Page 90 of The Faceoff

“That was circumstantial⁠—”

I kiss the rest of the sentence out of her, push her back against the tile, and her hand finds my cock between us and wraps around it, slow, deliberate, and it’s my turn for the words to stop. She strokes me with the water sluicing between us, her thumb dragging over the head, watching my face the whole time like she’s the one reading bodies now, and she’s good at it. She’s good at everything she decides to be good at, and my forehead drops to hers.

“Sloane.” It comes out wrecked.

“Turnabout is fair play,” she says, against my mouth, and there’s the dry thing back even now, even wet and undone, and I have never wanted anyone the way I want this woman who can make me lose my mind and land a line about it in the same breath.

I get a hand under her thigh and lift and she wraps around me — and then I stop, because there's no foil packet in here, nothing within reach, and I'm not going to be the guy who doesn't ask.

“I don't have anything in here,” I say, against her jaw. “I'm clean — I get tested, every few weeks, the season makes you. And there's been no one since before the summer.” I pull back far enough to find her eyes through the steam, because this is a thing you say to a face. “Your call.”

“I'm on the pill.” She says it steady, holding my look. “And I believe you.” A beat, and then the dry thing, even now, even wrecked: “Don't make me regret it.”

“Wouldn't dream of it.”

And I line up and push into her against the wall, slow, all the way, the water hot on my back, and we both stop talking entirely — and it's different like this, nothing between us, and I feel her register it the same second I do, the catch in her breath that isn't only the stretch. She's tight and slick around me and I have to stop, buried in her, forehead to the tile beside her head, just breathing, before I trust myself to move. I shift my stance and look between us, watching the way my cock disappears inside her small body, only to come out slick with her arousal. Jesus.

“Look at you,” I manage. “Look at you taking me. Fuck.”

“Beau—”

“I know. I've got you.” I move then, slow at first, drawing almost all the way out and pushing back in just to feel her breath catch, then faster, harder, the tile at her back and the water and her legs locked around me and her nails dug into my good shoulder, and I say things I don't plan, filthy things, true things, that's it and you feel so fucking good and this perfect fucking cunt and you're going to come for me again, I can feel it. I get a hand between us and find her clit and work it in time with my hips, and she does, clenching around me so hard I lose my own rhythm, a cry she doesn't try to swallow this time, and I follow her over a few strokes later with my face in her wet neck and her name in my mouth like it's the only word I've got left.

We stay there a minute, wrecked, the water going from hot to warm to a warning of cold, holding each other up.

“We’re going to be late,” she says, into my shoulder.

“Worth it.”

“You have practice.”

“Extremely worth it.”

She huffs a laugh, and I feel it against my skin, and for one more second everything is exactly right.

Here’s the thing I notice in the shower and don’t think about until later, because I’m not built to think about things until later:

She goes quiet on the way out of it.

Not cold. Just — quiet. I’m reaching for towels and riding the dumbest happiest high of my life and she’s gotten still in a way that’s different from the still she was a minute ago. When I hand her a towel, she takes it and wraps herself up fast, tight, like she’s covering something that isn’t her body, and there’s a beat where she’s looking at the middle distance and her face has gone somewhere I can’t follow.

“Hey.” I tip her chin up. “You good?”

“I’m good.” And she smiles, and it’s a real smile, mostly, but it arrives a half-second late, and her sentences are getting more grammatically perfect, which is a thing I’ve noticed she does, though I haven’t worked out yet what it means. “I just need clothes. Mine are — my sweater’s downstairs on your couch and it’s a whole situation.”

“I’ve got you.” I dig a clean hoodie out of the drawer, the grey Whitmore Hockey one, soft from a hundred washes, and hand it over. “Here. It’s warm.”

She pulls it on and it swallows her whole — comes down to mid-thigh, sleeves past her hands, the hem hiding everything — and she stands there in my sweatshirt with her wet hair and her bare legs and I have to physically stop myself from saying the thing in my chest, the thing I’ve been not-saying for weeks, because she’d run, and because it’s six in the morning, and because some things you hold.

She looks down at herself, swimming in it. “I look ridiculous.”

“You look—” like mine, my brain says, unhelpfully, a beat too late. “Warm. You look warm.”

“That’s the second time you’ve called me warm instead of finishing a sentence.” She catches my eyes, and there’s the sharp thing, the one I love. “You’re doing a lot of not-finishing-sentences this morning, Sorensen.”

“I’m conserving words. Big practice.”

“Mm.” She doesn’t believe me. She knows exactly what I’m not saying. That’s the thing about her — she reads everything, always has — and for a second I think she’s going to call it, and I think maybe I want her to, and then she looks away and the moment closes and she says, “Is there coffee in this house or do I have to be brave about it,” and we go downstairs.