Barely.
Aiden and Aurora find me near the lockers. Aurora leans up and says something in my ear I am taking to the grave, and when I look for Nova again, she’s across the room with Riley, notebook out, camera strap twisted around her wrist like chaos is just another language she knows how to translate.
I just watch her work. I’ve been watching since October. I don’t have a word for what she is to me.
Every word is too small.
The team replica Cup ends up on the kitchen counter. Brick is already on the counter. Looking at the Cup. Looking at me.
“I know,” I tell him.
Nova is in the kitchen wearing my hoodie. She looks at Brick. At the Cup. At me.
The corner of her mouth moves. Not a full smile. Just — that.
All those mornings.
Her coffee cup next to mine. Her camera bag by the door. Her notebooks on the table. Her plant on the windowsill that I keep accidentally overwatering and she keeps not mentioning.
All the ordinary evidence of her staying.
All the times I almost said it and swallowed the words instead.
I cross the kitchen. Put my hands on her face and look at her.
Then I get my mouth on hers and don’t let her go.
The kiss starts slow — controlled, the version I do when I’m being careful — and then she presses her body against mine and the careful version’s gone. Her mouth opens. My hand goes into her hair. The other slides down her back to the small of her spineand I pull her against me and she feels what she does to me, makes a sound into my mouth.
That’s the end of slow.
Hard the way I’ve been hard since she walked into my kitchen six hours ago looking like this. My jeans aren’t hiding a damn thing, and she’s pressed flush against me now, feeling exactly what she’s done to me. Her body catches up before her mouth does.
She rolls her hips against me once.
Deliberate.
“Nova.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not — I’m not gonna last if you keep doing that.”
“Good.”
She does it again.
I get my hoodie off her — the gray one — and it’s gone. The sports bra follows, and her tits spill free into my hands, soft and heavy and enough to make every thought in my head turn filthy. I drag my thumbs over her nipples and feel the way she arches into it, the way her breath catches like she’s been waiting for my hands all night.
My mouth goes to her throat. Then lower. I close my lips around her nipple and suck, slow and hard, until her fingers dig into the back of my neck and my name breaks out of her. I give her other one the same attention — tongue, teeth, the kind of pull that makes her hips roll against me like she can’t help it.
“That’s it, baby,” I murmur against her skin. “There you are.”
Her pulse is jumping under my mouth when I move back up to the hollow of her throat, then lower again, because there’s no version of me that gets this close to her and doesn’t taste more.
She makes a small sound and her hands are at my shirt, dragging it up, and I get an arm out of one sleeve and she gets the other and the shirt goes the way her hoodie went — somewhere, gone, not relevant.
Bare chest to bare chest. Her palm flat over my heart for one second. Then her hand drops.
