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The scar on her knee suddenly appears under my fingers. A pale line I hadn’t seen before. I trace it with my fingertips, then with my lips while she laughs and strokes my hair.
“That’s not the part where I’d like to have your mouth, but okay,” she jokes while stroking the letters of my tattoo with her thumb.
When she lays me down and starts covering my body with kisses, my ribs, my navel, my hip, my breath catches.
She settles between my legs and, when I feel her tongue, I grab the sheets.
“Don’t stop,” I sigh.
The words surprise me as soon as I say them. And Noa doesn’t stop. I come with one hand buried in her hair, her fingers still inside me, my thighs trembling against her shoulders, and it takes me a good while to let go of her.
When I catch my breath, I push her gently toward the pillow and she lets me. I kiss her breasts, run my tongue over her nipples, and little by little I discover what makes her moan.
She rocks on my fingers, moving her hips, throwing her head back until she comes with my name on her lips.
“And what score does this get?” I ask her, still breathless.
“A nine,” she answers. “But only because you have to leave room for improvement.”
Afterward we lie so still that I can hear the rain again on the other side of the window, as if it had been waiting its turn all this time. Maybe one of us should get up for water, or to turn off a light, but neither of us moves.
Chapter 16
Noa
The first alarm goes off at seven ten. The second follows exactly six minutes later, as if Jordan doesn’t trust herself to get up the first time. I’ve been sleeping at her place almost every night for two weeks now, though I still have my apartment in Belltown, and I still haven’t gotten used to her alarms.
In the morning, she always waters the plants in the same order. First the tallest one, the one that hasn’t bloomed in three years. Then the two on the windowsill. Last, the one beside the TV.
Sometimes, when she wants to break the silence, she tells a bad joke, then takes a moment to laugh at it herself. I’ve learned to wait for that little pause before laughing too, or at least smiling.
We share the same bottle of body wash, and now I smell like strawberry bubblegum when I get out of the shower. Of course, Iris has noticed and made her usual comment. When she isn’t in a hurry, Jordan likes to make breakfast naked, and watching her drives me crazy. Hades has already warned me twice about being late, and I used to be the most punctual person alive.
This morning I catch her writing in a small black notebook on the counter while she makes coffee.
“What are you writing down?” I ask casually as I look for the cereal in the kitchen cabinet.
“Data.”
“What kind of data?”
“Nothing about you.”
She says it so quickly, and with such a straight face, that I decide not to ask anything else. Then she closes the notebook and puts it in its usual drawer, the second one in the hallway dresser. I pretend not to notice.
***
That afternoon, practice goes great again. During the scrimmage, I set up two goals and put one into the top corner myself. Hades doesn’t say anything, but she lets us play almost ten minutes longer than scheduled before blowing the final whistle. That’s her way of saying she likes what she sees.
Zoe high-fives me on the way to the locker room.
“You seem different,” she says, without elaborating.
“Must be those supplements your wife prescribed,” I say with a shrug.
In the locker room, Iris hugs me from behind before I even start getting undressed.
“Man, Brit, you’ve been playing out of your mind lately. You seem…” She pauses far longer than she usually does. “Happy. Anyway. It’s pretty obvious someone’s keeping you happy at night,” she adds, laughing her head off.
