“Okay?”
“Yeah.” Her mouth curves. “Okay.”
I pull her in.
We find the rhythm the way we always find it in the morning — slow and certain, without discussion, the kind that doesn’t need steering. Her back against my chest. My hand low on her stomach.
Her breathing changes first. Then mine.
When I move against her, she presses back into me like she has nowhere else to be — and she doesn’t, and I don’t — neither of us in any hurry about any of it.
I kiss her shoulder. The back of her neck. The soft skin just below her ear that makes her make the sound she makes — low, barely there, just for me — and her hand tightens over my thigh.
Small. Deep. Unhurried.
We stay like that. Her voice saying my name in the exact way it does when everything is stripped down to nothing. My mouth at her hair. Her body soft against mine. The light changing slow above us.
At some point she turns to face me. She gets her hands in my hair and pulls me to her, and we finish it face to face — her eyes open, mine open — both of us just here. In it. All the way in.
Afterward, I pull her against me. Her breathing slows, and she lets out a big sigh. The kind that means she dropped something.
I hold her tighter.
We fall asleep.
A deep yowl from the kitchen breaks the quiet.
Low. Specific. The kind of sound a body makes when something is happening on its own schedule.
Nova goes still before I do.
“Jax.”
I hear it too.
Another sound comes from the kitchen. Smaller this time.
I get up first. Nova is right behind me.
I stop in the doorway.
Dina is on the kitchen mat in the morning light, curled on her side, breathing hard. Her eyes lift to mine once. Not panicked. Not asking. Just aware.
Pressed against her belly is one tiny kitten.
Wet. Moving. Already loud as hell for something that barely exists yet.
Nova’s hand finds my arm. “Oh my God.”
Dina makes another sound, low and rough, and tucks her body tighter around the kitten like she knows exactly what she’s doing.
She probably does.
I stand there in the doorway of Nova’s kitchen, naked except for my boxers, staring at the feral cat who refused to come inside for eight months giving birth on the kitchen mat like this was always where she meant to do it.
There is nothing remarkable about it.
Except it is the most remarkable thing I have ever seen before nine AM.
