She laughs against my chest. Quietly. Just a breath.
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
“That’s not your usual answer.”
“No.”
She is quiet for a second.
“Is it bad that you don’t know?”
I think about it.
“No,” I say. “It’s not bad.”
She puts her hand flat on my chest. Over my heart. Doesn’t say anything.
I don’t say anything either.
After a minute I say, “I should turn the water off.”
“In a minute.”
“Yeah.”
“In a minute.”
We stay like that for a long minute. Then I get up. Walk across the suite naked because there is nobody here to see me and even if there were I do not currently care. Turn the water off. Stand in the bathroom doorway and look at the shower — water dripping off the marble, the bench dark with water, her wet handprint on the glass where she pushed it open to step out.
I look at it for longer than necessary.
Go back to bed.
She rolls into me before I’m all the way down. Her wet hair on my chest. Her hand back over my heart. Her leg over mine.
“Jax.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re a weird man.”
“Yeah.”
“Good weird though.”
“Yeah.”
“...Yeah.”
She falls asleep with her hand over my heart and her breath even against my ribs.
I don’t sleep.
I lie there in a Vegas hotel bed with a woman on my chest who I am — the word is right there, I am not using the word, the word has a place and this is not the night for the word — and I think about the night I stopped because she needed me to.
She was in it tonight.
