I get a hand on her hip.
Pull her against me.
She makes that sound — the low one, the one I learned in Pittsburgh — and her hand finds me and wraps around me and I make a sound back that I can’t control and the water is in my eyes and her mouth is on my throat and this is —
I don’t have language for it yet but my body knows and my hands know and my mouth is on hers and I am pushing into her hand and she is biting down on my lower lip and I am about thirty seconds from losing every plan I ever had.
She backs me toward the bench.
Not pulling. Just stepping into me until I have to step back and back and back again and the back of my thighs hit the teak and she puts her hand flat on my chest and pushes once.
I sit.
The bench is warm. Everything in this fucking bathroom is warm.
She’s standing between my knees.
Looking down at me.
I look up at her.
The water is hitting her shoulders and running down her chest and the steam is rising around her and her hair is dripping down her back and she has both her hands on my shoulders and I have my hands on her hips and we are not in a hurry.
She drops to her knees on the marble.
“Nova — get up — your knees —”
“Jax.”
“The marble —”
“Jax. Shut up.”
I shut up.
She has me in her hand. She looks up at me with water running down her face and her hair stuck to her shoulders and the steam rising off her skin and she takes me in her mouth.
I lose the back of my head against the marble wall.
She works me — slow first, hand twisting at the base while her mouth does something on the head, the kind of thing that has me pressing my palms flat against the warm wet teak to keep from grabbing her — and then less slow, deeper, her handfinding my hip and pulling me into her, and the water is hitting my chest and running down my thighs and she is on her knees in a Vegas hotel shower swallowing me and I —
“Baby —”
She hums.
“Baby — fuck — Nova —”
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.
