Because her scent is still here.
Clinging to the interior of my nostrils like pollen in allergy season. Woven into the tissue of my nasal passages with a permanence that eleven minutes of cold water and thirty minutes of cardiovascular exertion cannot dislodge. Every inhale delivers her to me in fragments: the peppermint sharpness first, cutting through the steam and the shower gel and the antiseptic tang of the bathroom tiles. Then the fresh-cut grass, green and alive and carrying the specific vitality of a body that has been in motion. And beneath both, threading through the base of every breath like a melody humming under the percussion, cherry blossom. Soft. Hidden. The femininity she buries beneath oversized t-shirts and scarred knuckles and a mouth that deploys profanity with the accuracy of a sniper rifle.
Each layer taunts me independently.
The peppermint reminds me of the moment she turned her head in the living room and our lips nearly collided. The grassrecalls the weight of her body on mine during a forest trail encounter that rewired my nervous system in thirty seconds. The cherry blossom summons the private, unguarded version of her that surfaced when she bit her lip on my bed and looked at me with eyes that held gold rings around dilated pupils.
Fuck.
I press my forehead against the tiled wall, the porcelain cold and smooth against the overheated skin of my brow. Water cascades down the back of my skull, flattening my hair to my neck, streaming along the channel of my spine. My palms flatten against the tiles on either side of my head, fingers spread, arms braced as if I am physically holding myself upright against the weight of a desire I did not invite and cannot dismiss.
I am so turned on it borders on clinical.
My cock has maintained a state of rigid, insistent hardness that has not responded to the cold water or the treadmill or the seventeen separate attempts I have made over the past two hours to redirect my thoughts toward literally anything other than the feeling of her thighs bracketing my hips. The blood that should be circulating through my extremities and my brain and the parts of my body responsible for higher function has apparently been rerouted to a single anatomical location and is refusing to return.
I hate it.
I hate the loss of control. The autonomic hijacking that transforms a disciplined, regulated, carefully constructed mind into a hostage situation where the captor is his own biology and the ransom is a woman he has known for a cumulative total of forty minutes.
I bite my bottom lip. Close my eyes.
And stop fighting it.
My right hand leaves the wall. Travels down the wet terrain of my chest, across the ladder of abdominal muscles thateighteen months of kickboxing have carved into definition, past the cut of my hip where the bone creates a ridge beneath taut skin. My fingers find my shaft with the resigned familiarity of a man conceding a battle he was never going to win.
I grip.
And the image arrives before I finish the first stroke.
Her. Sitting on my lap in a room with pink walls and clover-print underwear, her green eyes holding mine with a ferocity that makes my chest ache. The warmth of her breath against my face. The taste of her mouth, peppermint and adrenaline and the faint salt of dried sweat from four hours on the ice. The pressure of her hands fisted in my shirt, pulling me closer with a strength that surprised both of us. The sound she made when I bit her lower lip. Not a moan. A surrender disguised as aggression, a white flag raised through gritted teeth by a woman who refuses to admit that yielding can feel like victory.
I stroke faster.
My grip tightens around the swollen length, the friction building in waves that radiate from the base of my spine outward. The water streams down my body, cold and indifferent, doing nothing to cool the inferno concentrating in my pelvis. Behind my closed eyelids, the images sharpen. Her collarbone exposed where the t-shirt slipped off her shoulder. The athletic curve of her calves. The way her hips rolled against mine when she shifted position on my lap, the movement involuntary, instinctive, guided by a hunger she was too stubborn to acknowledge and too honest to conceal.
I imagine what I did not get to do.
Sliding the oversized shirt up and over her head. Pressing my mouth to the junction of her neck and shoulder where her scent concentrates. Running my hands through her damp navy-and-emerald hair while her breath hitched against my collarbone. Peeling those ridiculous lucky panties down her thighs while shecursed at me and pulled my hair and wrapped her legs around me because Sage Holloway does not do anything gently and I would not want her to.
My climax crashes into me without warning.
Not the gradual ascent and controlled release that usually characterizes this particular activity. A detonation. A seismic, full-body convulsion that buckles my knees and whites out my vision and forces a groan from my throat that bounces off the shower tiles and reverberates through the enclosed space with an embarrassing acoustic clarity. My forehead presses harder against the wall as the waves roll through me, each one contracting every muscle group from my jaw to my calves in a sequence that feels less like an orgasm and more like being dismantled and reassembled by hands I cannot see.
I brace against the tile until the trembling subsides.
Breathless. Dizzy. The kind of lightheaded that comes from blood pressure changes and oxygen debt and the sudden realization that I just came harder from a fantasy about a woman whose last name I learned four hours ago than I have from any physical encounter in my entire life.
Which is not saying much, given that my physical encounter history consists of approximately zero events and a lot of determined avoidance.
But still.
I have not jacked off in weeks. Maybe longer. The urge had been dormant, buried under training schedules and academic obligations and the general numbness that accompanies a life structured around hiding everything that matters. Arousal required a stimulus my environment never provided, so my body simply stopped asking for one.
Until a sprinting Omega landed on my lap in a forest and rebooted a system I thought had been permanently deactivated.
Two interactions.
Technically three if you count today's events as a single extended catastrophe.
