“Nova — fuck — I’m gonna—”
The sentences are gone now.
It’s just my name.
Then it’s not even that.
He makes a sound that isn’t a word — broken, raw, scraped out from somewhere he doesn’t normally let people hear — and his hand fists in my hair and he comes in my mouth and I take all of it. Don’t pull off. Don’t flinch. Throat working around him while he pulses, while his hips buck once, while he keeps making that sound that isn’t a word.
I stay with him through every second.
I let him slip out of my mouth when he’s done.
Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.
Look up.
He’s looking down at me with an expression I have never seen on a man’s face before in my life.
“Hi,” I say.
He can’t speak.
I can see him trying.
He gets his hands under my arms and pulls me up off the floor onto his lap. Hard. Almost rough. Holds me there with my legs straddling his thighs and his arms around my back and his face pressed against my neck and he’s breathing like he ran somewhere.
“Nova.”
“Yeah.”
“Give me a second.”
“Take it.”
I press my forehead to his hair. His hand is flat against the small of my back, holding me to him, and I can feel his heart hammering against my chest.
I did that.
I am sitting in this man’s lap in his living room and I am still here. In my body. No armor, no exit plan, no joke to deflect with.
I have never been so completely in a room in my life.
He gets his breath.
His hands move.
One slides up under my shirt, palm warm against my lower back, the other comes up to my jaw and tilts my face toward his and he kisses me — with his own taste in my mouth, slow, deep, the kind of kiss that is also a thank you and also a promise and also him still not having quite gotten his words back yet.
“My turn,” he says against my mouth.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He lifts me off his lap. Sets me on the couch. Stands up, kicks his jeans the rest of the way off, pulls his shirt over his head. Bare. Scars at the hip from old gear, the line of him I’ve memorized in photographs from before I ever touched him.
He’s looking at me.
