag over every sensitive spot inside me, drawing soft cries from my lips and low, reverent groans from his. Our rhythm is the one we’ve perfected over countless nights: the way he knows exactly when to speed up, when to slow, when to grind deep and hold so I feel him everywhere. My legs wrap high around his waist; his hand slides beneath me to tilt my hips so every thrust kisses that place that makes my vision spark.
