She shoves me. Both hands on my chest. I stumble back through the kitchen into the living room, hit the rug, and she follows, driving my shoulders flat. She hooks her thumbs in her underwear, pulls them down, and steps out.
Bare. Standing over me.
"Take them off."
I strip.
She's looking at me, her eyes traveling down, and then she stops. The blood drains from her face and rushes back. Her lips part. Her hand drifts to her mouth.
For half a second, Maya Maddox loses the room. She stands over me with her lips parted and her fingers at her mouth because of something hidden on my body.
Six silver barbells run along the underside of the shaft. The air hits the metal, and I feel every one. Only the piercer in Milan and Cole have seen them. No one else in four years.
"Jacob's ladder," she says.
The corner of my mouth almost moves.
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Since eighteen."
She kneels beside me. Her fingers close around me, light, exploratory. Her thumb traces the first barbell at the base, then moves up, finding each one. The metal is warm from my skin. She presses each barbell gently, testing.
My cock twitches hard in her hand, and she grips me tighter.
"Cole knows about these," she says.
The certainty in her voice stops my breathing. She didn't ask. She stated it.
Cole knows about these.
She says it like she understands what Cole's hands have done to the body she's holding. Like a fact she filed years ago and never needed to verify.
"Four years."
My voice comes out stripped. She hears it. Her grip tightens, and something behind her eyes stills.
Four years of Cole's hands on these barbells in the dark. Four years of a secret that existed beneath everything she could see from the press box. Everything the distance hid.
She strokes me root to tip, adjusting to the barbells, the ridges catching against her fingers with every pass. She twists her wrist at the top, thumb circling the head, pressing the highest barbell against the frenulum. My hands find her thighs and dig in hard enough to bruise.
"Six," she says, finding the last one just below the head.
She presses it, and my hips jerk off the floor.
She rises and climbs over me, knees on either side of my chest. Her eyes are bright and furious. Her mouth is soft from mine. My chest aches under the weight of her looking at me like that.
"You've spent six years calling me names," she says. "I'm going to use your mouth and you're going to let me."
She settles over my face.
Heat. Weight. The scent of her flooding my lungs.
I grip her hips and drag her down. My tongue drags flat and wide through the full length of her, and her whole body jerks above me. I grip her thighs and pull her down harder.
Months of tables, doorways, press boxes, small rooms, and the memory of my hand stopping an inch from her jaw flash behind my eyes.
