Page 134 of Lethal in Pink

“We should shower,” she says eventually, picking a piece of eggshell out of her hair with clinical detachment.

“We should burn this apartment and start over.”

“Shower first. Arson after.”

The bathroom is small—the kind of graduate housing bathroom where the shower stall is barely wide enough for one person and the hot water heater was clearly installed by someone with a deep personal grudge against comfort. We make it work. We always make it work.

I turn the water to just shy of scalding and step in behind her. Steam rises fast, fogging the glass door, turning the room into something soft and indistinct and private. Her hair is a disaster—whipped cream hardened into clumps, syrup gluing strands together in sticky ropes, egg yolk dried into a crust that flakes when I touch it.

“Stay still,” I murmur, and she does.

I work shampoo through her curls with both hands, fingers finding the scalp beneath the wreckage, moving in slow, deliberate circles. She makes a sound—low, almost unconscious, the particular hum of someone being touched in a way they’ve needed without knowing they needed it. My thumbs find the tense spots at her temples, the knots where her jaw meets her skull, and press with just enough pressure to make her sigh.

“Your hands,” she says, her voice muffled against the tile. “How are they always so—”

“Shut up and let me wash your hair.”

She laughs, the sound vibrating through my palms where they cup the crown of her head.

I rinse with my palm curved at her hairline, the way my mother used to do when I was small and hated water in my eyes. The suds slide down her neck, over her shoulders, between her breasts, and the tenderness of the gesture catches somewhere in my throat and turns into something hungrier.

My hands don’t stop at her hair.

They find her waist. The small of her back, where the spine dips into a curve I’ve mapped with my mouth more times than I can count. The swell of her breasts, wet and warm under my palms, nipples tightening when my thumbs brush across them. She turns into me—one smooth, liquid motion—and her mouth finds mine with a hunger that matches the ache building low in my stomach.

“Jae,” she breathes against my lips, and my name in her mouth has always been the thing that unravels me fastest.

I lift her. Her legs wrap around my waist, her back against the cool tile, and I push into her in one long, slow stroke that has us both gasping. She’s tight—always tight, the particular hot clutch of her around me that makes my vision blur at the edges—and when I bottom out, holding there, her forehead drops to my shoulder and she makes a sound that is half prayer, half profanity.

“You take what I give you so well, jagiya,” I murmur against her ear, and feel her clench around me in response.

Her answer is her teeth in my shoulder—a sharp, deliberate bite that sends a jolt straight down my spine—and her nails dragging down my back, leaving thin, burning lines that I will find in the mirror tomorrow and treasure like evidence. She says my name again, broken and desperate, the syllables fracturing on each thrust, and something in my chest cracks open.

The water is still running. Steam fills the stall, condensing on the glass, turning the world outside into a blur of light and shadow. Her skin is slick under my hands, goosebumps rising where the cooler air finds her, and my grip on her hips is tight enough to leave marks—five points of pressure that I can feel even through the heat and the water and the desperate, building rhythm of us.

She’s close. I can tell by the way her breathing changes, sharp and shallow, by the way her inner thighs tremble against my ribs, by the particular pitch of the sounds she makes when my thumb finds her clit and circles with just enough pressure to tip her over the edge.

“Please,” she gasps, her voice cracking. “Jae, please, I’m—”

“I’ve got you.” The words come out rough, my accent thickening on the edges. “I’ve got you, jagiya, come for me, let me feel it—”

She comes with a cry that I feel in my teeth, her body clenching around me in rhythmic pulses that pull me right to the brink. I’m holding back—a frantic, internal mantra of don’t cum, don’t cum, don’t cum running on a loop behind my eyelids—but her hand finds my jaw, turns my face to hers, and she kisses me with a desperation that shatters whatever control I had left.

We finish together. Her second orgasm rolls into my first, overlapping, the sensation so intense it borders on painful—her inner walls milking me through each pulse, my release hitting in deep, shuddering waves that leave my knees weak and my vision spotted. I press my forehead to the tile beside her head, breathing hard, and feel her heartbeat hammering against my chest where our skin is pressed together.

The water has gone lukewarm. Neither of us noticed.

We stand there for a long time, her weight still in my arms, my face buried in the wet curve of her neck, the last of the steam dissipating around us like something reluctant to let go. Her fingers trace slow, absent patterns between my shoulder blades, over the scratches she left, and when she speaks, her voice is soft and slightly wrecked.

“We should probably clean the kitchen.”

“Probably.”

“We’re not going to clean the kitchen.”

“Absolutely not.”

She laughs against my collarbone, and the sound is warm and real and entirely, devastatingly ours.