I take a second.
The water keeps running. She has her face against my throat and her arms around my neck and I have one hand on the small of her back and the other in her wet hair and I am — what is the word — I am whatever the word is for what happens after a person breaks something open in you on a teak bench in a steam shower in Vegas.
“My turn,” I say into her hair.
“Take it.”
I lift her off me. Stand her up between my knees. The water hits her back and runs down to where I want my mouth and I lean forward on the bench and put my mouth on her hip first — because I’m thinking, I’m choosing — and she puts her hand in my hair and I work my way across her stomach and lower.
I look up.
“Bench.”
“What.”
“Sit on the bench.”
She switches with me. Sits on the warm teak. The water is running down her chest and between her breasts and she leans back against the wet marble and parts her knees and looks down at me and I am on the marble floor on my knees in front of her now and I do not care about the marble.
I get her thigh over my shoulder.
“Jax —”
“I know.”
I get my mouth on her.
She arches off the bench and her hand fists in my hair and her hips come forward and I work her — slow, the way she likes, the rhythm her body keeps trying to take from me — and her breath is in my hair and the water is running down both of us and she is making sounds I have never heard her make before, open, unmuffled, no roof to keep them down because this is a Vegas hotel bathroom and the door is closed and she is not holding back.
“Jax —Jax— “
“Mhm.”
“I’m —”
“I got you.”
I slide two fingers inside her and curl them and she comes off the bench so hard her thigh tightens on my shoulder and her hand pulls my hair and she comes against my mouth with a sound that is mine, just mine, that nobody else in her life has ever heard, and I work her through it until she is pushing my forehead with her hand and laughing breathlessly and saying my name like it’s the only word she remembers.
I come up.
Lift her off the bench.
Carry her — one arm under her thighs, the other around her back — out of the shower and across the marble floor while she’s still wet and dripping and laughing into my neck.
I don’t bother with towels.
We’re going to ruin the sheets. Vegas can bill the team.
I lay her down on the bed and the bedspread immediately goes dark under her wet hair and I climb up after her and she wraps her legs around me and I bottom out and she makes a sound into my shoulder and I have a thought — clear, complete, not in the body-not-feelings register — that saysI have never been here before.
Not the bed. Not the city.
Here.
This.
I move slow.
